While India has drastically reduced the spread of HIV over the past decade, new strains of the virus that cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) are troubling medical scientists in this country.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS, or UNAIDS, in its 2012 report, praises India for doing “particularly well” in halving the number of newly affected adults between 2000 and 2009.

But India – home to 2.4 million people living with HIV, one million of whom are on anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy – will need to pay attention to the proven fact that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type I (HIV-1), the most common and pathogenic strain of the virus, has been undergoing a process of fairly rapid viral evolution.

Of the various genetic families, HIV-1 subtype C is responsible for nearly 99 percent of infections in India and has a significant presence in China, South Africa and Brazil as well.

Now, scientists working at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore have found a family of five new strains of HIV-1 subtype C, two of which appear to be outstripping the standard viral strain.

“The study is the first of its kind to identify that a major family of HIV-1 is undergoing evolutionary modification,” Prof. Ranga Udaya Kumar of the molecular biology and genetics unit at JNCASR told IPS.

Kumar said that although the studies at the Centre do not show the new strains to be “more pathogenic”, there are reasons to believe that they are “more infectious”.

The results of the JNCASR study were first published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Nov. 6 edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Biological Chemistry.

“The new viral strains appear to contain a stronger viral promoter,” said Mahesh Bachu, who led the team of researchers at JNCASR. A promoter is a region of DNA that codes for whichever protein the cell is trying to produce. In other words, a virus with a stronger promoter is expected to produce more ‘daughter viruses’ and spread faster in a host population.

“Importantly, in the laboratory experiments the new HIV strains were found to be making more daughter viruses compared to the standard viral strains,” Bachu said.

Retroviruses that cause AIDS reproduce by transcribing their ribonucleic acid (RNA) into DNA using an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. The resultant DNA inserts itself into a host cell’s DNA and is reproduced along with the cell and its daughters.

“In addition to making more daughter viruses, people infected with the new HIV strains seem to contain more virus in their blood,” Bachu told IPS, adding that data for the study was generated from 165 samples gleaned from hospitals in diverse parts of the country.

Collaborators in the study included the YRG Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE) in Chennai; St John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bangalore; the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences, Bangalore; and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi.

The clinical findings have been substantiated by laboratory experiments using viral, immune and molecular strategies, Bachu said. “A similar process of viral evolution has also been observed in South Africa, China and southern Brazil – countries that have the same family of HIV-1.”

Significantly, when Bachu and his team first observed the new strains, during earlier studies conducted from 2000 to 2003, their prevalence was quite low – approximately one to two percent of each of the five variants.

A decade later, the prevalence of three of the five new HIV-1 groups had multiplied, with one group increasing from two percent during the 2000-2003 period to 20-30 percent in 2010-2011.

According to Bachu, it is important that subjects infected with the newer 4-kappaB strains show more plasma virus in their blood than those infected with the existing 3-kappaB HIV strain.

“It is possible that a higher viral load permits an enhanced transmission advantage to 4-kappaB strains of HIV, contributing to successful spread of the new viruses,” Bachu said.

“The findings raise several questions with serious implications for viral fitness, evolution and disease management,” according to Kumar. “The most important of these concerns is the possibility of the new HIV strains altering the landscape of HIV demographics in India.”

Both Kumar and Bachu caution, however, that the JNCASR “data should be considered only as suggestive and not conclusive”.

JNCASR and its collaborators are now conducting observational clinical studies to determine if the new HIV strains are more infectious than the existing one.

“It is for clinical scientists to see if the new strains of HIV are likely to cause rapid disease progression to AIDS,” Dr. Nagalingeswaran Kumarasamy, chief medical officer at YRG Care, told IPS.

Kumarsamy said that, as things currently stand, there is no cause for alarm. “We need to further study the new strains and see, for example, if there is a need to start ARV therapy earlier than usual.”

Social activists say that attempts to rehabilitate sex workers in this former monarchy call for special efforts to uplift the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution.

Badi sex workers await rehabilitation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

Sabitri Nepali was initiated into the traditional vocation of the Badis before she turned 14. Now, at 30, she is baffled by the changes taking place in a country struggling to climb out of a feudal past and transform into a modern, democratic republic.

“My family has survived on this trade for generations. My mother was a sex worker and I continued with the family profession. It was normal for us,” Sabitri tells IPS in this remote village in Kailali district, 700 km west of Kathmandu.

Badis, estimated to number 50,000, live in the western districts of Nepal but find work in the towns and cities of Nepal and neighbouring India, including Kathmandu, Mumbai and New Delhi.

Four years ago the Nepal government banned the Badis from pursuing their traditional occupation after it came under pressure from local communities fearing that the districts where there were Badi concentrations were turning into red light areas.

But, the government made no move to implement the ban, with the result that local communities formed monitoring groups backed by vigilantes that used violent methods to compel the Badis to give up their sole means of livelihood.

“We defied the ban and continued with our traditional occupation. How could we survive without incomes? Think about our children,” says Kalpana Badi,35, who like many others uses a surname that readily identifies her caste and her profession.

The word ‘badi’ is a corruption of the Sanskrit word ‘vadyabadak’, meaning one who plays a musical instrument, and suggests a degradation in the status of the caste over time.

South Asia’s rigid caste system once defined the occupation that people could engage in and Badis formed one group that has been unable to find its way out of an unfortunate position on the social ladder. “We didn’t want to continue with prostitution but the government has failed to fulfill its promises of rehabilitation,” says Bishal Nepali, husband of a Badi sex worker.

The government did announce a package that included housing, income generation activities and scholarships for Badi children, but these were never implemented.

“This has been a very frustrating process. We don’t know why the government has been so indifferent. The Badis are in a desperate situation,” says Uma Badi, a prominent activist and one of a handful of college-educated Badi women.

“Most Badis are uneducated and have no farms or livestock,” Uma explained.

Badis were denied citizenship until 2005 when the Supreme Court ordered the government to grant it to them and also extend financial support.

According to a study published in 1992 by Thomas Cox, an anthropologist then attached to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University, Badi girls “from early childhood, know, and generally accept the fact, that a life of prostitution awaits them.”

Badi girls, the study said, do not get married and commonly bear the children of their clients.

Cox recorded that upper caste Nepali society gives little encouragement to Badi girls to pursue other professions and those among them who enter public schools are “often severely harassed by high caste students.”

Two decades after Cox’s study, the Badis, as members of an ‘untouchable’ Dalit (meaning broken people) caste, are still not permitted use of the village water pump or well and their situation may have worsened.

In Muda village, many Badi girls and women have fled their homes fearing the Muda Anugaman Toli Samiti (a vigilante group) whose members have been accused of beating up Badis and their clients.

Badis are not allowed to run legitimate businesses. “People fear to buy anything from my shop because they fear the villagers,” says Dinesh Nepali, a Badi male who runs a small shop selling cigarettes, vegetables and soft drinks. “How can we survive like this?”

Badi activists are aware that they are prime targets for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals that deal with women’s rights, education and poverty, and that their uplift calls for extraordinary and determined initiatives.

“A handful of non-government organisations and donor agencies have been supporting the empowerment of Badi women, but that is not sustainable. Projects come and go but only government support can provide a long-term solution,” says Uma.

There were hopes that the abolition of the monarchy in favour of republican democracy, at the end of the bloody 1996-2006 civil war, would bring positive changes to the lives of the Badis, but Nepal is still coping with political instability.

“I have met three different prime ministers in the past few years,” said Uma. “They promise support but forget us as soon as we head back to our villages.”

In 2007, Badi activists threatened to march naked through Kathmandu to embarrass the government into implementing the court-ordered rehabilitation, but that brought nothing except more promises.

The local monitoring committees – that are backed by the vigilantes – admit that the government has failed in its promise to help the rehabilitation of the Badis.

“We are trying to help the Badi women start new dignified lives but we do admit that there are no viable alternatives,” says Riddha Bhandari, a leader of Muda’s monitoring group. “The government needs to act now.”

Bhandari denied that the Muda committee was out to destroy the Badis, but said there were worries over adverse influences on non-Badi girls and the possible spread of HIV/AIDS.

Sri Lankan refugees returning to the country after decades in India confront a harsh reality of homelessness, unemployment and poverty. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, May 3 2012 (IPS)

Krishnaveni Nakkeeran has fled the country of her birth twice and returned twice in the last two decades. The 36-year-old mother of four from the northern Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka first fled the bloody civil war to India when she was just 16 years old in 1990.

Her family mistakenly believed it was safe to return five years later and was forced to flee yet again in 1998. She returned again in 2010, barely a year after government forces had defeated the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, accompanied by her family. The war may have ended, but a harsh reality awaits those like Nakkeeran, returning after years spent in India. “Life has been hard, very hard, we probably work double (here) what we did in India,” she told IPS.

Tens of thousands of Sri Lankans, almost all of them from the minority Tamil community, fled to neighbouring India during the island’s three decades of civil conflict. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), there are over 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees in India, out of which roughly 68,000 live in 112 camps in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Since the war’s end in May 2009, some of these have begun to return. Last year UNHCR facilitated the return of over 1,700 refugees to the island.

This year has seen a drop of around 30 percent in the number of returning citizens; the latest figures released by the U.N. refugee agency said that 408 persons returned during the first quarter of 2012, compared to 597 during the corresponding period in 2011.

The UNHCR office in Sri Lanka has attributed the drop to the suspension of a ferry service between South India and Sri Lanka, which had allowed for cheaper passage and the chance to bring back more household material.

However, rights groups working with returnees and those still remaining in India speculate that the hard grind awaiting exiles in their old homeland might explain the reduced rate of return.

This is especially true of those returning to the Vanni, a vast swath of land in Sri Lanka’s northern province that weathered the worst excesses of the war.

“They have to start life all over again. During the years of absence, so much has changed in Sri Lanka that it is a new life in a new country that they come back to,” Sinnathambi Suriyakumari, Sri Lanka’s head of the Organisation for Eelam Refugee Rehabilitation (OfERR), that has worked in India and Sri Lanka since 1983, told IPS.

She added that the biggest problem for the returnees is starting from scratch. While there are programmes aimed at assisting internally displaced persons (IDPs) returning to their homes in the former war zone, there is no special programme for those returning from India.

“This is where the problem starts, these people feel as if they are returning to an alien land, especially those without extended family here,” Suriyakumari said.

UNHCR’s representative in Sri Lanka, Michael Zwack, told IPS that returning refugees lacked proper documentation like identity cards, land deeds and birth certificates that they lost during their flight from the country decades ago. The lack of such documentation is a serious bureaucratic hassle.

The returnees, who are given a standard reintegration grant, are faced with multiple other problems that need special attention.

“Shelter is another key challenge facing refugees returning to former conflict areas, as they need assistance with carrying out repairs or rebuilding homes that were damaged,” Zwack said.

Of the roughly 100,000 houses that were destroyed during the final phase of the war, only 16,000 had been built as of February 2012 according to the latest U.N. figures, which also revealed that reconstruction commitments only extend to the building or repair of 35,000 homes.

Meanwhile, the Indian government is expected to commence building 40,000 houses in the region by mid-2012.

The displacement of thousands of families, be they IDPs or exiles in India, has created a serious land issue in the Vanni. “Many land owners in the Vanni still find it difficult to claim ownership over their property, and land issues have become a serious problem,” Saroja Sivachandran, head of the Jaffna- based Centre for Women and Development, told IPS.

The problem of land and housing is worse for those returning from India, since people who fled as individuals tend to return with families in tow, according to Suriyakumari.

She said one returnee from the Jaffna district who left in the mid 1980s with five children has now returned with five full families. “All the children have their own families, and now all of them live on this tiny plot of land.”

Returnees like Nakkeeran are also forced to confront the phenomenon of squatters, people who have lived on others’ land for decades.

“We don’t have our land now, we (are forced) to live with someone else on our own land,” she said.

Jobs, scarce even among the 434,559 IDPs who are slowly trickling back into the Northern province, is even more pronounced among those who return from overseas.

Most of the returning refugees use a 200-dollar UNHCR resettlement grant to make ends meet. “They are free to use the money according to their own priorities to help them restart their lives, for example by purchasing household goods, a bicycle, seeds, or repairing damaged housing,” Zwack said.

Despite all the obstacles, many of those who have returned and others planning to make the journey feel they have made the right choice.

“It is a land of opportunity and hope for them, that is why they come back,” Suriyakumari said.

A glimpse of seagrass close to the seashore of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, which is home to a spectrum of marine wildlife Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
RAMESHWARAM, India, May 2 2012 (IPS)

Forest officials of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve abutting the Palk Straits between India and Sri Lanka have reported a decline in marine wildlife, as smugglers exploiting lax conservation laws in the region tank up on protected species used in traditional Chinese medicines and fine dining.

In coordination with the Indian Coast Guard, forest officials have recorded more than 200 cases of smuggling, accounting for the loss of over 13,000 kilogrammes of sea cucumbers (Holothurian scabra) and seahorses (Hippocampus species) in the last 16 months alone.

Illegal marine wildlife traders in India smuggle their catch to neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where the red-flagged items become legal marine exports to other Southeast Asian countries due to exemptions in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

“The seahorse found in the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park is one of the five rarer species of seahorses,” Shekhar Kumar Niraj, field director of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, informed IPS.

In 2001, India’s stringent Wildlife Protection Act listed sea cucumbers and seahorses as ‘schedule I’, thereby making forest officials legally responsible for their protection.

Around the same time as this classification came into play, the markets for traditional Chinese medicines exploded.

A fragile ecosystem

The Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park (GOMMNP), part of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, is an undersea reserve formed by the strip of land that once connected India to Sri Lanka. The peninsula divides the Palk Straits in the north from the Gulf of Mannar in the south.

The fragile reef ecosystem is shallow and forms the habitat for corals, crabs, clown fish, dugongs, dolphins, porpoise, prawns, parrot fish, sea cucumbers, seahorses, sea snakes, turtles, whales and a whole list of highly endangered endemic marine wildlife.

The marine diversity includes four species of shrimp, 106 species of crabs, 17 types of sea cucumbers, 466 species of molluscs, 108 species of sponges and 100 species of echinoderms.

More than 2000 species of fin fish are found in the Gulf of Mannar and seagrass is also clearly visible in the shallow sea. Prosopsis jujuba, a shrub forest species endemic to dry arid zones, “is surprisingly dominant in the mangroves and mud flats, amply justifying the protection lent to the marine national park,” Sundar Kumar, the wildlife warden of the underwater reserve, told IPS.

“The hotbeds and kingpins of marine wildlife crime are in Rameshwaram, Mandapam, and Tuticorin all around the Indian coast of the GOMMNP,” T. Rajendran, assistant conservator of forests for the marine reserve, told IPS.

Lose-lose deal for fisherfolk

“There is no local consumption or markets (for smuggled goods). Only the middlemen gain. These are the (people) who are connected to international crime syndicates,” added Niraj. These ‘middlemen’ buy sea cucumbers from fisherfolk for about 50 dollars per kilogramme and sell them for a profit of 600 percent, at 307 dollars per kilogramme.

“Sea cucumbers have ecologically significant roles in scavenging coasts and seabeds, which in turn helps other species like corals and seagrass to flourish and propagate,” Niraj explained.

“Only owners of trawler fishing boats indulge in poaching sea cucumbers, which is a double whammy for us traditional fishermen; not only is the catch depleting, but fuel prices are increasing. The additional burden of illegal poaching of marine wildlife by trawler fishermen make us suspect in the eyes of the enforcement agencies,” lamented K. David, a traditional fisherman in Rameshwaram.

Field director Niraj disputes the fact that trawler fisherfolk are the only smugglers involved in this rackets, pointing to statistics of recent raids that show traditional (Dinghy) fishermen also indulging in the smuggling of sea cucumbers and seahorses.

David is convinced that traditional fishing will come to an end when his generation is “dead and gone”, since youngsters like 10-year-old Vishal Selvan and 11-year-old Alan want to become merchant navy captains and Indian Administrative Service officers respectively.

In order to keep traditional fishermen from engaging with smugglers out of economic desperation, employment schemes have been put in place to guarantee the livelihoods of various fisherfolk, in the face of depleting fish stocks.

“The alternative livelihood initiatives carried out by the United Nations Development Programme-Global Environmental Facility (UNDP-GEF) through the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve Trust (GoMBRT) include Palmyra mat weaving and thatch making, clown fish and other ornamental fish fattening, goat rearing, jasmine cultivation, betel leaf cultivation, salt-fish making and plaster of Paris for doll-making,” V. Deepak Samuel, programme specialist at the energy and environment unit of the UNDP-GEF (GoMBRT), told IPS.

Unchecked crime

“We are as yet unable to trace the route of smuggled goods and links beyond Sri Lanka to markets in the Far East, primarily because once the goods arrive in Sri Lanka they become legal exports, blocking our investigations further,” explained a wildlife crime inspector, speaking under condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

Patrolling the sea is all the more challenging given enforcement agencies’ meagre logistical capacity.

Led by Rajendran, the entire patrol operation includes four range forest officers, 22 foresters, 11 guards, two watchers and 33 anti-poaching camp watchers who share six jeeps, six wireless sets, two base stations, six anti-poaching camps, eight mechanised patrol boats and three speed boats between them – to patrol an area of 10,500 square kilometres or 18,900 nautical miles.

They lack night vision lamps and financial incentives. They are no match for the 25,000 well equipped trawlers that fish illegally across the whole Marine Biosphere Reserve every day.

Still, the greatest challenge is not out on the water.

“Opposition to protection of marine wildlife (and) fishes comes from even official establishments like the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, the Marine Products Export Development Authority and the National Institute of Oceanography – all in the name of livelihoods,” Niraj said.

“Growing numbers of anthropologists propagate illusions glossing over the likely consequences that would emerge should we lose the remaining biodiversity… They quote the Convention on Biological Diversity where sustainability, right to access and benefits sharing are the guiding principles. However, sustainability that applies to economic principles may not exactly apply to ecology because of biological principles that are very different,” Niraj explained.

Poaching of sea cucumbers even in the seas around the Andaman Nicobar Islands is so rampant that natives report they hardly sight sea cucumbers anymore.

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker based in Bangalore.

Ignoring widespread concern over the safety, efficacy and cost of pentavalent vaccines, India’s central health ministry has, this month, approved inclusion of the prophylactic cocktail in the universal immunisation programme in seven of its provinces.

Pentavalent vaccine doses, a cocktail of five antigens in a single shot, confers immunity against five paediatric diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenza type b (Hib), with the last one considered particularly problematic by some experts.

Pentavalents, produced by several manufacturers and promoted by the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), has had a history of causing adverse reactions and deaths in India’s neighbouring countries like Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

In 2010, the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI), a body of experts selected by the Indian government, recommended limited introduction of pentavalents in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu and evaluation of results over a year before extension to other states.

Pentavalents were launched in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in December 2011, but the results were not encouraging. Kerala recorded four infant deaths following vaccination, with symptoms similar to what were seen in other South Asian countries.

Public health activists in Kerala, a state with 100 percent literacy and human development indices similar to those of advanced Western countries, quickly filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Kerala High Court asking for intervention in having the programme called off and a return to the existing health plan.

But despite infant deaths and two pending PILs (with yet another being heard in the Delhi High Court) against pentavalents, the health ministry announced on Apr. 16 that pentavalents would be introduced in five more states – Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry in October.

In making the decision, the government overlooked the NTAGI, which has not even been convened since August 2010 when the body suggested limited introduction to Kerala and Tamil Nadu as the two states have good adverse event following immunisation systems.

“Going by what we have seen in the neighbouring countries and now in the state of Kerala, pentavalents can, without warning, cause children (to suffer) hypersensitivity reactions and death,” Jacob Puliyel, an eminent paediatrician at St. Stephen’s hospital in New Delhi and member of the NTAGI, told IPS.

Puliyel likened the situation to penicillin sensitivity and said it bordered on criminality to be administering pentavalents without first testing a child for hypersensitivity. “Every child that is being given a dose of pentavalent vaccine is a potential victim of the adverse reaction,” he said.

