Mohammed (left) and Ahmed, two Somali migrants who survived crossing the Mediterranean and are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, although they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
AUGUSTA, Syracuse, Italy , May 11 2015 (IPS)

Not even a month has passed since over 700 hundred migrants lost their lives in their attempt to reaching the shores of Italy and the media spotlights have already faded on the island of Sicily, Italy’s southern region and main gateway to Europe.

Yet, the migration flows have not stopped.

Five days ago, on May 3, 300 people arrived in the port of Augusta, in the province of Syracuse, and among them were 19-year-old Ahmed and 22-year-old Mohammed.“That boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now” – Mohammed, a Somali migrant who survived crossing the Mediterranean to reach Italy

Both come from Somalia but they met in Libya, where they had worked for several months in order to save enough money to pay the smugglers running the traffic in migrants across the Mediterranean.

Ahmed and Mohammed are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, but they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Ahmed wants to go to Belgium, where some of his relatives already live, while Mohammed hopes to continue his trip towards Germany.

Crossing the Mediterranean was frightening, but they seem to have left all of their fears on the Libyan shores and their eyes are full of hope for the future.

“The sight of the sea from Libya was so scary, but when I look at it from here, it’s beautiful again,” says Ahmed, who is hoping to be able to study in Europe and become a doctor.

For Mohammed, “that boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now.”

Before leaving Libya, Ahmed had heard about the tragedy of the 700 who lost their lives, but that did not stop him because, he says, the risks are higher in Somalia than on the boats.

“The weather has been bad these days, but look how calm the sea is today,” a carabiniere standing in front of the centre told IPS. “We are getting ready for many, many more to arrive.”

Despite the fact that more than 25,000 migrants have already made it to Italy this year, the actual ‘migration season’ is just about to start. Meanwhile, Europe is lurching to answer southern European states’ request for help.

Currently, the Mediterranean is patrolled under Operation Triton, a border security operation conducted by Frontex, the European Union’s border security agency, which aims to deter migrants. Operation Triton replaced Operation Mare Nostrum, which had been a broader Italian search and rescue initiative.

During an extraordinary European summit on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean held on Apr. 23, E.U. leaders agreed to triple funding for rescue operations in the Mediterranean, but this is far from being the ‘European solution’ to the migration crisis.

“Of course more capacity and more boats and early detection by planes increase the possibility of saving more people,” the Frontex press officer in Catania, Ewa Moncure, told IPS.

“But even with the best efforts, if people are put on these boats and sent to sea with no safety equipment, with not enough water, then nobody can guarantee that they will be found on time and that the rescue services will save everybody, because that would be simply a lie.”

While E.U. leaders continue to discuss possible naval blocks off Libyan territorial waters and southern European states try to open a debate on quotas of refugees to be shared among all member states, local authorities and Sicilian citizens are left with the task of handling the first aid and reception operations.

Augusta, a town of around 40,000 inhabitants, is one of the main bases of the Italian Navy in Sicily and it served as the headquarters of the Mare Nostrum operation, until it ended in October 2014.

Between April and October 2014, the town also hosted an emergency centre for unaccompanied minors, raising concerns and complaints of around 2,000 people who signed a petition to move the centre somewhere else and to propose naval blocks at the departure ports.

“This petition suggested exonerating from the allocation of migrants those municipalities that already suffer from economic insolvency and high unemployment levels, as is the case of Augusta,” Pietro Forestiere, local spokesperson for the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party and one of the initiators of the petition, explained to IPS.

“The logic behind it is that you cannot ask someone who is already struggling to deliver proper services to its citizens to take care of migrant reception as well.”

The emergency centre of Augusta was eventually closed in October, but its example could be easily extended to the whole region, which suffers from the highest levels of poverty and the second highest unemployment rate in the whole of Italy.

Yet, despite the voices calling for strong action against immigration, it is very common to hear people in Augusta sympathise with the migrants, especially when it comes to refugees.

“They are made of flesh and blood, just like us. We simply can’t let them drown,” Alfonso, who owns a stand in the fish market, told IPS. “They are escaping war and poverty. If we can’t prevent them from coming, once they approach the coast, we must help them.”

Most citizens in Sicily do not appear to fear future arrivals. The problem is rather the feeling of being abandoned in handling the situation, as a customer at the market pointed out:

“This is a port, we have always been used to seeing foreigners around. The impact on our daily life is quite limited. Yet, something needs to be done, not so much for us but rather to help them, and we can’t do it on our own. This is a European – if not global – issue, and Europe must act.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Mohammed (left) and Ahmed, two Somali migrants who survived crossing the Mediterranean and are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, although they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
AUGUSTA, Syracuse, Italy, May 11 2015 (IPS)

Two Somali migrants who survived crossing the Mediterranean and reached the Italian island of Sicily describe their ordeal and hopes for the future, while local opinion is divided over the issue of immigration.

“It’s like putting explosive, gasoline and matches all in one shed. These are things that should be stored in separated places.”

Giuseppe Giorgioli, an inhabitant of the Tor Sapienza district of Rome and a member of the Tor Sapienza Committee, was explaining the mid-November outburst in the district against a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees, in which dozens of paper bombs were thrown.

The Tor Sapienza district, situated in the east side of the Italian capital, is home to almost 13 thousands citizens and, according to Giorgioli, is treated as a “second class quarter” by the Rome administration because of its relatively small dimensions.Episodes like the attack on a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees “are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed” – Monsignor Giancarlo Perego

“For the last 10 to 15 years there has been a progressive phenomenon of disruption-parking in our suburb. This is how we ended up hosting four reception centres for migrants and two gypsy camps, while other districts in the city have none,” Giorgioli complained.

The residents’ uprising followed an alleged attempt of rape by a Romanian citizen against a local resident and a series of attempted robberies in apartments in the neighbourhood.

The Tor Sapienza Committee had organised a demonstration to ask the Rome Town Council to act against the urban decay the neighbourhood is suffering but once the march was over, a group of people – about one hundred according to witnesses – gathered in front of the building where the ‘Il Sorriso’ cooperative manages different services, including a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees and three structures hosting foreign unaccompanied minors.

“When I arrived in the centre the following morning, I found huge pieces of asphalt, broken glass and people – both adults and minors – suffering from panic attacks,” recalls Alessia Armini of Italy’s System of Protection for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR), who is coordinator of the cooperative. “Let’s not forget the kind of vulnerable guests we have in such centres,” she adds.

While no one denies the critical conditions suffered by many suburbs in Rome, with cuts in transport services, council houses not having been refurbished for decades and inefficient garbage collection among others, the explanations for such a violent outburst vary widely.

“People are not racists, they are exasperated. Rome is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is about the whole country,” Paolo Grimoldi, MP for right-wing Northern League party, told IPS. “When you receive 150 thousand migrants – we say illegal, the government says refugees – in one year who are given a house, money and are taken care of by the State, this inevitably destabilises our social fabric.”

However, according to Monsignor Giancarlo Perego who runs Migrantes, the foundation of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) for migrants, the numbers tell a different story: “Migrants are abandoning our country because it no longer represents an economic opportunity for many of them,” he told IPS.

“The reasons must be found in a management of the suburbs that looked at the interests of building speculators rather than guaranteeing common assets such as meeting places that are necessary to build a feeling of safety within a territory.”

In addition, the economic crisis also plays an important role also in this context. “Episodes [like the Tor Sapienza] incident are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed,” said Perego.

“But such a difficult situation does not exempt us from the need of building relationships, delivering correct information and managing the places where people live in order to encourage encounters and not social clashes.”

For their part, the citizens of Tor Sapienza firmly reject any accusation of racism. “We welcome everybody and we’ve been welcoming everybody for twenty years,” Giorgioli told IPS.

“You don’t become racist in four days. But there are rules that need to be respected and services that the town council needs to provide. If such services are not provided, unfortunately someone with less patience begins to see red.”

In the days that followed the attack on the reception centre, both local and national politicians visited the neighbourhood, provoking strong criticism – and not only from angry citizens – that they were using the situation for instrumental reasons.

“I think that any form of manipulation, whether from left or right, is a serious aspect to be avoided. Politicians must govern a city, not pour in new reasons for social clashes,” Perego said.

Meanwhile, the violent episode in Tor Sapienza and signs of social unrest in other Italian neighbourhoods that have sparked debate and drawn attention to the migrant issue are not to be underestimated.

“In these suburbs, the level of social distress is extremely high, but all that hate, taking a symbol and pouring everything out on it … it’s frightening,” said Armini. “We heard people [outside the centre] screaming ‘let’s burn them all, let’s make soap out of them’. This issue brought out the worst in people.”

While condemning the recent violence, Giorgioli of the Tor Sapienza Committee is not sure that such situations will not be repeated

“I have reasons to fear that the same people who have already shown that they are capable of violent actions will repeat them if there are no signs of change. They could feel disrespected, as if the institutions were making a fool of them.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Part of the area planned for extraction of CO2 in Val d’Elsa, Tuscany, Italy with a protest sign reading: EXTRACTION OF CO2 FROM THE GROUND – A NONSENSE!!! Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Oct 30 2014 (IPS)

“If  they go ahead and dig those wells, all my work will be destroyed, all my life, everything,” says Franca Tognarelli, looking at the hills and vineyards around her house in Certaldo, Val d’Elsa, in the heart of Tuscany.

Now retired, Franca invested all her savings in restructuring her house in Certaldo, only to find that it sits on top of a deposit of CO2 that a private company – Lifenergy S.r.l. – is eager to extract and sell for industrial purposes, most likely in the production of sparkling beverages.

The irony is that the gas under Franca’s house is the same greenhouse gas held largely responsible for global warming.

While a growing awareness of the potential disastrous consequences of climate change is pushing nations to join efforts in curbing emissions of CO2, including considering highly disputed technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the prospect of lucrative business is enough for private companies to want to extract more of it from under the ground.While a growing awareness of the potential disastrous consequences of climate change is pushing nations to join efforts in curbing emissions of CO2 … the prospect of lucrative business is enough for private companies to want to extract more of it from under the ground

According to a scientific source who wished to remain anonymous, the CO2 obtained from the area in question would offset most of the production of renewable energy in Tuscany, ultimately cancelling its Italian leadership in the production of geothermal energy.

In a preliminary phase, the CO2 project would involve drilling two test wells to a depth of between 400 and 700 metres inside a 45 hectare area that Lifenergy has already purchased. If the testing gives positive results, the company would then proceed to expand a network of wells necessary for extracting the CO2.

“They will simply have to compensate me for the part of ground they’ll be drilling,” explains Franca, “but they will be allowed to enter my property and dig all the holes they want.”

Under Italian law, a land owner’s permission is not required to enter the land for experimental excavation purposes once such experiments have been authorised by the public authorities.

Lifenergy is not the first company to have attempted to put its hands on the CO2 reserves of Val d’Elsa, but it is the first which has managed to obtain the permits to do so, after a last attempt made in the 60s ended up with the explosion of a well.

In May, a group of concerned citizens took the issue to the Tuscany Regional Administrative Court, but the court rejected their objections to the Lifenergy plan. “The law is on our side and we are open to dialogue, but we are determined to carry forward our activities,” Massimo Piazzini, managing director of Lifenergy, told local news website GoNews.

“But we need serious and responsible institutions that are willing to discuss and find solutions to give new opportunities to the territory, while respecting mankind and the environment,” he added.

Members of the Committee for the Safeguard and Defence of Val d’Elsa blame the previous town council for not having taken concrete action against the Lifenergy plan, but the newly elected mayor of Certaldo, Giacomo Cucini, said that “after receiving the company request to start testing, the former mayor simply followed the normal procedure without expressing a political opinion on the matter.”

Nevertheless, he added, “the current town council openly opposes the extraction project on our territory, because this is a territory that lives on agriculture and tourism and we want it to remain that way.”

Apart from the ‘visual impact’ that an extraction plant would have on the characteristic landscape of Certaldo, the risks of water and air pollution are a major concern among members of the Committee for the Safeguard and Defence of Val d’Elsa.

“There are plenty of farmers here who have been working all their lives, sweating blood to keep their business going, especially with the crisis,” says Caterina Concialdi, one of the committee members. “Now they have to face a private company that might leave them empty-handed, because the risks are real and nobody is telling us who’s going to pay for the damages if something happens.”

Ubaldo Malavolta is one of those farmers. His land is part of the area for which Lifenergy has requested a drilling permit after the testing phase.

“If they get the concession, they will be able to dig holes in my garden, and it’s not like a water well,” he said, adding that the company itself has declared that there will be emissions of hydrogen sulphide.”

“It’s called H2S and it’s not just about the smell, it’s poisoning and it leads to air pollution” insists Tiziano Traini, another committee member. “They are obviously supposed to keep the level of these emissions under the threshold established by law. But this will nevertheless mean a serious worsening of environmental conditions for the people who live here.”

Despite the widespread opposition shared by local citizens and the town council, the decision on the concession lies in different hands: “We have been asked to express a technical opinion,” Cucini explains, “but in no way can the municipality allow or deny the research phase of the project.”

The Tuscany Region, the authority that is responsible for the concession, is currently in the process of evaluating the environmental impact and is expected to take a decision by the beginning of December.

“The research permit is still on, but the Regional Council has stated that there will be no more concessions for underground extractions in the area, and this is quite reassuring for us,” the mayor told IPS.

Enrico Rossi, president of the Tuscany Region, explained in a public statement that the Regional Council’s stance is an act of responsibility towards the environment.

But the citizens seem to have lost their faith in the institutions and look with concern at their future: “I’m too old to go anywhere,” says Franca, “and this house will be of no value inside a mining area.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

* Anja Krieger and Elena Roda contributed to this report.

