The number of journalists in prison worldwide has spiked to its highest level in 15 years. Of them, nearly half worked online, raising larger questions about Internet freedom for more than just reporters, but average citizens as well.

Eighty-six out of 179 journalists who were in prison worldwide as of Dec. 1, 2011 were reporters or bloggers whose work appeared online. Credit: Baddog/CC BY 2.0

Eighty-six out of 179 journalists who were in prison worldwide as of Dec. 1, 2011 were reporters or bloggers whose work appeared online, according to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists released this week.

“The ratio of imprisoned online journalists to other journalists has been disturbingly constant in the last few years,” Danny O’Brien, internet advocacy coordinator at CPJ, told IPS. “As for reasons behind it, I think that the desire for these people is to shut them up as quickly as possible, and throwing them in jail is the quickest way to do that.”

The imprisonment of journalists is perhaps the first indicator for the perils of freedom of expression and human rights, as reporters often face the brunt of repression for those looking to control dissent within and across borders.

The report’s revelation of the rising trend of imprisoned journalists appears as the 63rd anniversary of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights culminates in International Human Rights Day Dec. 10.

Article 19 of the U.N. Declaration grants the freedom to produce and consume information, “through any media and regardless of frontiers,” but this year, the Internet has taken center stage for the battle for opportunity, equality and access along political, social, and economic lines.

Though it is touted as a democratising force, there is a tremendous challenge that is also inherent within the openness of the Internet’s architecture – technologies for surveillance that can be used to monitor journalists and private citizens alike, or restrict their access.

At the Washington, D.C. component of an international seminar on Internet Freedom held at the Newseum on Thursday, U.S. Undersecretary of State Mario Otero cited concern about the growing sophistication of restrictive tools to control both external and internal opinions and information, and attempts to change the international standard to a legitimate “digital police state”.

“Repressive governments used to set up simple firewalls at Internet Exchange Points to block external content from outside their borders,” Otero said. “Now they’re using sophisticated software to monitor all digital activity within their countries, and to delete posts and block emails in something approaching real time.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered the keynote address to the Internet Freedom seminar at the Hague in the Netherlands on Thursday, to galvanise support for stronger international standards of access and rebuke restrictions imposed by governors on the governed.

“The more people that are online and contributing ideas, the more valuable the entire network becomes to all the other users,” Clinton said. “But when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the internet is diminished for all of us.”

The two-day seminar, sponsored by Google and the Netherlands, will culminate in meetings of public and private sector organisations, in the hopes that a multi-stakeholder approach will provide a more cohesive and enforceable strategy.

Thus far, the strategies to protect citizens and journalists from oppressive regimes have been predominantly through sanctions, but civil society organisations called for involvement beyond restriction of sales of hardware and software that enable monitoring activity online.

Through third-party sales and dual-use technologies for security, like encryption that can be used by private citizens, sanctions alone don’t work, argued journalists and civil society leaders at a panel discussion held in Washington on Friday by the New America Foundation.

“It’s not unreasonable to draw a parallel between the sales of Internet censorship tools and tracking and arms sales,” Nasser Weddady, civil rights outreach director at the American Islamic Congress, said Friday on the panel.

Weddady and panelists stressed the need for an overhaul of legislation to reflect the new realities of the digital revolution. Jochai Ben-Avie, policy director at Access Now and panelist at Friday’s event, said that in that effort, a broader theme needed to be represented.

“We need to start to add in human rights impact assessment into the equation, thinking through what are the impacts for human rights both at home and abroad as a result of legislation,” Ben-Avie told IPS.

In the CPJ’s Dec. 1 snapshot report of journalists in jail, the number of journalists had distinct regional differences. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa were the worst offenders with nearly 45 percent of the world’s jailed journalists, and Iran lead the list with 42 journalists in prison.

Another disturbing trend in the report revealed that although the majority of journalists were being held on “anti-state” charges or censorship violations, nearly half were held without due process.

But the high number of journalists imprisoned for material that appeared online, especially in countries with relatively strong online journalism and blogging communities, were indicative of larger trends, O’Brien said. All nine journalists in Vietnam, for example, were bloggers, and jailed for covering “politically sensitive” topics.

“Many online journalists don’t have the protections of other journalists, or protection of press laws,” O’Brien told IPS. “So they can be targeted as troublesome citizens rather than a rebellious journalist.”

Though the number of online journalists imprisoned has leveled out in the past two years, the consistently high numbers have been cause for concern, especially for future implications such as self-censorship, O’Brien told IPS.

“The other thing we’re seeing is that people are intimidated by these arrests,” O’Brien told IPS. “Talking with activists in Syria, people now feel more comfortable with talking online than they do online, because they feel more in control of the security of what they’re saying.”

“This is a worrying development, that all of the priorities we talk about will come to nothing if people are too scared to use it,” O’Brien told IPS.

Simple solutions can make an enormous difference in accessibility. Credit: Dominik Golenia/CC By 2.0

By Rosemary D'Amour
WASHINGTON, Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

As the International Day for Persons with Disabilities approaches this Saturday, one institution is working to remove some of the barriers that prevent disabled people from taking a leading role in policies that affect their lives.

Simple solutions can make an enormous difference in accessibility. Credit: Dominik Golenia/CC By 2.0

The Institute on Disability and Public Policy (IDPP), offering the world’s first virtual master’s degree on disability studies and public policy, is geared specifically toward those with disabilities, adapting innovative technologies to make the degree accessible.

The lack of inclusion for persons with disabilities (PWD), which the World Health Organisation estimated totals one billion people worldwide, extends beyond the built environment, where issues of accessibility are rampant in both the developing and developed world. The lack of inclusion for PWD is also seen in representation, among policymakers who determine the political and social framework in which PWD live.

The IDPP seeks to integrate these two concepts, enabling those with disabilities to advocate for and communicate their rights on a level playing field, providing them with an educational background in public policy through a Master’s of International Affairs in Comparative and International Disability Policy.

The IDPP, which has been in development since 2009 but is in its first year of instruction, is largely the product of the Center for Research on Collaboratories and Technology-Enhanced Learning Communities (COTELCO), a joint social science research center at American University and Syracuse University.

COTELCO’s director, Derrick Cogburn, said that the model of the programme could eventually be adapted for other subject matters, but currently serves a crucial function in tackling a stigma and changing the course of development.

“The overall goal is developing a cadre of leaders who can address public policy,” Cogburn told IPS. “A human capacity that could represent themselves in the issues that matter to them.”

The development of a graduate institute better equips those with disabilities to interact on the policy development level, Cogburn told IPS, and receive a degree that might otherwise have been a challenge to obtain.

Three deaf, three mobility-impaired, and four blind students make up the inaugural cohort of the one-year programme, which began in September. The 10 students are based throughout the ASEAN region, and attend the virtual programme via fellowships made possible by a grant from the Nippon Foundation, which cover all related costs.