Puliyel was among the many eminent physicians and public health activists in India who wrote to World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general Margaret Chan on Apr. 3 asking the health body to “re-evaluate” its recommendation of pentavalent vaccines on the grounds of safety.

Another signatory, Dr Meera Shiva, an expert on pharmaceutical drugs attached to the voluntary Medico Friends Circle, told IPS that WHO had to delist a number of brands of ‘prequalified’ pentavalent vaccine, “but adverse reactions persist and we have surely not heard the last of them.”

The letter to Chan, written under the aegis of the All-India Drug Action Network, an umbrella of public health activist groups, suggested that the cause of the vaccination- related deaths was likely to be “hypersensitivity reaction as described in the post mortem report on one of the children (who died) in Kerala.”

“Unlike conventional drug treatments meant for the management of existing diseases, in prophylaxis with vaccines, safety is of paramount importance. Vaccines that frequently and unpredictably cause the death of healthy children cannot be recommended,” the letter to Chan said.

Policy analysts specialising in vaccines said they were dismayed at the move to approve pentavalents in as many as seven of India’s states, which account for 340 million of India’s 1.2 billion people.

“Pentavalents are a test case for India’s new policy on vaccines that is in keeping with liberalisation and openly favours pharmaceutical majors at the cost of India’s public sector vaccine units,” said Madhavi Yennapu, a scientist who specialises in vaccines at the central government’s National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies.

Twenty of India’s 23 public sector vaccination units, once the mainstay of the country’s immunisation programme, have been shut down one after another over the last four years on the grounds that the quality of their products was suspect.

Yennapu pointed to the draft National Vaccination Policy, released last year, for clues on why the government has not made any serious attempt to revive the vaccine- manufacturing units by enforcing quality standards, for instance.

The new policy demands that the “risk of manufacturing vaccines by private manufacturers must be cushioned by assistance from (the) government” and suggests that it be made mandatory for the government to support vaccine producers with advance market commitments (AMCs).

Madhavi explained that AMCs provide guaranteed markets for a vaccine even before trials are conducted, with the government committed to paying a supporting minimum price. “Even if the vaccine turns out to be less efficacious than the existing one the government must honour the AMC by buying the new vaccine at the agreed price.

“This means that AMC funds must be deposited with the World Bank ahead of vaccine delivery by countries that GAVI is supposed to be helping with the introduction of new vaccines,” Madhavi told IPS. “Naturally, GAVI would be looking at large countries like India, Brazil and China to provide the AMCs.”

For a country like India, what is important is to “see how many vaccines are needed to prevent how many deaths and at what cost, rather than throw out tried and tested vaccines in favour of a cocktail (pentavalent) which not only has doubtful advantages but has been shown to cause adverse reactions,” Madhavi said.

According to Madhavi, there is no hard scientific evidence to show that India needs the Hib vaccine .”It is clearly piggybacking on other vaccines and the public made to pay for it.”

The existing diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DPT) vaccine costs about 30 cents for all the doses needed to immunise a child, while immunisation with pentavalents will cost more than 10 dollars. “We need to ask ourselves if introducing the new vaccine is really worth all the public money being spent on it,” Madhavi said.

Rayagada's tribal women look after community grain banks. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
RAYAGADA, India, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

Tribal farmer Harish Saraka has rediscovered the key to sustainable farming in this rain-dependent hinterland of eastern Odisha state – mixed cropping.

Saraka, 38, is careful not to take credit for helping to turn around farming in this area, in the news just a decade ago for starvation deaths. “All we are doing is returning to our grandfathers’ practices,” says this member of the Kondh tribe.

Saraka recalls that his forebears sowed three different seeds in the same field: millet, legume, oilseed and maybe a creeper bean.

The 72 Kondh households in Saraka’s village of Munda, in Rayagada district, reside in the foothills of the Niyamgiri Hills, stretching over 250 km, that the London-based mining major Vedanta Resources Plc has been trying to exploit for its bauxite deposits.

“The environs, the climate and the forests have changed drastically,” murmurs Bhima Saraka, 65, almost to himself, resting on a sagging string cot in front of the thatched house where he lives with 23 of his kinsmen.

The rains, he observes, are “regularly irregular”, resulting in crop losses year after year while Kondh families have grown in numbers, putting pressure on the forests they once shared with tigers and where they harvested tubers and fruits.

In 2010, amidst public outrage over a spate of farmers’ suicides over poor harvests and high interest on loans taken for farming inputs, the then agriculture minister Damodar Rout admitted that Odisha’s agriculture was in crisis, “impacted by climate change, erosion, dryness, soil acidity and falling ground water levels.”

For Harish Saraka and other subsistence farmers in 70 Niyamgiri villages in Rayagada, adapting to changing conditions meant reverting to traditional farming methods such as mixed cropping, the use of organic fertilisers and trusted seed varieties.

So, while farming has been failing elsewhere in Odisha, Harish Saraka has been cultivating not three but 14 crops on his half-hectare land since the last two years – enough to see his family through the lean August-December season.

“I now harvest 300 kg of food grains, a 200 percent increase from the earlier single-crop high-yield paddy farming,” says Saraka.

In Kerandiguda village, Loknath Nauri, 58, is the first to try mixed farming on a portion of his one-hectare hilly stream-fed land that he got under a government programme for the landless rural poor.

“Seeing my good harvest, ten other households here have decided to try their luck this year,” says Nauri, who is ready to share his seeds with them.

“The Kondhs’ once self-sufficient and local resource-based agriculture system was affected by the introduction of commercial high-yielding paddy,” says Debjeet Sarangi who heads ‘Living Farms’, a non-government organisation (NGO) that works with marginal farmers.

Bhima Saraka told IPS that a few years back, Munda villagers were lured into planting high-yielding paddy seeds given free by the government along with chemical fertilisers. “The seeds were old and many did not sprout, while the fertilisers demanded water, and we have no source except the rains,” he says.

“None got much out of this ‘free gift’ except an important lesson, that their local seeds – acclimatised to their dryland soil and more able to withstand monsoon’s unpredictability – were indeed their lifeline,” says Sunamajhi Pidika, Living Farms’s local field organiser.

Sarangi said tribal communities, “who neither cultivated nor ate rice traditionally, are now trying to re-establish their food sovereignty.”

‘Ailing Agricultural Productivity in Economically Fragile Region of India’ – a recent study published by the Bhopal-based Indian Institute of Soil Sciences found that the cultivation area for small millets in Odisha had declined by 500 percent over the last 40 years.

The popular perception is that the government policy is pushing in cash crops to the detriment of subsistence millet-farming practiced by communities like Bhima Saraka’s.

“The government is not coercing the tribal people, just putting intelligent choices before them,” said Nitin Bhanudas Jawale, administrative head of Rayagada district.

However, in April, it was decided to procure millet and make it available at fair price outlets, so that the tribal people could go back to their traditional food, Jawale said. “The U.N. World Food Programme is collaborating with us.”

“In discussions with village elders we came to know there are varieties of millets and pulses which can tolerate heat and water stress,” says Sarangi.

“I have heard my grandfather talk of the 11 varieties of millet that his father cultivated,” recounts 24-year-old Prasant Wadraka from Gandili village while waiting at the government’s tribal development office to collect free tin sheet roofing.

According to Wadraka, near-extinct millet varieties include one called ‘kodo’ which has medicinal properties to control diabetes. Millet is packed with protein, B-complex vitamins and minerals, nutritionists say.

“The movement in India to return to traditional seeds is growing stronger and at country inter-NGO level too we exchange seeds to supplement local communities’ seed needs,” says Sarangi.

In 2008, Living Farms began a programme of giving poor families seeds on condition that after harvest the same quantity would be returned plus 10 percent ‘interest’ to be put into grain banks.

Simple woven bamboo baskets sealed with thick clay-and cow dung daub, the grain banks are managed by Kondh women and opened only in times of need.

Just before the monsoons all the seed varieties are sown on the same field. These are a combination of niger (an oilseed), sorghum, millet varieties like finger, foxtail, pearl, pigeon pea and horse gram along with creeper beans.

Some of these will ripen in 90 days while others will take 120 days before harvest.

According to leading Indian agro-scientist M.S. Swaminathan, mixed cropping – that involves several cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetable and fodder crops – retards buildup of insect pests.

It is significant that tribal communities never use chemical inputs or even diesel irrigation pumps, and sell their produce in the local market.

“Their products have minimum carbon footprints,” Sarangi said. “In the imminent global climate crisis, we have much to learn from indigenous communities.”

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

After scientists in Kashmir successfully cloned the pashmina goat, that produces the famous ‘cashmere’ wool, hopes are running high for the revival of the traditional shawl-making industry in this Indian state.

“There is no match anywhere in the world for the handspun, tightly-woven pashmina shawl, although duplicates are steadily being pushed into the market with lower price tags,” says Rafiq Shah, a Srinagar trader. A greater threat to the cashmere wool industry is the dwindling herds of the delicate pashmina goat, which must be carefully reared in the cold and windy Himalayas in order to stimulate growth of the fine wool on its underbelly.

But the birth on Mar. 9 of ‘Noori’, a cloned pashmina goat, at Srinagar’s Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology (SKUAST) is being seen as just the breakthrough that the ailing cashmere shawl industry has been looking for.

“Just imagine the kind of impact that commercially multiplying pashmina goats through cloning would have on the shawl industry,” says Gouhar Rather, a handicrafts dealer in Srinagar. “It will certainly help genuine pashmina makers.”

At least 15,000 families are associated with the pashmina shawl industry in Kashmir with the women closely involved in the spinning of the wool while the men lend a hand with plying the heavy handlooms.

“It (spinning and weaving of pashmina) is in our blood. It even gives us an identity,” says Rather, referring to the fact that the textile ‘cashmere’ borrows its name from the Kashmir region.

Cashmere shawl sales bring in about 85 million dollars a year and, along with tourism, represent a major source of income for the seven million people of the Kashmir valley.

“Manufacturers in Amritsar and Ludhiana (major woollen goods centres in Punjab state) now import wool from New Zealand and Australia, spin it on machines and treat them with chemicals before passing off second-rate products as pashmina,” says Shah.

According to Shah, in the past, manufacturers in China and other countries have tried to produce cashmere shawls and failed. “It is not easy to spin pashmina the way our women do.”

The making of pashmina shawls, essentially a cottage industry, has long been considered an ideal way for Kashmir’s Muslim women to be gainfully employed without having to step out of their homes.

But there are Kashmiri women like Shameema Wani, 42, who have graduated to the marketing of pashmina shawls. She provides work for some 2,000 women, collecting their products for sale at an outlet she set up in the heart of Srinagar about 10 years ago.

“This is a job that is suitable for women, because it allows them to attend to household chores and also earn an income,” Wani said while welcoming the scientific developments that promise more raw material for shawl-making.

“Noori is the first cloned Pashmina goat in the world and she represents a major breakthrough for us,” said Prof. Riaz Ahmad Shah at SKUAST’s centre of animal biotechnology and head of the World Bank-funded cloning project.

Shah and his team at SKUAST used a simple method involving little more than a microscope and petri dish to produce Noori and the method, now standardised, can readily be replicated through the valley.

Shah told IPS that cloning will not only help increase the number of Pashmina goats but also “result in development of animals that can produce finer wool than that from the naturally existing Pashmina goat.”

The technology developed at SKUAST can easily be extended to other commercially valuable species in the Himalayas, notably the ‘chiru’ or Tibetan antelope which produces ‘shahtoosh’, a type of wool that is even more highly prized than cashmere.

The exceptionally fine fleece of the chiru, which insulates the animal against the harsh climate of the Tibetan plateau and Kashmir’s Ladakh region, has traditionally been woven into shahtoosh shawls, another fine handloom product of the Kashmir valley.

However, as at least four chirus must be killed to make a single shawl the animal has had to be placed on the protected list since 1975 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

In India, shahtoosh shawls, once a part of bridal trousseaus, fetched around 5,000 dollars a piece until the Indian government banned the trade in 1991. The state government of Jammu and Kashmir, which makes its own laws, delayed banning the trade until 2000 to help artisans.

“We are now experimenting with assisted reproduction of the chiru and other commercially valuable animal species such as the musk deer,” Ahmad Khursheed, wildlife management expert at SKUAST, told IPS.

According to Khursheed, SKUAST already collaborates with the Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species in Hyderabad and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington to conserve several of Kashmir’s endangered species, including the chiru.

Kashmir’s traditional shawl makers, particularly female artisans, suffered heavily from the CITES ban on trade in chiru products and there are fears that the art of weaving shatoosh shawls, a preserve of the Kashmir valley, may vanish altogether.

“We have undertaken conservation breeding of the chiru and have developed a technique for combing out its wool without killing the animal,” Khursheed said.

While India’s largest left outfit, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), was licking its electoral wounds, a newly-elected regime in West Bengal was busy chopping chapters on Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution out of high school syllabi, in celebration of breaking CPI-M’s 34-year stronghold over the state.

The axing of Marx and Engels on Apr. 6 was a highly symbolic gesture in a state that had hitherto been the last standing citadel of mainstream communism in India and signaled the rise of the ragtag Trinamool Congress, now in alliance with the ruling Congress party of India, whose leader, Mamata Banerjee, is desperately trying to uproot a decades-old communist legacy in the eastern state.

The CPI-M’s decline has been swift. Its unpopular decision to forcibly appropriate 1000 acres of farmland on behalf of the motor industry in 2006 led to the communists’ defeat at the polls in May 2011, where they secured just 61 of 294 seats, down from 235 seats in 2006.

The Left Front in India still holds an enclave of influence in a small northeastern state called Tripura, but losses in its showpiece West Bengal, a state of 90 million people, as well as in Kerala, have been colossal.

So when CPI-M leaders met in Kerala’s Kozhikode from Apr. 4-9 for the 20th Party Congress, everyone expected a public declaration of a ‘roadmap’ to regain lost ground and identify new areas of support besides Kerala and West Bengal.

No visible ‘roadmap’

The biggest question on the table was: can communists reinvent themselves in the Indian context after the electoral debacle of the 2011 assembly elections?

Experts believe that the communists still have a big role to play in India, if they can leverage on mass opposition to globalisation and general dissatisfaction with the ruling powers.

However, though the party came out with reports that were self-critical, analysts say the communists only paid lip service to reinventing themselves at the brainstorming session.

No concrete roadmap was visible, they say.

CPI-M’s top decision making Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury said the party will toe the same Leninist line, but adapt policies to address India’s specific needs.

“It is not a copy of (the) Chinese or Russian path. We have analysed the trends in socialist countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and South Africa. We are learning from their experiences so that we can implement the good aspects in accordance with the situation here,” he said.

The congress also adopted a political resolution to forge a new Left democratic alternative to the ‘neoliberal’ policies of the ruling Congress party in New Delhi and the ‘communal’ agenda pursued by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the two forces that have intermittently ruled India throughout the past two decades.

But many believe these were empty promises, unsubstantiated by specific action plans or targeted policies.

Addressing the needs of the voter base

Monobina Gupta, a renowned journalist, said that even if the Left refuses to accept the globalisation model, they do not have to keep looking back to the Socialist model either.

“There (is) no movement forward. There is only talk about giving new directions but it is couched in the same (old) language and it is superficial,” she said.

The congress did not discuss issues close to the heart of CPI-M’s constituency, such as the plummeting standard of education and paltry healthcare, nor the root causes of discontent with the party, such as its policing of communities, interference in family life and land disputes, and its unilateral decisions on industrialisation at the expense of the peasantry.

According to Kolkata-based political scientist Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chowdhury, the only positive outcome of the congress was a sign of maturation, “a semblance of an independent line emerg(ing) out of a colonised mindset”, he said, referring to CPI-M’s hitherto blind following of the Russian and Chinese models.

But the Congress neither highlighted issues like caste, prevalent in northern states where the Left has no presence, nor of tribal oppression and rights, an issue championed by the barrels of Maoist guns, he added.

Failure to address these burning concerns partially explains why, over the past three decades, communists have only been able to consolidate themselves in pockets like West Bengal, Tripura or Kerala where caste politics do not dominate the political scene and where liberal ideas already have deep roots.

The party’s patron, former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the man responsible for wresting farmland from peasants on behalf of the industrial titan Tata Motors, was conspicuously absent at the congress, citing health reasons.

According to an editorial entitled ‘The Man Who Stays Away’, which appeared in the Kolkata-based Telegraph, Bhattacharjee’s decision to stay away sent a strong message to central leaders based in New Delhi who “call the shots using the alibi of democratic centralism.”

Bhattacharjee has also openly criticised the “unpragmatic” decisions of central leaders like Prakash Karat.

Yet the congress failed to apologise for interference “by armchair theoreticians” like Karat in the work of mass-based leaders; nor did they present “new faces that carry no previous baggage,” said Basu Roy Chowdhury.

“Leaders like Karat (who got a third term as general secretary) or Sitaram Yechury have never been (involved in electoral) politics outside of University or college campuses,” he added.

CPI-M’s leaders in Bengal blame losses in the eastern state on Karat’s policies. For instance, his decision to withdraw support for the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2008, over an India-U.S. civil nuclear deal, brought the Congress party and its breakaway but dominant faction, the Trinamool Congress, together in a victorious alliance at the polls.

However, at the congress last week, CPI-M endorsed the 2008 decision to withdraw support for the UPA, thus missing a chance to truly reflect and re-group before moving forward.

“West Bengal is a unique case of surviving 34 years in power by winning elections,” said Gupta. “That model, too, is very flawed, though (it) started initially with (positive) initiatives like land reforms”, famously called Operation Barga, in which the rights of poor sharecroppers to own the land they tilled was protected.

In the end however, the communists proved completely incapable of loosening their stranglehold over social functions and were unable to democratise their approach, she added.

“They took over the cultural space and the political space. (There was) daily intimidation and a politics of retribution prevailed along with the arrogance of power,” Gupta said.

In the absence of a solid roadmap that carves a new path through India’s distinct social, economic and political terrain, and a projection of new leaders who can bring fresh ideas and vision to the group, talks about reinventing the party will remain a shallow promise.

Donghyun Park, lead author of the ADB’s 2012 Asian Development Outlook, launched the report at Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney Credit: Neena Bhandari/IPS

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

While developing Asian countries have experienced robust growth – lifting living standards and reducing poverty – increasing wealth is fuelling income disparities and inequality, posing a major threat to the region’s stability, warns the Asian Development Bank (ADB)’s flagship report released Wednesday.

The Manila-based ADB’s 2012 Asian Development Outlook says if the spoils of growth had been more evenly distributed, another 240 million people in the 45 countries that make up developing Asia would have moved out of poverty in the last two decades.

Inequality widened in the three most populous countries – the People’s Republic of China, India, and Indonesia—which have been key drivers of the region’s rapid economic growth.

“A high degree of inequality breeds social tensions between the haves and have nots and tends to generate instability. One of the key ingredients of Asia’s economic growth in the past has been social and political stability and if that is jeopardised, it will inevitably undermine economic growth,” Donghyun Park, one of the lead authors of the report and principal economist at ADB’s Economics and Research Department, told IPS.

“Growing inequality also generates pressures for populist and inefficient policies, which again hamper growth.”

For developing Asia, the Gini coefficient – a key measure of income distribution on a zero to one scale, with one representing ‘maximum inequality’ – has leapt from 0.39 to 0.46 in the last two decades. The richest one percent of households accounted for six to eight percent of the total income while close to 20 percent of total income went to the top five percent in most countries.

Technological progress, globalisation, and market-oriented reforms, which have been the primary catalysts for the region’s growth, are said to have been the key forces behind the rise in inequality, particularly between rural and urban areas, and coastal and inland provinces.

“The more educated people are better able to capitalise on technology and that translates to higher income. However, technology can also be deployed to reduce inequality, such as ICT being used to better inform farmers about crops and weather, and ‘e-education’ reaching out to children in remote areas,” Park told IPS.

Unequal access to assets such as capital and land; human capital, such as education and training; and labour and financial markets is common in the region.

The report states that in order to address inequality, policymakers need to spend more on education and health; introduce better targeted social protection schemes; reduce or eliminate general price subsidies; broaden the tax base; create more productive jobs and assist lagging regions.