Anti-coal human chain crossing the Niesse river which separates Poland and Germany, August 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Poland

By Claudia Ciobanu and Silvia Giannelli
GRABICE, Poland / PROSCHIM, Germany, Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

“People have gathered here to tell their politicians that the way in which we used energy and our environment in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is now over,” says Radek Gawlik, one of Poland’s most experienced environmental activists. “The time for burning coal has passed and the sooner we understand this, the better it is for us.”

Gawlik was one of over 7,500 people who joined an 8-kilometre-long human chain at the weekend linking the German village of Kerkwitz with the Polish village of Grabice to oppose plans to expand lignite mining on both sides of the German-Polish border.“It's high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels" – Anike Peters, Greenpeace Germany

They were inhabitants of local villages whose houses would be destroyed if the plans go ahead, activists from Poland and Germany, and even visitors from other countries who wanted to lend a hand to the anti-coal cause. The human chain – which was organised by Greenpeace and other European environmental NGOs – passed through the Niesse river which marks the border between the two countries, and included people of all ages, from young children to local elders who brought along folding chairs.

At least 6,000 people in the German part of Lusatia region and another 3,000 across the border in south-western Poland stand to be relocated if the expansion plans in the two areas go ahead.

In Germany, it is Swedish state energy giant Vattenfall that plans to expand two of its lignite mines in the German states of Brandenburg and Saxony; state authorities have already approved the company’s plans. In Poland, state energy company PGE (Polska Grupa Energetyczna) plans an open-cast lignite mine from which it would extract almost two million tonnes of coal per year (more than from the German side).

On the German side

Germany has for a long time been perceived as an example in terms of its energy policy, not in the least because of its famous Energiewende, a strategy to decarbonise Germany’s economy by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent, reaching a 60 percent renewables share in the energy sector, and increasing energy efficiency by 50 percent, all by 2050.

Today, one-quarter of energy in Germany is produced from renewable sources, and the same for electricity, as a result of policies included in the Energiewende strategy.

Expanding coal mining as would happen in the Lusatia region contradicts Germany’s targets, argue environmentalists. “The expansion of lignite mines and the goals of the Energiewende to decarbonise Germany until 2050 do not fit together at all,” says Gregor Kessler from Greenpeace Germany.  “There have to be severe cuts in coal-burning if Germany wants to reach its own 2020 climate goal (reducing CO₂ emissions by 40 percent).

“Yet the government so far is afraid of taking the logical next step and announce a coal-phase-out plan,” Kessler continues. “So far both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats keep repeating that coal will still be needed for years and years to provide energy security. However even today a lot of the coal-generated energy is exported abroad as more and more energy comes from renewables.”

Proschim, a town of around 360 people, is one of the villages threatened by Vattenfall’s planned expansion. Already surrounded by lignite mines, this little community has one feature that makes its possible destruction even more controversial: nowadays it produces more electricity from renewable energy than its citizens use for themselves.

Wind farm in Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

But Vattenfall’s project to extend two existing open cast mines, namely Nochten and Welzow-Süd, would destroy Proschim along with its solar and wind farm and its biogas plant.

“It is such a paradox, we have so much renewable energy from wind, solar and biogas in Proschim. And this is the town they want to bulldoze,” says former Proschim mayor Erhard Lehmann.

The village is nevertheless split on the issue, with half of its citizens welcoming Vattenfall’s expansion project, including Volker Glaubitz, the deputy mayor of Proschim, and his wife Ingrid, who came from Haidemühl, a neighbouring village that was evacuated to make room for the Welzow-Süd open-cast mine. The place is now known as the “ghost-town”, due to the abandoned buildings that Vattenfall was not allowed to tear down because of property-related controversies.

Abandoned buildings in Haidemühl, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

Lignite undoubtedly played a major role in Lusatia’s economic development, creating jobs not only in the many open-cast mines spread over the territory, but also through the satellite activities connected to coal processing. Lehmann himself was employed as a mechanic and electrician for the excavators used in the mines. Ingrid Glaubitz was a machinist at ‘Schwarze Pumpe’, one of Vattenfall’s power plants and her son also works for Vattenfall.

“There must be renewable energy in the future, but right now it is too expensive and we need lignite as a bridge technology,” Volker Glaubitz told IPS. “The mines bring many jobs to the region: without the coal, Lusatia would be dead already.”

Johannes Kapelle, a 78-year-old farmer of Sorb origin and at the forefront of the battle against Proschim’s destruction, sees coal in a completely different way: “Coal is already vanishing, it something that belongs to the past.”

His house, right in front of the Glaubitz’s, is covered in solar panels, and from his garden he proudly shows the wind park that provides Proschim with an estimated annual production of 5 GWh.

Johannes Kapelle in his courtyard, with roof covered in solar panels, Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

According to Kapelle, lignite extraction has been threatening the Sorb culture, which is spiritually connected to the land, since the beginning of industrialisation over a hundred years ago. “When a Sorb has a house without a garden, and without farmland, without forests and lakes, then he’s not a true Sorb anymore, because he has no holy land.”

On the Polish side

Poland is Europe’s black sheep when it comes to climate, with 90 percent of electricity in Poland currently produced from coal and the country’s national energy strategy envisaging a core role for coal for decades to come. The Polish government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has over the past years tried to block progress by the European Union in adopting more ambitious climate targets.

For Polish authorities, the over 100,000 jobs in coal mining in the country today are an argument to keep the sector going. Additionally, says the government, coal constitutes a local reserve that can ensure the country’s “energy security” (a hot topic in Europe, especially since the Ukrainian-Russian crisis).

Coal opponents, on the other hand, note that the development of renewables and energy efficiency creates jobs too (according to the United Nations, investments in improved energy efficiency in buildings alone could create up to 3.5 million jobs in the European Union and the United States). Environmentalists further argue that coal is not as cheap as its proponents claim: according to the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies, in some years, subsidies for coal mining in Poland have reached as much as 2 percent of GDP.

“In Poland, the coal lobby is very strong,” says Gawlik. “I also have the impression that our politicians have not yet fully understood that renewables and energy efficiency have already become real alternatives and do not come with some mythically high costs.”

The future of coal in Europe

In Europe as a whole, coal has seen a minor resurgence over the past 2-3 years, despite the European Union having the stated goal to decarbonise by 2050 (out of all fossil fuels, lignite produces the most CO₂ per unit of energy produced).

Access to cheap coal exports from the United States, relatively high gas prices, plus a low carbon price on the EU’s internal emissions trading market (caused in turn by a decrease in industrial output following the economic crisis) led to a temporary hike in coal usage. Yet experts are certain that coal in Europe is dying a slow death.

“In the longer term the prospects for coal-fired power generation are negative,” according to a July report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Air-quality regulations (in the European Union) will force plant closures, and renewable energy will continue to surge, while in general European energy demand will be weak. The recent mini-boom in coal-burning will prove an aberration.”

“Additional coal mines would not only be catastrophic for people, nature and climate – it would also be highly tragic, as beyond 2030, when existing coal mines will be exhausted, renewable energies will have made coal redundant,” says Anike Peters, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Germany.

“It’s high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels.”

* Anja Krieger and Elena Roda contributed to this report in Germany

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Group of asylum seekers in Casoli, near Bagni di Lucca, Italy. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

His journey started four years ago in Conakry, Guinea. Now that Mamoudou* has finally reached Italy, he hopes this will be his final stop.

When he first left his home, his plan was to stay in Libya, but after the 2011 crisis, when Gaddafi’s government was overthrown, life in the country became very hard for migrants. “I was jailed 28 times, and tortured,” he told IPS, “so I decided to come to Italy, because it’s a democracy and I hope I will have a peaceful and secure life here.”

Together with 13 other asylum seekers from Mali, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Mamoudou is now living in a tiny village in the Tuscan mountains, where the ‘Partecipazione e Sviluppo’ association is taking care of his application.“While trying to look at tackling the root causes [of migration] in economic disparity may be a laudable objective, it is not going to make a difference any time soon […] Without an effective rescue response people are going to drown, and they have drowned, and more will drown” – Benjamin Ward, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch

They all arrived between April and June from Libya, where they had migrated to escape conflicts and hunger and it is now painful for them to recall how their voyage took. “

In order to smuggle me to the Libyan coast, they put me in the boot of a car,” says Mamoudou. “I don’t know how many hours I spent there and what day I left Libya, but my registration documents say I arrived in Sicily on April 11. “

He paid the equivalent of 1,000 dollars to human traffickers to share a boat with 80 people and no skipper. “They told us where the North was and that we should have taken turns steering. When the Italian Navy found us, we had no idea where we were and the boat was already sinking.”

Since the tragedy off the Italian island of Lampedusa, which left more than 350 migrants dead in October last year, the Italian authorities have started a rescue operation called ‘Mare Nostrum’ (Our Sea). Mamoudou is one of the more than 80,000 migrants that have been saved since the operation started, winning appreciation from human rights NGOs and European Union authorities.

“Mare Nostrum is extremely important because it has saved many lives,” Benjamin Ward, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “We think it is something that needs to continue and we are among other groups calling for the European Union to respond positively to Italy’s call for European support for the operations”.

Given the high costs of the operations – about 9.3 million euro a month, according to Italian Navy – the Italian Minister of the Interior, Angelino Alfano, who is also leader of the New Centre Right (NCD) party, has stressed on several occasions the need for Frontex, the European Union border management agency, to take over Mare Nostrum.

“Mare Nostrum was set up as an emergency operation. It can’t last forever,” the minister told G6 interior ministers in Barcelona in June. ”Europe must replace Italy in this effort, and Italy will continue to make its contribution,” he added.

“Europe must come up with a clear strategy to regulate the flow of migrants. The Mediterranean that unites us is a European sea. It does not just belong to Italy, Spain, or any of the other countries that look onto this extraordinary body of water,” said the minister.

Yet, the answer of the European Commission leaves little room for negotiation. “Mare Nostrum is a very broad and expensive operation and Frontex is a small agency, it cannot take over Mare Nostrum,” Michele Cercone, spokesperson for EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström, explained to IPS. “Of course Frontex can and will contribute and can do a lot, but we don’t have the means to totally substitute it.”

Despite the widespread approval that the Italian rescue operation enjoys, Italian right-wing party Northern League has been calling for its termination since its early stages. “The only real outcome of Mare Nostrum is the favour we make to the traffickers, who can now leave tens of thousands of people at risk of dying, because they know the Navy will come and rescue them,” Massimiliano Fedriga, party leader in the Chamber of Deputies, told IPS.

“The only real solution is to have EU observatories in the North African countries to verify who has the right to receive asylum, which must be a European asylum and not the asylum of a single country. The others, the illegal migrants, who are the majority, should not come and must not come to our country,” he concluded.

Yet, in April Alfano had already said that “immigration is deeply changing profile […] there are increasingly more asylum seekers than economic migrants.”

Riccardo Noury, communications director of Amnesty International Italy, confirmed. “The migrants who arrive, when they manage to survive, at the European border, which is often the Italian and the Greek border, are mostly people who would have the right to asylum or other types of international protection,” he told IPS.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch seem to be mostly concerned by Europe resistance to changing its approach towards migration.

“Obviously there are other aspects like border enforcement, like taking action against dangerous smuggling, which are important and need to continue, but we do think that saving lives should be the top priority,” said Ward.

“While trying to look at tackling the root causes in economic disparity may be a laudable objective, it is not going to make a difference any time soon […] Without an effective rescue response people are going to drown, and they have drowned, and more will drown. That in our view is something that has to be engaged. The European Union can’t simply say that it’s Italy’s mess to fix,” he added.

According to Noury, there are several reasons why Italy’s requests have not been heard.

“In the past years, Italy has lost the chance to show credible policies while asking for Europe’s support. We have been the country of push-backs, the country that threatened to release fake residence permits during the 2011 crisis to allow migrants to cross the Italian Northern border… we haven’t been a reliable partner when it came to reform the EU’s migration policies,”  the Amnesty International spokesperson commented.

“But we now have another opportunity, with the EU presidency [which Italy assumed for a six-month period at the beginning of July], to assume a leadership role.”

If Italy fails to obtain strategic and financial support from the European Union, it will be soon forced to scale down or discontinue its rescue operations. One year after the Lampedusa tragedy, exactly same conditions might be in place, and the consequences could be deadly once again.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

 * Name changed to protect his identity.

Still edible food thrown away together with plastic bottles and empty crates at local food market in Lucca, Italy. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Jul 29 2014 (IPS)

“Only two years ago, the soup kitchen was serving 50 meals a day. Today the number has almost doubled and, what is even more worrying, we have started receiving families with children,” says Donatella Turri, director of the Caritas Diocese of Lucca.

The paradox is that the lengthening queues at the Lucca soup kitchen come against a backdrop of increasing food loss and waste.

Turri has no doubts concerning the impact of the current economic crisis on Italian families in terms of food security – “we call it ‘poverty of the third week’.”If our goal is to feed the planet, we cannot simply increase production and keep losing and wasting one-third of it. Our first commandment needs to be 'thou shall not waste' – Andrea Segré, President of Last Minute Market

“It means that the poor are no longer the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug addicts. More and more often we get requests for primary goods from families that simply cannot reach the end of the month with their salaries,” she told IPS.

Turri’s claims are confirmed at the national level by the yearly Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) report on poverty. According to the survey, absolute poverty [the threshold below which a family cannot afford the goods and services that are essential to guarantee a barely acceptable standard of living] has maintained its steady increase in recent years, rising from 4.6 percent in 2010 to 7.9 percent in 2013.