Cogburn, also an Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, D.C. where the degree is housed, said that the goal was to expand the programme to more students, eventually an annual cohort of 25 students, and eventually to other regions, such as Latin America and Africa.

This year’s International Day for Persons With Disabilities, a U.N.- recognised day on Dec. 3, will focus on including PWD in development, following the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which states that every citizen has the right to freedom “without distinction”.

“The U.N. has led the development of a new global framework for persons with disabilities,” Cogburn told IPS. “It’s helping to change the context of human rights for disabilities not as political, but as a social justice issue.”

Luis Gallegos, former ambassador from Ecuador and chair of the U.N. Global Partnership for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies, in a demonstration of the IDPP’s web conferencing tools on Friday, said that “a new type of development is extremely important”.

“How should we change the structures of government and of society? Because this is not just talking about government institutions, but a change in society,” he said.

Challenges still exist in mainstreaming disability in the political discussion, however, and this is largely because of a lack of awareness or promotion of disability-inclusive development.

“We need policies that reflect that, but also that enforce it,” Cogburn told IPS. “A nice principle won’t change the life of a person on the ground.”

In order for there to be change on the ground, however, foresight is needed in the design and implementation of policies – in the built- environment, for example, where ramps are favoured over stairs.

Though issues of accessibility and infrastructure may seem exclusive to remote and lesser-developed areas, there are significant challenges anywhere where the infrastructure is older – and this, Cogburn said, could provide for a bigger opportunity as regions are developed and maintained.

“It’s less about accessibility, and more about universal design,” Cogburn told IPS. “Thinking about the built environment, there are a range of issues that make it easier.”

And the inclusion of those with disabilities in the formation and implementation of these policies would only increase their relevance, particularly because those without disabilities may not realise just how simple solutions can be to make an enormous difference in accessibility.

“These efforts have to be led by persons with disability,” Gallegos said. “They led the thrust to this U.N. convention, and they are the ones who will take this further on, and help us to look at disability as a pro, rather than a con.”

In the development of the programme’s curriculum, several factors had to be taken into consideration, but the cyber infrastructure for the programme was perhaps the most crucial component to the programme’s effectiveness for those who they intended to reach – the physically disabled.

The development of the programme’s technological prototype was built around the issue of accessibility: be they for impairments to vision, hearing, or mobility. This includes recognising the bandwidth that students would be remotely using, and therefore working from the lowest common denominator.

The IDPP and COTELCO also looked to develop specific technologies, such as an advanced screen reader for the visually impaired, and built in real-time closed-captioning and sign language interpretation.

The programme uses an open-source content management system as the foundation for the virtual degree, and a virtual portal for classrooms and related work, putting all of the information on classes, from course readings to lectures, in one place.

Activists for the rights for persons with disabilities have weighed in throughout the fight to increase awareness of the issue, as Gallegos reiterated after his comments on Friday.

“In every person with a disability are activists in the realm of civil society,” Gallegos said. “Working to have society change its views, its perception, of those with disabilities.”

On a small stage, a woman appears, grief written on her face as she wanders through the streets of Kabul, searching for her missing child. Suddenly, she stops by a scene of ruins and stares.

A scene from "Infinite Incompleteness". Credit: Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn/AHRDO

“This wall should not be rebuilt,” Butimar-e Kabul says. “Otherwise, people will forget the pains and I will be left alone.”

The story of the fictional character named Butimar-e Kabul is unfortunately not unique. In the 30 years of conflict throughout the country, Afghanistan’s victims of war have amassed tragedy and struggle, and – despite the odds – hope.

In “Infinite Incompleteness”, the tale of Butimar-e Kabul is interwoven with nine other stories of the victims of Afghanistan’s 30-year conflict. It was presented by the Afghan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation (AHRDO) in the first-ever U.S. performance held Saturday at the American University’s Kay Spiritual Life Center in Washington.

AHRDO, an Afghan-based civil society organisation using theatre and the arts to present transitional justice and gender platforms, has been developing the piece since the organisation’s inception in 2009.

Transitional justice, or the idea of redressing human rights violations following conflict, can be a controversial issue, and one that is difficult to execute. In Afghanistan, the documentation and accountability for human rights abuses has fallen off the agenda internally, and had little push from the international community, said AHRDO’s co-founder and current director Hadi Marifat.

“The immediate focus is on security and stability, but the judicial system is not working here,” Marifat told IPS. Thus, he said, the role of citizens in organising a collective movement to not only address human rights violations, but to move on from them, is extensive.

A crucial component of transitional justice is giving voice to victims – and was the inspiration for AHRDO. Through participatory theatre, says Marifat, they are not only able to engage with victims, but help to portray the broader issues at play.

“It’s not possible to do everything, to show everything that has happened in Afghanistan from the 1970s to now,” he told IPS.

Marifat said that they want the audience, whether in Afghanistan or globally, to understand that it is possible for the atrocities of war to happen again. “(We can) put it in a simple language, and the message at its core is to stop the return of these kinds of tragedy.”

“Infinite Incompleteness”, which has been performed four times in Afghanistan and now is on a two-city U.S. tour, features four actors bringing scenes of victims in Afghanistan – warlords taking over towns, wives losing husbands, parents losing children- presented in three languages, Dari, Pashto, and Hazaragi.

To gather these stories and create a thematic production, AHRDO engaged victims’ groups through five intensive theatre training projects in different regions throughout the country, with the goal of creating an environment of trust, where their personal stories could be told.

Sayed Mohammad Jawid, an executive member of AHRDO and who plays the “Man in Green”, said that there was a strong sense of responsibility on the part of the actors and activists working to tell these stories, because, in many cases, this was the first time that stories from these individuals had been collected, or told at all.

“This was a new methodology working with victims on the grassroots level,” Jawid told IPS. “As an Afghan and a human being, it was shocking for me to hear these things from them. It was the only thing we could do (to) make a strong play to reflect the emotion.”

AHRDO used different types of participatory theatre genres in their programmes throughout the country, most prominently, Playback Theatre, and more than 150 games and exercises to engage victims, who represented a cross-section of ethnic and social groups in Afghanistan.

“When they first come and interact with one another, there’s the feeling at the beginning of ‘you’re less victimised, I’m more victimised,'” Marifat told IPS. “But at the end, there’s a consensus – we’re all victims, and we have to collectively work to address that wrong.”

AHRDO worked extensively with the Afghanistan division of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), and to facilitate its U.S. performances in Washington and New York City, with the Open Society Foundations, to bring the issues of Afghanistan’s transitional justice to the international arena.

“What this process does is give you another way of thinking about the problem,” Nadia Siddiqui of ICTJ’s Afghanistan team told IPS about the mission and structure of AHRDO’s participatory theatre. “It makes you realise that you have a shared experience with someone that you thought you never did.”