“Most Asian governments are very much aware that growing inequality is harmful for their country’s growth and social harmony. However, they have yet to take more concrete and specific measures to deal with this issue,” Park observed.

He suggests a closer partnership between governments and civil society groups for more equitable growth and gives the example of the Saemaul Undong (New Village) movement in South Korea. “The community-based movement was kick-started and then supported and partially funded by the government in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of which the rural-urban divide in South Korea didn’t go as high as in many other countries despite the country’s rapid economic growth,” he said.

The report says from a moderate growth of 7.2 percent in 2011, the gross domestic product (GDP) growth in developing Asia will slow to 6.9 percent in 2012 before rebounding to 7.3 percent next year. The region was shifting towards a “more sustainable long-run growth path” based on strong domestic demand.

The People’s Republic of China, the world’s second largest economy, is set to post GDP growth of 8.5 percent in 2012, and 8.7 percent in 2013 after expanding to 9.2 percent in 2011. The pace of India’s growth is projected to edge up to seven percent in 2012 and 7.5 percent in 2013.

’Wildly Optimisic’

But Satyajit Das, an international specialist in financial derivatives and risk management, says the report is “wildly optimistic”. The ADB has cut its forecast from the September projection of 7.5 percent to 6.9 percent.

“I think they have wholly underestimated the downside risks. European problems will get deeper before they get better and that is going to have two effects on Asia: first, the export demand will be much less than anticipated. Secondly, there are countries in Asia, particularly India, (that are) heavily reliant on foreign capital because of their current account deficit and that is going to become more difficult to finance in this particular environment.

“The United States’ recovery is very tepid and their biggest trading partner is Europe. As Europe slows, the U.S. economy is going to slow as well,” he stressed.

Major industrial economies like the U.S., Eurozone and Japan are collectively expected to expand by only 1.1 percent in 2012 and 1.7 percent in 2013.

Das said, “The policy moves that are being taken in developed markets are extremely destructive to Asia. The U.S., the UK, Japan and indeed Europe are now in a mode to monetise their debt and that has several effects on Asia. The first and most direct effect is that all the Asian central bank reserves are held in developed market currencies and there is an enormous loss of wealth is going to occur.”

“The next direct effect is that by pushing down these currencies they are effectively doing two things: One, they are pushing currency upward pressure on the Asian currencies making them less competitive. As most commodities are traded in U.S. dollars, the commodity prices go up (to compensate for the weak currency) and feed inflation in these domestic economies in Asia and that is the basic issue. This is absolutely…willful and malicious,” Das stressed.

The report says that oil-price spikes and volatility in food prices could revive the threat of inflation, but policy makers in developing Asia can refrain from further monetary and fiscal stimulus.

Robust expansion in the resource-exporting economies of Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands, and strong growth in the tourism-oriented economies of the Cook Islands, Fiji, Palau, and Vanuatu, lifted sub-regional growth to seven per cent in 2011. The Pacific countries have been relatively insulated from the Eurozone crisis.

According to the report, the Pacific is expected to slow to six percent and 4.1 percent over the next two years due to lower resource export revenue, the winding down of infrastructure projects, and lower international agricultural prices.

Standing on a patch of arid, degraded land, 100 km from southern Bangalore city, Ramapal, member of the ‘gram panchayat’ (local village administration), points to a roughly-dug canal feeding a narrow belt of green cultivation.

Cash-for-work schemes are greening arid areas. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

“We cannot do without the government’s cash-for-work programme,” he tells IPS. “We are happy with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) which gives us an assured income, but we want more work.”

The canal took 29 village individuals 14 days to build, paid for by the government under NREGA, the world’s largest social welfare scheme, with a budgetary allocation of 15.02 billion dollars for the 2011-2013 period.

The government says NREGA has so far provided over 10.1 million jobs to 550 million rural poor households.

NREGA, the ruling Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance coalition’s flagship scheme in 2005, helped return the party to power in the 2009 general elections.

Total funding for NREGA since its inception has crossed 29 billion dollars.

Begun in 2005-06, NREGA mandates 100 days of paid, unskilled manual labour to one member of every poor, rural household in a year, the scheme having accompanying legal strictures on transparency, accountability and monitoring.

Any eligible worker not given a job within 15 days of his or her request is entitled to unemployment allowance from the government.

Jobs include soil and water conservation-related measures such as afforestation, irrigation, conservation of ponds and activities related to agricultural productivity. Amendments to NREGA in 2012 have now included dairy and poultry-related activities.

Wages, which began at about two dollars six years ago, have now been increased, with each state adjusting NREGA wages according to respective minimum wages for labour.

In Karnataka state, NREGA now pays a little over three dollars per day, while states like Bihar and Jharkhand pay 2.39 dollars and economically better off states like northern Haryana pays 3.74 dollars.

Yet, in spite of its massive public spending budget, NREGA has come under withering criticism, starting with allegations of corruption in several states.

In northern Uttar Pradesh, massive siphoning of NREGA funds by officials and local administration, including village panchayat heads, has now led to the minister for rural development, Jairam Ramesh, calling for an official inquiry.

The largest of the NREGA scams in Uttar Pradesh emerged from the constituency of Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the ruling Congress party. Not surprisingly, the Congress party fared badly in provincial elections held in the state, India’s largest, in March 2012.

Critics say NREGA’s massive public expenditure is a drain on India’s economy, besides affecting industry by pulling away its labour force and promoting a ‘welfare ethic’.

But, villagers in Dasarahalli and its surrounding areas are united in holding on to NREGA as a straw of hope to earn an income.

“If NREGA is not there, then we can close the gram panchayat,” states Rajappa, a member from the Thimmanayakanahalli village where no wages have been paid in the last two months.

“It is way too much to expect quick results in NREGA,” says Jojo John of the Foundation for Ecological Security, a major non-government organisation which helps panchayats build capacity to work with NREGA.

“Despite all its faults, NREGA has a very strong ‘rights’ component where the poor can demand work and access development,” stresses John. “We do need NREGA.”

Meanwhile, at Dasarahalli village, Venkateshappa, 55, is expecting good returns on his cabbage, maize and ragi (finger millet), grown with the help of water from a canal dug by the villagers adjoining his 5.5 acre farm.

“We have chosen the bigger landholders because their lands are arable, whilst others own rocky fields – we will take those up later,” says Ramapal.

Venkateshappa says he uses five labourers for three months on his land, giving them food and two dollars as wages per day.

Presently, some 20 farmers get water from the NREGA canal while others are waiting for the next round of construction.

NREGA, however, is on shaky ground with shortfalls in payments, administrative hitches and corruption.

India’s official ‘Economic Survey 2011-12’ shows that while the government’s ‘reach’ for NREGA has expanded, it has been able to provide, on average, just 47 out of the mandated 100 days of employment per family per year.

In spite of that for the 2012-13 fiscal year, the Congress-led government has chosen to cut almost 20 percent of the NREGA budget, even while stipulating increased wage rates, straining the programme.

For India’s large population of poor people – estimated at 55 percent of the 1.2 billion population by the United Nations Human Development Report in 2010 and at 37.2 percent this year by India’s Planning Commission – NREGA remains a beacon of hope.

“This is the best programme yet for development of backward areas, but you need to give it time,” says B.S. Shekharappa, chief executive officer of Chikballapur, under which district Dasarahalli village falls.

The rapid currents moving the centre of economic influence towards an emerging global order headquartered in Asia were evident at the PanIIT’s 2012 annual conference of alumni of the highly prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which took place in Singapore over the Easter weekend.

The three-day conference hosted a diverse range of top-notch speakers representing global business, academia and the financial sector, expressing their views on developing strategies to navigate the challenging global economic environment and to create sustainable long-term growth.

Except for one Westerner, all the speakers were Asian, mainly Indian, including heads of formidable global businesses, such as Arjun Malhotra, co-founder of Hindustan Computers Limited and chairman of Headstrong USA; Shekhar Mitra, senior vice president of Procter and Gamble USA; R. Gopalakrishnan, director of Tata Sons Limited; and Ho Kwong Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, Singapore.

Hosting the meeting in Singapore was a first for a group that, since 2002, has convened alternatively in India and the United States. But there are over 1000 IIT graduates who now work in Singapore, many in high profile jobs such as the provost of the new Singapore Management University, Rajendra Kumar Srivastava.

“Most IITians coming here have had significant work experience and they have filled a gap in Singapore’s existing skills,” S.N Venkat, secretary of Strategic Partnerships at the IIT Alumni Association of Singapore, told IPS.

The high regard in which IIT is held in Singapore was reflected in the fact that the country’s former president S.R Nathan is the patron of the alumni association here, and the current president, Tony Tan, was the chief guest at the gala dinner on Saturday night.

In his keynote speech to the conference, S. Iswaran, minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, said the high number of IIT graduates working in Singapore and across Asia “reflects more generally a fundamental shift in the global centre of gravity from the West to the East.”

Iswaran warned that as manpower costs and energy prices rise, and Western currencies weaken, Asia’s advantage as a low-cost manufacturing base will wane.

“Asian economies need to be able to move on to higher value-added economic activities in order to sustain their economic growth. They will have to leverage on design technology and a skilled labour force to create products and services for their own domestic markets, as much as for the rest of the world,” he noted.

This is where Asian institutions like IIT are expected to play a leading role.

A roundtable involving visiting directors of IITs from around India and four local universities discussed possible collaboration efforts, including the long-standing invitation from the Singapore government to set up an IIT campus here.

“As Singapore becomes an educational hub for Asia, especially for Southeast Asia, (our) emphasis is on having institutes of higher learning of global repute to be based here to attract students from the region,” explained Venkat.

Many speakers pointed out that with economic crises in Europe and the U.S. still unresolved, following the western capitalist model blindly is not the right development path for Asia, which should instead develop its own model, utilising traditional practices.

This was a theme reflected in a keynote speech given by Ho Kwong Ping, whose Banyan Tree Holdings has developed a chain of luxury hotels across the world based on Asian tastes and standards.

Still, he warned that Asia’s rise is not predetermined and argued that the continent must produce a basket of intellectual solutions to address Asia’s chronic social inequality.

“China has a deficit of democracy (while) Indian leaders have realised that democracy is not reducing inequality” and both are unable to “move beyond capital reforms,” he noted.

“As Asia continues its dynamic growth we need to delve into our own history and culture for inspiration to develop Asian values of capitalism. One resource could be the webs of mutual obligations which are present in virtually all civilisations of Asia,” argued Ping. “It is possible for Asia to develop this communitarian capitalism, if properly nurtured and developed, as an alternative to the highly individualistic model of American capitalism.”

Ping singled out India’s Tata model of capitalism, which benefits from being “stakeholder driven and not shareholder driven.”

Tata’s Gopalakrishnan told IPS that most Asian businesspeople have been reading books written by Westerners and adopting their ideas only because there are hardly any books written about good practices by Asians.

“The West is…saying we must become conscious capitalists (though) many people in Asia are saying we have always been doing that,” he said.

He said that Tata used its one billion dollar profits to set up a trust to help the poor, “so part of our profits go back to the community.” The Tata group consists of over 100 companies in seven business sectors operating in more than 80 countries around the world.

In the past two decades IIT graduates have been some of the most successful innovators and entrepreneurs in the U.S.’s Silicon Valley. If they turn their attention to the rest of Asia now, experts believe they could make a big difference.

Jignesh Shah, founder chairman and group CEO of Financial Technologies India, a world leader in creating and operating technology-centric financial exchanges, argues that new business models in Asia are opening up.

“It will create huge opportunities for the best brains from Asia like you (graduates of IITs),” he told the conference. “India and China have huge savings rates and if it gets into share markets rather than remaining in banks … Asia will generate the next Goldman Sachs.”

Azhar Karimjee (52), an exporter based in Karachi, is eyeing the “huge market”, comprised of the Indian middle class, for his Bermuda and cargo shorts and chino pants once trade links open between Pakistan and India.

Having done business in Europe since the 1980s, Karimjee considers Pakistan’s decision to accord India the long awaited Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status by October 2012, to be a harbinger of prosperity.

“While India has a monopoly over ladies’ garments (made of finer quality fabric) we have an edge over them in men’s clothing, made of twill and canvas,” Karimjee told IPS.

Although India granted Pakistan MFN status back in 1996, Pakistan hitherto only allowed India to trade some 2,000 items.

Yusuf Raza Gilani said his government planned to remove restrictions on Indian imports by 2013. New Delhi, for its part, has assured Pakistan it will not oppose preferential trade access to Pakistani products in the European Union.

Current bilateral trade stands at 2.7 billion dollars, tilted heavily in India’s favour. But if restrictions are removed, trade can be expected to increase to as much as 6 billion dollars by 2014. However, informal trade through ‘third-party’ countries (the United Arab Emirates or Sri Lanka for example) is estimated at 10 billion dollars.

Controversy over ties with India

The news has stirred a round of passionate debate in the country as to why Pakistan needs to trade with a country long held to be its “enemy”.

For the longest time, Pakistan’s political leaders held the view that there was to be no business with India until the Kashmir dispute was resolved. The current government led by President Asif Ali Zaradari, considered one of the weakest in recent years, seems to have separated the Kashmir issue from the trade issue and opened the country’s market to India.

“Delinking trade from a resolution of Kashmir is a betrayal of the pledge we have made to the Kashmiri people,” Asif Ezdi, a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service, told IPS. “We must keep alive the flame of azadi (freedom) that burns in the hearts of the Kashmiri people, not extinguish it for dubious trade benefits,” he added.

At the time of independence in 1947 almost three-fifths of Pakistan’s exports were directed to the Indian market and one-third of its imports came from India. Trade relations were severed following the 1965 war between the two countries and the 1971 debacle in which Pakistan lost its eastern province, which is now Bangladesh.

Relations between the two nuclear-armed nations slipped further in 1999 after the Kargil war. Then in 2001, after an attack on the Indian parliament by Kashmiri terrorists allegedly trained in Pakistan, there was renewed tension, which peaked during the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

Abid Qamar, a senior economist with the State Bank of Pakistan, told IPS that a “stressed relationship” between the nuclear-armed neighbours resulted in low trade.

Today, however, the “sheer logic” of economic benefit attached to open bilateral trade has made the option too attractive for political leaders and businessmen to pass it by, said Asad Sayeed, a Karachi-based economist.

Benefits outweigh risks

The push for opening trade barriers gained ground after five major political parties (comprising 90 percent of representatives in the parliament) endorsed trading with India at an event organised by the Pakistan Business Council last April, Sayeed said.

“Pakistan is in dire need of improving its trade and India, being a large economy sitting next door, is a great opportunity,” said Qamar. He said if countries like the United States and Brazil were so enthusiastic about trading with India, Pakistan could not afford to miss out. He cautioned that according India MFN status does not ensure “trade will pick up” between the two and “it in no way means any special treatment to India.”

Still, there are others who are sceptical of trading with the “enemy” country.

Ezdi, for example, feels opening up trade links makes no “economic sense”. “There will be a sharp rise of Indian imports that will destroy our industry and jobs. There will be no gain for Pakistani exporters or Pakistan’s economy,” he said. Many experts like Ezdi are apprehensive that this may lead to items such as chemicals, machinery, vehicles, base metals, plastics, precious or semi precious metals and stones flooding Pakistan’s market.

Others, like Sayeed, believe in Pakistan’s economic resilience, arguing, “If our local producers have not been ruined by (the entrance of) industrial giants like Germany, UK, the U.S., China etc (with whom we trade freely), then India does not stand much of a chance!”

In the short term it may hurt the industry; but in five years’ time, Pakistan’s economy can expect to benefit, acknowledged Qamar. “More exports mean more economic activity and more employment in the country. We also benefit if we substitute our expensive imports with cheaper imports from India, assuming similar quality,” he added.

“If Pakistan can import machinery or pharmaceutical raw materials or steel from India at a cheaper rate (and lower transport cost) than it does from Germany or the U.S. then it is in Pakistan’s benefit,” Sayeed said, adding: “A bilateral trade deficit with India may still result in a smaller aggregate trade deficit for Pakistan.”

Ironing out the wrinkles

However, there are certain contentious business hurdles that need to be crossed before a just and fair trade relationship can develop. While India has given MFN status to Pakistan and allows all items to be exported from Pakistan into India, Amin Hashwani, a prominent Karachi-based businessman, pointed out that there are many non-tariff barriers that “prevent Pakistani goods from entering (Indian) markets.”

Pakistan’s goods in the Indian market amount to less than 0.1 percent of its total imports, according to Hashwani. “We want to enter into an agreement with them that is open and fair to both sides and allows Pakistani goods to enter into the Indian market in a meaningful manner,” he told IPS.

Most experts believe trade can also help reduce political tensions. “Increased trade between India and Pakistan will make it harder for the two to go to war,” Hashwani speculated.

“When the two countries have substantial economic stakes, it will actually motivate them to keep their relationship normal,” said Qamar. After all, sparring nations like the U.S. and China; Iran and Iraq; and Saudi Arabia and Iran keep their political differences from affecting their economic relationship.

In some parts of Colombo, informal housing structures, or slums, are built right on waterways. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Apr 4 2012 (IPS)

Sri Lanka’s capital city Colombo, the vibrant economic and administrative heart of the bustling island nation, is rapidly turning into a city of slums. Home to over 30 percent of the country’s population, one in every two people living in the Greater Colombo Area is a slum dweller.

Sadly, Colombo’s bulging urban population is not a rarity in South Asia, where most of the region’s major metropolises are scrambling to stitch up their bursting seams.

Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, is home to 34 percent of the country’s population and is the fastest growing city in Asia – around 40 percent of those living in Dhaka are slum dwellers. A quarter of Nepal’s population lives in cities, while 36 percent of Pakistan’s population is now concentrated in urban centres. In India 93 million people are estimated to be living in slums; fully half the population of the capital, New Delhi, lives in slums, while the figure could be as high as 60 percent in glittering Mumbai.

Indu Weerasooriya, deputy director general at the Sri Lankan Urban Development Authority, told a recent World Bank symposium on regional cities and sustainability, “Forty-three percent of the Greater Colombo (population) lives in slums and shanties.”

Ming Zhang, the World Bank sector manager for Urban Water and Disaster Management for South Asia, predicted that the urban population in South Asia would double in the next 25 years. Already one in every four persons is categorised under ‘informal population’ or living in shanties or slums in the urban areas of the region, Zhang warned.

The expansions are so rapid that in Dhaka, according to Nazrul Islam, chairman of the Centre for Urban Studies in Dhaka, one of the most profitable businesses nowadays is developing and renting out ‘slums’ that stand on stilts near waterways.

And when unannounced floods come, like they did in Colombo in November 2010 and May last year, it is the low-lying areas where most of the slums are located that go under first. A similar situation was experienced in Bangladesh in July last year.

Urgent need for urban planning

Regional experts and those from the World Bank agree that most of the problems faced by the cities are man-made, primarily due to lack of proper planning.

“If we thought about proper urban planning, institutional coherence and community participation, we would be able to address a big chunk of this (problem),” Abha Joshi-Ghani, the World Bank’s Sector Manager for Finance Economics and Urban Planning, told IPS.

Colombo, particularly, knows the ramifications of haphazard expansion. When the rains come down in buckets, even for short periods, parts of Colombo go under in double-quick time.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, secretary to the Ministry of Urban Development and Defense, told the World Bank workshop that the flooding is mainly due to informal housing structures coming up on or near water retention areas, canals and other climate-sensitive spots.

In some parts of Colombo, like along the sections of the Hamilton Canal and connecting waterways north of the city, the structures are not near but actually on the water. Weerasooriya said that rain patterns affected by climate change – resulting in shorter rainy days with intense downpours – have exacerbated the problem.

Joshi-Ghani told IPS that cities like Colombo sitting near the coast now face the added risk of coastal erosion.

“In South Asia we have a large number of coastal cities threatened with inundation,” she said.

Drinking water is also becoming a major issue in other regional cities like Dhaka. Islam told IPS that overuse has already made the water supply from two of the four rivers that feed the city unreliable, because “they are running dry,” he said.

Climate change experts warn that cities need to adapt fast.

“Most of these places have seen unplanned development take place for decades, they need to change that,” Rutu Dave, a climate change expert at the Washington-based World Bank Institute, told IPS.