“The traditional distinction between the quantitative aspect of food security being typical of developing countries, and the qualitative one being a concern of the industrialised world, is fading away,” Andrea Segré, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Bologna University and President of Last Minute Market, a company that recovers unsold or non-marketable goods in favour of charity organisations, told IPS.

However, while access to food is also becoming increasingly difficult for the low-income class of developed countries, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that Europe, North America and Oceania are top of the world’s food wasting classification, with a per capita food loss of almost 300 kg per year in North America.

“Food loss and waste are dependent on specific conditions and local circumstances,” Eliana Haberkon from FAO’s Office for Communications, Partnerships and Advocacy, explained to IPS.

“In low-income countries, food loss is mainly connected to managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage, transportation, processing, cooling facilities, infrastructure, packaging, etc. … and food waste is expected to constitute a growing problem due to undergoing food system changes and due to factors such as expansion of supermarket chains and changes in diets and lifestyle.”

Currently, the biggest gap between rich and poor nations remains the quantity of food wasted at the consumer level. According to FAO figures, Europeans and North-Americans waste between 95 to 115 kg of food per capita every year, while in sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia the number drops down to only 6 to 11 kg a year.

At the beginning of July, Last Minute Market, in cooperation with the SWG survey company, published a report called ‘Waste Watcher’. Using a complex questionnaire survey among Italian consumers, the outcomes paint a comprehensive picture of the social dynamics and behaviour of families that lead to food waste.

“The overall waste of food in Italy is worth 8.1 billion euro every year, and most of it comes from our houses. The rest of the losses, in agriculture, industries, distribution and service, can be recovered, but it is much less significant than what we throw in our bins,” said Segrè, commenting on the survey results.

Last Minute Market is now working to prepare the ground for a discussion on food waste during EXPO 2015, which will take place in under the heading ‘Feeding the planet, energy for life’.

“In order to be credible, EXPO needs to take into account the issue of food waste,” said Segré. “If our goal is to feed the planet, we cannot simply increase production and keep losing and wasting one-third of it. Our first commandment needs to be thou shall not waste.”

Indeed, as Haberon explained, the consequences of food loss and waste stretch far beyond their monetary value, “affecting current use and future availability and causing unnecessary pressure on natural resources.”

Studies by FAO estimated a yearly global quantitative food loss and waste of 30 percent of cereals, 40-50 percent of food crops (fruits and vegetables), 25 percent of oil seeds, meat and dairy products and 30 percent of fish.

Both Last Minute Market and Caritas agree on the paramount role of education in tackling food waste. In cooperation with more than ten local primary schools, the Caritas Diocese of Lucca has managed to recover excess food intact from school canteens for a value of 40,000 euro, taking it to the soup kitchens it manages.

This initiative has allowed it to develop a parallel food education project with the children of the schools involved.

“We obviously need normative support to help us reduce food waste, but first of all we must re-introduce food education, starting from primary schools,” said Segrè. “The current generation has completely lost the value of food and we must get it back.”

The Costa Concordia cruise ship. Credit: Courtesy of the Parbuckling Project

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Jun 28 2014 (IPS)

Two refloating sponsons is what separates the Costa Concordia cruise ship from leaving the shores of Giglio Island, Italy, where it has lain since its sinking that left 32 people dead on January 13, 2012.

The global parbuckling project is currently over 90 percent complete, and the ship is set to be removed before the end of the Italian summer – but where it will then be towed is still an open question.

“The operations are going well,” Franco Porcellacchia, the engineer coordinating the removal project on behalf of the Costa Crociere company which owns the cruise ship, told IPS, “and, according to our forecasts, we will be able to refloat and remove the ship by July 20.”“Hundreds of people working daily and continuously have inevitably had an impact on the local marine environment, such as on posidonia [a species of seagrass]” – Marcello Mossa Verre of the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection in Tuscany

That still does not answer the question of where the wreck will end up. While, on one hand, the dismantling constitutes a major project and economic opportunity for the port that will be chosen, on the other, Costa Crociere’s so-called ‘club of insurers’, comprising the companies that will fund the operation, are obviously concerned about its costs.

And in the middle lie environmental concerns. “Despite all the rumours, at the moment there is no official decision, but only two ports [Piombino in Tuscany and Genoa in Liguria] fighting over the contract,” Alessandro Giannì, Greenpeace Italy Campaign Director told IPS. “There are also many unanswered questions they still need to address, both concerning the economic and the environmental aspects of the project.”

Earlier this week, the ‘Conferenza dei Servizi’ – the committee comprising representatives of all competent authorities evaluating the projects drawn up by Costa Crociere – failed to reach an agreement, because two of the 19 authorities involved in the decision (the Tuscany Region and the Province of Grosseto) voted against the Genoa option. The Italian Council of Ministers (Cabinet) is now expected take the final decision next week.

“We ran an international tender, as our insurers asked us to do,” said Porcellacchia, “and then we restricted the options, having the safety of the operations as our priority. We wanted to make sure that the ones who offered to do the job had the ability and the infrastructures to complete it, which is all but obvious. We eventually chose Genoa because it offered the best guarantees in this sense.”

In a press statement, the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection in Tuscany (ARPAT) said that it had voted in favour of the Genoa option given the fact that it was a “yes or no” question and no other option had been presented by Costa Crociere.

ARPAT did not agree on the methodology of the decisional process, because no other alternative had been taken into account in order to reduce environmental risks but, considering the urgency of the matter – the Costa Concordia must be removed before the end of the summer for meteorological reasons – it approved the choice of Genoa, provided that it was shown that the port of Piombino would not be ready to receive the wreck in time.

In other words, Genoa would be acceptable to ARPAT only if the Piombino option had to be rejected.

The route to Genoa from Giglio Island crosses the ‘Whale Sanctuary’, an international marine protected zone aimed at the safeguard of marine mammals. “We are witnessing a systematic underestimation of the environmental risks,” Greenpeace and WWF wrote in a joint press release.

“We are very concerned about the length of the towing and how they are planning to get accurate weather forecasts for that period,” Giannì stressed. “Guarantees on the structural resistance of the ship should also be given. We addressed all these questions to the Ministry for the Environment, but we never received an answer”.

For his part, Porcellacchia is confident about Costa Crociere’s choice:  “The ship will be able to travel at a speed of two knots, which allows it to reach Genoa port in four days. The trip could even be faster, but in order to avoid any risk, we are also considering the unlikely chance of finding bad weather, in which case we might need some more time. We truly the believe that our proposal will be approved, because it is solid and has no reason to be rejected,” he concluded.

The Observatory on the rescue of Costa Concordia, also taking part in the ‘Conferenza dei Servizi’, is a pool of specialists that work together to evaluate the different options and support the decision of Franco Gabrielli, who was appointed by the Italian Government as Commissioner for the Costa Concordia emergency.

Together with the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), the Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport, the Ministry of the Environment and the Coast Guards, ARPAT is on the board of the Observatory.

“It is not us, the public administration, that will decide eventually,” Marcello Mossa Verre from ARPAT explained to IPS. “Costa and its club of insurers, based on technical and economic factors, will take the final decision, but we are the ones verifying that the conditions to move forward are in place.”

ARPAT has been monitoring the situation of the marine ecosystem since the shipwreck, reporting overall no major damages due to the leaking of polluting substances from the Costa Concordia. “The real damage so far, and there is no need to monitor the area to see it, has been caused by the presence of the ship and the work site itself,” Mossa Verre explained.

“Hundreds of people working daily and continuously have inevitably had an impact on the local marine environment, such as on posidonia [a species of seagrass].”

While most of the liquid fuels were extracted right after the shipwreck through a hot-tapping system, there are still several tons of fuel oil, lube oil, cleaning products and chemical products used for the wellbeing of the guests. “Luckily, the containers have resisted so far,” Mossa Verre told IPS. “There are traces of contamination of the internal waters but the levels are lower than expected. Obviously, the longer they remain there, the higher is the risk of leaking.”

Porcellacchia confirmed the presence of possibly dangerous substances inside the ship, but also claimed that most of them have been removed already: “We individuated four critical areas, three of which have been ‘reclaimed’. And we are operating on the fourth one now, which is approximately where the pantries are located”.

Environmental organisations, including Greenpeace, are also concerned with the possibility that the towing of the ship will cause a ‘rinsing’ effect, in which clean water entering the wreck would be contaminated by these polluting substances and flushed back into the sea. “This ‘rinsing’ effect has been constant for the last two years,” Porcellacchia responded, “and yet the monitoring tells us that there is no critical contamination of the water.”

Mossa Verre’s conclusions are more cautious, but he is also optimistic about the outcome of the operations: “There are environmental risks, this is out of question. But so far Costa has cooperated with us with great openness. After all, it is also their interest to find an elegant solution. They have the eyes of the whole world on them.”

Fidenato's MON810 maize in Tomba di Mereto 2014. Credit: Leandro Taboga

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, May 25 2014 (IPS)

“I  want to grow genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because I want to feed my family with biotech products. In no way do I want to eat biological food because I think it’s not so healthy or nutritious.”

This is how Giorgio Fidenato, Italian farmer and President of Agricoltori Federati (Federated Farmers), explained to IPS the reason behind his fight against the Italian ban on Monsanto’s genetically modified MON810 maize.

“I’ve already sown [GMO maize] in three different plots this year and I have self-denounced myself for doing so” -- Giorgio Fidenato, Italian farmer, President of Agricoltori Federati (Federated Farmers)
The Monsanto maize is the only GMO allowed for cultivation throughout the European Union, and the directive that regulates the deliberate release into the environment of GMOs, Directive 2001/18/EC, includes a ‘safeguard clause’ that allows member states to prohibit such cultivation, provided that they “have justifiable reasons to consider that the GMO in question poses a risk to human health or the environment”.

So far, 129.000 hectares of land – roughly the area covered by a city the size of Rome – are being cultivated with genetically modified corn in Europe, 90 percent of which is in Spain, while the rest is spread across Portugal, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.

In Italy, three ministers – Health, Agricultural Policies and Environment – signed a decree last year to ban Monsanto’s GMO maize. “There are currently six countries in Europe that have invoked the ‘safeguard clause’ to prohibit GMO cultivation,” Giuseppe Croce, agriculture director of Italy’s environmental organisation Legambiente, told IPS, “namely, Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, Germany and Luxembourg.”

“On the other hand,” said Croce, “Italy used an emergency-measure procedure that bans them only temporarily.” The inter-ministerial decree banning GMO maize has a validity of 18 months. “If nothing happens in the meantime, at the end of 2014, Fidenato will be free to grow Monsanto’s genetically modified maize,” Croce explained.

However, Fidenato has no intention of waiting. In the last three years, he has already sown his three hectares of land with MON810, fuelling strong protests by environmentalist groups and sparking a huge debate in the country. “My first harvest, in 2010, was confiscated by the authorities. My farm was under legal possession until May this year, but I’ve already sown in three different plots this year and I have self-denounced myself for doing so.”

Despite the upholding of the national ban by the Regional Court of Lazio, to which Fidenato had appealed in October last year, the farmer is not giving up and has already presented another appeal to the Council of State. “This is my chance to show the arrogance and iniquity of democracy, because here we are facing the pretension that, just because the majority does not want GMOs, I can’t eat them either. What I say is: if you don’t want them, don’t buy my products.”

But not all agriculturists see farming the way Fidenato sees it. Lucca, in Tuscany, is the Italian province with the highest concentration of biodynamic farms. Like the majority of those, Gabriele Da Prato’s ranch farm in the mountain region of Garfagnana, north of Lucca, produces wine. For him, his choices – and the choices of the farmers around him – will determine the future of the territory where he grew up.

His farm covers three and half hectares and he is the only ‘employee’, producing around 14,000 bottles of wine each year. “I decided to take over the family farm in 1998, in the years of heavy chemicals, also in subsistence farming,” Da Prato told IPS.

Farmer showing a clump of soil, with “simply no life underneath”. Photo credit: IPS/Silvia Giannelli

In 2000, he began to realise that his land had problems of soil erosion, lack of potassium and calcium, “but what bothered me the most was to find out, by observing the clumps of soil, that there was simply no life underneath. This was the consequence of years and years of chemical use: artificial fertilisers had impoverished the soil, herbicides had killed all the grass, the butterflies had disappeared, it was a disaster.”

It was then that he took a radical decision and began to apply biodynamic methods, using uniquely natural substances, such as mineral, plant, or animal manure extracts to enhance soil quality. For him, opening the doors to GMOs in Italy is simply nonsense: “First of all, Italy’s surface area isn’t big enough to compete with giants such as North America in the field of GMOs. High quality, inimitable products and our territorial identity, these are our trump cards,” Da Prato stressed.

But beyond the economic factor, threats to the ecosystem seem to be his biggest concern. “On a field sown with GMOs, the water simply slips away. My plot, which is healthy and lively, can hold up to 90 percent of water. Last year we had a big flood, and I can thank my biodynamic vineyard if my house is still intact,” Da Prato said. “Once we are done exploiting our territory to fill up the wallet, and the earth won’t be able to give us food any longer, then maybe people will start asking themselves what happened,” he concluded sadly.

The legal battle between these two points of view is still on, as Croce explained: “The EU is in the process of reforming the directive on GMOs, and this will likely happen during the Italian presidency (July-December 2014). Based on the current negotiations, we are hopeful that the new regulation will include an additional clause allowing member states to ban GMOs also for economic reasons, which is crucial for ‘Made in Italy’ exports.”

Yet, Fidenato remains firm on his position: “When I was a kid, I used to go with my mother to pull out weeds with my bare hands, I know what it means and they won’t make me go back to that. Others can keep doing so if they like, I won’t.”