In a panel discussion following the performance at American University on Saturday evening, it was revealed that the actors presenting the play were not, in fact, actors at all – they are Afghan citizens, AHRDO workers, human rights activists, and victims themselves.

Zahra Hussaini, who plays the role of Butimar-e Kabul, came as a participant at one of the AHRDO workshops in Afghanistan, asked to attend by her employer at the time. She gradually overcame an initial timidity of telling her story through the workshop’s atmosphere of “nothing is wrong, and nothing is right.”

“The respect within these workshops, it trickles throughout life,” Hussaini, who is now an executive member of AHRDO, told IPS. She said that she was like other participants, who valued the safe space of respect for whatever was said, or felt. “It’s a positive way to change the whole society.”

“Transitional justice is a long process,” Mohammad Zaman Khoshnam, who played the “Man in White”, told IPS. “But it can bring changes from the bottom to the top.”

For the women who participated in the political and social revolutions during the Arab Spring in 2011, there is a significant opportunity to enact real change for women’s roles and relationships in the region – and also the possibility things could go the other way.

For Palestinian women, the uprisings are nothing new. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

Such was the focus of a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations joint subcommittee hearing in Washington Wednesday, in which witnesses testified about the role of women’s participation in the Arab Spring, and the outlook for the future.

The subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy and Global Women’s Issues is the first of its kind for Congress, and met with the intention of recognising and defining this moment of transition.

“It’s not every day that you’re negotiating a new social contract, that you’re creating a new constitution,” said Manal Omar of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who commented not as a member of USIP but as a witness in her testimony before the Senate subcommittee.

Omar stressed that the urgency to solve the myriad of problems facing countries following the Arab Spring could actually be a detriment if all social groups are not included in the process.

“If this process is fast-forwarded, women, minorities (and) other groups who are marginalised politically will be missing from the decision-making table,” she said.

The role of women in the Arab Spring has been heralded as a key to the success of the social movements, and has been recognised even by the international community.

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Yemeni citizen and journalist Tawakkol Karman, called the “iron woman” of the Arab Spring, who shares the award jointly with two other women, each of whom demonstrate an element of establishing women’s rights and full participation.

“It is a time of critical opportunity for women and girls in the Middle East and North Africa, but it also a time of serious risk for women’s rights,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, founder and president of the Women’s Learning Partnership, during her testimony at the hearing. “There is a very real possibility that women will not only be marginalised but also lose ground here.”

The issues facing women in the participating Arab Spring countries range from access to voting, property and family rights, and educational and economic opportunities.

Afhkami, whose organisation is a partnership of women’s rights activists and non-governmental organisations in 20 countries, said that women were facing challenges rooted in history.

“Traditional social and cultural norms have relegated Middle Eastern women,” Afkhami said in her testimony. “They often lack the social, economic, and political power they need to overcome antagonistic groups and aggressive policy.”

Witnesses said that although the push for democratic reform and the inclusion process for women was a significant step, there were immediate concerns of a push backwards in the fight for women’s rights, and the effects could be detrimental in the long-term.

“Despite the rhetoric of democracy that drove the reform movement in Egypt, the large numbers of women who played key roles during the Tahrir Square protests, and the longstanding networks of women’s civil society organisations in the country, no women were included in the country’s constitutional reform committee,” Afkhami said.

The most comprehensive effort to create an inclusive policy for women on a global scale, addressed at the Senate subcommittee hearing, has been the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979, which works to both define discrimination and set guidelines for nations to impose equality-driven legislation.

“No country can benefit if it leaves half of its country behind,” said Melanne Verveer, ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues at the U.S. Department of State, in testimony at the hearing.

Thus far, CEDAW has been ratified by 187 out of 193 U.N. member countries, with the exceptions being Iran, Somalia, Sudan, two South Pacific island nations, and – some argue the most symbolic – the U.S.

While the Barack Obama administration has come out in favour of CEDAW and its mission, the treaty has yet to be brought to the Senate floor for a vote since 1980, despite the U.S. playing a role in its drafting.

“The U.S. is schizophrenic when it comes to treaties – it works on creating them, but then has problems ratifying them,” Kraus told IPS, who said that failure of the U.S. to ratify CEDAW could hurt its credibility when advocating for women’s rights in other countries.

“U.S. ratification would provide credibility to U.S. diplomats when they urge other nations to abide by commitments they made when they ratified CEDAW,” he said.

CEDAW’s design is context-specific – the convention permits each country to determine when and how to bring its policies in line with ending discrimination against women.

“It’s up to each country as to how to implement (CEDAW),” June Zeitlin, director of the CEDAW Education Project at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told IPS. “The programmes we have to combat violence against women may be different than another country, but protecting women against violence is a universal right.”

The adjustments that each country makes upon enacting CEDAW, or the inclusion of reservations, understandings and declarations (RUDs), are present in most enactments of the treaty, experts said, but that the ultimate goal was equality without reservations.

“Once governments have adopted the treaty, women use it as a tool to improve the status of women in their country,” Kraus told IPS. “In Morocco and Tunisia, political pressure resulted in their reservations being scrapped – it’s an evolutionary process.”

Opaque shell companies, foundations and trusts are the modus operandi of corrupt organisations looking to hide significant sums of money, often just by using existing loopholes in the current financial system, experts say.

“The Puppet Masters”, a report released Monday by the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR) at the World Bank, examines how legal structures are exploited by some corrupt organisations to hide stolen assets.

StAR, a partnership between the World Bank Group and with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), gathered information from 150 grand corruption cases involving senior public officials over the past 30 years, estimating 50 billion dollars in stolen assets, bribes, and other criminal activities in the sample analysed in the report.

The report, taken in conjunction with the database of stolen asset recovery information via the StAR Initiative at the World Bank, looks to provide a comprehensive view of how what is known as “beneficial ownership” takes place, said Emile van der Does de Willebois, senior financial sector specialist with StAR and author of the report.

“What we found, in almost every big case, there will be a company legal structure involved as a way to conceal the identity of the corrupt official to separate his identity from the proceeds of corruption,” van der Does told IPS.

Such was the case in Kenya in 2002, when the government, tasked with replacing its passport printing system, rejected a six million euro bid from a French firm in favour of a contract worth 31.89 million euro with a company called Anglo-Leasing and Finance Ltd. Anglo- Leasing, a shell company in the United Kingdom, proposed using the French company to subcontract the actual work, leaving millions in profits.

The report makes recommendations for how to defend against this type of ruse, mostly through increased transparency and accountability for policymakers.

“Transparency has been an issue for a very long time already,” van der Does told IPS. “What we’re proposing here it’s nothing new, we will take putting it up on the agenda every time we get the opportunity, because the baddies don’t give up that easily.”

Robin Hodess, the group director for research and knowledge at Transparency International, a global civil society advocacy organisation, says that illicit funds in the developing world amount to an estimated one trillion dollars per year, having an enormous impact on the resources and future financial plans for these countries.