Her colleague Joshi-Ghani added urban centres have to fix the problem of overuse of limited resources. “We are depleting our resources by inefficient and indiscriminate use of resources.”

Secretary Rajapaksa told the World Bank workshop that authorities have launched a massive programme to relocate 70,000 families living under poor conditions in Colombo and to clear blocked waterways. “Providing proper housing for the under-served settlements is a significant problem for town planners and architects,” Rajapaksa said.

With space at a premium, the project envisions resettling slum dwellers in high-rise buildings.

Joshi-Ghani told IPS that any relocation has to take into consideration the incomes and lifestyles of those affected, which, if disrupted, could turn the solution itself turns into a problem. “Many think that cities make people poor, when in fact cities attract the poor who think they can make a better living (there),” she said.

Dave told IPS that awareness was growing among authorities as well as ordinary people on the dangers faced by unplanned urban development. “Some of the best awareness campaigns have been at schools. Children can be drivers of change,” she said.

But as long as city planners lack the political will, at national and local levels, to go head with strong decisions, cities like Colombo, Dhaka and others in the region will have to deal with more chaos as nature’s fury increasingly joins hands with man’s ignorance.

“The scary thing is that natural disasters don’t honour geographical boundaries, they hurt the poor most,” said Jesse Robredo, secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Governments in the Philippines, who travelled to Colombo to advise his South Asian colleagues on the issue.

Excerpt:

Trade ministers of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa – say that at the G20 trade ministerial summit later this month in Mexico they will try to ensure that attempts by industrialised countries to frame a new trade agenda do not drown development-led trade liberalisation and the World Trade Organization talks.

The G20 is not representative of the WTO because the poorest countries have no say in setting the trade agenda. Credit: Kim Cloete/IPS

The Doha Development Agenda (DDA) was launched by the WTO almost 11 years ago to correct the historical imbalances and asymmetries in the global trading system. It was designed to enable poorer countries to integrate into the system.

“This is a most dangerous move by the industrialised countries which are determined to undermine the independence and multilateral character of the WTO, where a large majority of countries are asking for developmental flexibilities for implementing liberal trade commitments,” said a trade envoy, referring to the agenda for the meeting.

“The G20 is not representative of the WTO because the poorest countries and countries in Africa, except for South Africa, have no say in setting the trade agenda,” the envoy said.

The G20 bloc of major and emerging economies is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union.

Clearly, the rich countries have overwhelming influence in setting the agenda at the G20 meetings, the envoy said.

“The draft agenda for the meeting is basically asking trade ministers to agree on creating a super-body headed by the chiefs of the WTO and OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) to oversee all the review and monitoring functions,” the envoy argued.

Therefore, the presence of the BRICS ministers is so essential and important, lest the trade agenda be radically altered for the next 10 years, said sources familiar with the BRICS ministers meeting.

During their meeting in New Delhi last week, the BRICS ministers discussed the draft G20 agenda issued by Mexico, and not yet made publicly available, the South African trade minister said.

Significantly, the draft agenda is silent on the Doha trade talks.

It aims to take decisions on core trade issues without first discussing them at the WTO, which is now grappling with new approaches to accelerate the DDA talks.

“We strongly believe that the process has to be multilateral and the central focus has to be on the Doha single undertaking,” said Davies, emphasising the importance of transparency and inclusiveness.

“Attempts to reshape the architecture without concluding the Doha talks are not correct,” Davies said, suggesting that the BRICS countries are ready to take small steps to reinvigorate the Doha trade negotiations. The minister insisted that agriculture is at the heart of the DDA and that precious little is done to address the continued trade-distorting subsidies of the industrialised countries.

It is important to accord primacy to the Doha multilateral trade negotiations by discussing issues first at the WTO, Davies argued.

The draft agenda for what is going to be the first G20 trade ministerial meeting of its kind – beginning on Apr. 19 – sets the stage for preparing a “New Trade Narrative.”

The five-page agenda obtained by IPS, which remains confidential, squarely addresses the trade interests of the rich countries, under subheadings such as “better understanding global value chains to better regulate trade” and “services, trade finance and trade facilitation are essential to oil global value chains.”

Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the OECD, known as the rich-country think tank, and Pascal Lamy, the WTO director general, will provide the justification for pursuing this new agenda to the G20 trade ministers.

The heads of the OECD and the WTO have been working in tandem for some time now to change the manner in which global trade is measured and assessed in a neoliberal framework away from a development perspective, say analysts.

But developing countries and the least-developed countries have opposed the framework advanced by the OECD and WTO Secretariats on market-led trade reforms.

In addition, the G20 ministers will discuss “trade, growth, and jobs.” The themes for discussion include “trade as a source of growth,” “trade as a source of jobs,” and “the imperative to keep markets open and to keep opening markets.”

Up until now, trade negotiations, including the very setting of the trade agenda for any negotiations, have been based on a give-and-take framework. But for the first time, Mexico is asking ministers to move away “from this setting in which many trade discussions happen” to identify “the links between trade and job creation and (to improve) trade statistics that consider global chains and value addition.”

Mexico also wants ministers to focus on “the major forces and challenges facing their economies, including protectionist pressures, and what alternative policies are there to deal with them, other than trade instruments.”

“Reading the draft agenda, one gets the feeling that there is a hidden language, which shows basically the interest of developed countries and not of developing countries,” said Isabel Mazzei, a former Oxfam International trade policy advisor.

Speaking in her private capacity to IPS, she asked: “What does it really mean ‘to change the trade narrative’- does it mean to ‘move the goal posts’?”

“The Doha Round is about development, agriculture, elimination of subsidies, policy space….and now it looks like this narrative is obsolete as there is no mention of agriculture or subsidy elimination,” she said. “Many developing countries still have a big portion of their labour force coming from the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

“Clearly the G20 draft agenda is a concerted attempt to bring the issues and concerns of rich countries from the back door,” she concluded.

At their summit in the Indian capital on Thursday, leaders of the coalition known as BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – made several noteworthy decisions that experts say hint at the converging of economic and political interests of a disparate regional bloc.

China’s trade minister Chen Deming opposed sanctions against Iran when rising oil prices were hitting BRICS. Credit: World Economic Forum/CC-BY-SA-2.0

Though the leaders chose to defer the long-awaited announcement of a ‘South-South Bank’ to next year’s meet, or beyond, the ‘Delhi Declaration‘ produced at the end of the summit said BRICS finance ministers have been directed to “examine the feasibility and viability of such an initiative, set up a joint working group for further study, and report back to us (heads of state) by the next Summit (in South Africa).”

“Creating such a ‘BRICS Bank’ involves complex issues, such as the medium of transfer of credit,” said Vivan Sharan, associate fellow at the prestigious Observer Research Foundation (ORF), which hosted a BRICS academic forum of experts and scholars from member countries in New Delhi from Mar. 4 – 6.

“But there are no roadblocks ahead and it is an idea whose time has come,” Sharan told IPS. “While the plan now is to supplement rather than supplant the existing global financial structure, there is clearly the ambition to go ahead.”

For now though, according to Sharan, citizens of the bloc, who account for nearly half the world’s population, can be content with the knowledge that by June there will be a BRICS Exchange Alliance in place, allowing trading options using local currency.

“Investors will soon be able to invest in each other’s progress and there will be greater liquidity, better market-determined integration and the possibility of extending credit in local (currencies),” Sharan said. “Two BRICS countries are among the top five in purchasing power parity terms and four are in the top 10.”

BRICS’ frustration with the policies of the wealthy G7 countries – France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the United States, and Canada – was palpable at the meeting of the new bloc’s trade ministers on Wednesday with Brazil’s Fernando Pimentel leading complaints of the G7’s tardiness in meeting reforms promised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Pimentel’s concerns were reflected in the Declaration, which said: “The build-up of sovereign debt and concerns over medium to long-term fiscal adjustment in advanced countries are creating an uncertain environment for global growth.”

Further, the Declaration charged that “excessive liquidity from the aggressive policy actions taken by central banks to stabilise their domestic economies have been spilling over into emerging market economies, fostering excessive volatility in capital flows and commodity prices.”

But the toughest statements came over the sanctions imposed on Iran and the situation in the Middle East. “We respect the United Nations (Security Council) resolution but at the same time it does not forbid countries to engage in trade in essential commodities and what is required for human good,” said India’s Anand Sharma at a joint press conference of trade ministers.

China’s trade minister Chen Deming declared that his country could not be expected to follow unilateral sanctions against Iran at a time of rising crude prices that were adversely affecting the BRICS countries and the global economy.

BRICS leaders said in the Declaration they were agreed that the “period of transformation taking place in the Middle East and North Africa should not be used as a pretext to delay resolution of lasting conflicts but rather it should serve as an incentive to settle them, in particular the Arab-Israeli conflict.” “This is indeed a bold declaration coming from a group that is seen as disparate and one known to have divergent interests,” said Pushpesh Pant, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of International Studies. “Earlier there were flip-flops over issues in the Middle East.”

Pant said it was still left to be seen how BRICS members will be able to carry out any of their articulations. “China has internal problems, Russia looks increasingly European, Brazil cannot shake off its Latin American moorings and India has serious problems in dealing with its neighbours.” “Will membership in BRICS encourage China to support India’s candidature for a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council is a question that looms up,” said Pant. “Another is the sometimes conflicting interests of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (that includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.)”

The Declaration said: “China and Russia reiterate the importance they attach to the status of Brazil, India and South Africa in international affairs and support their aspiration to play a greater role in the U.N.”

According to Sharan the strength of the Delhi Summit lies in the Delhi Action Plan (DAP), released along with the Declaration on Thursday, calling for meetings of BRICS foreign ministers on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, and of its finance ministers around the G20 meetings.

There will also be, according to the DAP, meetings of finance ministers and fiscal authorities around those organised by the World Bank and IMF, including stand-alone meetings.

“All this means is that, in spite of the ifs and buts, we can expect more of the kind of coordination seen at the Security Council during the year 2011 and that there is a better chance for multilateral approaches when it comes to global peace and security,” said Pant.

By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA , Mar 25 2012 (IPS)

Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn a decent income.

A resident of Mousuni village in the Namkhana area of the Sundarbans, Sahara has lost her home twice in seven years owing to erosion caused by the rising sea level as a result of the severe impact of climate change.

Declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO and home to a highly unique ecology – including the world's largest mangrove gene pool and the endangered royal Bengal tiger – the Sundarbans (spread across a 9630 square kilometer-area in India and covering 16,370 square kilometres in Bangladesh) face a drastic threat from global warming and attendant climatic change.

Here, the sea level has been rising at a rate higher than the global average for years now, wreaking havoc on the archipelago’s population of roughly 4.37 million people, according to 2011 provisional data released by the Indian census department.

Furthermore, a new study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), one of India’s leading environment pressure groups, in partnership with the Kolkata-based South Asian Forum for Environment (SAFE), has revealed a double whammy for the region’s people – not only loss of habitat from climate change but also a complete lack of climate-sensitive development planning.

According to "Living with Changing Climate: Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation challenges in Indian Sundarbans", inadequate development planning is forcing people in this fragile region to migrate to other parts of India in search of livelihoods, while the number of climate refugees in the area swells and vast swathes of agricultural land is either devoured by the encroaching sea or rendered unfit for cultivation.

When Sahara’s younger son Sahzahan went to the Southern Indian state of Kerala to work as a mason, she was shattered. But now her son earns 300 rupees (roughly six dollars) a day and persuades others from their village to join him as a migrant labourer. Since migration is dependent on networks and acquaintances, Kerala is quickly becoming a depot for scores of workers fleeing their ravaged home in search of minimum-wage jobs.

When the CSE quizzed Sahara about the efficacy of government schemes for alternative livelihood in her region, she said she had heard nothing about it.

Nor has she been provided with any information about the perils of climate change in the Sundarbans, despite being a climate refugee herself. All she knows is that the number of pre-seasonal cyclones has only increased in the Sundarbans, with the worst – Cyclone Aila – causing utter devastation and massive deaths in May 2009.

Unlike Sahara, Saikh Rustam (52), also hailing from the Namkhana area, is better informed about government schemes but is unable to avail himself of their benefits.

Rustam’s home has been devoured by the rising sea level thrice in just 12 years. The advancing sea robbed him of his livelihood as a farmer and he was forced to become a fisherman.

However, "during the monsoon, when the river is dangerous, there is no livelihood even as a fisherman," he told IPS.

Rustam says he has heard about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), a flagship government rural poverty alleviation plan promising 100 days of wage labour per financial year to rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

"But I prefer not to get engaged in MGNREGS because the payment is made in a bank account. I did not have an account earlier, while even now one has to lose a day’s wage to go to the bank located far away," he said.

Urgent need for climate-sensitive development

According to official statistics, sea surface temperature (SST) in the Sundarbans is increasing at the rate of 0.5 degrees centigrade per decade, compared to the global increase of 0.06 degrees centigrade per decade.

The Sundarbans is losing land rapidly and soil salinity is increasing fast, posing a dire threat to the future of agriculture in the region.

The Indian part of Sundarbans has been losing land at the alarming rate of 5.5 square kilometres per year over the past ten years.

In the same period, the frequency of cyclones increased by 26 percent, according to the CSE.

The joint CSE-SAFE research report also warned that one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world is getting pummeled not only by a changing climate, but also by the complete lack of development planning.

"With a growing population, there is a constant conflict between conservation and livelihood needs. The costs of conservation are globally dispersed but not locally enjoyed. With a growing subsistence economy, no global market for the produce from the region and little benefits from tourism, a majority of the population is forced to suffer grinding poverty," says lead researcher and author of the report, Aditya Ghosh.

CSE-SAFE researchers also report that broad development planning for the region has failed to envisage how people will continue living in the island with a sense of security and dignity.

"There is a piecemeal approach that can, at best, serve a short term agenda. Population pressure and diminishing returns from natural resources are at loggerheads (and) the sustainability of the island itself is threatened," Ghosh added.

The report goes on to claim that many families in the Sundarbans are now entirely dependent on remittances from migrant family members for all major household expenses.

According to Chandra Bhushan, head of CSE’s climate change programme, development planning in the Indian Sundarbans has never included the impacts of climate change impacts in its purview.

"This is quite evident in the way everything from electrification to land management is being done here. A decentralised distribution network for renewable energy has not been promoted," Bhushan lamented.

According to SAFE chairperson Dipayan Dey, the paradigm for sustainable development in the Sundarbans must shift from disaster-based hazard mitigation to community-based climate adaptive intervention.

"Before it is too late, (strong) political will to advocate community governance of natural resources must emerge," he stressed.

Excerpt:

India’s generic pharmaceutical industry meets 70 percent of domestic demand and exports 11 billion dollars worth of generic drugs annually. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

By allowing a generic manufacturer to produce a patented cancer drug at a fraction of its current cost, India has declared that it is not about to abandon its role as the ‘pharmacy of the world’s poor’.

In a path-breaking move on Mar. 9, India’s patent office invoked compulsory licensing (CL) provisions under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules to allow generic drug manufacturer Natco Pharma to produce and sell ‘Nexavar’ in India, a drug developed by the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer to treat liver and kidney cancer.

CL allows generic manufacturers to produce a patented drug or use a patented process when denied by the patentee. It is an important ‘flexibility’ clause in the WTO agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS), but one that countries capable of manufacturing generics are still putting to test.

The issue has aligned non-government organisations (NGOs) and the manufacturers of generic drugs with those governments prepared to take on powerful pharmaceutical multi-national corporations (MNCs) that sell drugs worth more than 800 billion dollars annually.

“India always had CL provisions, even in its original 1970 patent laws. In 2005, when amendments were made to make WTO laws consistent, CLs were retained and this was a major achievement (of the Doha declaration of 2001),” Sachin Chaturvedi, senior fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, a think-tank of India’s ministry of external affairs, told IPS.

“More generic drug manufacturers in India are sure to come forward now and seek licenses to cheaply manufacture drugs and make them accessible to the poor,” said Meera Shiva, chairperson of the Health Action International – Asia Pacific, an NGO dealing with public health issues.

Shiva told IPS that the cost of treatment with Nexavar – the trade name for sorafenib tosylate – is expected to drop by nearly 97 percent, from 5,500 dollars for a month’s treatment per person to about 175 dollars, once production of a generic version by Natco Pharma begins.

“This will bring relief to more than a million people suffering from liver and kidney cancer and extend their lives by several years,” said Shiva. “It brings hope in a country where government surveys have shown that 65 percent of the 1.1 billion population fall into debt as result of ‘out-of-pocket’ healthcare spending.”

India’s patent office ruled that “the mandate of the law is not to just supply the drug in the market, but to make it available in a manner such that (a) substantial portion of the public is able to reap the benefits of the invention. If the terms are unreasonable, such as high cost, availability is meaningless.”

Shiva said what is significant is the realisation that avenues exist within the WTO for governments to intervene on behalf of their people and ensure access to medicines in the face of attempts by pharmaceutical MNCs to keep profit margins high.

Indian Move a Victory for IBSA

Volunteers for the humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF) in Brazil and South Africa – countries that have benefited from the Indian generics industry – hailed the Indian move.

“In 2007, the Brazilian government issued a CL for the drug Efavirenz, used to treat AIDS, after declaring it of public interest,” said Felipe de Carvalho, project officer with MSF’s Access Campaign in Brazil.

“Right after the issuance of the CL for Efavirenz, while local production was being developed, Brazil bought generic versions from Indian generic producers,” de Carvalho said. “In 2007 alone, the purchase of cheaper versions of Efavirenz represented savings of 30 million dollars.

“So, if the use of CL in India is expanded and allows for exportation, countries like Brazil can benefit from the resulting generic production, as happened in the case of Efavirenz,” de Carvalho told IPS.

When the Brazilian government issued the CL for Efavirenz, the country became the target of intense denouncement by pharmaceutical companies and developed country governments, de Carvalho said.

“The decision in India is important to reinforce developing countries’ right to use TRIPS flexibilities.”

India’s CL has brought on a storm of protests from pharmaceutical MNCs. In a published statement Ranjit Shahani, who heads the Switzerland-based Novartis in India, warns that the move will “work to the detriment of patients through the negative impact they (CLs) will have on future investment in innovative pharmaceuticals.”

However, Shiva debunked this claim that investments in research and development for drugs come solely from excessive profits generated by the pharmaceutical industry. “The fact is, there is publicly- funded research and often big pharma benefits from that too.”

Catherine Tomlinson, senior researcher at the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, said it was “heartening to see India’s ongoing resistance against pressure from developed countries to not use the TRIPS provisions to protect health and we hope it will serve as a positive example for our own government.

“For activists in South Africa, it is distressing that our government continues to bow to pressure not to use CL provisions, despite the country facing numerous health emergencies and many critical medicines remaining unavailable to the majority of the population,” Tomlinson told IPS.

Leena Menghaney, a lawyer who works for MSF’s Access Campaign in New Delhi, said India’s patent laws had many advantages. “CLs can be issued to generic producers if patented drugs are unavailable or unaffordable, or if countries that lack production capacity order drugs from India.

“In fact compulsory licensing, under Indian law, is not reserved for emergencies – this is another myth spread by the MNCs,” Menghaney said.

Between 1970 and 2005, India did not recognise patents for medicines, allowing the growth, in that period, of a large and powerful generic pharmaceutical industry that takes care of 70 percent of domestic demand and also exports 11 billion dollars worth of generic drugs annually.

Excerpt:

By Ravi Kanth Devarakonda and - -
GENEVA, Mar 17 2012 (IPS)

India, Brazil, and South Africa, the international grouping for promoting international cooperation among the three countries known as IBSA, along with China and several other developing countries, have denounced the ongoing attempts to craft an exclusive, plurilateral agreement to liberalise trade in services without concluding the multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization.

IBSA has denounced the ongoing attempts to craft an exclusive, plurilateral agreement to liberalise trade in services. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

In sharp contrast, the proposed plurilateral agreement for services, which aims to seek WTO commitments for the 16 countries part of the initiative, will turn the clock back for providing the much-promised developmental gains from the poorest and developing countries.