Judith Mwikali Musau has successfully introduced the use of grafted plants for crop and fruit harvesting. IFAD says it is clear that a new revolution in agriculture is needed to transform the sector. Credit:Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Apr 16 2014 (IPS)

The Millennium Development Goals deadline of 2015 is fast approaching, but according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), poverty still afflicts one in seven people — and one in eight still goes to bed hungry.

Together with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), IFAD unveiled the results of their joint work Apr. 3 to develop five targets to be incorporated in the post-2015 development agenda."We have a growing global population and a deteriorating natural resource base." -- Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD

These targets include access to adequate food all year round for all people; ending malnutrition in all its forms with special attention to stunting; making all food production systems more productive, sustainable, resilient and efficient; securing access for all small food producers, especially women, to inputs, knowledge and resources to increase their productivity; and more efficient post-production food systems that reduce the global rate of food loss and waste by 50 percent.

IPS correspondent Silvia Giannelli interviewed Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD, on the role of rural poverty and food security in shaping the current debate on the definition of a new development agenda.

Q: Do you think it is time to rethink the strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals?

A: It’s not only that I think, I know it. And that is why we have Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are being fashioned. The SDGs are an idea that was born in the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012. The crafting of a new global development agenda is a unique opportunity to refocus policy, investments and partnerships on inclusive and sustainable rural transformation.

The intent is to produce a new, more inclusive and more sustainable set of global development objectives that have application to all countries. These goals – once agreed by governments – would take effect after the current MDGs expire in 2015.

And measurement will be crucial if we are to achieve what we set out. This is why we are talking about universality but in a local context. The SDGs will be for all countries, developing and developed alike. But their application will need to respond to the reality on the ground, which will vary from country to country.

Q: How do the five targets revealed this month fit in this discussion on the post-2015 development goals?

A: The proposed targets and indicators are intended to provide governments with an informed tool that they use when discussing the precise nature and make-up of the SDGs related to sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition.

These are five critical issues for a universal, transformative agenda that is ambitious but also realistic and adaptable to different country and regional contexts. The targets can fit under a possible dedicated goal but also under other goals. So, it is for governments to decide whether or not they wish to include these targets in the SDGs.

Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD, says it is clear that a new revolution in agriculture is needed to transform the sector so it can fully live up to its potential to drive sustainable development. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

Q: Why does agriculture represent such a critical aspect within the post-2015 development agenda?

A: We have a growing global population and a deteriorating natural resource base, which means more people to feed with less water and farmland. And climate change threatens to alter the whole geography of agriculture and food systems on a global scale.

It is clear that we need a new revolution in agriculture, to transform the sector so it can fully live up to its potential to drive sustainable development. Target areas should address universal and context-specific challenges, but context-adapted approaches and agendas are the building blocks for any effort to feed the world.

Q: Why is the focus on rural areas so important in order to overcome inequality?

A: The world is becoming increasingly urban, yet cities are still fed by the people working the land in rural areas. And it is in those rural areas where 76 percent of the world’s poor live.

At IFAD we see that the gap between rich and poor is primarily a gap between urban and rural. Those who migrate to urban areas, oftentimes do so in the belief that life will be better in the urban cities.

However they get caught up in the bulging slums of cities, they lose their social cohesion which is provided by rural communities and they go into slums, they become nothing but breeding ground for social turmoil and desperation. One only has to look at what is happening today in what was described as the ‘Arab spring’.

Q: But beyond the issue of exclusion and turmoil, why is key to addressing rural poverty?

A: Because the rural space is basically where the food is produced: in the developing world 80 percent in some cases 90 percent of all food that is consumed domestically is produced in rural areas.

Food agriculture does not grow in cities, it grows in rural areas, and the livelihoods of the majority of the rural population provide not only food, it provides employment, it provides economic empowerment,[…] and social cohesion.

Essentially, if we do not invest in rural areas through agricultural development we are dismantling the foundations for national security, not just only food security. And that translates into not just national security but also global security and global peace.

Q: What risks are we facing in terms of global security, if we don’t face and take concrete action to ensure food security?

A: We just need to go back to what happened in 2007 and 2008: the global food price crisis, as it is said, and how circumstances culminated in what happened in 40 countries around the world where there were food riots.

Those riots were the results of inaction that occurred in some 25-30 years due to these investments in agriculture and the imbalances in trade, across countries and across continents. Forty countries experienced serious problems with food riots, and they brought down two governments, one in Haiti and another one in Madagascar. […] We’ve seen it, [and] it continues to repeat itself.

Q: What role are developed countries expected to play in the achievement of these five targets?

A: All countries will have an essential role to play in achieving the SDGs – whatever they end up looking like. Countries have agreed that this is a “universal” agenda and developed countries’ commitment will have to extend beyond ODA [Official Development Assistance] alone.

At IFAD we [are] seeing that development is moving beyond aid to achieve self-sustaining, private sector-led inclusive growth and development. For example, in Africa, generated revenue shot up from 141 billion dollars in 2002 to 520 billion dollars in 2011. This is truly a universal challenge, but it also requires local and country-level ownership and international collaboration at all levels.

Excerpt:

A demonstration in support of abortion rights in Dublin. Credit: Irish Family Planning Association.

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Apr 5 2014 (IPS)

Two out of three doctors in Italy are ‘conscientious objectors’ to abortion, according to new data. The Italian Ministry of Health reveals that in 2011, 69.3 percent of doctors refused to carry out abortions, with peaks of over 85 percent in some regions.

In the face of such numbers, the ruling of the European Committee of Social Rights of the Council of Europe against Italy earlier this month over a complaint for violating the right to protection of health came as no surprise.“Many doctors object simply because they have nothing to gain from doing this extra work.”

“The Italian situation really worries us, and this is why we filed the complaint,” Irene Donadio, advocacy officer at the International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network (IPPF_EN) told IPS. “We believe that there is a problem with the functioning and application of the abortion law, which, in fact, would be a good law but is often violated.

“We acknowledge the fact that the right to conscientious objection is included in the same law, but the right of women to access a service that is legal and fundamental for their health needs to be respected as much as this right.”

IPPF_EN sees the high number of conscientious objectors in Italy as the main cause behind refusal of women’s right to termination of pregnancy.

IPPF_EN, with the help of several Italian associations, presented to the Committee a scenario of never-ending waiting lists and arbitrary suspensions of the service. It listed many instances where women were forced to travel for abortions within the country or to go abroad.

“According to data from the Ministry of Health, the number of voluntary interruptions of pregnancy per year is around 110,000,” Giuseppe Noia, president of the Italian Association of Catholic Gynaecologists Obstetricians (AIGOC) told IPS.

“If we consider that there are about 1,500 non-objecting physicians, each physician carries out around 74 abortions per year, that is an average of five or six per month. The fact that non-objectors are overloaded and cannot guarantee an efficient system is therefore absolutely false,” Noia said.

In its response to the Council, the Ministry had said that due to a decline in abortions, “the workload for non-objecting doctors was cut by half in the last 30 years” and therefore “it appears difficult…to maintain that the high number of conscientious objectors would be an obstacle for accessing the interruption of pregnancy.”

The ministry’s note does not elaborate on the geographical distribution of objectors across the country. This is what, according to the Council of Europe, creates a disparity in treatment depending on where the woman seeking an abortion resides.

In the southern region of Basilicata, according to official data, 85.2 percent of physicians are conscientious objectors, in Apulia they account for 79.4 percent of the total, and in Sicily 81.7 percent.

“The situation is generally worse in the South, but also Lombardy [in the north bordering Switzerland] has serious problems, and we know that this is because is a not very laic region,” Silvana Agatone, president of  the Free Italian Association of Gynaecologists for the Application of Law 194 (LAIGA) told IPS. Law 194 is the law that regulates abortion in Italy.

The decrease in abortions claimed is subject to different interpretations. The ministry maintains that this is due to “the promotion of a higher and more efficacious recourse to conscious procreation.” But Marilisa D’Amico, a lawyer who was involved in presenting the complaint, says that the increase of cases of spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, “can only be explained as an increase of clandestine abortions” presented as miscarriages. There were less than 57,000 such abortions in 1990, 68,000 in 2000 and more than 76,000 in 2011, according to ISTAT.

The official figures show a constant increase in the number of miscarriages through recent years.

LAIGA provided a list of 45 hospitals that have a gynaecology unit but do not perform terminations of pregnancy, disregarding Article 9 of the Italian law on abortion. This article states that hospital establishments and authorised nursing homes shall ensure that procedures for the termination of pregnancy are guaranteed.

Clandestine abortions continue to take place, says Massimo Srebot, head of the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Lotti Hospital of Pontedera in Tuscany region, the first structure in Italy to introduce RU-486, a pill that blocks the action of the hormone progesterone in order to cause abortion without surgical intervention.

“Women who find obstacles in public hospitals seek alternative channels with physicians who, upon receiving a bribe, are willing to simulate a spontaneous abortion. These are conscientious objectors only when they have to work for free. They turn a blind an eye to their conscience in their private clinics.”

Srebot says “many doctors object simply because they have nothing to gain from doing this extra work.” Also, “carrying out abortions doesn’t help a doctor’s professional career because it is not a high-level specialisation operation.”

Srebot has proposed new solutions to ensure the respect of Law 194. One option would be to nominate a non-objector as a sub-head physician for every public hospital.

“I truly respect the real conscientious objectors, but there are those who speculate on women’s difficult situations, they don’t sustain them, they don’t help them preventing further incidents, they only wait for them to get pregnant again, so they once again cash in.”

Migrants being transferred from the Lampedusa centre. Credit: Caritas Italiana.

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Mar 11 2014 (IPS)

“We walk inside an area that is 128 steps long and seven-and-a-half steps wide. This is the path they made for us: two metres of bars over our heads, and upon the bars, two metres of plexiglas. We are like canaries in a cage, like birds of different races all in one cage.”

Ahmed (name changed) is from Africa but he has been living in Italy for 22 years now. On Dec. 20 the police stopped him and asked for his documents. Ahmed does not have them, and so has been kept in the Ponte Galeria Centre for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) of Rome since then. “It’s been two months now, but it feels like two centuries,” he told IPS on phone from the centre."You are lucky if you get out of here with 100 grams of your brain left.” -- Ahmed, a migrant from Africa

Last month, the Caritas Italiana and Migrantes Foundation published their annual dossier on migration, which states that “the true reform of the repatriation system would be the closure of the centres.” Oliviero Forti, director of immigration issues at Caritas explained to IPS the reasons behind such a strong recommendation.

“Helped by Prof. Roberto Cherchi, constitutional lawyer, we came to the conclusion that there is a problem of constitutional legitimacy connected to those places. Precisely for the way they are conceived, built and managed, it is easy to slip into gross violation of human rights.”

The CIE is a part of the Italian system of reception and identification for migrants. Besides, there are the centres of reception (CDA is the Italian acronym), the centres of reception for asylum seekers and refugees (CARA) and the centres of first aid and reception (CSPA). The CSPA in Lampedusa, Sicily, caused outrage when a national newscast circulated a video of naked migrants sprayed for scabies in the December cold.

The CIE are centres for migrants who have no resident permits or identity documents, and for those who have received a deportation order. Yet, as the Caritas and Migrantes dossier reports, the available places are far fewer than the number of migrants in such a state.

As a consequence, placement is decided on a case-by-case basis, following such informal criteria as whether the person is considered a danger to society and whether the chances of identifying and deporting the person are high. This brings disparity in treatment often based on nationality.

Khalid Chaouki, Italian MP from the Democratic Party, visited the Ponte Galeria CIE following a protest by some inmates who literally sewed their mouths shut in January to draw attention to the conditions at the Rome centre. “The situation there was even worse than in Lampedusa, because it is in fact a prison outside the law, where people who often haven’t committed any crime are detained for months,” he told IPS.

Migrants who should be in other centres are often kept in the CIE. “Unfortunately we often found women victims of trafficking, minors, stateless people and also EU citizens, Romanians for instance,” Gabriella Guido, spokesperson for LasciateCIEntrare (Let Us In) told IPS. LasciateCIEntrare is a campaign that began in 2011 after then Italian minister of the interior banned media access to the centres.

That was the year that the maximum holding period was extended from six to 18 months. “Often the problem with the identification is that the foreign consulates are not very cooperative, but if a migrant is not recognised in the first 30 to 60 days, it is not going to happen in 18 months either. The extension of the permanence only increased the stress, the riots and the episodes of self-harm inside the CIE.”

“Nobody sleeps here,” Ahmed said, “apart from the ones who take sleeping pills. Many withdraw into themselves. There is a guy who doesn’t speak any more, and one who talks to himself. You are lucky if you get out of here with 100 grams of your brain left.”

Media access to the CIE now depends on permission from the prefect. Forti says the reception system needs deeper reform. “Regularisation of migrants, fair salaries, legal protection of foreign citizens, all of this means granting a correct culture of work in Italy, both for migrants and for Italian citizens.”

But there is political opposition to this idea. Nicola Molteni, Italian MP for the Northern League told IPS that Italy has been a victim of the “indulgent political behaviour of the last two governments” and that it has been abandoned by the European Union.

“We have 3.2 million unemployed, one million of unemployed youth, and we must give a job to our people first. With these numbers we don’t even need regular migration, not to mention the illegal one, which often leads migrants into the hands of organised crime.”

Molteni and his party defend the CIE. “They have a functionality and necessity which is fundamental,” he said. He says the problem is “the complete lack of a push-back policy, of a control of the borders and of international cooperation with the North African countries to prevent migration.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, Chaouki says the CIE centres are an ideological flag of the Northern League, that have solved no problems. “We need to develop alternatives to those centres, we need to open new regular channels of access to Italy, new procedures of reception and also of deportation that are not harmful to people,” he told IPS.