Often, Hodess said, those looking to combat corporate corruption face an uphill climb.

“On the investigator side, usually government agencies are under- resourced,” she told IPS. “This is particularly the case in developing countries, but also for any struggling economically.”

StAR’s report calls for such efforts as requiring a minimum standard of information on registered entities, such as shareholders, members and directors, and allowing easy accessibility of this information online.

Civil society organisations have called for increasing the social responsibility of corporations in this fight, mostly by increasing the role of the actors involved.

“Looking at the financial services sector, we can be looking at the role that not just banks, service providers, but that lawyers, accountants, the people that make up this corporate structure,” Hodess told IPS. “Quite a lot can be done to make them part of the solution, to contribute to transparency.”

But, van der Does said, accountability is a two-way street – and not just about increasing the responsibility for those in the corporate world, but those doing the investigating, increasing expertise and capacity as to how to find information on potentially corrupt corporations.

“The other side of the equation is that investigators need to be made more aware to those sources of information,” he told IPS. “Many times, when it hasn’t been made readily available, you look for what you know already.”

There is already significant international legislation on the books to combat corporate corruption practices, such as the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), ratified by 100 countries since its adoption in 2003, and recommendations by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an inter-governmental body whose mission is to create a global financial policy framework.

While the efforts to create legislation have been significant achievements, van der Does said, they were simply the first step, as the difficulty often lies in the enforcement of regulations.

“There is certainly a discrepancy between how you write it down and what you do in your supervisory and regulatory regime,” van der Does told IPS.

“It’s always a matter of how these laws are implemented,” Hodess said. “These kinds of problems, of shell companies, and illicit financial flows, this is happening in large part because the rules are not being enforced.”

StAR’s report calls for special attention to be paid to the different jurisdictions within a country’s financial system, be they banks or other entities, before legislation is enacted, van der Does said, by conducting a assessment analysing the areas of risk within the country.

“The challenges for each jurisdiction are going to be different,” van der Does told IPS. “Determine what the specific situation is in their countries, what entities are being abused, where we should focus our drive for transparency.

“Any policy decision costs money, and investment, and somebody willing to convince company registries, the corporate service providers and everyone else,” he said.

Although there are significant challenges ahead, the strides that have been made in the past 20 years, such as the increased role of banks in providing company registry information, are positive indicators for the future.

“Culture changes don’t happen overnight,” van der Does told IPS. “But, given the fact that we can already see some examples of this happening over time, I’m cautiously optimistic.”

By Rosemary D'Amour
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 2011 (IPS)

Dr. Rick Steketee, science director at the Malaria Control Partnership at PATH, a leading nonprofit organisation dedicated to public health in the Pacific northwest city of Seattle, isn’t alone when he says that elimination of the infectious disease is a possibility.

In the so-called malaria belt centred around the Equator, the disease is often transmitted year-round. Credit: U.S. CDC

But Steketee and his colleagues at PATH are making some assertions that, 20 years ago, would have seemed outlandish: malaria can be eliminated in Africa, mostly leveraging current tools and strategies that are available now.

“This is not about a dichotomy of waiting for new tools versus using what we have today, because we have some really good tools today,” Steketee told IPS. “It’s about saying we shouldn’t just be waiting for some tool to come along to be a total solution.”

The 2011 Malaria Forum hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle was ground zero this week for optimistic news on the disease that kills nearly 800,000 people per year, mostly children and more than 85 percent in Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

By far the biggest announcement out of the 2011 forum was the results from clinical trials that could potentially produce the first ever vaccine for malaria, a drug known as RTS,S, which could reduce children’s risk of infection by half.

But a huge component for this year’s forum was the resurgence of the “elimination” idea, which Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, first proposed four years ago at the 2007 forum.

“To achieve elimination and eradication, we need to start with control, drive it up to very high levels, and sustain it,” Bill Gates said in a speech at the forum on Tuesday, adding that it was a goal that could be achieved in his lifetime.

Elimination of a disease refers to the reduction of a disease’s prevalence in specific areas to zero, while eradication means zero cases worldwide. So far, smallpox is the only disease that has been successfully eradicated.

Steketee agreed that the possibilities for elimination were encouraging, given existing interventions such as long-lasting insecticide-treated nets, indoor residual spraying, diagnostics and anti-malarial medicines.

“We need to build both the systems for prevention and for treatment,” Steketee told IPS. “Let’s build a buffer and go after it.”

To do this, he argues, along with colleague Carlos Campbell, in the October 2011 issue of The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene that leveraging existing interventions with an evolutionary strategy is key, taking the most effective efforts and combining them with a scale-up for impact (SUFI) approach, which factors in growth for initiatives.

The paper lays out specific goals, such as ensuring prevention and treatment tools are reaching every person at risk by improving delivery and management of initiatives, and, ultimately, reducing the transmission of malaria by focusing on the parasites in infected people.

The immediate results seen from current interventions – for example, child infections and mortality were reduced within one malaria season with treated bed nets – left experts wondering what else could be achieved.

“It left us emboldened to set elimination as a goal, and eradication as a consequence of that,” Steketee told IPS. “How far could we go with existing interventions versus waiting for some new tool to come along.”

The newest tool – a potential vaccine for malaria – was something that took the media and malaria advocates by storm this week, but already sparked some controversy.

This week’s announcement has some wondering how soon a vaccine will be made available, and how best to integrate it into the current strategy to battle malaria. And the question of who will pay for not only the development of the vaccine but its implementation looms large.

“This is likely to be a potential tool that could be available to us within a few years, and people are already looking into what it would take to add it to the current set of interventions,” Steketee told IPS. “It’s not just a tool that would replace something else, but would add value to the existing package of what we’ve got.”

But, he warned, breakthrough technologies like this are not the be- all, end-all solutions for public health programmes like those combating malaria, particularly because they take so long to come about.

“It’s important to highlight the fact that this (potential vaccine) has been nearly a quarter of a century in development,” he said.

Competing for limited resources

Public health programmes are often a Catch-22 of sorts – health goals compete for resources and support, and who is to say that preventing malaria is more important than, say, preventing tuberculosis – and the victor usually is the one with the best strategy.

“Particularly when economies start to take a dive, it’s ‘how many resources do I have? What do I provide to people?'” Steketee said.

Resources for public health programs are stretched thin across the board, but a strong alliance which works not only to actually implement interventions, such as bed nets for malaria, but also in uniting goals, is usually the most successful.

The global campaign to combat malaria, through efforts like the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM) under the auspices of the WHO, is an example of a united front against a health hazard that experts say offers valuable lessons.

“How do you move from that campaign into a stronger system that is a routine, and that’s solid in delivering services to all who need it,” Steketee told IPS.

As the scale of objectives change, Steketee said, often growing to include more services, or new partners, the tactics of a campaign need to change as well.

“All the way along we need to be tweaking that focus,” he told IPS.