Ahead of the current turmoil in global trade negotiations, the IBSA trade ministers warned that that “plurilateral initiatives go against the fundamental principles of transparency, inclusiveness, and multilateralism.”

The 16 countries, the United States, countries from the European Union, Japan, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taipei, Pakistan, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, call themselves the real good friends (RGF) of liberalisation of trade in services.

The RGF coalition will hold their third brainstorming session on Mar. 21 to prepare the ground for a plurilateral services agreement outside the WTO. Though the contours of the form and substance of the proposed agreement are not clear yet, the coalition appears determined to achieve an outcome based on the highest common denominator, say trade envoys from the coalition.

The IBSA countries have not adopted any formal position on the ongoing plurilateral initiative of the RGF coalition. But trade envoys from the respective countries spoke against the dangers it would pose to the multilateral negotiations in general, and the Doha trade negotiations in particular.

“We don’t think that plurilateral initiatives will comply with the requirement of transparency and inclusiveness, which is the basis for any multilateral process,” Brazil’s trade envoy to the WTO, Ambassador Roberto Azevedo, told IPS. “Brazil doesn’t believe it is a building block for the resumption of multilateral negotiations and on the contrary it would make that even more difficult.”

Brazil, said Azevedo, “is perfectly willing to negotiate multilateral market access in services as long as others are willing to negotiate market access in agriculture which is at the heart of the WTO’s Doha trade negotiations.”

The plurilateral route for an agreement on services will undermine the “balance” in the Doha trade negotiations, said Ambassador Jayant Dasgupta, India’s trade envoy. South Africa’s trade envoy Ambassador Faizel Ismail expressed concern that a plurilateral agreement will undermine the much- promised “developmental” outcome in the Doha trade negotiations.

Even the EU, which is taking an active part in the current RGF plurilateral initiative remains uncomfortable. “Our line is that we should not take initiatives that undermine the WTO because the WTO is very important for trade,” the EU’s trade commissioner Karel de Gucht said on Mar. 12.

Under the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which governs global trade in services, any group of countries can strive for economic integration by seeking higher and deeper services commitments among themselves.

Until now, there was no attempt by any group of countries to craft an exclusive plurilateral services free trade agreement among a select group of countries within the WTO since its establishment in 1995.

In the past there were open-ended plurilateral agreements such as the WTO’s Information Technology Agreement involving liberalisation of trade in various electronic goods, and the telecom services agreement.

The ongoing exploratory talks among the 16 countries are taking place at a time when the WTO members have not been able to conclude the much-promised Doha negotiations, which were started in 2001.

A continued stalemate in negotiations between a large majority of countries seeking a palatable outcome and one major industrialised country making “maximalist” demands has put paid to an early conclusion, said trade diplomats.

As opposed to multilateral negotiations in which all members have an equal say, at least on the paper, the plurilateral process involves closed-door negotiations among select-members. The U.S. and other major industrialised countries, however, reckon that it is difficult to negotiate with 153 countries as it would involve a grand bargain of compromises.

“We live in a consensus based-organisation and what that means is that 153 members have to approve on everything and what that means in practice is the least common denominator,” the U.S. trade envoy to the WTO, Ambassador Michael Punke, told a seminar organised by the European Centre for Political Economy in Brussels.

He said “we should look at the services plurilateral as a different, fundamentally different way, of approaching the agreement.” Punke argued that the RGF group would provide the ideal ground for accomplishing an outcome based on “highest common denominator” since most of them are engaged in significant liberalisation of trade in services.

However, developing countries remain opposed to the assault on the multilateral framework. “The greater the number of participants, it would be difficult to reach a common agreement but it would provide greater benefits,” said Azevedo. “In short, a modest outcome with a larger number of participants should lead to more attractive and meaningful outcome.”

Excerpt:

By Sana Altaf and - -
SRINAGAR, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

While the Jammu and Kashmir Cricket Association is hogging headlines over the alleged embezzlement of sports funds, Kashmiri youth are gearing up to write history in Kashmir’s cricket record.

Not a single major sports event has been hosted in Kashmir since the insurrection began in 1989 but street cricket continues to be a national pastime Credit: Dave Watts/CC-BY-2.0

The initiative is not a government undertaking but was kick-started by two Kashmiri youth who own a small private web development company here.

“I am not a cricket buff. But after watching day-night cricket matches in other states, I wanted the same in Kashmir,” said 25-year-old Amir Meraj Shah, who was moved to organise the tournament after consistently observing the pathetic state of cricket in Kashmir, despite the massive presence of cricket fanatics in the Valley.

Most everyone from young children to their grandparents are avid cricket followers; posters of cricket players fondly find prominent wall space in shops, on buses and in numerous public places. Street cricket is a widespread pastime, particularly during the frequent strikes or curfews.

The tournament is scheduled to be played in a North Kashmir cricket stadium some 25 kilometers from the capital Srinagar, in the same place that hosted the state’s first Twenty20 premier league last year, and will include four matches of 20 overs each. The first three will take place during the day and the final match will be played at night.

The tournament can accommodate 64 teams and already 25 teams from Jammu and Kashmir have registered.

Together, Shah and his friends are ironing out all the details and managing all the expenses of the tournament with no support from the Cricket Association or any other government organisation.

“We had asked the Cricket Association for dimensions of (flood)lighting but they denied knowing anything about it,” Shah told IPS. The organisers have secured permission from all the necessary authorities and security agencies for the tournament.

“We have done all the preparations on our own, with the help of friends.”

“Our electrical engineers are already on the job of setting up lights. The diesel generators and poles have been acquired and mounting will start in a day or two,” Shah said. The venue can hold 210 spectators under roof seating.

Meanwhile, two officials from the Jammu and Kashmir Cricket Association have been accused of siphoning off 300 million rupees worth of sports funds into ‘shadow’ accounts running parallel to the official bank accounts of the association, which has been headed for the last 30 years by Farooq Abdullah, former chief minister and father of the current chief minister.

While saluting the young men’s initiative in driving the day-night Twenty20, officials from the Jammu and Kashmir Sports Council claim the organisers are not entitled to any government funds.

“The Cricket Association or other state sports agencies (can only fund) those organisers who are registered with (the government),” said Mushtaq Ahmad, a representative of the Sports Council.

The prospect of the event has thrilled the people of Kashmir who are eagerly anticipating Mar. 18.

“It is a wonderful initiative. We have never seen a cricket tournament in Kashmir. I will surely be a part of it,” said Mukeen Khan, a 12th grade student.

“The scam of the Cricket Association has clearly exposed their work. Now it is the youth who can change things,” he added.

Ruheela Habib, a cricket buff and post graduate student of political science, believes that the tournament will create history. She says that the people of Kashmir should support such ideas by all means.

“It is nice that youth are involved in reviving sports. But we all share the responsibility of appreciating their work and extending a helping hand too.”

Only two international cricket matches have so far been played in Kashmir. The first was between India and Clive Lloyd’s legendary West Indies in the autumn of 1983. In 1986, India and Australia played a match at Srinagar’s Sher-e-Kashmir cricket stadium. Day-night matches have never before been played in the conflict-ridden valley.

Sports activities took a major hit after the insurgency began in 1989, with no major sports event held or organised here in well over two decades. Indeed, the Jammu and Kashmir Sports Council has been almost redundant for years. Absence of infrastructure, lack of required coaches and training for youth has marred sporting activities in the region.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya and - -
BANGALORE, India, Mar 9 2012 (IPS)

Agriculture experts blame the crisis faced by India’s small farmers on a highly inefficient supply chain for perishable farm produce, a situation exploited by traders and middlemen.

A farmer at a co-operative in Bangalore. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

The stagnation coincides with a period in which India’s economy has been growing steadily, with projections of a respectable growth of 7.7 percent expected in 2012 despite the prevailing global downturn.

“It’s obvious there is a major block in the growth of the agricultural sector in India,” says P.G. Chengappa, national professor with the apex Indian Council of Agricultural Research, “mainly because of stagnation in productivity and the lack of market support for perishables.”

The overuse of chemical fertilisers and pesticides – together with the government’s encouragement of water-intensive crops and related soil-salinity – has led to the now well-documented environmental decline in India’s faming lands.

India’s current policy is to help farmers by handing out huge subsidies on fertilisers and agricultural inputs, estimated to be worth 25 billion dollars in 2009-2010.

Small farmers, forming over 60 percent of India’s farming community, have neither the financial clout nor the access to groundwater or irrigation, while having to spend large sums on costly pesticides and fertilisers.

The government subsidies are cornered by industrial farming and benefit the fertiliser and chemical industry leaving smallholders out in the cold. An estimated 70 percent of India’s 1.1 billion people are small farmers.

During 1995-2010, over 250,000 poor farmers in India committed suicide, according to national statistics, mainly attributed to their inability to pay debts incurred on agricultural inputs.

While India’s soils are said to be failing due to continuous use of chemical inputs, small farmers, desperate to improve productivity, increase the doses of expensive fertilisers and pesticides and end up falling further into debt.

Curiously, the desperate situation of farmers remains unmitigated by the demand for fruits, vegetables and grains in urban India where increasing incomes have allowed organised food retail chains to mushroom, particularly in south India.

Almost two-thirds of the farmers’ suicides were reported from southern Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh states, indicating serious agrarian distress in the peninsular region.

Direct dealings with farmers by these food retail chains are almost negligible, with most chains outsourcing their daily supply of groceries through contractors or middlemen. “Large retail chains keep a supply of green groceries only to attract the customer for convenience shopping,” explains B. Somesha, chief financial officer of Sahaja Organics, one company that serves as a direct marketing chain for its 500-odd farmer-members in Karnataka.

Set up in April 2010, Sahaja Organics leaped from a turnover of 38,732 dollars in 2010-11 to an expected 100,000 dollars in 2011-12.

But this growth still does not allow farmers to cash in on the demand from retail food chains.

“They (retail chains) want a listing (registration) fee of at least 1,000 dollars plus three months’ credit, which is not possible for small operators,” says Somesha. On the other hand, they skim off high 40 percent margins.

Prof. Chengappa says India’s Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) is actually a barrier to direct benefit for small farmers through its myriad bureaucratic clauses that deter retailers from seeking permission to deal directly with farmers.

“The APMC allows so many superfluous middlemen that it has actually institutionalised commercial agents and traders in India’s agricultural system,” complains Chengappa.

There are, however, better run government ventures such as the 12.25 million-dollar turnover Horticultural Producers Co-operative Marketing and Processing Society (HOPCOMS), in Bangalore, which works with 18,000 farmer-members.

HOPCOMS enjoys the loyalty of farmers who say they are happy with the assured payments and higher prices compared with what they are offered by the city’s four major markets.

“We don’t need to pay any commission to the market auction agent,” says 35-year-old Shivananda Attibele, who brings leafy greens to HOPCOMS twice a week from his two-acre plot at Jigani, 43 km outside the city.

The markets have commission agents, permissible under the APMC, who fix the day’s rate for vegetables and grains according to the quantities available for the day and the demand for particular produce.

The system has given rise to exploitation and extortion, with farmers forced to pay commissions to the agent and are often at his mercy because of credit they may have taken from him.

“Farmers take loans from the agents and have no option but to take whatever the agents give them,” says 56–year-old Muniraj, whose father began dealing with HOPCOMS 40 years ago.

Traders forming cartels that prohibit small farmers from selling their produce elsewhere is a countrywide phenomenon in India’s markets.

HOPCOMS managing director, Shanmugappa, agrees that the situation is bad for small farmers who are forced to sell their produce at wholesale auctions in city markets.

“There is a huge middleman lobby that is cornering very large margins,” says Shanmugappa. “That is why I say that the government should control the prices of vegetables at the ‘end-point’, the market, not at the ‘source’ by subsidising fertilisers, water and electricity.”

Shanmugappa says the method of government control of market rates for vegetables and grains is successful in several countries.

Satish Natarajan, a director of Sahaja Organics, believes civil society has been irresponsible about its link with farmers.

“We have absolutely no idea about where our food is coming from, or the plight of the farmers,” says Natarajan. “We need to build community support to ensure a regular income for our farmers.

Calls to amend APMC rules have come in from various states in India, but these have been overshadowed by the controversy over a plan to introduce foreign direct investment in the retail sector, that may finally break the middleman’s stranglehold.

India, along with Brazil, Russia and China (that form BRIC), is slated to be among the world’s top five grocery markets by 2015.

Excerpt:

A pregnant mother and her daughter in the rural Purulia district of West Bengal state in India struggle against the country's "son preference" Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive.

The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age.

When she was first brought to the hospital by a 15-year-old sexual abuse victim, Baby Falak was almost dead and covered in bite marks, apparently inflicted by the young girl who brought her in.

In medical terms, Falak is suffering from battered baby syndrome, in which an infant sustains injuries as a result of physical abuse, usually inflicted by an adult caregiver.

Internal injuries, cuts, burns, bruises and broken or fractured bones are all possible signs of battered child syndrome and Baby Falak has suffered it all.

As her story unfolded and a harsh media spotlight prompted an in-depth investigation, it transpired that the baby had changed several hands to end up with the 15-year-old who is herself a sexual abuse victim of the man with whom she eloped to escape an abusive father

In anger and frustration, the teenager beat up the infant quite brutally before dropping her off at the hospital.

While the police hunted for the baby’s birthmother Munni, who had been separated from her children, they stumbled upon a sordid story of India’s treatment of its girl children.

Though India’s electronic media hijacked Baby Falak’s story to highlight the plight of the girl child, social workers say she is but one of countless infants who suffer similar trauma and whose stories almost always go unreported.

In the first two months of 2012 alone, four baby girls between the ages of two days and six months were found abandoned on trains and roads across Indian cities like Bhopal and Asansol.

Meanwhile, activists also claim that while newborn girls live an insecure life and fall prey to atrocities, countless girls in India are eliminated even before they see the light of this world.

“According to the 2011 Census and other national statistics 700,000 girl children are missing at birth (due to termination of pregnancy once a foetus’ sex is confirmed) and experts say this may reach the 1 million mark in this decade if serious effort is not made to reverse or halt it,” Akhila Sivadas, executive director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Advocacy and Research (CAR) told IPS.

Sivadas’ remarks come in the wake of a new United Nations study indicating that India is the world’s most dangerous place for girl children.

“Sex Differentials in Childhood Mortality,” a project of the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), reveals that a girl aged between one and five years is 75 percent more likely to die than a boy in India, marking the world’s most extreme gender disparity in child mortality.

Global infant and child mortality rates have been on the decline in recent years, with a large portion of the world seeing young girls experiencing higher rates of survival than young boys; but India remains the exception to this positive trend.

“The issue of gender discrimination and precarious survival of girls where there is (already) prevalence of foeticide is a matter of grave concern and requires urgent action,” said Shantha Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) in India.

According to Sivadas, the number of girls missing at birth can be attributed to the advent of ultrasound technology that has made it possible for even rural women to determine their child’s sex before birth.

She said that new technology must be regulated, or else it will become a double-edged sword.

Activists also say that Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is being used to conceive male children now.

Sivadas claims that all these technologies first became available to the “educated” class between 1991 and 2001 in the rich of Punjab and Haryana states, resulting in the queer phenomenon of higher female mortality rates or less girl children altogether.

Now that the technology is freely available, its effects are much more widespread.

“There is a deep seated ‘son preference’ in this country; (thus) we are directly paying the price of development as technology makes it possible to eliminate the unborn girl child,” Sivadas stressed.

“And even when the child is born she is subjected to early neglect. Neonatal child mortality is also linked with the problem of malnutrition. All forces combine to create life precariousness,” she added.

She believes that the dismantling of India’s public distribution system (PDS), through which essential food items were made available to poorer families at subsidised rates, is an important factor in the crisis, since parents who cannot feed their children often grow desperate.

“If we can at least prevent (sex-selective abortions), the way (they were stopped) in the Northern states of Haryana and Punjab, at least the girl child has a fighting chance when she is out in this world,” Sivadas said.

But while the number of sex-selective abortions is a grave phenomenon, Baby Falak is a reminder of the other side of the coin: the plight that awaits a newborn girl in a society that does not welcome her, or objectifies her.

“The Falak incident reminds us of the need to expand and deepen the presence of institutions that are meant to offer protection to children. This includes a secure family,” Sinha told IPS.

She added that Falak’s story, which has aroused the national conscience, has reminded the nation of the inadequacy of the reach of the system in safeguarding the most vulnerable populations.

“There is a lot that has to be done. We need greater cooperation between the police, the child welfare committee (CWC), health ministries and the media if we want to protect every child who is left abandoned and uncared for,” she said.

“Unless there is a sincere endeavour based on the non-negotiable principle that children should enjoy all their rights, it will be difficult to reach out to them,” she added.

According to Sivadas, India now needs a response similar to the one instituted back in the 1960s in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“In Tamil Nadu a basket of change was brought in for health, nutrition and childcare, with good results. We need that today,” she stressed.

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet and - -
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

The Brazilian government is stepping up South-South aid, to strengthen the South American giant’s status as a donor country and its international clout. It now provides assistance to 65 countries, and its financial aid has grown threefold in the last seven years.

Itamaraty Palace (Brazil’s foreign ministry), homebase for the country’s South-South development aid strategy. Credit: Public domain

The United Nations announced in late February that Brazil would provide 2.37 million dollars for a local food purchasing programme, to benefit small farmers and vulnerable populations in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal.

The project, carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), will thus draw on the expertise accumulated by Brazil in its own food purchasing programme, known by its Portuguese acronym, PAA.

The PAA buys agricultural products from small farmers and distributes them to vulnerable groups, including children and adolescents through school feeding programmes. Besides fighting hunger, it is aimed at strengthening local food production.

The PAA is a cornerstone of the country’s Zero Hunger strategy, launched by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and continued by his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, both of whom are moderate leftists who belong to the Workers’ Party.

The programme, in conjunction with other anti-poverty policies, has helped reduce malnutrition by 25 percent and pulled 24 million people out of extreme poverty, according to Lula administration statistics.

“This is a way to help other governments develop policies of support for family farmers, who in this country are responsible for the production of 60 percent of the food consumed,” Marco Farani, director of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC), told IPS.

The PAA “works very well, and keeps farmers in the countryside, caring for their small plots of land and making them their source of subsistence and livelihood,” said Farani, whose agency operates under the foreign ministry.

The project is based on cooperation between FAO and the WFP in the production and supply of seeds and fertiliser, and the organisation of the purchase and distribution of food, among other aspects.

Since January, FAO has been headed by José Graziano da Silva, from Brazil.

In an interview with IPS in December, Graziano said he would bring to the U.N. organisation his experience as one of the architects of the Zero Hunger programme, in areas like the strengthening of local markets to produce higher quality food, reduce food waste, and lower costs.

Now, in association with organisations like the United Nations or in bilateral aid, Brazil wants to extend throughout the developing South its own successful initiatives like the PAA.

This new cooperation and development aid strategy has been taking shape since 2005, when Brazil, now the world’s sixth largest economy, earmarked 158 million dollars for foreign aid. That amount rose to nearly 363 million dollars in 2009 and to an estimated 400 million dollars in 2010, according to preliminary figures from the ABC.

Meanwhile, Brazil plans to dedicate 125 million dollars to technical cooperation over the next three years, more than double what this country will itself receive in international aid in that period.

“Today we are active in more than 65 countries, while three or four years ago we were only active in the Portuguese-language countries of Africa. We currently have cooperation projects in 38 African nations, and in Latin America,” Farani said.

The countries of Latin America receive 45 percent of Brazil’s foreign aid. The rest is distributed among other areas of the developing South, mainly through bilateral channels, but also through the U.N., as in the case of the new local food purchasing fund for the five African countries.

Brazil is now one of the WFP’s 10 largest donor countries.

The difference, Farani said, is that “in our South-South cooperation, we do not impose closed models or solutions. We recognise the experience of the other countries, while sharing our own expertise.”

Brazil has thus established a kind of manual of principles to guide international aid.

“In first place, we are a developing country, which is why our attitude towards the challenge of development is one of humility, because development is still a challenge for Brazil,” Farani said.