According to the Caritas dossier, of the 35,872 expulsion proceedings in 2012, 18,592 resulted in actual expulsions. In all 7,944 foreign citizens passed through the CIE, of which only half were eventually deported.

“Despite the huge amount of money spent to maintain these places, they don’t even serve the purpose they were created for. Our conclusion is that their function is rather to placate the anxiety of those who perceive migrants as a threat to security,” said Forti.

Ahmed’s voice becomes harsh over the phone: “We are losing our minds here. If an average Italian could see us now, he would think that is better to keep us locked inside. But they do nothing, because they see nothing.”

UNFCCC Lighthouse Award Projects Presentation - 4PCCD project leader Vanesa Castan Broto third from the right. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
WARSAW, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

In Maputo, a port city on the Indian Ocean in Mozambique, 44 percent of the 1.2 million inhabitants live in poverty, making them even more vulnerable to the effects of sea level rise, floods and cyclones. But despite their severe poverty, their day-to-day experience gives them practical knowledge on how to deal with climate change effects.

The Public Private People Partnership for Climate Compatible Development (4PCCD) received the prestigious UNFCCC climate convention Lighthouse Award at the Nov. 11-22 COP19 climate change summit in Warsaw.

The 4PCCD, declared one of the 2013 Lighthouse Activities under the U.N. Momentum for Change initiative, brought together the national government, local authorities and citizens in the construction of strategies to boost resilience against climate change in Maputo.

“Relating to their own experiences, citizens showed they had a good understanding of climate change,” Vanesa Castan Broto, 4PCCD project leader, explained during her presentation at COP19 in Warsaw.

“Thanks to the mediation of local facilitators, local residents could discuss and develop adaptation plans that are feasible and sustainable: organising waste collection, constructing toilet blocks, fixing leaky pipes, etc.”

This is just one example of clashing realities inside the National Stadium, where the 19th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is coming to an end.

While hopes for relevant outcomes from the negotiations are fading away and national governments seem to have reached a stalemate, the success of small, bottom-up projects like the 4PCCD has brought fresh air to the corridors of the conference.

On Thursday, cities and local authorities took the stage in what was the first ‘Cities Day’ ever celebrated during a COP – an initiative by the COP presidency, the UNFCCC secretariat, the city of Warsaw and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability and partners.

In fact, cities were for the first time allowed to participate in the official negotiations, under the “Friends of the Cities” group at UNFCCC.

“We are opening up a dialogue at the national level, between national governments and cities, on what they can collectively do if they all use their maximum efforts, and what the private sector role can be in that process,” David Cadman, president of ICLEI, told IPS.

“Half of the world population lives in cities. By the end of the century 90 percent will, and we are going to build more in the next 40 years than we’ve built in all of humanity,” he continued. “So if we don’t build it right, then it’s going to be a draw on energy, and the form of energy will probably be a dirty one.”

Around 12,000 cities and towns already joined ICLEI’s network and decided to take concrete action on mitigation, adaptation, urban biodiversity, ecological purchasing, and ecomobility.

“When everyone said it was very difficult to have an MRV [measurable, reportable, verifiable] greenhouse gas [GHG] reduction plan, we put it in place,” he said. “And we’ve got a software that cities can now use to measure GHGs and we are seeing really dramatic drops: in 107 municipalities they’re exceeding one percent lowering of GHGs per year.”

Yet, according to Cadman, better coordination among local and national authorities is necessary to obtain greater results: “The most interesting study on this has been done by the city of London, which basically said ‘we can get a 30 percent reduction of CO2 if we use all of our facilities. But if simultaneously we had these actions from the national government, we could get to 60-80 percent’. The limits [of local authorities] depend on what your sources of energy are.”

And ICLEI is not the only network of cities engaged in tackling climate change.
The Climate Alliance (CA) of European Cities with Indigenous Rainforest Peoples is another example of cross-national cooperation, where European member cities and municipalities aim to reduce GHGs at their source.

“When they become a member of CA,” Thomas Brose, from the European Secretariat of CA, explained to IPS, “they commit to the following goals: reduce CO2 emissions by 10 percent every five years, halve per capita emissions by 2030 at the latest [from a 1990 baseline], preserve the tropical rainforests by avoiding the use of tropical timber, and support projects and initiatives of the indigenous partners.”

Their alliance with indigenous communities through the Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica – COICA (Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon River Basin) is based on an acknowledgment that while industrialised countries are mainly responsible for climate change, its effects will largely impact populations that live in ecologically sensitive areas.

Furthermore, protecting those areas is crucial to reducing the greenhouse effect.

“Destruction of forests worldwide is responsible for about 17 percent of GHG emissions. Effective protection of this environment will only be achieved if we integrate the people who live in these environments into our protection strategies,” Brose told IPS.

At the foundation of these networks is the warning by scientists that time is running out and concrete action is needed if we are to stay below the two degree C threshold of temperature rise and avoid catastrophic consequences. Yet, cities and local governments need to be included in an international framework.

“They need to be included in the legal frameworks on energy, housing or transportation,” Brose underlined. “And they also need financial support programmes to implement and develop their activities.”

Hopefully, the participation of local authorities in the UNFCCC process is a good sign that such inclusion is about to happen.

“Whereas national governments have been somewhat slow in terms of establishing national goals, and in achieving those goals, cities have been establishing and exceeding local goals. Cities can, and are, leading this process,” Cadman concluded.

The Italian delegation’s negotiation desk at the COP19 plenary session in Warsaw. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
WARSAW, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Cleopatra is the name chosen for the younger sister of Haiyan, the cyclone that wreaked havoc in the Philippines last week. This latest storm caused massive floods and left 16 dead and hundreds displaced in Sardinia, Italy.

More than 450 mm of rain fell in just 12 hours on this Mediterranean island – half of the usual quantity that falls in a year, Environment Minister Andrea Orlando reported to the lower house of parliament Tuesday.

“I felt it was right to call the attention of this assembly [Thursday’s plenary session] to what happened in Sardinia,” the minister told IPS on his arrival to Warsaw for the Nov. 11-22 COP19 climate change summit.

“This is clearly an event which is connected to what we are discussing here, climate change and its impact on peoples’ lives and security. Yet,” he added, “it seems to me that there is still too much distance between denunciations of such phenomena and the capacity of the international community to concretely act for a common adaptation strategy.”

It is not possible to scientifically prove a direct link between climate change and the floods in Italy or the super typhoon Haiyan that claimed at least 4,000 lives in the Philippines on Nov. 7. But there is scientific evidence that extreme weather events are likely to increase in frequency and intensity as a consequence of global warming.

“Due to climate change, and more specifically global warming and the warming of the oceans, phenomena that were once happening every hundred years are now repeated every 20 to 30 years, and this last one [floods in Sardinia] perfectly fits the picture,” Luca Lombroso, an Italian meteorologist and delegate of the environmental organisation Fondazione Lombardia per l’Ambiente, told IPS.

Controversy over the efficiency of the early warning system and scarce abilities in risk management has been sparked across Italy after the tragedy. Civil Protection, however, claims that it did everything in its capacity.

While damage, and maybe victims, could have been spared through better urban planning and by measures to curb unauthorised building, “when we face such heavy rainfall, there is no way to prevent flooding, it is unavoidable,” Lombroso said.

“This is a very good illustration that no country is immune to losses and damage from climatic events from now on,” Saleemul Huq, senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and a leading expert on loss and damage, told IPS. “All countries are going to suffer and are going to have to deal with this; the new mechanism is supposed to discuss that.”

Yet, fearing that the establishment of a third ‘loss and damage’ pillar – next to mitigation and adaptation – would turn this new mechanism into a compensation tool, developed nations are making their stand.

The “behaviour and tone” of the Australian delegation was such, according to Huq, that the lead negotiators of the G77 group of developing countries plus China decided to walk out of the negotiations at 4am on Wednesday morning.

“They felt they were blocked, they were frustrated by the attitude [of Australia], but my understanding is that they are still prepared to negotiate, if Annex I countries [industrialised nations and economies in transition] are serious about it,” Huq added.

Despite their milder approach, other industrialised actors don’t seem to be willing to create an additional loss and damage track.

“Our aim has been to move into a more constructive debate, into a debate which will allow us to make progress with our partners from the developing world,” Paul Watkinson, leading negotiator on adaptation and loss and damage for the EU, told IPS.

“We know it’s a very important project to many of them, particularly the small islands and some of the more vulnerable countries who find themselves having to deal with the effects of climate change. They are adapting but they are very worried that in the longer term they will face impacts which they won’t be able to manage.”

But, Watkinson continued, this is something that can be done through the institutions that have already been created under the climate convention and also outside the convention.

Huq, however, argued that “Existing mechanisms are not adequate; when you fail to mitigate, when you fail to adapt, you still have losses and damage. It is a new subject, and it requires a new mechanism.”

The debate keeps revolving around a different perception of what the loss and damage proposal is actually about.

One side stresses its universal scope, insisting on how recent events such as the Italian cyclone, and also the hurricanes in the U.S. or the floods in Germany, show that everyone will have to deal with extreme events and consequent losses.

Meanwhile, the bloc of developed countries fears that this will automatically lead to the creation of a compensation fund, with less universal scope.

Indeed, had a mechanism on loss and damage already been established, on what basis would a country like Italy expect developing countries to dig into their pockets?

“Let’s not reduce this mechanism to simply money from one side coming to another side,” Huq insisted. “It may be about compensation, but money is not the only transaction to be made here. This is about the expression of human solidarity across the globe, it’s about sharing knowledge. We can help the Italians from other parts of the world. We may be money-poor but we are knowledge-rich, and we can share it with [them]”.

Panelists at the Gender and Climate Change workshop held Nov. 12 at the COP19 in Warsaw. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

Tuesday was Gender Day at the COP19 climate summit in Warsaw, and many of the events that took place in the National Stadium focused on the topic of gender and its relation with climate change, and tried to shed a light on problems that require action from policy-makers.

The day opened with the launch of the Environmental Gender Index (EGI), a project of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Lorena Aguilar, IUCN senior gender adviser, explained it to IPS.

“The EGI is the first index of its kind, bringing together measurements of gender and environmental governance; 72 countries have been rated for six different variables, with each one of its indicators,” Aguilar said at the COP19 United Nations Climate Change Conference running Nov. 11-22 in the Polish capital.

The 72 countries were ranked according to their performance in livelihood, gender rights and participation, governance, gender education and assets, ecosystem and country-reported activities. Each of the variables contains a set of indicators to better define their scope.

For example, the ‘gender rights and participation’ variable looks at whether women enjoy equal legal rights, property rights and balanced representation in the decision-making processes.

The first outcome of this extensive research that should be stressed is that in many cases the highest-income group of countries – the 34-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – recorded rather poor performances in reporting about gender, environment and sustainable development.

This might be due to the “perception that gender equality has already been achieved throughout all spheres in the country, including the environmental sector,” but also to a lack of political will, the report observes.

The top three performers in country-reporting to the Rio Conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification and the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) are India, Kenya and Ghana, while “at the lower end of the scores, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Italy do not address gender in any of their latest three Rio Convention reports,” the IUCN study says.

Yet, poverty still goes hand in hand with gender inequality, when it comes to environmental issues as well. This translates into an index that sees the first positions all occupied by OECD countries, with Iceland, Netherlands and Norway in the top three, and Italy closing the list in the 16th position.

Latin American and Caribbean countries appear in the middle of the ranking, with the exception of Panama being among the strongest performers, right after Italy and followed by South Africa. Eurasian countries are also all ranked as moderate performers, with the best being Romania in the 22nd position and the last Uzbekistan in the 39th.

The list of weakest performers is occupied mainly by MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries, with Yemen second to last in the overall ranking; Asian countries, among which India ranks 46th and Pakistan last of the continent in 67th position; and African countries, which account for most of the weakest performers, closing the table with the Democratic Republic of Congo as the worst performer of the sample.

Gender advocates here at the COP also seem to confirm what the ranking shows. It is in the poorest countries that climate change effects have the most different impacts on men and women.

“Because of the socially constructed roles, women in Uganda are culturally required to provide food, cultivate food, prepare it and serve it to their families,” explains Gertrude Kenyangi from Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) in Uganda.

“Food, energy and water are interconnected, and if you don’t have these three things, which are made even scarcer by climate change, then you won’t be able to fulfil your role, and that alone will create problems between you and your husband, it will probably make your children destitute, and it will affect your entire livelihood.”

Kenyangi escaped that same fate thanks to an educational programme.

“I myself come from a forest-dependent community, but I broke out of that cycle. I happened to be connected with some religious organisations that sponsored my education.” And this is how, after her studies, she founded SWAGEN, a network of grassroots women community-based organisations.

Grassroots movements are paramount to connecting vulnerable people to the governance level, “but you need to make a deliberate effort to reach out to them,” Kenyangi told IPS.

“For instance, Women in Europe for a Common Future (WESC) is a platform that brought me into the debate, so I can bring in the grassroots dimension. Without their support I wouldn’t have the money to come on my own, I couldn’t afford the ticket, the accommodation, not even the registration to this event.

“That’s what changes the vicious cycle – if somebody intervenes from the outside, appreciating that we are all living on this planet and have just one planet,” she said.

Despite the name, WECF’s reach goes way beyond Europe, connecting more than 150 organisations and communities all over the world with the aim of influencing gender-sensitive environmental policies at the international level.

What they want to remind policy-makers of is that climate change is caused by life’s day-to-day decisions and has an impact on everybody’s daily life. But because women and men often have different lifestyles, their activities have a different impact on the environment.

While from a Western point of view it might be hard to imagine how climate change effects can have a different impact on men and women, in many parts of the world, such as areas where subsistence farming is carried out by women, the relationship becomes clearer.