In his paper, Steketee argues that the strategy that has been adapted for malaria elimination in the past decade has been an evolutionary one, requiring significant investment on multiple fronts, and one that acknowledges that there is no quick fix.

“It’s a core of public health – find those things which work, and don’t just do it once and walk away from it,” he told IPS. “You could pick any disease, any environmental concern you care about and want to fight against, and that sentence still applies.”

Excerpt:

The three landmark deals between the United States and trading partners South Korea, Colombia and Panama approved by the U.S. Congress late Wednesday represented the largest free trade agreements in the U.S. since 1994 and the first free trade agreement made by the U.S. since 2007.

A milestone for the U.S. economy, the agreements have been the subject of a tortuous debate over trade liberalisation since 2006, when they were first proposed by the Bush administration. They had bipartisan support during this round of negotiations, following efforts by the Obama administration.

The free trade agreements (FTAs) could generate more than 13 billion dollars in export revenue and hundreds of thousands of jobs for the U.S. by removing trade limitations in favour of U.S. manufacturers and agricultural producers, as well as banking and insurance service industries, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

The largest component of the deals approved Wednesday is the agreement between the U.S. and South Korea, the world’s 15th largest economy, in what some call the biggest trade deal for the U.S. since the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994.

Arguments in favour of the deal urged the passage of the FTAs to help revive the U.S.’s stalling economy by increasing exports, thus creating jobs both at home and abroad.

But prior to the deal’s passage, labour unions like the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters argued that the agreements could actually do more damage.

They could lead to layoffs of potentially hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers and contribute to continued abuse of workers in Colombia and Panama, some said. Others argued that the new trade agreements are mere continuations of old policies that have run economies into the ground.

“The United States has lost five million jobs since NAFTA, and the last thing America’s middle class needs right now is ‘Son of NAFTA,'” Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said before Congress passed the deal. “We desperately need to reverse direction and protect our economy, instead of giving it away to our diplomatic partners.”

Nevertheless, U.S. President Barack Obama called the FTAs a “major win” for U.S. workers. The deal is seen as a major political victory as part of a plan to double U.S. exports during his tenure as president.

“I’ve fought to make sure that these trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama deliver the best possible deal for our country, and I’ve insisted that we do more to help American workers who have been affected by global competition,” Obama said in a statement released Wednesday night.

The agreement could generate 10 billion dollars from U.S. exports to South Korea by gradually removing tariffs on more than 95 percent of industrial and consumer exports over the next five years and slashing the majority of duties on U.S. farm exports.

The deal is expected to be especially significant for U.S. automakers trying to enter the South Korean market. Ultimately, it could serve as precedent for more U.S. goods to enter other Asian markets.

The President of South Korea, Lee Myung-Bak, in Washington this week, called the deal a “win-win” that marked a new era of relations with the U.S. and would increase two-way trade by more than 50 percent by 2015.

“The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement will demonstrate to the world that we can create good-quality jobs and stimulate growth through open and fair trade,” Lee said at a press briefing at the White House on Thursday.

“The passage of the KORUS FTA has opened up a new chapter in our partnership, in our alliance.”

South Korea’s minority Democratic Party has contested the FTA’s passage, which received overwhelming support from the leading Grand National Party, arguing that the deal primarily favors the U.S., the nation’s third-largest trading partner.

Although the deals with Colombia and Panama are expected to result in fewer economic gains, each generating a little more than one billion dollars in export revenue for the U.S., they are by no means less important in the scale of their impact on the Latin American region.

Some are warning that the history of liberalised trade agreements has led to greater economic inequalities, and that the results of this deal will be no different, particularly in Latin America.

“With every trade agreement there are winners and losers,” Joy Olson, executive director at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said in a statement. “The experience with similar agreements has taught us who the losers will be – those least able to bear the cost.”

Although labour rights were a significant component of the legislation that was finally approved after a five-year debate, WOLA cited concerns about ensuring the protection of workers, an argument at the core of the case against this and other free trade agreements.

“Supporters of this agreement can’t just say ‘hooray’ and move on,” Olson said, adding that in places like Colombia, where an ongoing armed conflict has made the political and economic situation ripe for exploitation of the poorest sections of society, liberalising trade poses significant risks.

“They will have to deal with the consequences of this vote in Colombia,” she continued. These consequences include “continued labour violations and assassinations, people moving into the illicit drug trade, greater internal displacement, and out-migration.”

Civil society organisations weighed in Friday on the risks and necessities associated with results-driven aid, asking the key question when it comes to a development project: Results for whom? Donors, or the people on the ground?

In an event sponsored by Oxfam International on Friday during the World Bank’s annual fall meetings, civil society organisations from around the world contributed their experience to the debate, calling for aid organisations to rethink their approach.

“Shorter-term outcomes are easiest to measure, and politically, more saleable,” said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and former administrator for USAID.

McPherson said that solving short-term goals is often a matter of fire-fighting, or solving immediate, serious, problems, often putting projects that could have long-term effects on the back burner.

The results for a development project can be deceptive, panelists said – an increase in enrollment in schools does not necessarily mean an improvement in literacy levels, for example, which ultimately means that the project will be ineffective in changing the society in which it is operating.

“But if you’re not careful, everything gets skewed, [like] longer term creation -technology, human resources, institutional building – all of the things which you can’t measure as easily or often,” McPherson said. “The donor community tends to push the short term.”

Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, echoed these sentiments on the panel on Friday, arguing that in Afghanistan, the lack of progress was due to immediate expectations for projects.

“Sometimes, it’s very ambitious, people may want to see change overnight,” Nadery said.

This focus on greater context for development projects has been a theme of the international finance institution’s meetings this year, with increased attention paid toward civic engagement and responsibility in creating accountable governments and development projects.

Friday’s panel ramps up attention for results of the Busan Agenda meetings in South Korea this November, to convene the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4), which will offer both quantitative results of projects in recent years and suggestions for new focal points in development projects, such as focusing on long- term impacts, and using those who will be impacted by projects to name the results they want achieved.

“This notion of country ownership should not be equated with government ownership,” said Richard Ssewakirvanga, executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum. “It should be about how a citizen is actually owning the development process.”

The civil society panel occurred just one day after the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report monitoring the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness, which painted a bleak picture for the goals set six years ago.

According to the report by the OECD which tracked more than 100 aid donors and developing countries, only one out of 13 targets set has been achieved as of 2010 – the goal of increasing “coordinated technical cooperation”.

“Developing countries have come through with their part of the programme, they’re improving, but how are we doing on the donor side? Not so well,” said Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America, who moderated the panel discussion. “Basically, we talk to each other better.”

Despite this seeming setback, O’Brien said that he and others were still optimistic about the progress made towards the next 12 goals, especially amongst developing countries who have been working to create enabling environments for aid.

Ssewakirvanga said that development projects, in tandem with civil society organisations and governments themselves, should have this enabling theme in mind.