“Besides, we have similar realities and challenges” as developing countries, and “we approach things from the idea that it is possible to overcome those challenges, while the attitude of a country from the industrialised North is ‘we are going to help to keep things from getting even worse’,” he said.

Mauricio Santoro, an analyst at the independent Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, mentioned political reasons as well for Brazil’s strategy of becoming a donor country.

Brazil hopes to win a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and wants greater decision-making power in multilateral bodies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.

“The political objective is to increase Brazil’s influence in other developing countries, particularly in Latin America and Africa. It’s part of the consolidation of Brazil’s international leadership vis-à-vis nations of the so-called global South,” he said.

But Santoro said there is a difference with respect to traditional donors that use aid as an instrument to establish a presence in new markets.

Brazilian companies, like the state-run oil company Petrobras and private construction and mining firms, are increasingly operating throughout Latin America and in other regions as well.

“The focus is more on politics than on the economy,” he told IPS. “Cooperation is not necessarily stronger with large commercial partners.”

“But it works as a kind of buffer for tension in countries like Bolivia, Paraguay or Mozambique, where there is a heavy presence of Brazilian companies,” he said.

Another difference, Santoro said, is that Brazil’s foreign aid does not come with strings attached, and generally promotes projects that put a priority on developing human resources, by means of training of public employees, for example.

It is the age-old concept of “teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish,” he summed up.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz and - -
SRINAGAR, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Kashmir is missing out on a ‘demographic dividend’ and unable to cash in on its youthful population for lack of initiatives from a state government bogged down by a two-decade-old separatist insurgency.

A group of Kashmiri university students. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

According to the survey, Kashmir is experiencing a ‘youth bulge’ with about 70 percent of its 10 million-strong population under the age of 31.

The World Bank’s chief economist, Justin Yifu Lin, submits in his blog ‘Let’s Talk Development’ on Jan. 5 that the increase in the number of working age individuals can, if fully employed in productive activities, other things being equal, result in a youth bulge becoming a demographic dividend.

“However, if a large cohort of young people cannot find employment and earn satisfactory income, the youth bulge will become a demographic bomb, because a large mass of frustrated youth is likely to become a potential source of social and political instability,” Lin warns in the posting.

Signs of youth unrest are already visible in the Kashmir valley in several stone-throwing sprees lasting days and occasioning the imposition of curfews since 2008. Several hundred youth, including juveniles, are currently lodged in jails on charges of rioting that are not entirely unrelated to separatist militancy.

“These stone-throwing episodes are largely the result of frustration among Kashmiri youth from a sense of hopelessness and frustration regarding the future,” says Roshanara Malik, a schoolteacher and psychologist. “The government needs to think of career counselling and placements seriously, rather than lock young people away.”

The Bank holds that most developing countries have a short window of opportunity to enact policies and promote investments that raise the human capital of young people while positioning them for greater economic productivity.

Citing official data, Mercy Corps said that the incidence of unemployment amongst youth in Kashmir has continued to rise since 1993. “With more and more educated youth entering an already over-saturated job market each year, Kashmir faces a mounting challenge.”

One issue reflected in the survey is that government jobs continue to be prized in Kashmir, creating a mindset in which jobs in the private sector or entrepreneurship are less valued.

But Kashmir’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has made it clear that it is unrealistic to expect the government to provide more employment in a state already groaning under an annual wage bill worth 3.6 million dollars.

“The preference for government jobs in a conflict zone, where investing in businesses is risky, is understandable. But this preference has resulted in high unemployment rates,” Shamas Imran, a researcher on social issues and teacher at Kashmir’s Central University, told IPS.

Imran and others say that if the government cannot provide jobs it should create conditions for the growth of entrepreneurship in Kashmir beyond traditional activities like tourism.

Several participants of a November 2011 youth gathering in Kashmir’s capital, the ‘Young Kashmir Leadership Meet’, told IPS that they would like to see the government encourage private sector investments aimed at generating jobs and incomes.

“We do need to give up this notion that government jobs alone are everything and rest is nothing. But this mindset can change only when employment opportunities are created in the private sector,” said Imtiyaz Lone, a participant in the meet.

Imran, however, said limited employment opportunities in government and the private sector were already beginning to push youth towards self-employment in such areas as floriculture.

Mumtaz Sheikh, 27, a post-graduate from Kashmir University, is happy growing flowers on his farm. “After realising that a government job or even a private job is hard to find, I started exploring options of self-dependence,” Sheikh told IPS.

Nusrat Jahan, 37, a woman who graduated in computer applications, is another entrepreneur who has taken the floriculture route to self-employment. She has no regrets and now employs 20 people in her business supplying flowers to such clients as ‘Ferns N Petals’, India’s largest florist chain.

“Floriculture pays good dividends, giving an average farmer an additional income of around 2,000 dollars per season,” Harcharan Pal Singh, director of floriculture in Kashmir, told IPS.

When Alexander Mudragey, director of Wisdom Flowers, a major Russian importer, visited Kashmir last year, he put the potential of floriculture in the state at 100 million dollars a year, though this would call for initial investments.

Mudragey said the cost of flower production was much lower in Kashmir than elsewhere in the world, with climatic conditions favouring roses and tulips which were of better quality than those grown in major flower exporting countries like the Netherlands, Columbia, Ethiopia, China and Vietnam.

Entrepreneurs like Sheikh complain that Kashmir’s provincial government has done little to boost entrepreneurship in horticulture or other potentially income-generating activities.

“Unfortunately, the government has been slow in tapping such identified employment-generating sectors as commercial floriculture, fisheries and forest- and agriculture-based industries,” says Mohammad Ashraf, an independent researcher.

Ashraf’s views were in consonance with the findings of the Mercy Corps survey that said “Kashmiri youth are highly resilient, educated and motivated, but currently lack the skills needed to compete in the 21st century.”

“Kashmir’s burgeoning youth population is an untapped asset and represents a potential opportunity for positive economic and social change. Large percentages of Kashmir’s youth are potential entrepreneurs,” the survey said.

Excerpt:

Behind closed doors, a trade deal affecting a fifth of the world’s population has been quietly in the works for years.

The EU-India FTA could kill the generic drug market despite the fact that generic competition lowers medicine prices by 90-99 percent. Credit: Erich Ferdinand/CC-BY-2.0

But while details of the free trade agreement (FTA) between the European Union and India remain ambiguous to the general public, concerns continue to mount over the effects such a deal could have on an unsuspecting third party: the affordable drug market of the developing world.

Negotiations have been underway for five years, with details on issues such as India’s generic drug market sending delegates from both the EU and India through multiple rounds of deliberations in the hopes of settling on an FTA that would be “mutually beneficial and sustainable”, especially given Europe’s current economic climate.

Finally, the five-year ordeal seems to be moving toward a conclusion, according to the European External Action service.

The latest EU-India summit took place on Feb. 10 and was hailed by José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the European Commission, as a “significant step forward.”

The European Union is already India’s primary trade partner and largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI), according to Barroso.

EU-India trade doubled from 28.6 billion euros in 2003 to more than 67.9 billion euros in 2010, while EU investment has tripled to three billion euros since 2003.

Barroso says the final agreement will be reached in the fall of 2012 and, if passed, would signal the implementation of the largest trade agreement in the world, opening the doors for research and innovation, job creation, and countless business opportunities.

But experts and activists are fiercely opposed to the deal, which they say will stunt the availability of affordable medicine in the developing world.

“Hands off our medicine”

These concerns aren’t new; the issue has been on the radars of several organisations for years, with growing concerns over how the trade agreement is being reached and what it means for organisations who work to supply low-cost medicines to those in need.

As the FTA has evolved, certain measures such as data exclusivity have been taken off the table, though other potentially harmful provisions remain.

Initial opposition to the trade deal centered on issues of intellectual property rights and market access for large European businesses, with the not-for-profit group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) at the helm with a petition to halt the trade agreement altogether.

The petition had the signatures of over 100 organisations as of December 2010, just prior to the 11th EU-India summit.

One of CEO’s biggest concerns is that new trade rules could stall the distribution of generic drugs, thus keeping patented medicine prices high and increasing the overall cost of healthcare for households. According to Oxfam International, generic competition lowers medicine prices by 90-99 percent.

Most significantly, generic competition in India has lowered prices for first line antiretroviral drugs to 100 dollars per year for a single patient, down from 10,000 dollars just 10 years ago for the same treatment.

Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF), an independent international medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid, has also been steering opposition to the FTA’s impact on generic drugs.

The organisation’s campaign called for Europe to keep their “hands off our medicine” and issued a statement outlining risks associated with the widening net of enforcement provisions, which have serious implications for the availability of medicines.

If certain enforcement provisions related to intellectual property are included in the FTA, they could give large pharmaceutical companies the right to sue not only generic drug manufacturers but also generic drug supplies and customers, MSF said.

Such measures could deter treatment providers from buying or supplying generic drugs, leaving the far more expensive brand drugs as the only option for people in desperate need.

The organisation rallied in New Delhi on Feb. 10 along with HIV-positive community members to call attention to the remaining provisions in the FTA that put the generic drug market in serious jeopardy.

Nearly 2,000 people strong, the protests included remarks from Unni Karunakara, the president of MSF, who proclaimed, “We have watched too many people die in places where we work because the medicines they need are too expensive. We cannot allow this trade deal to shut down the pharmacy of the developing world.”

Given that Europe posits itself as a world leader in development aid, the potential hypocrisy of the situation isn’t lost: if these provisions are, in fact, included in the FTA, the EU stands to undermine its own large-scale aid efforts by limiting access to life-saving medications.

Besides the petition, CEO also launched legal action against the European Commission early last year, claiming that corporate lobby groups were given privileged access to information on the EU-India trade talks.

The organisation alleged that 17 documents were released to industrial players but withheld from CEO because it would “undermine the EU’s international relations.”

CEO requested the documents in order to monitor the trade deal, which the organisation believes leans much heavily towards the interests of large corporations at the expense of trade unions, NGOs and small enterprises.

CEO’s Pia Eberhardt said that she expects a hearing within the first half of this year, though no formal date has been set. From that point, it will take roughly six additional months to reach a conclusion.

But while the case circles the justice system, the FTA could slip through the cracks.

Emerging economies China, South Africa and Brazil have indicated their openness to legally-binding carbon emission reduction targets from 2020 during the United Nations climate change summit in Durban, South Africa.

Emerging economies face developmental challenges but are also significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Zukiswa Zimela/IPS

Climate experts say the three countries’ willingness to consider legally binding commitments, even if they will not take immediate effect, was potentially “a great step” to unlock one of the big political issues of this year’s climate change talks.

Only India continues to refuse to commit.

The European Union (EU) proposed a “roadmap” last week, which stipulates that all major economies, including emerging countries like South Africa, Brazil, India and China, generally called the BASIC group – and not only industrialised nations as currently under the Kyoto Protocol – will be subject to legally binding carbon emission targets.

BASIC countries all face developmental challenges but are at the same time significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Major emerging economies and other developing nations already emit more than half of current carbon emissions. Within the next 20 years, they are projected to account for two- thirds.

The 194-nation climate talks, which will wrap up on Dec. 9, are abuzz with speculation on the prospect of emerging economies agreeing on the proposed roadmap.

In a move that surprised many after a tough week of negotiations that brought to the fore deep rifts between different countries’ demands and expectations, China announced for the first time it would accept a legally-binding climate deal after 2020, when current voluntary pledges will run out. After first insisting the demands of the EU roadmap were “too much,” China now seems open to finding a middle ground, especially with Europe.

“But there are pre-conditions,” said China’s top climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua. “A second Kyoto commitment period is a must for rich nations. After (the second period has ended), we need to review what has been done. Based on this assessment can we start negotiating what we shall agree after 2020.”

China laid out five conditions under which it would consider a legally-binding carbon reduction deal. Apart from a second commitment period of carbon-reduction pledges by industrialised nations under the Kyoto Protocol, they include hundreds of billions of dollars in short- and long-term climate financing for developing countries.

China also wants to see the Green Climate Fund signed off during the summit and demands the implementation of a range of agreements outlined at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, which were integrated into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at last year’s climate gathering in Cancun. These include initiatives for technology transfer, adaptation to climate change and new rules for verifying that carbon-cutting promises are kept.

South Africa and Brazil – two countries most vulnerable to the adverse effects of global warming, especially with regards to agriculture and biodiversity – have also shown interest in the roadmap.

South Africa’s Minister of Environment Edna Molewa said the EU roadmap was “seen favourably”, but noted that South Africa would, like China, want to place “conditionalities” on any binding agreements.

“We would like to work towards a legally binding outcome. As South Africa, we’re of the opinion that the seriousness with which we will deal with the level of contributions that South Africa can make in the global arena is understood in the context of articles 4.1 and 2 of the UNFCCC,” confirmed South Africa’s second negotiator Xolisa Ngwadla.

UNFCCC article 4.1 refers to “common and differentiated responsibilities” depending on the gross domestic product (GDP) of each country, while article 2 refers to the stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions at a level that allows ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner – a point important for countries that heavily feel the effects of climate change.

“Our future commitments will also depend on finance, technology transfers and capacity building,” Ngwadla added.

Contrary to South Africa, Brazil said it is not placing any conditions on committing itself to an internationally legally binding instrument to reduce carbon emissions as long as such a treaty helped the fight against climate change based on scientific studies.

“We could agree already today on an internationally legally binding instrument, but not on any. It has to be robust, respond to what science is telling us is needed and therefore something that will make a difference in the fight against climate change,” explained Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, head of Brazil’s delegation. “We would not adapt a legally binding instrument for the sake of it.”

Currently, Brazil has set voluntary carbon reduction targets, which have been passed into national law. Figueiredo said he is aware this commitment will have to increase over time: “We understand that this regime will have to evolve over time. We think voluntary actions alone usually don’t add up to the level of international response that science tells us is needed. We are willing to play our part in the future evolution of the international fight against climate change.”

As part of the Group of 77 and China negotiating bloc, a group of 132 developing countries, Brazil is pushing for the adoption for a second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol before the end of the climate change summit on Dec 9. The country is also lobbying for a sign off of a fully functional Green Climate Fund, which will have short-term and long-term financing mechanisms so that developing nations can adapt to climate change.

Delegates from BASIC countries have repeatedly noted that South-South cooperation is important to them, not only economically but also with regards to decisions made during the climate change summit, and have indicated that they would support each other’s positions.

India, however, the fourth member of the BASIC group, does not seem to fall into line. It has repeatedly expressed its opposition to the EU roadmap, as it is not willing to consider signing a legally binding agreement to cut carbon emissions.

India said it felt implementing its voluntary target of reducing the emission intensity of its GDP growth by 20 percent to 25 percent by 2020, compared to 2005, was sufficient. Having one of the smallest per-capita-carbon footprints in the world, tougher targets weren’t necessary, said India’s lead negotiator J.M. Mauskar: “We are not a major emitter.”

India was only willing to negotiate “mutual reassurances”, he said. “In terms of the Cancun pledges, developing countries’ voluntary pledges by 2020 amount to more mitigation in absolute terms than that of developed countries,” Mauskar further explained, insisting that rich nations, not developing countries and emerging economies must ramp up their commitments.

India has criticised industrialised nations, especially the United States, for not making firm commitments to cutting green house gas emissions. “We are deeply concerned that there has been hardly any progress in achieving a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol,” said Mauskar.

Russia, a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, which belongs with South Africa, China, Brazil and India to the BRICS economic bloc, has blankly refused to consider a second commitment period.

By Kanya D'Almeida
WASHINGTON, Sep 25 2011 (IPS)

Headlines this week have been saturated with protests against unaffordable food, unfair taxes and unsustainable austerity measures, with one distinct difference setting these stories apart from countless others in recent history.

The people demanding reform are no longer marginalised Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, but poor, working class Europeans.

As citizens of Western Europe – particularly in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, or PIGS – flood the streets of their once-stable countries demanding an end to cuts in public education, health care, youth programmes and housing subsidies, the big question at the annual fall convergence of the Bretton Woods Institutions is, “Who will solve the impending crisis in Europe?” Rana Foroohar wrote in Time Magazine last month, “While the crisis appears to be Europe’s problem, if it results in a break-up of the euro zone or a growth-dampening series of costly bailouts, it will reverberate from Beijing to Boston and back.”

“Europe is the largest trading partner of… China. If they stop buying our stuff, everyone suffers. Meanwhile, a dissolution of the union would make nations from Asia to Latin America that hold the Euro as a reserve currency much weaker,” she added.

Small wonder then the world’s leading emerging markets– Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, or BRICS – took centre-stage at the World Bank/International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington this week, discussing everything from possible investment in troubled euro zone sovereign bonds to domestic job creation.

The BRICS possess a combined 4.3 trillion dollars in hard cash reserves, with China holding three-quarters of the kitty, much of it in Euros.

Following the “Lehman Crash” and ensuing financial crisis in 2008, the BRIC countries experienced the fastest rebound, with India and Latin America springing back to life with surprising resilience to the shock waves.

The result has been a shifting of the power relations within the economic arena increasingly towards emerging economies, which will likely account for 60 percent of global economic growth by 2014.

A communiqué issued following a meeting of BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors Thursday expressed a stern warning to the developed world to “adopt responsible macroeconomic and financial policies, avoid creating excessive global liquidity and undertake structural reforms to lift growth”.

Given the fact that nearly every euro zone country has flouted the three-percent annual budget deficit limit and the 60-percent debt-to- GDP ratio, the BRICS’s concern appears to be well founded.

“The BRICS are open to consider, if necessary, providing support through the IMF or other IFI (international financial institution) in order to address the present challenges to global financial stability, depending on individual country circumstances,” the communiqué stated, though it steered clear of hard numbers or blueprints for such actions.

“What everyone has to realise is that we, as a cluster of nations, face an enormous demand for resources at home, particularly in the realm of (poverty reduction),” D. Subbarao, governor of India’s Reserve Bank, told the press on Thursday.

“This causes an incredible amount of tension between allocating money to multilateral institutions for the sake of global stability and meeting stability at home,” he added.

In fact, the Bank’s release Wednesday of a report calling for more and better jobs in South Asia predicted that the region, home to half a billion poor people, will have to generate 1.2 million jobs every month over the next 20 years, equivalent to about 40 percent of the increase in the global labour force, in order to ward off extreme poverty and unemployment.

“Most of us are democracies, so we are constrained by democratic processes of when and how much is given to the (global pool) of monetary reserves,” Subbarao added at the press conference, a likely reference to China as one of the only economic players capable of acting outside of the will of the majority of its people.

Numerous economists have echoed this view, tempering the media speculation that the BRICS will “save the day”.

“When people talk about the BRICS, they really mean China, and to a lesser extent India and Brazil,” Omar Dahi, professor of development economics at Hampshire College, told IPS.

“However, while (these countries) have the clout to be heard on international policy as well as to refuse the impositions of the Quad (the United States, the European Union, Canada and Japan), they do not yet have the ability to reshape international economic policy and certainly not to pull Europe or the U.S. out of its slump.”

“The BRICS are not thinking or speaking in unison,” Susan Schadler, a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and former deputy director of the IMF’s European Department, told IPS.

“I would not look to a large contribution to financing from the BRICS soon. A token contribution is all that is likely in the immediate future. What would be the incentive for the BRICS to expose themselves on a significant scale to the risk inherent in the European situation, when the high saving countries of Europe (such as Germany) are worried about their (own) exposure?” she asked.

Stubborn Inequalities

The dominant view of South-South cooperation indicates that a “shifting of the power relations” will somehow end the legacy of economic hegemony by now waning superpowers.

But discussions between the BRICS this week threw that assumption into question.

Chinese national economist Luo Xiaopeng said earlier this week, “After so many years of humiliation (from Europe), they (are now) kneeling down to beg from us and you cannot underestimate the satisfaction and joy that Chinese politicians derive (from this).”

“If the euro zone collapses because of the (PIGS), it would result in a global financial crisis,” said Yukon Huang, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding that China was unlikely to lend a hand until Europe came up with a solid solution on its own.

“China is not going to put its money into a situation where there are enormous risks and only downsides,” Huang added.

Projections like this suggest that “whatever country or group of countries holds significant shares of global wealth will be driven to preserve their wealth and place in the global economy,” Schadler told IPS.