Maira Zahur is part of the GenderCC delegation here at the COP, but back home she works on the policy level with the Pakistani government as an expert on disaster risk reduction.

“In simple terms, I advise them on how to use certain policies on the ground, how they can benefit women, how they should be revised, edited or extended, and how they can be taken to the grassroots level, explaining to people what things are there for their benefit,” she told IPS.

Recently, U.N. Women carried out a study on flood early warning systems in Pakistan, looking at different aspects, such as the social composition in the different areas, whether men are based in such areas or are working outside, how women make decisions if there are no men in the home, whether they are able to make their own choices in case of a flood warning or are dependent on males in the home or in the streets.

The study reported that “hesitation about taking women and girls out of the protected environment of homes” was one of the reasons for people not to leave their houses even when they had been warned in advance.

The report further analysed several gender-related issues arising inside relief camps for flood victims, from food access to hygiene implications and security problems faced by women.

“That’s why when you make policies such as early warnings, you need to take into account gender issues,” Zahur underlined.

Women’s involvement at all decision-making levels seems to be, if not a solution, at least a first essential step to addressing these policy gaps.

The attention towards gender-related issues within the climate change debate is growing, as shown by the decision adopted at last year’s climate summit in Doha to promote gender balance and participation by women in the UNFCCC negotiations, as well as by the big turnout at the Workshop on Gender and Climate Change held here on Tuesday Nov. 12.

Yet Zahur seems sceptical about possible advances during the conference. “We are all so involved in plenaries, contact groups, side events, that the basic purpose for which we are here is kind of lost. We need to find solutions that can help people at the grassroots level. That should be the major motivation. But here a lot of blah blah blah is happening, this is so tedious,” she sadly concluded.

Niscemi, with its 30,000 local residents and its white houses, is a typical southern Sicilian town. But it stands out not only for its ancient cork forest, but also for the Naval Radio Transmitter Facility located within the protected forest itself.

The MUOS antennas in the cork forest in Niscemi. Credit: Courtesy of Fabio D’Alessandro

Almost one third of the municipality is covered by a cork forest, the most important relict of the oak forests that once covered the central-southern part of the Italian island of Sicily. But the NRTF base, with around 40 transmitting devices, is located right inside the 3,000-hectare forest, which was named a Site of Community Importance (SIC) in 1997.

Although the base officially belongs to the Italian army, the use of it is exclusively reserved for the U.S. Navy as part of the Naval Air Station of Sigonella. In recent years it has become the target of protests by the people of Niscemi.

The base reportedly hosts one of the four ground stations of the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), an ambitious satellite communication system that according to the U.S. Navy official website will provide military users with 10 times more communications capacity than the existing system.

Traces of the project are already visible from the town centre, or even more clearly from satellite images, where three 20-metre diameter antennas stand out in the barren landscape of the Sicilian countryside. The system is composed of three other ground stations – one in Virginia, one in Hawaii and one still in the making in Australia – and a constellation of four operational satellites plus one on-orbit spare.

“The NRTF antennas were installed in 1991, and caused mild concern for health risks,” Paola Ottaviano, a local lawyer and activist, told IPS. “But it was in 2009, when talk about a new project involving three additional big antennas started circulating, that people decided it was too much.”

“The first NO-MUOS committees rose around that time,” said Salvatore Giordano, spokesperson for the Regional NO-MUOS Coordination Board. “And in 2011, a few hundred people took part in the first demonstration against the project. One year later, on Mar. 30, 2012, we were 20,000.”

For activists, possible health hazards are not the only reason to oppose the completion of the MUOS: “The cork forest became a Site of Community Importance because of the unique flora and fauna that needs to be preserved, and we don’t know what impact the electromagnetic waves might have on the forest’s biodiversity,” Ottaviano stressed.

Yet the European Commission’s written answer to a parliamentary question on the issue states that “The Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC(1) does not prohibit the construction of satellite telecommunication infrastructures in or near Sites of Community Importance (SCI). The compatibility of such a development with the conservation objectives of a site needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis.”

On the other hand, through the official site of the U.S. Consulate General of Naples, the American authorities assure that the MUOS ground station respects all applicable standards on safety and health mandated by Italy and the United States.

The authorities also claim that the results of the MUOS Earth Terminal Survey for both Hawaii and Virginia showed that the actual electromagnetic radiation levels were well below the maximum allowed by the law, both for people working on the site and for people off-site.

The initial phase of the building process has been plagued with controversy. As one can see on the U.S. Consulate General site, it was the Italian Defence Ministry that had to grant approval for the construction of the MUOS system inside the NRTF base. But the Ministry spokesperson did not confirm this, and refused to answer any questions.

Nevertheless, as the project is situated in a Site of Community Importance, it needed the go-ahead from the local authorities before the works could get underway. Ottaviano said: “The authorisation eventually arrived in June 2011, but we are in possession of a document from the U.S. Navy with pictures clearly showing the foundations of the antennas already in place and the caption says ‘Niscemi, April 2009’. That is why we turned to the courts to demonstrate that it was illegal to start the works.”

Both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Embassy in Italy refused to answer any questions regarding the MUOS project, making it impossible to confirm or deny this claim.

The MUOS antennas in the cork forest in Niscemi. Credit: Courtesy of Fabio D'Alessandro

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Niscemi, with its 30,000 local residents and its white houses, is a typical southern Sicilian town. But it stands out not only for its ancient cork forest, but also for the Naval Radio Transmitter Facility located within the protected forest itself.

Almost one third of the municipality is covered by a cork forest, the most important relict of the oak forests that once covered the central-southern part of the Italian island of Sicily.

But the NRTF base, with around 40 transmitting devices, is located right inside the 3,000-hectare forest, which was named a Site of Community Importance (SIC) in 1997.

Although the base officially belongs to the Italian army, the use of it is exclusively reserved for the U.S. Navy as part of the Naval Air Station of Sigonella.

In recent years it has become the target of protests by the people of Niscemi.

The base reportedly hosts one of the four ground stations of the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), an ambitious satellite communication system that according to the U.S. Navy official website will provide military users with 10 times more communications capacity than the existing system.

Traces of the project are already visible from the town centre, or even more clearly from satellite images, where three 20-metre diameter antennas stand out in the barren landscape of the Sicilian countryside.

The system is composed of three other ground stations – one in Virginia, one in Hawaii and one still in the making in Australia – and a constellation of four operational satellites plus one on-orbit spare.

“The NRTF antennas were installed in 1991, and caused mild concern for health risks,” Paola Ottaviano, a local lawyer and activist, told IPS. “But it was in 2009, when talk about a new project involving three additional big antennas started circulating, that people decided it was too much.”

“The first NO-MUOS committees rose around that time,” said Salvatore Giordano, spokesperson for the Regional NO-MUOS Coordination Board. “And in 2011, a few hundred people took part in the first demonstration against the project. One year later, on Mar. 30, 2012, we were 20,000.”

For activists, possible health hazards are not the only reason to oppose the completion of the MUOS: “The cork forest became a Site of Community Importance because of the unique flora and fauna that needs to be preserved, and we don’t know what impact the electromagnetic waves might have on the forest’s biodiversity,” Ottaviano stressed.

Yet the European Commission’s written answer to a parliamentary question on the issue states that “The Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC(1) does not prohibit the construction of satellite telecommunication infrastructures in or near Sites of Community Importance (SCI). The compatibility of such a development with the conservation objectives of a site needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis.”

On the other hand, through the official site of the U.S. Consulate General of Naples, the American authorities assure that the MUOS ground station respects all applicable standards on safety and health mandated by Italy and the United States.

The authorities also claim that the results of the MUOS Earth Terminal Survey for both Hawaii and Virginia showed that the actual electromagnetic radiation levels were well below the maximum allowed by the law, both for people working on the site and for people off-site.

The initial phase of the building process has been plagued with controversy. As one can see on the U.S. Consulate General site, it was the Italian Defence Ministry that had to grant approval for the construction of the MUOS system inside the NRTF base. But the Ministry spokesperson did not confirm this, and refused to answer any questions.

Nevertheless, as the project is situated in a Site of Community Importance, it needed the go-ahead from the local authorities before the works could get underway.

Ottaviano said: “The authorisation eventually arrived in June 2011, but we are in possession of a document from the U.S. Navy with pictures clearly showing the foundations of the antennas already in place and the caption says ‘Niscemi, April 2009’. That is why we turned to the courts to demonstrate that it was illegal to start the works.”

Both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Embassy in Italy refused to answer any questions regarding the MUOS project, making it impossible to confirm or deny this claim.

Meanwhile, in March 2013 the newly elected regional government decided to revoke the authorisation for the installation, under pressure from the citizens’ protests and the Niscemi municipal government, which had asked for an independent risk assessment.

Two physicists, Professor Massimo Zucchetti, a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor Massimo Coraddu at the Polytechnic University of Turin, stated in a study that, first, the surveys on the already existing transmitting devices showed that the limit on the allowed emissions had been reached and was likely to have been passed in some cases.

Second, they found the information provided on the MUOS incomplete and partially contradictory. Nevertheless, it was possible for the two professors to assess that there are possible risks for the ecosystem of the cork forest, for air traffic and for the health of the local population.

The National Institute of Health (ISS) holds a different opinion. In a document released in July it stated that no evidence was found of possible risks, due to the known effects of the electromagnetic fields. MUOS construction activities got underway again on Aug. 20.

“Having received these results from the ISS, we had no choice but to cancel the suspension of the authorisation,” Maria Lo Bello, chairman of the regional environment committee, told IPS. “The Sicily region deeply regrets the fact that the works will go on, and we can give no guarantees that there won’t be consequences for the health of the people of Niscemi, but there is nothing else we can do about it.”

The ISS document does state that the population of Niscemi presents a critical health situation compared to the rest of the region, with excessive numbers of cases of liver cancer and other liver diseases, multiple myeloma (a cancer of plasma cells), central nervous system diseases and other pathologies, for which no precise cause could be found. It added that further investigation was highly recommended.

In other words: more tests, more measurements and more studies are to come. “It’s going to take time, but we are patient,” said NO-MUOS activist Giordano. “Because what matters is that people know that this project is based on deception. And how long can deception last?”

The 2001 demonstrations against the G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy. Groups of violent protesters, the so-called Black Block, had been looting the streets of Genoa. Ten demonstrators have been convicted for conspiracy to cause destruction. However, justice for the killing of 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani has been slow. Credit: Han Soete/CC By 2.0

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Jul 23 2013 (IPS)

“It was midnight and I was sleeping; I woke up to the noise of the police breaking down the entrance door of the school,” says Italian journalist Lorenzo Guadagnucci. “They came in running and screaming. The bashing was immediate, with no chance of mediation.”

That was on Jul. 21, 2001. Guadagnucci, journalist with Resto del Carlino, a local newspaper based in Bologna in the north, had decided to go to Genoa that morning to witness the demonstrations against the G8 Summit.

“I saw them beating up everyone they encountered on their way before they came to me. Two policemen vented all their anger on me with their truncheon. Then a third came and hit me on the back.”

The day before, groups of violent protesters, the so-called Black Block, had been looting the streets of Genoa. The police had charged into one demonstration that was authorised, and 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by a carabiniere.

Twelve years later, Italian justice has slowly run its dubious course."Cold analysis suggests that the same conditions are still in place, and it could happen again.” -- Riccardo Noury, communications director of Amnesty International Italy

Ten demonstrators have been convicted for conspiracy to cause destruction, a law rarely used since the fascist period of the 1930s and 1940s. The protesters were given sentences of six to 14 years in jail.

Of the 25 police officers sentenced for the school raid and seven policemen and doctors convicted for the violence in the local barracks at Bolzaneto, no one will go to prison.

Heads of the police where banned from public office for five years. “From a judicial point of view, it is an important result,” said Guadagnucci. “But the paradox is that this outcome is completely useless. In the face of these sentences, the passivity of the parliament and of the government and the president the clear message is ‘we don’t care.’”

“Our request for the institution of an independent inquiry has been simply ignored,” Riccardo Noury, communications director of Amnesty International Italy told IPS. “And therefore we still have no answer to the question why all of this happened in Genoa.”

“The worst moment came after the bashing,” Guadagnucci told IPS. “They kept us inside the school for two hours: no press, no MPs, no one was allowed to enter. I remember people crying, screaming, bleeding, a girl having an epileptic attack.

“And the police kept saying that nobody knew they were there and they could do with us whatever they wanted. When you hear such things you really think they will kill you, and that is a trauma you cannot overcome, you simply cannot.”

All 93 people who were inside the school, of which 78 needed medical care, were immediately arrested for aggressive resistance to arrest, conspiracy to cause destruction, and illegal carrying of weapons after two Molotov bombs were allegedly found inside the school.

All charges against them were finally dropped in 2004 when the judges concluded that the Molotovs were brought into the school by the police to justify the raid.

That night Guadagnucci was “lucky enough” to be kept in hospital due to the risk of internal bleeding. The ones who did not suffer serious injuries were brought to the Bolzaneto barracks, where the second part of the nightmare began.

With no means of contacting their families or a lawyer, the witnesses later said girls were threatened with rape, people were forced to stand with their heads against the wall for hours, some were forced to bark like dogs, others were denied use of a toilet, and almost everyone was beaten up.

But Italy, despite ratification of the United Nations convention against torture in 1988, does not have a law against torture. “If we had it before Genoa, we could have prevented something, because the presence of a crime in the penal code works as a deterrent,” said Noury.

“We already have billions of laws in Italy and other tools to compensate for this lack,” Matteo Bianchi from Coisp (a police trade union) told IPS. But Noury is not convinced that is good enough.

Giuliani’s father is still seeking answers: “We were forced to start a civil lawsuit as a last possibility to evaluate things as they really happened, and not based on the imagination of some expert witness,” he told IPS.