“Let’s think of it not as a place where we ask governments to do things for us, but a place where the government creates conditions that allow me to actually do what I’m supposed to do,” said Ssewakirvanga.

Civil society organisations have weighed in on the debate of effective aid, with some arguing that “real aid”, or the money that can be and is used by governments for development, should be a major measure to determine the effectiveness of projects.

Lucia Fry, a policy advisor for ActionAid, an international non- governmental organisation focused on alleviating poverty, said that “real aid” was a benchmark in determining how aid dependency amongst developing nations can be reduced.

“This is a story that gets missed, because there’s the idea that aid is a bottomless pit,” Fry told IPS. “But if we see where the money is going, if we put it to use in catalysing domestic revenues, increasing domestic accountability, we’ll see results.”

Numbers show that on average, dependency on aid in low income countries has actually gone down by about one third since 2000, or down by 12 percent of the average country’s expenditure, according to an ActionAid report.

Civil society and government leaders gathered at World Bank headquarters in Washington on Thursday to debate the future direction of social and government accountability in the Middle East and North Africa.

The discussion, “Towards a new social contract in the Arab World: global lessons in citizen voice and accountability”, featured representatives from the ministries of finance of Egypt and Tunisia, as well as civil society leaders from the region who have worked to increase the role of civic participation in the development process.

The social contract stressed the importance of both civil society and government institutions to the daily function and future development of countries in the region – a relatively new concept, some leaders said, but one which is tied inextricably to the social and political transition following the Arab Spring earlier this year.

Driss Ksikes, a journalist and managing director at the Centre for Research HEM in Morocco, expressed concern about where policies to increase transparency and government accountability would actually go.

“This idea of access to information brings me back to the top-down approach,” he said. “(It limits the discussion if) I as government put up what I want to put up, and people can only access that.”

Ksikes said that civic inclusion in governance involved two-way communication, a new idea to the region that historically belonged to a tight circle of elites who only communicated with each other.

“We are going through a new era where we’re talking about spreadable and shared information,” Ksikes said. “(We need information that) doesn’t come only from above, but also from the bottom.”

Ksikes’s insights were representative of the overall problem in the MENA region, panelists said – lacking dimensions of open governance – but an overwhelming consensus was that public confidence was crucial to facilitating change in the future.

“There is a great need to restore public trust in the government,” said Marcus Noland, deputy director and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who moderated the event. “There are legal and institutional gaps that are most prominent in the areas of transparency, accountability and participation.”

The World Bank’s annual fall meetings on economic and development scenarios have all shared this argument, with great pushes for gender equality and inclusion of the public sphere being central to the mission. The Bank has given indicators that the focus of international financial institutions would shift to include greater involvement of the private sector, though some have argued that the Bank’s policies are hindering development on the ground.

Tunisia’s finance minister, Jelloul Ayad, said he was encouraged by the push for civil society involvement in his country, and said that efforts to facilitate communication between officials and citizens would increase as more innovations were developed, such as Tunisia’s e-government initiative.

“While civil society is a nascent phenomenon in the country, we believe that that’s only going to continue and be reinforced in the months and years ahead,” said Ayad.

Thursday’s discussion came on the heels of an announcement by the World Bank that bank president Robert Zoellick and Amr Lashin, director of governance and civic engagement at CARE, Egypt, a branch of the international poverty and development assistance NGO, signed a deal awarding initial seed funding to CARE’s efforts to foster accountability in governance in the Middle East and North Africa.

The 500,000-dollar investment is the first round of funding for what could potentially be three years of project support for the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability (ANSA) in the region, in the hopes that establishing accountability following the social movement-driven uprisings earlier this year will be facilitated by MENA practitioners in participatory governance, such as civil society organisations, the private sector, the media, and even governments themselves.

Despite this news, the world’s international financial institutions have faced criticism upon their involvement in the MENA region. A three-billion-dollar loan package from the IMF was rejected by the Egyptian finance ministry earlier this year following a public debate over the implications of such a deal.

Seventy-six civil society groups in Egypt released a statement claiming that IMF and World Bank policies had helped to facilitate the oppressive regimes in the region they were at that very moment trying to overcome.

They argued instead that financial policies needed a democratic approach with a “people-led process of development and not be part of increasing…debts or restricting their policy spheres,” according to the Bretton Woods Project.

However, when questioned about Egypt’s decision to reject IMF loans in June, Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs and Finance Minister Hazem el-Beblawi skirted direct criticism.

“The decision is left to the politicians to decide what they think is in the interest of the country,” said el-Beblawi, who was not in office at the time the deal was rejected. “If it is appropriate and useful, we will accept it – it’s a matter of usefulness.”

Amid a global financial crisis that has shown little signs of reversing, next week’s fall meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are crucial in setting the tone for rebounding world markets, to which leaders of the Bretton Woods institutions offered optimistic, yet ultimately vague, solutions in speeches this week.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said that political leaders needed to become “responsible stakeholders” in the world’s development in an appearance Wednesday at George Washington University.

“We need to leverage aid more effectively through new instruments, and we need to expand the contributors by involving more stakeholders through more innovative approaches,” Zoellick said, stressing private investment and entrepreneurship as avenues which needed to be more involved in global growth strategies.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde echoed Zoellick’s comments on Thursday, in her first speech in Washington since her appointment in July. Lagarde emphasised a need to restore confidence in the global economy, but said that the world would take its cue from the action and cooperation of political leaders.

“[Solutions] have to be demonstrated, implemented by political leaders who may have to put aside for a little while their ego and their partisan interests, and extend the agenda to beyond the next election,” Lagarde said.

Lagarde, formerly France’s finance minister, was herself the subject of partisan debate upon her appointment as head of the IMF in July, with many in the developing world balking at the idea of continued European control of the organisation.

During her speech on Thursday, she hinted at the work that the IMF had undertaken to increase its internal management, and also at the results of a report that will be published next week during the shareholder meetings.

“Growth is continuing to slow down,” Lagarde said, citing high levels of unemployment in the advanced economies of the world, combined with an increase in credit balances and high inflation in emerging markets. For the lower income countries, the degree of dependency on other countries for capital and assistance is still very high, placing them in a vulnerable position in the global marketplace.

“There are major conduits of connections generally in the financial system,” Lagarde said. “In this interconnected world, economic tremors in one country can reverberate swiftly and powerfully across the globe.”

Civil society organisations have weighed in on the need for a change in the modus operandi of development programmes, especially when it comes to how the money is handled.

“There’s growing consensus about the need for innovative new methods to raise financing for development,” Caroline Pearce, spokesperson for Oxfam International, told IPS Friday.

Among the options to be discussed at the upcoming meetings are taxes and new investment strategies, which Pearce said could be useful to help face the myriad of structural problems the world is facing, particularly relating to climate change.

“A tax on global financial transactions could raise at least 650 billion dollars annually, and a tax on shipping fuel could raise billions more,” she said. “We hope that the World Bank and IMF will be calling for proceeds to go to development and climate change adaptation.”