“I doubt that from the point of view of creating a more equal opportunity for the most and least wealthy countries of the world, having former colonies or developing countries in the driver’s seat will make much difference. The ways in which China has pursued its self interests in establishing its interests in commodity producing countries and resisting calls for ending global imbalances perfectly (encapsulates) this,” she added.

“While increased south-south integration, trade, and foreign direct investment have reduced reliance on Northern markets, it has also led to rising inequalities within the global South as well as tensions between rising powers – China’s presence in Africa is an example of benefits and drawbacks of this cooperation,” Dahi told IPS.

“More broadly, we are witnessing a worldwide crisis of capitalism, and the type of global economy that will emerge is still not clear,” he added.

Excerpt:

Studies by the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Academic Forum on food security issues in the three countries suggest that providing food access works best when backed by cash transfers.

A paper on food security brought out by the UNDP’s Brasilia-based International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG), under the Forum, shows that despite the great strides in food production made by India people in this country are just not eating enough.

Citing indices of the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and International Food Policy Research Institution, the paper shows that India needs to improve on poverty, hunger, nutrient intake and per capita consumption.

Ramesh Chand, director of New Delhi-based National Centre for Agricultural Economics, who was involved in preparing the paper, said the Indian situation calls for a mix of food distribution and cash transfers.

Chand told IPS that India’s decline in cereal production since 1995 is a cause for concern.

“Either we ensure access to nutrition through livestock foods, production of which has increased, or we address the decline in cereal intake by the poor,” says Chand. “Since the markets can’t support this huge intake, I feel a mix of cash and grains is necessary,” explains Chand.

India’s main tool for access to food, besides a mid-day school meal scheme, is its vast targeted public distribution system (TPDS), the world’s largest food distribution mechanism benefiting 160 million families.

Food subsidies in the 2010 – 2011 annual budget saw 14 billion dollars allocated to meet the difference between the actual cost of foodgrains and sale prices fixed under welfare schemes including the TDPS and also to maintain buffers stocks of wheat and rice.

The TPDS, however, is acknowledged, even by the government, to have huge infrastructural and systemic flaws, with significant numbers of the poor being excluded from its subsidy ambit.

P.V. Satheesh, founder of the Deccan Development Society, a voluntary agency which has successfully shown that indigenous grains are an infallible method of addressing overall food security, suggests introducing locally grown millets into India’s PDS.

Currently, the transportation of rice and wheat to all parts of the country in the PDS is expensive, and deterring the production of nutritious millets. Production of white, polished rice is also environmentally destructive, being water and chemical-intensive agriculture.

“Millets address food, health, fodder and livelihoods by being cultivable almost everywhere,” Satheesh explained to IPS.

Brazil-style cash transfers, suggested by the IBSA Academic Forum, are currently controversial in India, with the new Food Security Bill, tabled to be passed in parliament in the coming weeks, recommending it as one of several measures.

A group of research scholars, including prominent development economist Jean Dreze, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, In July, opposing cash transfers as an alternative to the PDS.

“We urge you to ensure that the National Food Security Act includes the strongest possible safeguards against a hasty transition from food entitlements to cash transfers”, the letter requested the prime minister.

“Cash transfers will be a disaster; Brazil’s position is not the same as that of India,” Satheesh told IPS.

As per FAO’s Hunger Map 2010, undernourishment actually increased in India, from 20 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2007, whereas it dropped from 11 percent to six percent in Brazil during the same period. It has remained consistently very low (under five percent) in South Africa.

Brazil’s food security measures are an integrated mix of its zero hunger strategy of over 20 programmes in strengthening access to food, family agriculture and income generation.

One significant strategy has been Brazil’s Food Acquisition Programme (PAA), a system of public procurement and distribution under which food was bought from 138,000 farmers in 2009, and donated to 13 million people. Its budget in 2009 was 300 million dollars.

But Brazil’s proven strongpoint has been its Bolsa Familia (PBF) programme of conditional cash transfers launched in 2003, using over eight billion dollars to reach 12 million households in 2010.

PBF gives monthly cash payments to pre-defined poor families provided they fulfill education and health stipulations, basically related to pre- and postnatal care, school attendance and immunization.

The IBSA paper suggests India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee, ensuring work for pay for rural households, as a feature worth emulating.

In South Africa, as per its General Household Survey 2009, 20 percent of households have inadequate or severely inadequate access to food.

“The largest expenditure is on social welfare programmes, grants and cash transfers which assist in providing people money with which to buy food,” said Josee Koch, contributor to a 2011 policy document by the Wahenga Institute on public support for food security in India, Brazil and South Africa.

“The social grants are critical,” Koch says. “If you look at an analysis of what poor households spend on food, it’s between 50 to 70 percent of income that goes towards food. With rising food prices, there is little chance that this proportion will drop.”

There is debate in South Africa over the sustainability of grants, with concerns raised over the large number of recipients against the size of the workforce whose taxes must support them.

In contrast, Brazil’s Interministerial Chamber on Food and National Security and the National Council of Food and Nutritional Security, both at high political levels, have been significantly effective in a co-ordinated effort at all the related indices to food security.

India, says the IBSA paper, can in turn offer its experience in consolidating a rights-based approach to food security.

Indian civil society’s Right to Food Campaign has used the courts to guarantee basic entitlements.

*With reporting by Terna Gyuse in Cape Town

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 29 2011 (IPS)

A scientific alliance in which developing countries are playing a key role has taken on the challenge of producing paediatric AIDS drugs, an area that is no longer a priority for pharmaceutical companies because mother-to-child transmission of HIV has virtually been eliminated in the industrialised world.

HIV-positive children in Muhanga, a village in Rwanda. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

The programme will focus exclusively on developing child-adapted formulations for children under three, the most neglected segment in terms of availability of ARVs. The DNDi hopes to have new paediatric-specific medicines available between 2014 and 2016.

DNDi Executive Director Dr. Bernard Pécoul told IPS from Geneva that because mother-to-child HIV transmission has practically been eliminated in developed countries due to effective prevention, “there is little incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop children’s formulas” of ARVs.

The great majority of children living with HIV are in poor or developing countries, and their families cannot afford costly medications, added the head of the DNDi, which was created in 2003 by public-sector research organisations from four developing countries and France; Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF); and the UNDP/World Bank/WHO’s Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, which acts as a permanent observer.

The public sector institutions are the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation from Brazil, the Indian Council for Medical Research, the Kenya Medical Research Institute, the Ministry of Health of Malaysia, and France’s Pasteur Institute.

Of the more than 2.5 million children under the age of 15 currently living with HIV around the world, 92 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to WHO (World Health Organization).

But only 28 percent of the children in urgent need of ARVs have access to the treatment, says UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS).

Without treatment, one-third of them die in the first year of life, half of them before the age of two, and 80 percent before the age of five.

Although WHO recommends immediate treatment for children under two, the safety and correct dosing of key ARVs have not been established in very young children, Pécoul said.

“This is where DNDi can play a crucial role,” Leena Menghaney, a lawyer working with MSF in India, told IPS.

In India, a country of 1.1 billion people, 403,567 adults and 25,071 children were living with HIV as of June.

“DNDi’s entry into the field of paediatric drug development was after an R&D needs assessment which showed how children living with HIV/AIDS are a neglected population. In addition, in the developing world, patents on AIDS medicines are hampering the creation of paediatric versions,” she added.

Menghaney described children living with HIV/AIDS as an “afterthought” for pharmaceutical companies.

To illustrate the problem, Pécoul cited the use, in poor areas, of a fixed-dose combination of stavudine (d4T), lamivudine (3TC) and nevirapine (NVP).

The first, d4T, is no longer preferred due to its toxicity, and NVP is not recommended in children who were exposed to it in the womb, during treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission, since the virus could have developed resistance to the medication.

The director of DNDi also cited other problems, like the “unpalatable taste” of many ARVs, which make it difficult for caregivers to administer them to young children.

Determining and administering weight-adjusted doses of liquid ARVs for children is a complex task

Another difficulty faced by doctors is managing interactions between anti-tuberculosis medications and ARVs.

Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection rates are high in Africa – up to 80 percent in some countries – and tuberculosis is one of the main causes of death among children and adults living with HIV, said Pécoul.

These problems are all too familiar to Janice Wanja, a nurse at Afya Clinic in the heart of the Dandora slum on the east side of Nairobi.

There are other challenges in Kenya too. For instance, the stigma surrounding HIV in that country has meant that a majority of parents and guardians of HIV-positive children have not told them their status.

“Most children are not told their status. This makes them take their medication less seriously,” Wanja explained.

The WHO indicates that “informing older children of their diagnosis of HIV improves adherence” to antiretroviral treatment.

Government statistics estimate that of the 1.4 million people living with HIV in Kenya, a country of 41 million people, 180,000 are children. But only 40,000 – a mere 22 percent – have access to ARVs.

And 90 percent of HIV infections in children in Kenya are from mother-to-child transmission.

Another challenge in treating HIV-positive children is malnutrition, a problem that has gotten worse in recent months in Kenya and other countries facing drought and food shortages in East Africa.

“For children who are malnourished, the nutrition status may discourage the health care worker from providing drugs to the child,” Dr. Lucy Matu from the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation explained to IPS.

In Brazil, another of the DNDi partner countries, which has a population of 192 million, a total of 592,914 cases of full-blown AIDS were reported between 1980 and June 2010. In 2009, 38,538 new cases were reported.

The number of HIV/AIDS cases among children under five dropped 50 percent in a decade, from 954 in 1999 to 468 in 2010.

An estimated 0.4 percent of pregnant women in Brazil are living with HIV, and an average of 12,456 newborns are exposed to the virus every year. But thanks to prevention measures, only 6.8 percent of them are infected with HIV, according to the latest epidemiological bulletin, which cites figures dating back to 2004.

And the authorities report that in areas where all mother-to-child transmission prevention measures were followed, the rate fell to just two percent in 2009.

The DNDi programme is working to come up with a new first-line paediatric HIV therapy that is easy to administer and better tolerated by children than current drugs, as well as heat stable (important for tropical climates), easily dispersible, and dosed once daily or less.

It must also carry minimal risk for developing resistance and be suitable for infants and very young children, with minimum requirements for weight adjustments. Finally, any new formulations must be compatible with anti-tuberculosis drugs, and, importantly, affordable.

The DNDi has already developed medication for neglected diseases like sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, Chagas’ disease and malaria.

* With reporting by Miriam Gathigah in Nairobi and Ranjit Devraj in New Delhi.

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Aug 25 2011 (IPS)

Armed with a smile, Don Marut exposes the pitfalls of Western aid to developing countries. At a conference here, the Indonesian recalled the story of how 40 electric-train carriages were sent from Germany to his country for a journey to nowhere.

The second-hand carriages, it turned out, were unsuited for Indonesia’s network of narrow-gauge tracks.

Purchased from Germany under a “tied aid” scheme in 2004 the rolling-stock, built for broad-gauge rails, lies rusting in a corner of Jakarta’s railway station, though it was part of a World Bank-backed railway efficiency project.

Marut has other stories to fault “tied aid”, “a euphemism for the stringent conditions that developing nations have to accept in order to receive a ‘development’ loan from a Western country.

“We have received a warship and sea patrol boats from the West that cannot be used in our waters,” adds the executive director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID), a Jakatra-based umbrella group of non-governmental organisations that plays watchdog roles.

Such strings under the guise of a ‘development’ agreement have been a regular ruse for richer nations to “use aid to relocate unused technology,” Marut explained, after addressing the conference on aid and development.

“This cannot go on. We are supporting the aid business that is driven by the need for job security among donor agencies,” Marut said.

Marut’s arguments have long been voiced by activists across developing Asia, but countries that have monopolised development aid cannot now afford to ignore them.

Analysts say the arrival of non-Western players like China, and increasingly India, offering millions of dollars in official development assistance (ODA) with no strings attached, is transforming the aid industry.

Consequently, countries like Sri Lanka in South Asia, and Cambodia, Laos and Burma in Southeast Asia, do not have Western doors to knock on, cap in hand; they have these new ODA players to turn to.

Little wonder why a conference in Busan – South Korea’s second largest metropolis – later this year is creating a buzz among activists and analysts of development aid trends.

They regard the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF), from Nov. 29 to Dec.1, as a watershed for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a largely Western, rich-man’s club that has shaped the politics of development aid for decades.

“The OECD’s legitimacy is being challenged by the new donors, especially China and India in Asia, and Brazil in Latin America,” says Antonio Tujan, international director of IBON International, a Manila- based network of grassroots groups drawn from the global south.

“The global economic crisis has added to the OECD’s woes, challenging its existence,” Tujan said.

OECD knows that “developing countries can go to China if they don’t want to accept the traditional aid conditions,” Tujan told IPS. “The Busan meeting will be an OECD-led process but it will mark the crossroads of the changing development landscape.”

The South-South ODA includes China’s contribution of 2.5 billion dollars in 2009 and India’s 547 million dollars in 2008, against the total world aid package of 140 billion dollars in 2009.

However, figures monitored by New York University’s Wagner School of Chinese aid, estimates China’s contribution to be much larger at 27.5 billion dollars in 2006 and 25 billion dollars in 2007.

The university’s figures are based on media reports, but are corroborated by ‘South-South Cooperation: A Challenge to the Aid System’, a publication by IBON, which speaks of a “dramatic increase in Chinese aid and related investments” amounting to 27.5 billion dollars in 2006 and 25 billion dollars in 2007.

“There appears to be consensus that Chinese aid is substantial and increasing in recent years,” the IBON publication says.

Africa remains the main target of Chinese largesse, with the continent receiving over 45 percent of Beijing’s assistance. India has divided its assistance between South Asian nations like Bhutan and Afghanistan and African nations such as Sudan and Ethiopia.

China’s contribution of aid, development assistance and trade in Cambodia, a country still struggling to develop after a 1991 peace accord ended two decades of conflict and genocide, illustrates the speed with which the South-South development cooperation trend is eroding the monopoly of Western donors.

Beijing pumped in 850 million dollars for 14 dam and infrastructure deals in 2008, a dramatic increase from the 45 million dollars it invested in Cambodia in 2003.

Such financial backing has emboldened Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, as also the leaders of other Asian and African countries receiving Chinese help, which comes with few strings attached. Hun Sen now stares down the World Bank and traditional OECD donor countries that insist on conditions like better governance.

“China and India have entered this field with foreign policy and strategic interests in mind,” Kavaljit Singh, director of the Public Interest Research Centre, a New Delhi-based think tank, told IPS. “China wants to get natural resources in return for infrastructure investments, while India wants to secure geo- political returns – a greater voice in the international community.”

Yet, neither Beijing nor New Delhi has revealed what role they intend playing at the Busan meeting, where the South Korean government is under pressure from the OECD countries to have the two Asian giants fall in line with the OECD-led development aid model.

“This is one of the most important political agendas happening behind the scene,” Anselmo Lee, a ranking member of the Korea Civil Society Forum on International Development Cooperation, told IPS.

“They (OECD) want India and China and Brazil because they are aware of their diminishing legitimacy and influence globally,” he added. “The OECD doesn’t feel comfortable with the competition from the South.”

Excerpt:

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, Jul 20 2011 (IPS)

South African companies are being urged to use the leverage of its government’s strong political relationship with India to develop new business and investment opportunities.

Now a member of the BRICS emerging economies grouping alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China, South Africa, is in a strong position, experts believe, to enhance its South-South co-operation.

Trade volumes between South Africa and India doubled from 2007 to 2010, with India becoming South Africa’s sixth-largest destination for exports and its ninth-largest source for imports.

South Africa’s minister of trade and industry, Rob Davies, said he believes there is huge potential for furthering mutually beneficial trade exchange and increasing investment channels between South Africa and India.

Speaking at the launch of the India Africa Business Network (IABN) at the University of Pretoria Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), Davies, said world trade patterns were changing and that South Africa was in a good position to seize new opportunities.

“The African continent is now in a fortunate position where there is now a diversity of trade and investment partners,” he told an audience of Indian and South African business leaders and bankers at the GIBS Sandton campus in Johannesburg.

“No longer are we confined in terms of trade and investment to the old powers that we used to know in the past,” he said.

“We now have broader opportunities, particularly from BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries being here on the African continent, and India is of course among them.”

He added: “There’s a very solid commitment from the South African government and our institutions to support South African businesses in becoming more involved in India.”

The minister welcomed the IABN as a way to help grow business relations and address what he called a “mindset issue” relating to how South African companies could position themselves better among dynamic markets.

The IABN will be run out of GIBS’ newly-formed Centre for Dynamic Markets (CDM) and will complement existing networks such as IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) and the India and South Africa CEOs forum co-chaired by leading Indian industrialist Ratan Tata and Patrice Motsepe, executive-chairman of Africa Rainbow Minerals.

The new network’s founder and director, Abdullah Verachia, described IABN as a “knowledge hub for India-Africa commerce” promoting exchange between business leaders and educational institutions in both countries.

He said: “We want to provide a forum where senior South African and Indian government and business leaders can meet and interact so as to increase trade and investment between the two economies.

“There are incredible opportunities for South African businesses in India, which has a population in excess of one billion. The two countries are also on the first tier of emerging market economies and both face similar challenges of poverty and inequality.”

He agreed with Davies that the political foundations that united the two countries through their anti- colonial struggles provided a strong platform for economic engagement.

“It is now how we leverage that that counts,” noted Verachia, who is also a director at the Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory strategy and research company.

Indian investment in South Africa is estimated to be more than six billion dollars with several major Indian multinationals such as Tata, Reliance, and Mahindra and Mahindra having established a firm foothold in the local market place.

This week Tata is due to begin construction on a vehicle assembly plant in Rosslyn, outside Pretoria.

Although details are being kept firmly under wraps until the launch on Jul 22, the factory is believed to be the first of its kind in South Africa and will assemble pre-manufactured parts to produce light commercial vehicles, which are currently imported into the country.

India’s High Commissioner in South Africa, Virender Gupta, told IPS: “Tata has been importing vehicles to South Africa for a long time and it was the logical step to start manufacturing here.

“It’s a very significant development and I would really like more Indian companies to go that route, of creating manufacturing facilities and jobs here in Africa.”

South African investment in India is so far only at around the 250 million dollar mark, spearheaded by SABmiller, First Rand (the first African bank to get an operating license in Africa) and Airports Company South Africa, which won a lucrative contract to rehabilitate Mumbai Airport.

Verachia said the aim of the IABN was to help address that imbalance and help more small and medium South African businesses find their way into the Indian market.

“If you look at Indian investment coming to South Africa, it is in a second wave through smaller businesses, and we as South Africans need to look at that see how we can take advantage of similar opportunities in India,” he explained.

Davies said that mutually beneficial trade was South Africa’s key objective going forward and that greater engagement with emerging economies gave them an “historic opportunity to create new patterns of trading”.

“The dialogue we are having at the moment is looking at the areas where we are directly competitive and those where we are complementary,” he explained.

“The questions are, can we not identify the complementary areas and prioritise those and so contribute to both growth and employment in both of our countries?”

Davies said South Africa currently exported primary or scrap products like coal and wood pulp, while India exported value-added items like petroleum oils, cars, pharmaceuticals and mobile phones.

“We need to find a balance between competiveness and co-operation,” he said, something he believed the Cape to Cairo Free Trade Area would help achieve, as it would create a larger single market of Africa nearer in size to other BRIC economies.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 15 2011 (IPS)

Some Indians and Africans believe Africa is on the verge of becoming a world economic power, but changes are needed to ensure that the continent takes up its rightful place in the global economy. From India’s perspective, South Africa is vital to its engagement with the continent.

Paul Baloyi, chief executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, says African governments are under pressure to deliver services. Credit: Tinus de Jager/IPS

Dhawan was speaking at the “India, South Africa and Africa in a Changing Global Landscape” conference in Johannesburg. The South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) hosted the conference on Jun. 9-10. SAIIA is a think tank attached to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Dhawan says confidence also plays a big part in filling big shoes on the global stage. “So when you host a successful Soccer World Cup, why do you allow the world to forget about it one year later? Keep on celebrating and marketing the country’s capabilities,” the Tata executive said. “Being good is one thing; being seen is quite another.”