The trial for his son’s death was dismissed for legitimate self-defence for the police, based on the fact that the carabiniere shot in the air but the bullet hit a stone, deviating its trajectory. “It is the most absurd and shameful thing they could have made up,” said Giuliani.

There are other reasons to open a new trial, he told IPS. “There are two pictures that prove that after the shot, when Carlo was lying surrounded by the police, but still alive, one of them hit him on his forehead with a stone. Right after, a video shows the deputy commissioner running after a demonstrator screaming ‘you killed him with your stone’. That was a sordid attempt at throwing facts off track.”

“Common sense might tell us that this was a unique event,” said Noury. “But cold analysis suggests that the same conditions are still in place, and it could happen again.”

An ECPAT campaign picture against sexual exploitation. Credit: Arabella Shelbourne.

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Jul 7 2013 (IPS)

The scandal around the under-age prostitute that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi allegedly had sex with is not about just that one girl: an estimated 10,000 under-age girls become victims of sexual exploitation every year in Italy.

Most of them are not “seen”; street prostitution is in fact on the decline. But that is only because these “services” are accessed more and more online.

“Sometimes I worry when I hear people discussing underage prostitution,” Myria Vassiliadou, anti-trafficking coordinator at the European Union Commission for Home Affairs, told IPS. “When you talk about girls and boys whose bodies are used for sexual services, it is an illegal activity.”

According to European Commission statistics, based exclusively on identified and presumed victims, 9,528 victims of trafficking were reported by EU member states in 2010. Of these, 66 percent were used for sexual exploitation, and of these, 12 percent were girls and three percent boys below 18.

The official figures do not come close to describing the real situation. In Italy 9,000 to 11,000 children become victims of sexual exploitation every year, according to End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking (ECPAT) estimates. ECPAT is an Italian NGO defending children from sexual exploitation."Selling one’s sexuality is a way of obtaining something immediately, be it a seat in the parliament or the latest phone or designer clothing."

“In Italy, the outdoor prostitution we usually think of involves mainly migrant girls,” Yasmin Abo Loha, Italian coordinator of ECPAT told IPS. The main countries of origin are the eastern European countries, followed by a constant flow from Nigeria, and now emerging trafficking from Asia, mainly China.

“The victims that are forced to prostitute themselves on our streets are usually girls of advanced age,” said Loha. “We also estimate that 15 to 20 percent of the victims are boys, but it is particularly difficult to give a precise percentage especially when it comes to male prostitution, which is the hardest to intercept.”

There is also a myth to dispel, said Vassiliadou. “We are used to saying that trafficking is something that affects migrant people, but 61 percent of the victims of trafficking we now know are EU citizens.”

With Italian children, the main arena where contacts are made for sexual exploitation is now online. In most cases, the phenomenon cannot be defined as prostitution since in many cases contact may not lead to physical sexual intercourse, but may involve pornography and more.

The new forms vary quite widely, “from teenagers simulating sexual intercourse among them and then selling the images,” said Loha, “to step-by-step stripteases on webcam, where the price starts from 15 euros to show the breasts and can go up to 50 euros.” In such cases the payment can be a phone top-up or other direct presents.

Prostitution in the strict sense usually happens around underage clubs where teenagers perform sex acts in exchange for money. “If we compare it to the standard forms of prostitution, where minors are forced, Italian teenagers seem induced by a certain message and a cultural change that is happening,” said Loha.

“Today, selling one’s sexuality is a way of obtaining something immediately, be it a seat in the parliament or the latest phone or designer clothing,” said Loha.

The many dangers of sexual exploitation that stops short of prostitution have been hidden behind the publicity around the Berlusconi scandal.

“However we put it, a person under 18 that is sexually exploited is a victim,” said Vassiliadou. “There is a law against it and I don’t think we should be having a debate on that.” Yet, the fact that Karima el-Mahroug (the Moroccan girl Berlusconi allegedly had sex with) was 17, and the fact that she looked older, gave space to a vivid debate on whether she was or not aware, and responsible for her actions.

Instead of concern, there was gossip, Loha said. “We often hear these comments also from professionals in our area, who think that 17-year-old teenagers are grown up and can do what they want. The fact is that the law states the opposite and as such must be applied.”

The debate should focus instead on ways to end trafficking and sexual exploitation, Vassiliadou said. “Because for victims to be there, it means there is someone willing to buy the services.”

The attempts to counter this have to come through training, campaigns, actions targeting the persecutors and the victims, and through media. But the problem is that so far there is no successful model to apply, Vassiliadou said.

“We don’t have any example, anywhere in Europe. So as far as I don’t have an answer I need to ask more questions, and push more.”

At the UN Forum of Mayors on Crime Prevention and Security in Urban Settings, from left to right: Dong Min Ki, Jonathan Lucas, Cecilia Andersson, Martin Xaba, Bilal S. Hamad, and Marin Casimir Ilboudo. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
TURIN, Italy, May 21 2013 (IPS)

As people around the world continue to migrate into cities, swelling urban populations, they have sparked growth in another area: crime and security issues.

“Big cities are…where the greatest opportunities are, but also where more criticalities concentrate,” said Piero Fassino, mayor of Turin, Italy, at the plenary session of the Forum of Mayors on Crime Prevention and Security in Urban Settings, held in Turin from May 20 to 21.

“While the quality of services to citizens are usually higher in those centres, they also present more problems of social alienation, youth unrest and crime,” Fassino added."[Cities] present more problems of social alienation, youth unrest and crime."
-- Piero Fassino

The forum, organised by United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) with the United Nations Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) and the municipality of Turin, sought to reduce inequality and injustice in urban settings and address the dynamics of security and crime preventions.

The challenge for the future is to take advantage of opportunities offered by urbanisation while reducing episodes of crime and violence that hinder sustainable development, particularly for the most vulnerable people: women, youth and marginalised groups.

“From 1960 to 1990, urbanisation was accompanied by a severe increase [in] crime and violence, which affected the majority of cities and towns in both the developed and the developing world,” explained Cecilia Andersson, human settlements officer of the Safer Cities Programme of UN-HABITAT, during her opening speech.

“This situation required change. It required the cities and towns themselves to take responsibility to deal with these issues,” she added.

Mayors and representatives of 18 municipalities around the world from Cape Town to Bangkok, from Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to Seoul, discussed the biggest challenges they encountered and the best measures to take to address them.

Martin Xaba, head of the Safer Cities and I-Trump Department of Durban, South Africa, explained how the local municipality decided in 2000 to adopt the Safer Cities strategy.

“The strategy requires the implementation of both reactive and proactive approach,” Xaba explained. While adequate responses to crime are always needed, “prevention remains the most effective tool, and this is where community involvement becomes critical”.

Such tools, in the case of Durban, include campaigns for crime awareness and against the abuse of women and children, workshops on drug abuse, and the active participation of the community in ward safety committees.

It was “upon the request of African mayors, who were having an issue with regards to safety in their cities” that the programme Safer Cities began in Africa, Andersson explained to IPS, with Johannesburg, South Africa and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania as pilot cities. The programme has since gone global.

Meanwhile, local leaders say that exchanging ideas among cities does work. Antonio Frey, director of local security in Santiago del Chile, told IPS, “The experience of Cape Town, South Africa, is very interesting for us. They managed to recover public spaces, thanks to the involvement of citizens from marginalised areas.”

“This strategy has positive effects in the long run, because those people recover that space, and then take care [of] and manage it.”

Despite the substantial differences between cities in terms of crime rates and types of crimes, a key requirement to enhance safety and security is the decentralisation of policies from the national to local level.

When policies are not decentralised, improving circumstances becomes very difficult, as Bilal S. Hamad, mayor of Beirut, could attest during his speech at the plenary session.

In Beirut, a lack of decentralisation is hindering the municipality’s ability to intervene on crime and safety issues. “The central government has its hand in the affairs of the municipality,” Hamad lamented. The city is not in charge [of] a police force, and the central government put someone in the role of governor, “taking all the executive power in the city of Beirut”.

In another example, inadequate housing is a problem indirectly connected to crime, but “we don’t have full power [over] it, because it’s the central government which controls that”, insisted Hamad.

According to Andersson, apart from decentralisation, cooperation is also essential. “The best results come when all the various departments in a municipality [understand] that they have a role to play with regards to providing safety and security for the inhabitants of the city,” she told IPS.

Interestingly, crime and violence differ significantly from city to city, and developed and developing countries do not necessarily face separate types of crimes.

“In developing countries, the biggest challenge is always finding resources,” Andersson told IPS, particularly moving resources from national to local governments. Some problems, however, affect most cities, regardless of the country in which they are located. “Across borders, in all regions, the issue of women and girls’ safety…comes out quite clearly,” Andersson said.

This issue, by limiting the freedom of women and girls, prevents them from participating in and contributing to their communities. As Andersson clarified during the conference, “Communities where all citizens are empowered to participate in social, economic and political opportunities…are instrumental [in reducing] poverty.”

The wake of the global financial crisis, as many national governments in Europe cut back on services to citizens and used public money to rescue banks, taught many people a valuable lesson.

“Nowadays finance is an end in itself, to make money out of money, while it should be a tool to serve the economy and the people,” says Andrea Baranes, president of Fondazione Culturale Responsabilità Etica (the Cultural Foundation for Ethical Responsibility).

Andrea Baranes, president of Fondazione Culturale Responsabilità Etica. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

“Finance lost its social role,” Baranes explains. “We need measures to change this route.”

The Cultural Foundation for Ethical Responsibility (FCRE, in Italian) is part of the Ethics Network Bank, a network of organisations that promote financial services and cultural, environmental and human protection.

FCRE is of the main partners of Terra Futura (Future Earth), a annual three-day forum and exhibition held in Florence where associations, institutions and citizens meet to exchange ideas and experiences on good practises in social, economic and environmental sustainability.

IPS correspondent Silvia Giannelli interviewed Baranes on the opening day of the forum about the purpose of the forum and the alterative models it can offer to alleviate Europe’s economic crisis.

Q: As this is the tenth edition of Terra Futura, how do you evaluate this experience?

A: It was definitely a positive one. Over the years, the public, exhibitors and local institutions have become more aware of the importance of networking.

It does not make sense to reflect on the environment, jobs, rights and so on, as separate things, the way it does not make sense to talk about ethical finance without considering responsible tourism, fair trade and solidarity based purchasing groups.

But when you put all these things together, creating a network that deals with consumption, production, living and eating habits, you can build a truly alternative economic model that has been shown to work better than the traditional one, not only from social and environmental perspectives but from an economic one too."It does not make sense to reflect on the environment, jobs, rights and so on, as separate things."
-- Andrea Baranes

Q: This year Terra Futura is dedicated to the economic crisis and the effort to overcome it. In what direction is the European Union headed?

A: Unfortunately Europe nowadays means almost exclusively austerity, sacrifices and the like. Even worse, we see a Europe of the common currency, of the common markets, of the free movement of capital, but there is no social Europe.

From one side, we have the European Central Bank, with its monetary policies, but on the other there is no parliament, because the European Parliament has no regulatory authority.

Q: What are solutions can Terra Futura offer to these issues?

A: What we say here is that we need to act in two directions. One is top-down, by means of regulations, in order to close what we call “casinò finance” and to block tax havens.

We also need to act from the bottom-up, to promote virtuous models in the way we use our money. I truly believe that by putting together theoretical analysis and practise we can find real solutions.

Q: What are the priorities of the Ethics Network Bank in this economic phase?

A: Before the Italian elections, the Ethics Network Bank launched proposals under the name of “Let’s change finance to change Italy”. In these proposals we asked to reduce financial derivatives and increase transparency, close tax havens, and introduce a tax on financial transactions.

We also proposed measures to enhance ethical finance, like the revision of the Basel Accords, an international regulatory framework for banks, in order to prevent ethical banks and cooperatives from being penalised and to facilitate the service sector’s access to credit.

Q: Do other European countries have organisations similar to Ethics Network Bank?

A: There are many examples of ethical finance in Europe and in the world. The differences depend on the social context of the country.

The Netherlands, for instance, being a low-lying country, is concerned with climate change, and therefore to them ethical finance means investing in renewable energies and energy conservation.

In France, where trade unions are very strong, ethical finance corresponds to job creation. In Italy, it all started thanks to the initiative of grassroots associations and civil society, so Banca Etica has always been the bank of non-profits and social cooperatives.

They come from different models, and they are different organisations with different functions, but they all have essential elements in common: the importance of real economy, the attention towards social and environmental impacts and the rejection of speculation.

Q: On Saturday you will present the campaign “Con i miei soldi” (“With my money”). What is this campaign about?

A: Last year we launched “Non con i miei soldi” (“Not with my money”), which wanted to show how we often are not only victims but also accomplices of this crisis. The money in our bank accounts risks ending up in tax havens, in weapons or other polluting activities.

This year we wanted to be proactive and explain to people how, through ethical finance, their money can boost biological agriculture, fair trade, energy conservation, etc. That way, our little savings can eventually influence the choices made in the business world.

Q: Are you optimistic about the chances of Ethics Network Bank’s reflections and proposals being heard?

A: I have one main reason to be optimistic, which at the same time makes me angry. There are no technical challenges preventing the enforcement of our proposals. We know perfectly what needs to be done and how to do it.

What is missing is the political will. But we can change this, through campaigns and grassroots actions, just what we are trying to do here at Terra Futura.

Vandana Shiva, a scientist and environmental activist, presents plants to schoolchildren as part of the campaign "Gardens of Hope". Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
FLORENCE, May 20 2013 (IPS)

As the global agricultural sector is faced with ever-greater challenges, the question of how to reform and improve the sector is a controversial and difficult one. So Terra Futura, a three-day exhibition and conference on agricultural good practises held annually in Florence, brought the debate back to its roots: seeds.