Zoellick’s remarks revealed much of the same perspective on the new reality for development in the 21st century.

“Today, we are seeing economic, trade, and financial interdependence that was incomprehensible in 1944,” he said, the year that the Bretton Woods system was created.

But despite the myriad of economic challenges that the world’s economies are facing, Zoellick, whose term ends next year, seemed optimistic about the patterns of investment in emerging economies.

“In the 1990s, developing countries accounted for about a fifth of global growth,” he said. “Today, developing countries are the engine driving the global economy.”

These countries are attracting 45 percent of global investment, a number that has more than doubled in 20 years.

And more and more, Zoellick said, developing countries are interacting with and taking a cue from not just aid donors, but from each other, as the share of foreign direct investment between the global south has increased to about 40 percent, up from just over 30 percent in 2008.

“Relationships among developing countries are changing the development world as we knew it,” Zoellick said.

Zoellick, who was appointed president of the World Bank in 2007, has proposed various development strategies in his tenure, including the “One Percent Solution” for development in Africa, with countries investing one percent of their Sovereign Wealth Funds in the region’s growth.

On Wednesday, he highlighted a new development focus, perhaps a major point in the meetings next week, on women in development, called the “Fifty Percent Solution”.

“Women make up 50 percent of the global population and 40 percent of the global workforce,” he said. “Yet women own only one percent of the world’s wealth.”

An important point in the discussions next week will include working to mainstream women’s rights as part of the development conversation as well as increasing the knowledge base on gender-related data, such as numbers on women’s access to credit and justice systems, Zoellick said.

“We will build on the 65 billion dollars we have provided over the last five years to support girls’ education, and women’s access to credit, land, agricultural services, jobs and infrastructure, ” he said. “This is important work, but it has not been central enough to what we do.”

Addressing global gender inequities would have an enormous impact on other elements of development, analysts said, and should be a focal point for discussion next week.

“Narrowing the gap between women and men – in terms of resources, opportunities, and decision-making at every level – is at the core of development,” Pearce said.

South American experts and officials met in Washington this week to discuss current policy initiatives to combat human trafficking in their respective countries, part of a broader U.S.-wide tour to share information and strategies to deal with the issue.

In an event at George Washington University on Thursday, officials from throughout the region detailed not only their existing efforts, but also future goals in terms of legal policies and assistance for victims of human trafficking, stressing a multi-faceted approach to combat the issue.

An important element in combating human trafficking, officials said, was increasing communication of the goals that need to be accomplished, as well as creating a standard for evaluating progress.

“We need to coordinate the work that needs to be done among countries,” said Sebastian Bagini, a director at the National Immigration Directorate in Argentina. “And we need statistics to measure how well we’re doing in this fight.”

Sexual exploitation, enabled by human trafficking, is a social epidemic throughout South America, and the situation for women in Brazil is especially so, said Maria Araujo, executive coordinator of Coletivo Mulher Vida, an NGO that works on combating gender-based violence.

And because of upcoming world events like the Olympics and the World Cup, officials are worried about women and children being trafficked into the country to meet a demand for sexual tourism, Araujo said, which already ensnares more than 250,000 people in Brazil, according to UNICEF.

Recent policies in Brazil focus on social services for victims of violence and human trafficking, she said, because poverty plays a major role in the ability of women and children to escape, and often puts them at risk for exploitation.

“This foresees and attempts to diminish the impact of poverty in the life of people who are experiencing [this type of] violence,” Araujo said.

While designing and establishing a viable legal framework within which to address human trafficking is an obstacle, execution of these laws remains an even bigger challenge.

“It’s not going to be a question of passing the law, but implementing the law,” said Omar Pardo, a lieutenant in the Panama National Police, also a representative at the discussion.

Panama’s own efforts to combat human trafficking have been limited, Pardo said, with very few laws on the books that actually deal with human trafficking, versus only sexual exploitation, or smuggling.

And in the absence of government-sponsored support or feasible legal safeguards, the task of assisting victims in Panama falls largely to the police, Pardo added.

“In my country, if we as policemen have managed to save someone from a trafficking situation, we have to take care of all their needs,” Pardo said. “We have to find where they’ll spend the night, we have to find them something to eat, and we have to find where to send them abroad, as most are foreigners.”

This is one of the repercussions of human trafficking – an enormous number of new residents entering into a country without documentation, thereby affecting other levels and resources in a country, officials said. In Panama, Pardo said, more than 90 percent of victims are Colombian, and must be sent abroad.

Sending victims back to their country of origin is a common solution, but this does little to solve the actual problem, officials said. And often, sending victims back without the physical, emotional and legal support that they require will be detrimental for them.

Bagini, whose work at the NID deals with permanent residency for victims of human trafficking, said that Argentina’s efforts in this respect have been comprehensive, including landmark moves like the Patria Grande, or “Great Homeland”, law in 2006, which granted legal residency to over 400,000 undocumented immigrants from countries like Paraguay.

Argentina is also one of the few countries in the region to have five shelters specifically for rescued victims. This goes beyond simple criminalisation of human trafficking, Bagini said, by providing physical and legal support to victims during their transition.

“You have to give victims a different type of treatment,” said Bagini, who added that Argentina’s use of government policy in coordination with that of NGOs and police to provide support was crucial to any success it achieves.

Officials said they were optimistic about the result of the tour, hoping it would give them new ideas and methods to combat human trafficking.

“[We have the opportunity to meet with] people truly interested in exchanging information with us,” Bagini said. “This is the only way to create worldwide policies or global policies that would make it possible to fight against what is a global crime.”

Critics of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) gathered here Thursday to voice concerns over the U.S.’s stronghold on intellectual property rights.

The seventh meeting to determine policy for the TPP – an Asia-Pacific regional trade agreement between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam – is slated for Sep. 6 in Chicago, but advocates for access to health and information have disapproved strongly of some proposed measures.

Although the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the United States’ primary negotiator for the agreement, has not released official material, leaked documents reveal a precarious situation for international intellectual property and copyright law if the agreement comes to fruition, with particularly serious implications for health initiatives aimed at HIV treatment and tobacco consumption.

Matthew Kavanaugh, director of U.S. Advocacy for the Health Global Access Project (GAP), said that the implications for TPP could be disastrous, and that the partnership’s reach would eventually extend beyond those included in negotiations.

“This is in fact overtly meant to be a broader trade agreement,” said Kavanaugh. “It’s a beachfront strategy for gaining a hold in Asia for a certain set of countries, for a certain set of interests.”

At the Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property held at American University here this week, Kavanaugh and a panel of others went through the proposed legislation, arguing that provisions in the agreement would benefit predominantly big transnational companies and powerful states like the U.S.

Rashmi Rangnath, staff attorney and the director of the Global Knowledge Initiative at Public Knowledge, said that a majority of provisions for the TPP were dependent upon interpretations of U.S. law, which could provide challenges for the future.