Eltie Links, a member of SAIIA’s national council, agrees Africa is on the brink of an economic take-off due to perceptions that the continent is changing, for the good. “Optimism around this (economic) growth is apparent. Africans are investing in other African countries and that shows that investors believe in their own futures. The fact is that Africans will remain crucial in their own future.”

Links says India can and must play a large part in lifting Africa out of the economic doldrums. “Both Africa and India share a common colonial history. That gives them a platform to build from. Now, however, with constant talks among African countries and India, there is a new narrative that can change the lives of the poor on the continent and in India.

“Over and above that there needs to be changes in the developed world as well to facilitate these changes in the third world,” he adds.

Virendra Gupta, the High Commissioner of India to South Africa, reiterates “the need for faster action from both the continent and India to work together to bring about positive changes in the lives of the poor.

“The relationship between India and Africa must be approached as part of the changing global context. Developing countries have a unique opportunity to contribute to various international organisations, like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.

“Developing countries have weathered the storm of the global economic crisis well, in some cases better that in the developed world, and this is being underlined by their growth figures. Africa’s voice is now being heard and the countries that make up the continent are becoming more assertive. They are becoming part of the discussions that affect their future,” Gupta said.

“It is becoming more difficult to make decisions that affect the third world without having its inputs in these decisions. Again, this is showing that all countries deserve attention.”

Gupta declares that India is looking at South Africa to anchor its involvement on the African continent.

A roadmap to economic engagement, grants and technical assistance is in place. India does not see aid as a priority. “We are more interested in capacity building and developing the human resources of South Africa,” Gupta contends. “India does not want to dictate policy, economic or political. It was colonised as well and it understands the dynamics involved.”

But Gupta also believes changes are needed: “Government will have to change economic policy to help more than just a few.”

Paul Baloyi, chief executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, agrees that time is running out to help poor people. Institutions in South Africa, but also on the rest of the continent, are under pressure to deliver.

“Statistics show that there is more stability on the African continent than in the past and people are more positive. The improvements are small, however, and poverty and the redistribution of wealth remain key issues on the continent.

“In South Africa, executives realise that time is running out to deliver services to previously disadvantaged people. There is a lot of planning taking place, but, because this is not known, people are getting more and more restless.

“What is not needed now is a change of government, as this will throw service delivery back to where it was years ago as the new government will start from scratch. What government needs is a long quiet time to implement its plans.” South Africa held local government elections in May that showed a growth in opposition party support.

Baloyi acknowledges that Africa’s natural resources are the rationale for most of the interest from outside the continent. He cautions that African states should, however, be careful to ensure that benefits accrue to both sides. “International relations are an opportunity for both sides; to gain resources on the one hand, but also to gain skills on the other.

“The size of Africa’s population is another opportunity. The question is, ‘how do you use this market?’ South Africa’s middle class is growing, which means its spending power is growing and that is driving economic development.”

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By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 15 2011 (IPS)

Cooperation between India and Brazil in pharmaceuticals and medical biotechnology has begun to falter, because Indian authorities would rather collaborate with western counterparts than those in developing countries, new research shows.

As a result, cooperation between the two countries, once touted as capable of solving public health problems in the developing world, has failed to come up with marketable products.

The study by the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a publicly funded think tank based in New Delhi, cited as a reason for product failure the lingering perception in concerned Indian ministries and departments that “collaboration with the North (referring to developed countries) is much more valuable than South-South collaboration.”

India lags far behind Brazil and China in the number of papers co-authored with scientists from developing countries, in spite of frequently heard Indian rhetoric over the importance of South-South collaboration.

“India has to put its money where its mouth is in order for collaborations to succeed,” said Sachin Chaturvedi, a senior fellow at RIS who led the study. “This means that key ministries and agencies, especially the Department of Biotechnology, must genuinely ‘de-West’ themselves and start seeing the real potential of South-South collaborations.”

Leena Menghaney, a lawyer working with the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines of the non- government organisation Médecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) told IPS concerned ministries in both India and Brazil need to build innovative mechanisms to facilitate access and sharing of products and technologies with developing countries.

“Particularly, these two emerging countries must steer away from the disadvantages of the northern intellectual property (IP) system which has traditionally been associated with blocking access not only to medicines and diagnostics but research tools as well,” she said.

The study, which is due for release this week, said India-Brazil collaborations have given Indian pharmaceutical firms increased market access in Brazil, as well as in other Latin American countries. The Brazilian market alone is expected to reach a value of 18.3 billion dollars by 2012.

A significant impact of the India-Brazil health biotech collaboration has been increased availability of cost-effective health products. Indian biotech firms have proven their abilities in process innovation, lowering the prices of such products as the vaccine against Hepatitis B.

Brazilian firms could also contribute cost-effective health products to the Indian market, given proper official support. In Brazil, for example, diagnostic kits for AIDS and leishmaniasis (a disease caused by a parasite spread by sand flies) are available at prices 30 to 40 percent lower than in India.

“Research collaboration has the potential to make these technologies available to the public in a way that would increase accessibility through affordability,” said Chaturvedi, adding however that poor product development was denying the public such benefits.

For instance, a leishmaniasis kit, ready in 2003 with the technology transferred to the Brazilian Centro de Produção e Pesquisa de Imunobiológicos (CPPI or Centre for Research in Immunological Products) in Parana State, is only now being adapted in India. A tuberculosis diagnostic kit developed in Brazil has also met a similar fate.

A joint team from the CPPI and the Jamnalal Bajaj Tropical Disease Research Centre (JBTDRC) at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences at Sevagram in India is now working to produce TB and leishmaniasis kits suited for India.

The RIS study said the driving force behind successful joint venture deals between Indian and Brazilian pharmaceutical firms has been a desire to tap the large Latin American markets.

“India’s success has depended on an ability to provide high quality drugs and intermediates at cost- effective prices,” Chaturvedi said. “The focus for now is on importation and marketing in Brazil, although research and development are on the cards for the future.”

Indian participation in Brazil began in 1997 when then Brazilian health minister Jose Serra invited Indian companies to invest in his country and use it as a production hub for pharmaceuticals rather than as a mere export destination.

Ten years later, however, Brazil increased import duties on pharmaceutical products, making it difficult for Indian firms to rely solely on exporting their products to Brazil, pushing them to set up local operations or go into collaborations.

Yet, Indian pharmaceuticals in Brazil have expanded over the last decade. In 1999, India’s pharmaceutical exports to Brazil were worth seven million dollars, but by the end of the decade, the figure had grown to 115 million dollars.

Items exported by India to Brazil include antibiotics, vitamins, corticosteroids, vaccines, reagents and surgical instruments.

Brazil accounts for roughly three percent of India’s total pharmaceutical exports, which in 2010 stood at nine billion dollars. India is the world’s fourth largest exporter in terms of volume.

The RIS study quoted an Indian entrepreneur saying that collaborations with Brazil were catalysed by the promulgation of Brazilian rules promoting the manufacture of generics.

Indian entrepreneurs employed a variety of strategies to penetrate the Brazilian market, ranging from setting up manufacturing plants to forging joint venture alliances, and pursuing acquisitions and mergers.

For example, the Indian company Glenmark acquired the Brazilian firm Laboratories Klinger in 2004, and set up a subsidiary in Brazil. Indian companies with subsidiaries in Brazil include Cellopharm, one of the fastest growing firms in the generics field with business valued at 98 million dollars.

India-Brazil entrepreneurial linkages cover various high-tech areas. Brazil, for example, has emerged as a major centre for organ transplants requiring immunosuppressant drugs which Indian companies like Biocon have readily supplied.

India and Brazil became natural partners in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, especially when multinational companies all but abandoned research for newer drugs for TB and malaria pandemics.

To be truly meaningful, Menghaney said, collaboration between India and Brazil must, in addition to generics, take on the production of drugs against infectious diseases urgently needed in developing countries.

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By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 24 2011 (IPS)

Of the various cooperation programmes Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced in Addis Ababa on Tuesday, plans for an India-Africa Virtual University (IAVU) take pride of place.

Tata scholars at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Credit: Tata Holdings Africa

An additional 700 million dollars were pledged by Singh for building new institutions and devising training programmes on the continent, an Indian government website said. IAVU follows the huge success of the Pan-African e-Network Project, and Singh said the initiative would help spur demand in Africa for higher studies in Indian institutions.

“We further propose that 10,000 new scholarships under this proposed university will be available for African students after its establishment,” he said.

The Pan-African e-Network has already created satellite-linked infrastructure that has brought modern e-governance, distance education and tele-medicine services to scores of African states with support from Indian universities and top-notch hospitals.

Singh said that through the grant of scholarships, his government wanted to make education in India an “enriching experience” for students from Africa.

“We are substantially raising the number of scholarships and training slots for African students and experts, including under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme,” he said.

India’s top Africa experts said there was method in Singh’s choice of strategies to engage Africa.

“Pretty obviously India cannot focus on areas like infrastructure, where China has distinct advantages, but India is an acknowledged power in information technology (IT) on which it can safely leverage its Africa strategy,” said H.H.S. Viswanathan, a former career diplomat who is now a distinguished fellow at the independent Organiser Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Viswanathan, who has served as Indian envoy to various African countries, told IPS that in the 1970s and 1980s a large number of Indian teachers and doctors went to African countries under government programmes, a fact not well-known today. “This is remembered gratefully by the present generation of African leaders,” he said.

Right from the first India-Africa Summit, held in New Delhi in 2008, there was focus on the human resource development sector, Vishwanthan said. “It is only logical to be consolidating this approach now.”

Singh announced plans to establish an India-Africa University for Life and Earth Sciences and an India- Africa Institute of Agriculture and Rural Development. An India-Africa Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting will harness satellite technology for the agriculture and fisheries sectors as well as contribute towards disaster preparedness and management of natural resources.

There will soon be an India-Africa Food Processing Cluster and an India-Africa Integrated Textiles, both of which will help create regional and export markets, according to Singh’s announcement.

India’s focus on training was already apparent at a trade ministers’ meet in Addis Ababa on May 21 that was designed to inform the summit three days later.

Earlier, Sanjay Kirloskar, chairman of the Africa Committee of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which is taking a lead role at the Forum, said Indian companies were focusing on developing “job ready” manpower in Africa through skill development and capacity-building initiatives.

Kirloskar told IPS that training programmes run by Indian companies were “aligned with local business operations” so that “Africans can learn on the job and then run the projects by themselves.”

He said Indian companies have initiated educational and training programmes that address the broader needs of society through scholarships as well as entrepreneurship development programmes. “This is truly a South-South relationship,” he said.

An example would be the Indian conglomerate Tata, which has established major businesses in African countries that are involved in such diverse sectors as steel-making, automobiles, IT and telecom, and has several well acclaimed capacity-building programmes. Tata vice-president for new business initiatives Vikas Gadre told IPS his company found it practical and profitable to build large skilled manpower bases empowering African technical and managerial personnel to run Tata outfits.

“It is initiatives of this type that are winning applause both for Tata and for India from Africa’s leaders,” Gadre said.

Vishwanathan said private sector participation is important considering that the vast majority of African states are now multi-party democracies that hold free and fair elections. “This helps India engage Africa politically and economically.”

Trade between India and Africa climbed to 46 billion dollars last year and is expected to reach 70 billion dollars by 2015.

Indian private sector entrepreneurs have by now invested over 25 billion dollars in sectors such as IT, farm equipment, automobiles and agriculture in several major African countries.

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By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA, India, May 23 2011 (IPS)

When it comes to sports, India has always cheered for Brazil in soccer. Now come another three cheers, this time for South Africa in cricket. The reason: a South African named Gary Kirsten who coached India to win the Cricket World Cup this year, for the first time in 28 years.

Kirsten is back home in South Africa, now that the 2011 Cricket World Cup is over, but parting with his Indian fans and teammates was not easy. “It has been one of the hardest goodbyes I have had to say,” Kirsten told journalists before he left.

It is here, on the field and on the street that ideas about IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) are coming alive.

Kiran More, former Indian cricketer and chief of national selectors, says what Kirsten brought to Indian cricket and its team is incomparable, and he could do so because he understood the culture of the country.

“He is from South Africa and there are lots of Indians living there. So he knew our culture and he did a wonderful job,” says More, speaking to IPS. “He now enjoys the highest respect from Indians. Gary has his own style of functioning and the way he handled the senior players is praiseworthy.”

Kirsten has made South Africa a focus of adulation in cricket, which people here liken to a religion. South Africa will now share centre stage with Brazil, the country Indians root for when it comes to soccer.

During soccer World Cup games, the soccer mania turns violent, as in the clashes of the fans of two archrival clubs – East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. But Brazil unites the people when it comes to international soccer and World Cup allegiance.

In India’s eastern city Kolkata, the palette of soccer is yellow-green, the colours of Brazil. Barring the hysteria over Argentina’s Diego Maradona, the West Bengal state of 90 million people of which Kolkata is the capital, soccer fans live, drink and sleep Brazil during the World Cup games.

A walk down the streets of Kolkata during the World Cup will be like strolling down the streets of Rio de Janeiro, as the walls are covered in graffiti of yellow-green and Brazilian soccer stars.

It is not just the walls. During the World Cup and on the days of Brazil’s encounters in the field, youngsters paint their faces yellow and green, gripped by the Samba fever.

A famous visit by Brazilian soccer legend Pele in 1977 is still etched in the memory of every Kolkatan— from the fans to the soccer players of the town then who recall those emotional moments more than 34 years ago.

In 2006, Brazilian Carlos Roberto Pereira Da Silva was appointed the head coach of Kolkata’s glamour outfit East Bengal. Djair Miranda Garcia, a Brazilian, is now physical coach of another famous soccer outfit of India—the Chirag United Sports Club.

But India wants more and has formally requested Brazil to send soccer coaches for the development of football in India. When Brazil’s foreign minister Antonio Patriota met his Indian counterpart S. M. Krishna in New Delhi in March this year, the latter asked him to send coaches to India for training players here.

They even issued a joint statement that said, “The Ministers reiterated the need for enhancing cooperation in sports under the MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) signed in February 2008 between India and Brazil and welcomed the initiative to celebrate the decade of sports in Brazil. They also welcomed the proposal of sending football coaches to India for training of Indian players.”

Former football player and now expert commentator Prasun Banerjee says “Only a Brazilian can take Indian soccer forward. It is because we are both skill-based and we have many things in common.

“No other country can help us more in soccer than Brazil,” Banerjee adds. “We need Brazilian coaches. Our food habits are similar – Bengalis are sold on fish and rice— while we genuinely love Brazil.”

Aside from common food preferences, soccer experts attribute this affinity to the physical similarity between the players of Brazil and India.

With South Africa, that affinity is cultural. Cricket pundits feel Kirsten successfully coached India owing to the understanding of Indian culture, something he perhaps imbibed from the large Indian diaspora in South Africa.

Kirsten himself was effusive about the victory and the love he received from India.

“I’m very grateful to have played a part in this victory, which means so much to all of India,” he says. “The past three years have been a privilege for me as I have learned about India and got to know not only the talented cricketers but also the many, many wonderful people I have met over this time.”

Now, it is not just trade and commerce, but sports as well, that binds the people of India with South Africa and Brazil, like they do in few other countries.

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 19 2011 (IPS)

Since the election of Camille Gutt of Belgium as the first managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) back in 1946, the Europeans have continued to claim that job as their political and intellectual birthright.

Outgoing IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accused of sexually assaulting a maid in a New York hotel. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

The resignation Thursday of the current IMF chief, Dominique Strauss- Kahn of France, following allegations of rape in a New York hotel room last week, has triggered speculation about another European for one of the most powerful jobs in international finance.

As things stand, one of the front-runners for the job is the current Finance Minister of France Christine Lagarde, who could well be the first woman to run the Washington-based IMF, if she is elected to succeed the departing Strauss-Kahn.

James A. Paul, executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS the resignation of Strauss-Kahn offers an important moment of opportunity.

“At last there is the possibility that the chief of the IMF might be drawn from somewhere other than Europe and selected in a transparent way,” he said.

The international financial institutions (IFI) have always been long the captives of the United States and Europe, with candidates chosen far from the public eye, said Paul.

“Like the (U.N.) Security Council, the IFIs reflect an outworn geopolitics and an outworn geo-economy,” he said.

In the 1940s, the United States and Europe struck a “gentleman’s agreement” that while the IMF managing director will necessarily be from Europe, the president of the World Bank will be a U.S. national.

In contrast, the post of secretary-general of the United Nations has been rotating among regional groups: Europe (Norway, Sweden and Austria have held the job since 1946), Africa (Egypt and Ghana), Asia (Burma and South Korea) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Peru).

Paul said that several names have been put forward – promising new leadership from Turkey, South Africa, India, etc.

“Yet suddenly we are told that Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, is the front-runner for the job,” he noted.

True, it would be an important step forward to have a woman leader of the Fund – and all the more so, in light of Strauss-Kahn’s abysmal record on gender equality, said Paul.

“But surely it is time to have a serious process of selection in place, a process that will give due consideration to candidates from all the world’s regions, not just anoint a pre-cooked candidate in the same old way,” he said.

Let the Board take this process seriously and democratically, said Paul, and let women candidates get every consideration, “but let us not fall back on the old formulas of Western domination in a world that has moved on”.

The Europeans who are staking the claim for the job say the IMF needs a European to resolve the spreading economic crisis in Europe.

Strauss-Kahn was involved in overseeing the 141-billion-dollar bailout loans to Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Chakravarthi Raghavan, a veteran journalist who has covered the United Nations both in New York and Geneva for several decades, refuses to buy that argument.

“As for the EU argument that they need one of their kind because of the spreading economic crisis in Europe?, it is (really) a valid reason for having a non-European to head the IMF, and steer the international monetary and financial system safely through this crisis,” he said.

In the 1980s, he said, when restructuring and democratising international institutions was very much on the agenda, the United States and Europe used to argue that since the developing countries are borrowers, they can’t be allowed to control the bank.

“This logic applies here. No European should be allowed to head the IMF,” said Raghavan, a former chief editor of the Geneva-based South- North Development Monitor and editor of Third World Economics.

In fact, the rescue packages for Europe are turning out to be efforts to protect the interests of the French and German banks, who are the major creditors, as bondholders, of Greece, Spain, and Portugal, he pointed out.

“And probably British banks are the creditors of Ireland (that has guaranteed the private bank debts),” he added.

“I am not sure about the chances of the various candidates for any of them to prevail. But the developing countries have to stand together,” said Raghavan.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a U.N. diplomat told IPS: “The Europeans have indicated they would like to keep the job. So they have no plans to let go off their hold on the IMF.”

It will be difficult for the emerging world to stake a claim if the Europeans take this approach, he said. This is especially so as Europe, the United States and Japan hold the majority of voting shares.

That is not to say that there are no capable candidates from the strongest emerging economies, he added.

“I am sure that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) or others can put up good candidates, if they want to,” he said.

But if Europe wants to retain its hold on the top job, and they have cited their current financial and economic difficulties as a reason for wanting to make sure they have the job – needing someone sympathetic to their plight – than it is going to be difficult for the Asians, Africans or Latin Americans to get it, he added.

Traditionally, the IMF head is elected by the 187 members of the institution.

The winner must obtain 85 percent of the votes. But the voting power is concentrated among the top contributors to the IMF, including the United States (16.7 percent), Japan (6.0 percent), Germany (5.8 percent), UK (4.8 percent), France (4.8 percent), China (3.6 percent) and Italy (3.2 percent).

So, in effect, the Europeans have command of the majority voting powers.

Meanwhile, a global coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is calling for an open and transparent process in the election of the IMF head and a break in the European monopoly.

The campaigners, including the Bretton Woods Project, ActionAid, Oxfam, and Eurodad, want “a fair, transparent and merit-based process for the selection of the next head of the IMF”.

Oxfam spokesperson Elizabeth Stuart said, “The only way to give the new IMF head legitimacy and authority is through open voting, with the winner backed by a majority of countries, not just a majority of shares.”

Strauss-Kahn was expected to continue his term of office until 2012.

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