Terra Futura (Future Earth) has been held for ten years as a network for institutions, associations and civil society, which gather in Florence and exchange ideas and experiences for alternative and sustainable environmental, economical and social development.

Vandana Shiva, a scientist and environmental activist, presented a series of initiatives to defend the survival of local and traditional seeds. The initiatives connected land, food sovereignty, biodiversity and environment.

Shiva presented the “law of the seed”, a campaign targeting intellectual property and patents claimed by agribusiness giants. The project aims to reaffirm the centrality of biological and natural rules against the logic of the agribusiness sector, which relies on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), monocultures and intensive agriculture.

“What we intend to achieve is to overturn the logic behind the criminalisation of ordinary seeds and protect the right of farmers to breed their own seeds,” Shiva told IPS.

Yet the current trend seems to be running in the opposite direction, with multinational companies trying to impose the use of patented, genetically modified seeds, with disastrous consequences for local farmers, especially in the third world.

“We have already seen what the entry of Monsanto [a multinational company in agricultural biotechnology and leader of genetically engineered seeds], has done to the cotton sector in India,” Shiva explained.

She added that “95 percent of cotton seed is currently owned and controlled by Monsanto, causing farmers to get into deep dept to pay the royalties”.

Staving off GMOs

According to Beppe Croce, the head of the non-food agriculture section of Legambiente, Italy’s biggest environmental organisation, Europe has managed so far to keep the cultivation of GMOs outside its borders. “From a legislative point of view, the local production is protected,” he said.

The problem lies instead in what European countries import from abroad, as Croce explained to IPS. “Most of our animal feed is integrated with imported products, such as soy and maize. More than half of the total maize cultivated in the world is transgenic,” he said. “This is why we need to strengthen and uniform the tracking system of imported products throughout Europe.”

Giovanni Fabris, national coordinator of Altragricoltura, a national farmers’ movement for food sovereignty, is similarly critical of Europe’s importation policies. During a workshop on access to land in Italian agriculture, he noted, “Europe is focusing on guaranteeing its citizens with the cheapest food possible, regardless of where it comes from.”

According to Fabris, this policy is undermining the production system of countries like Italy, which “have to face the competition of agroindustrial systems outside Europe that are obviously cheaper than ours”.

Under such circumstances, the odds of GMO cultivation not entering Europe seem all but impossible.

“The argument is always the same: the population is growing and we need GMOs to meet the future food demand,” Croce pointed out. “The truth is that production cannot be boosted indiscriminately everywhere, and most of all, it does not need to be done via GM techniques.”

But the lobbying efforts of agribusiness companies are finding new ways of breaking through. On May 6, the European Commission drafted legislation that prevents farmers from producing their own seeds.

“This draft is an example of criminalising the alternative to GMO,” Shiva told IPS. “They would like only patented seeds, all royalties flowing, farmers having no freedom to choose what to grow and consumers having no freedom to choose what to eat.”

People power

But citizens are rediscovering the value of good food, as demonstrated by phenomena and movements such as Slow Food, solidarity-based purchasing groups, and urban gardens. After a half-century of industry control, “people are experimenting [with] new solutions to have more control [over] what they eat,” Shiva said.

Another initiative, “Seeds of Future, Gardens of Hope”, is moving in the same direction. It is being promoted by Shiva’s non-profit organisation, Navdanya International. Through it, children in Florence’s primary schools are given plants of local species to grow in their gardens.

“We are not just talking about education. We are talking about them being the custodian,” Shiva told IPS.

“But everyone is a child in this matter,” she added. “Farmers have been made into children in the sense that they have been made to forget they are savers and breeders of seeds. Consumers have been made to forget that food begins with seed. So, in a way, this it is education for all, education for life.”

By Silvia Giannelli
CAPANNORI, Italy, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Capannori, a rural town in the Italian province of Lucca, in Tuscany, boasts a proud history. Six years ago, it became a trendsetter and leader, not just in Italy but throughout all of Europe, as the continent’s first Zero Waste town.

Today, about 3.5 million Italian citizens carefully separate their waste into coloured bags before leaving them on their doorsteps for collection. The movement has spread further, too, to other European countries.

Giorgio del Ghingaro, the mayor of Capannori (population 46,000), defines this trend as a “cultural revolution” that began with rubbish and in time went much further. Since 2007, residents of Capannori have reduced their urban waste by 30 percent as part of a Zero Waste strategy, which calls for the elimination of all superfluous waste – anything that can be recycled – by 2020.

In Capannori, they are determined to meet this deadline. “Zero waste by 2020 is no utopia,” Del Ghingaro told IPS. “It is a concrete goal that we intend to achieve”.

Initially, the project looked quite ambitious. Its model was that of San Francisco, California, which differs from the Tuscan town in size and conformation. Nevertheless, Capannori’s midterm goal of recycling 75 percent of waste by 2015 was met long in advance; the town currently recycles 82 percent.

After Capannori tested door-to-door collection methods in one part of the town, successfully increasing waste recycling from 30 to 70 percent, “we decided to embark in the zero waste adventure”, Del Ghingaro said.

Locals leading the charge

Since then, Capannori’s waste management has become a model for all of Europe. Joan Marc Simon, executive director of Zero Waste Europe and European coordinator of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, confirms that the Zero Waste strategy came to Spain through the Italian experience."Italy, and Capannori in particular, was definitely the model to follow."
-- Jean Marc Simon

“When it comes to waste, Italy has given the best and worst examples. But if you look at the good practices…Italy, and Capannori in particular, was definitely the model to follow,” Simon said.

Since 2008, one hundred cities in Spain, all concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country, have adopted the strategy. “Southern Europe is giving a lesson on how things can and should be done in a more sustainable way,” Simon stressed.

Rossano Ercolini, Capannori resident, primary school teacher and environmental activist who is the winner of the Goldman Prize for the environment, knows well how local experience can serve the rest of Europe. After all, he is the man who introduced the Zero Waste strategy to Italy – and Europe.

It all started in 1997, when construction plans for an incinerator near the town encountered firm opposition. Ercolini, who is also president of Zero Waste Europe and of Ambiente e Futuro (Environment and Future), a local environmental movement, was part of it.

“Ambiente e Futuro engaged in a strong fight against this proposal,” he explained. Key to the movement’s success was “informing the population about the risks of incineration and offering them a viable alternative. Without the citizens’ commitment, none of this would be possible.”

In introducing the alternative method of separate collection, “we held assemblies…to explain the new system and to hear people’s doubts and concerns,” Ercolini recounted. “We worked together to find solutions.”

Luigi, 67, has lived in Capannori for over 40 years. “People always find a reason to complain,” he said of the door-to-door collection system. “But honestly, I find the system quite easy.” Residents are given different rubbish bins and coloured bags, along with an informational flyer. “If you get it wrong, they just leave a note explaining why they could not collect your bag”.

Indeed, the town decided to avoid fines, so as not to penalise residents for mistakes, and to reward residents instead. Beginning in January, they introduced something called an R-feed waste system.

“Every family has been given a fixed number of gray bags… for non-recyclable waste, with a code on it. The garbage collector has a reader which stores the data so that every family will pay waste tax according to how much non-recyclable rubbish they produced throughout the year,” Del Ghingaro explained.

Targeting the source

Zero Waste does not mean just door-to-door separate collection. It also requires a series of parallel actions aimed at reducing the production of avoidable waste. “We strongly focused on water,” Del Ghingaro told IPS. “Buying water at the supermarket means also buying a lot of plastic. Therefore we made a strong campaign in order to enhance the use of public water.”

Fifteen public water springs were restored and purified, and plastic bottles have been banned from all schools and public buildings, which now use only public water.

For now, Ercolini’s task is to analyse the 18 percent of rubbish that still requires traditional waste management and find a solution. The results so far show that the main problem lies at the roots of the production chain. “Companies need to take responsibility for what they put on the market and redesign their products in order to make them sustainable,” he says.

Following a letter of concern that the Capannori Municipality wrote to the coffee giant Lavazza, the company started a pilot project to substitute standard non-recyclable coffee capsules for espresso machines with new, reusable ones. “We are also studying a way to use the coffee grounds to grow mushrooms,” Ercolini added.

Zero Waste Europe’s Simon told IPS that he is optimistic and convinced that the Zero Waste strategy could become the standard for waste management. Indeed the EU, through the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Strategy, has already established that by 2020 all European countries must stop using incinerators to burn anything that can be recycled.

“Our movement is nothing but the vanguard of what…needs to become the norm,” Simon concluded.

When Claudio was detained in a prison in the northeastern Italian city of Vicenza, he had to share a 7.6 square-metre cell with two other people. “Once you excluded the space taken up by beds and drawers, each inmate was left with 90 centimetres to himself. We had to take it in turns to stand up,” he told IPS.

But cramped living conditions were not the only problem. Forced into that room for 21 hours each day, “there was no possibility for (inmates) to engage in any activity”, Claudio added.

In a prison in Busto Arsizio, a city in the northern Italian region of Lombardy, “there was only one educator for 420 inmates, and the only psychologist could dedicate just six minutes of his time to each of them every year,” Claudio recalled.

In short, the real problem lay not in each individual case but in “the systematic violation of human rights” in prisons across Italy, he concluded.

Indeed, a recent decision by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirmed the level of dysfunction inherent in Italy’s prison system.

The Strasbourg Court’s January ruling declared that the crowded conditions seven inmates had been forced to endure in two Italian prisons constituted a violation of their basic rights.

As the official sentence reads, “Their conditions of detention had subjected them to hardship of an intensity exceeding the unavoidable level of suffering inherent in detention”, and violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The court also ordered the state to pay the applicants 100,000 euros (about 131,000 dollars) in damages.

Now, people like Claudio who feel their rights have been similarly violated, are queuing up at the ECHR.

“The aim is to denounce the general violation of people’s dignity: we were not allowed to touch our relatives’ hands during (visits), and there was no space dedicated to (visits) with children, who had to go through searches and a hostile environment,” Claudio added.

Ornella Favero, director of the non-profit organisation Ristretti Orizzonti (Narrow Horizons) who has been “denouncing the conditions in Italy’s prisons for years”, told IPS the ruling is just the tip of the iceberg.

With an occupancy rate ranging from 142 to 268 percent of maximum capacity, Italy holds the dubious distinction of having the most overcrowded prisons in the European Union, according to a report published by the Rome-based Prison Observatory of Antigone.

But the rate of overcrowding should not be used to justify “building new prisons, which is absolutely not what our country needs”, Favero stressed.

Quoting the Council of Europe, Alessio Scandurra, coordinator of the Prison Observatory, stressed that the “solution to overcrowding is not building new structures, because that is a system that creates its own demand: the more prisons you build, the more they will get filled”.

Following visits to prisons across Italy, the 2010 report by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) states, “(A)dditional accommodation is not likely, in itself, to provide a lasting solution to the problem of overcrowding. Addressing this problem calls for a coherent strategy, covering both admission to and release from prison, to ensure that imprisonment really is the measure of last resort.

“This implies, in the first place, an emphasis on non-custodial measures in the period before the imposition of a sentence and, in the second place, the adoption of measures that facilitate reintegration into free society of persons who have been deprived of their liberty.”

According to various studies, incarceration rates increased in Italy from 47,316 in 1992 to 67,961 in 2010.

Favero believes this is because “in the last decade, there has been no ability or (political) will to reform the Penal Code.”

According to the Prison Observatory of Antigone’s report, more than 20,000 people are serving terms of less than three years and approximately 25 percent of the inmates are drug addicts.

Italy has one of the highest percentages of drug-related crimes in the region: 38.4 percent of all prisoners compared to 14 percent in Germany and France and roughly 15 percent in England and Wales.

While the European average for pre-trial detainees is just 28.5 percent, in Italy they account for 42 percent of the prison population, Scandurra said.

The number of immigrants in Italian prisons is also well above the European average, comprising 35.6 percent of all prison inmates.

“All these people should have access to non-custodial sanctions,” Favero argued.

But in 2012 less than 20,000 people incarcerated in Italy were serving their sentence outside a prison, far less than the EU average: in 2009 Spain, Germany and France could boast 111,000, 120,000 and 123,000 people respectively taking advantage of alternatives such as pecuniary fines, community service and house arrest for lesser crimes, as well as medical treatment for drug addiction. In England and Wales the number was closer to 200,000.

“These are definitely the countries we should look at when it comes to non-custodial sanctions,” Scandurra said.

A robust body of evidence supports the civil society push towards alternatives to imprisonment. According to the Justice Ministry’s Observatory on Alternative Measures, non-custodial sanctions and gradual reintroduction into society show an 81 percent success rate, while 69 percent of those people who serve their entire sentence in prison tend to repeat their offenses.

“Keeping inmates in jail for longer does not make our society safer. But while this seems to be clear in many EU countries, in Italy the idea is that prison is the universal panacea,” Favero lamented.

Despite the grave outlook, Scandurra said the government has begun to pay more attention to the issue than it has in the past, and a consensus about what needs to be done is gradually developing among social workers.

“Elections are a delicate phase — bringing up these topics during a campaign is almost impossible, because it doesn’t get votes. But the hope, now that elections are over, is that politicians will finally have the courage to enforce the required measures,” Scandurra said.

Turning a slightly more cynical eye to the problem, Favero believes that what is more likely to promote a change is the threat of high monetary sanctions coming from Strasbourg. More than 500 similar cases are currently queuing up at the ECHR – if they result in a similar ruling to the one passed down in January, the government will be hard-pressed to cough up the necessary compensation, experts say.

(END)