“Case law is still developing in some areas, so codifying these principles into an international instrument before it’s properly developed within the U.S. is problematic,” Rius said.

An element of the partnership agreement would alter current policy regarding provision of affordable drugs for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. Under the legislation proposed, critics said, there would be an expansion of intellectual property barriers, enabling pharmaceutical companies to hold or renew patents for longer, limiting the availability of generic medicines and treatment.

Prices of medications to treat HIV and AIDS globally have fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, Kavanaugh said, largely due to intellectual property legislation which allows for more wide-spread access to patents that were hitherto guarded by major money-making players like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

Tobacco has also come under fire in the TPP negotiations, as companies would be permitted to sue governments who impose restrictions on packaging – such as use of warning labels for the health risks associated with using the product, making recent moves by the Food and Drug Administration obsolete.

The TPP copyright model mimics the existing system in the U.S., said Jonathan Band, attorney at Policy Bandwidth, but is lacking the exceptions that make a stable environment, swinging too far in the other direction.

“It’s exporting the enforcement provisions, supporting the more draconian features of U.S. copyright law, without all of the balancing features,” Band said, citing fair use as a common exception to copyright law in the U.S., a provision not featured in TPP.

Without such provisions, Band said, restrictions could be placed on entities like libraries and internet service providers, which provide access to information.

The negotiation process for TPP has been plagued by criticism of free trade policies, with one of the biggest frustrations for advocates being a lack of transparency from negotiators, including the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen, said that not addressing the implications of TPP legislation could lead to a dramatic change in international policy.

“What we’re seeing with the TPP is a whole slate of new proposals designed to get in under the political radar where no one’s watching, and expand patentability in as many ways as possible without going through a domestic political fight in the United States,” said Maybarduk.

Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not respond to inquiries for comments or background, and efforts to follow the negotiations of the TPP process through their webpage were fruitless, as it was not functioning.

Updates on the office’s “outreach” strategies have not been updated since June 2010.

Band said that the structure for the TPP as it stands failed to take into account trade and technological developments of the past 30 years, which could prove to be its biggest downfall.

“The whole international framework that we’re pushing is the PhRMA approach, because that’s the template that made sense in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s,” Band said. “Then, it was very much ‘we developed the copyright product, and we want to sell it internationally and prevent infringement internationally’.”

“But (now) we live in a much more complicated world,” Band said.

China’s burgeoning presence as a leading trade and investment partner in Latin America is still an overriding concern for some observers in Washington, as the East Asian giant appears to have changed the focus of economic development in countries south of the U.S.’s border.

The Chinese “footprint” in Latin America was featured in a discussion Wednesday at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, highlighting new research on the decade-long south-south partnership. Though the relationship has proved to be most lucrative since 2000, when China’s rapid urbanisation created a huge market for Latin American exports, experts now warn that the once-easy profits won’t last forever.

“Latin America cannot count on fast growth in terms of demand for commodities from China forever, and this of course means there are some policy challenges that [the region] will have to face,” said Mauricio Cárdenas, director of the Latin America Initiative at Brookings. “Latin America has to begin thinking about ways to generate growth more indigenously.”

According to a paper by Cárdenas and Adriana Kugler, Latin America’s economy today is marked by steep deindustrialisation and a lack of productivity in its biggest market, the services industry – largely due to an increase in demand for primary goods from booming countries like China.

Though the United States and the European Union have historically held the reins of Latin America’s trade and growth, the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimates that China could become the region’s second largest trading partner as early as 2015, and in fact is already leading in Brazil.

The problem with the current structure of trade within a majority of Latin American countries, Cárdenas argues, is that the numbers are unsustainable.

For example, the last 10 years have witnessed a ballooning of Chilean exports to China from five to nearly 25 percent of total exports since 2000.

Given that China’s primary demand is for natural commodities such as crude oil to fuel its ever-increasing urbanisation programme, experts fear that this demand could easily peter out.

“In the case of exports from Latin American countries to China, they are heavily concentrated in one to two types of goods,” Cárdenas explained. “Whereas imports from China are much more diversified.”

As Latin America imports a variety of goods from highly industrialised or industrialising areas, it has slowed its own manufacturing plans, a far cry from the manufacturing boom of the late 20th century, which left the economy undervalued, even while increasing production.

An over-emphasis on production in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with neoliberal policies conducive with the Washington Consensus, left the region underdeveloped in key areas such as education and science and technology, Mauricio Mesquita Moreira principal economist at the Inter-American Development Bank and panelist at the Brookings event, said Wednesday.

He echoed concerns that that Latin America’s fast-paced industrial growth, hand in hand with China, was simply not sustainable.

Moreira said that prior to 2000, Latin America reached a point of saturation with production. “It was inevitable, and desirable that we would see a decline in the share of manufacturing in most countries in the region, particularly the largest countries where industrialisation went further, like Brazil,” he said.

But despite the leveling-out hypothesis that many economists predicted, the current lag in manufacturing in Latin America is tied to its policies and trading partners.

“Recent deindustrialisation trends appear closely related to an influx of inexpensive Chinese goods,” said Margaret Myers, programme director at the Inter-American Dialogue. “Manufacturing sectors in the region simply cannot compete.”

In Brazil, for example, production and goods are very expensive, due in large part to the country’s economic policies. The country’s industrial output fell 1.6 percent in June, the second worst decline in production since the global meltdown in 2008, due in large part to its outdated labour laws, excessive taxation, and system of tariffs, Myers told IPS.

The situation seems precarious for the region, as countries deepen their dependence on a diverse range of manufactured imports from China, and on revenues from its exports.

China’s involvement has upset trade balances within the region itself – oil- and mineral-rich countries like Venezuela and Brazil boast trade surpluses with the Asian nation, whereas Mexico is nursing a deficit of 11 billion dollars.

“If Chinese growth were to slow, and if slower growth were accompanied by a decrease in demand for commodities, this could have a disastrous effect on certain countries in Latin America,” Myers told IPS.

China has vehemently argued against this assumption. The country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has insisted that China’s interests are geared towards a harmonious and collaborative trade partnership. According to IAD, however, the view within Latin America and the U.S. is that the relationship is based predominantly on the exploitation of natural resources.

Some countries are taking precautions against economic downturns by using current revenue strains to their advantage, such as Chile’s re- vamped Economic and Social Stabilization Fund (ESSF), created in 2007 out of revenues from its copper exports.

Moreira said that the region should use the resources they have and current revenue strains to their advantage, investing in the wealth of resources and human capital that would be the best avenue for sustainable development in the future.

“The best thing that we could do is to try to channel those resources to one of the biggest weaknesses of the region, which is education, science and technology,” he said. “Then you’re going to be able to not just be stuck in basic commodity exports, but to add value to those exports – that’s a clear opportunity we have.”