Participants taking part in the colloquium "The role of communication in the challenge of South-South cooperation", organised in Buenos Aires by Inter Press Service (IPS) Latin America, within the framework of the Second High-Level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 24 2019 (IPS)

Communication can be a key tool for the development of cooperation among the countries of the global South, but the ever closer relations between them do not receive the attention they deserve from the media.

This conclusion arose from the meeting organised by Inter Press Service (IPS) Latin America in Buenos Aires on Mar. 22, during the third and final day of the Second High-Level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation, which brought together representatives of almost 200 countries in the Argentine capital.

“The role of communication in the challenge of South-South cooperation” was the colloquium that brought together journalists, political analysts and officials from international organisations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia."There is little coverage on what progress has been made in trade, technology or health cooperation among the countries of the South, which may seem very different among themselves but are quite similar in terms of their needs." -- Mario Lubetkin

The colloquium, organised by the regional branch of the international news agency IPS, was one of the parallel meetings to the conference and the only one dedicated to communication.

“Forty years ago, when the first conference, also held in Buenos Aires, approved the Plan of Action that forms the basis of South-South Ccoperation, there was awareness that communication was key,” said Mario Lubetkin, assistant director-general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“However, that notion has been lost and communication has not kept up with the changes that have taken place since then. This creates a vacuum for our societies,” said Lubetkin, the moderator of the meeting.

“There is little coverage on what progress has been made in trade, technology or health cooperation among the countries of the South, which may seem very different among themselves but are quite similar in terms of their needs,” concluded Lubetkin, a former director general of IPS, an international news agency that prioritises information from the global South.

In front of an audience made up mainly of journalists and other media workers, the debate was oriented towards the most appropriate tools for developing countries to better disseminate news from the global South, the latest term coined to define the group of nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The president of IPS Latin America, Sergio Berensztein, stressed that “today there is an opportunity for nations like ours, thanks to the fact that there is no longer the biloparity of the Cold War era, nor the unipolarity of the years that followed. Today we are in a time of what we call apolarity.”

Berensztein stressed that at a time when there is a renaissance of protectionism and nationalism in the world, it is necessary for journalists to reinforce the idea of cooperation and ensure that a plurality of voices is heard on the international stage.

“We are living in a moment of crisis in which the old has not fully died yet and the new has not yet been fully born. That is why it is a time of uncertainty and accurate information is an element that favors the peaceful resolution of conflicts,” said Berensztein.

View of the room where the meeting on the role of communication in promoting South-South cooperation was held in Buenos Aires, organised by Inter Press Service (IPS) Latin America. The participants agreed that media outlets in the global South must generate attractive content that will allow them to combat a news agenda imposed by the countries of the industrialised North. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The power of the large media based in countries of the industrialised North, which tend to impose their journalistic agenda on a global level, was present in the debate as a worrying factor and as evidence of the failure of initiatives aimed at bringing about a new and more balanced information and communication order.

“What is the best way to foment the mass circulation of information about the global South, in order to escape this problem?” was one of the main questions that arose during the two-hour debate, held at a hotel in the Argentine capital.

From the city of Lagos, in a videoconference, the news director of the Nigerian Television Authority, Aliyu Baba Barau, called for strengthened cooperation between media outlets and journalists from developing countries, through the organisation of trips and mechanisms that favour the sharing of resources.

“Nigerian TV permanently shares its resources with other countries,” he said as an example of what can be done in terms of cooperation in media projects in the South.

“The mechanism of South-South cooperation and its advantages need to be understood not only by those who lead our nations, but also by the global community,” said Baba Barau.

Media representatives from China played a prominent role in the exchange of ideas and reflected the strong interest in Asia’s giant in achieving closer ties with Africa and Latin America.

Participants included Zhang Lu, deputy editor of China Daily, the country’s largest English-language news portal; Cui Yuanlei, Mexico correspondent for the Xinhua news agency, which distributes information in several languages (including Spanish); and Li Weilin, team leader of the CCTV television network in São Paulo, Brazil.

Li said the media in emerging countries should not depend on the information distributed by the news networks of industrialised countries, and said journalism should be a way to share experiences.

He said, for example, that during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, CCTV produced coverage for people in Kenya to see how Jamaica’s star runners were trained, and for Jamaica to meet the Kenyan runners who perform so well in the long-distance and medium-distance races.

Roberto Ridolfi, Assistant-Director General of FAO’s Programme Support and Technical Cooperation Department, stressed that the countries of the South “do not have a shared past, but they do have the same future.”

Ridolfi said communication has a key role to play in the arduous path towards Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which seek to improve the quality of life of the world’s population and bring the South into line with the level of development in the North.

“The media and journalists have the mission of attracting audiences with news linked to sustainability. The proliferation of plastics in the oceans, the devastation of forests or the problems plaguing food production are issues that should be on the agenda,” he said.

Like the other panelists, Ridolfi lamented that societies are unaware of the South-South cooperation mechanisms that have emerged in recent years and said journalists have a lot of work to do in that regard.

“We have yet to demonstrate to the world the real value and benefits of South-South cooperation,” the FAO official said.

The need for African, Asian, Latin American and Arab media to get to know each other better was recognised as a necessity.

The local participants were particularly emphatic about this, since Argentina is a country with deep cultural ties with Europe, where little is known about what happens in the countries of the regions of the South, beyond catastrophes and conflicts.

The challenge, now that new technologies have democratised communication but have also put it at risk, is to generate information from the South in attractive formats that allow a better understanding of the realities and opportunities in developing countries and between the countries and regions of the South.

Dear Reader:

TerraViva, a special publication of the IPS news agency, the leader in coverage of development issues, civil society and the emerging South, is once again circulating, this time in the meeting rooms and hallways of the FAO building.

The print version of TerraViva was available early this year at the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in the United Arab Emirates, and a few months before that, in June 2012, at the Rio+20 global conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro. Now, in Rome, our independent publication is dedicated to food.

We are producing it in an extraordinary setting: the 38th FAO conference, which will focus on the challenges facing agriculture, emerging global scenarios and, naturally, the new balances of power arising from them.

Mario Lubetkin, Director General of IPS

As in dozens of TerraViva editions produced over the last 20 years at U.N. or civil society conferences, our publication hopes to be an instrument of reflection and reporting with a critical eye on the crucial issues facing humanity.

In terms of food and agriculture, this means raising adequate funds to provide the current FAO leadership with the conditions that would make it possible for the agency to fulfil its mandate with regard to a strategic plan for the future.

During the conference, a significant number of countries that have met the Millennium Development Goals and World Food Summit hunger reduction targets will be recognised.

A critical focus on the limitations and difficulties encountered along the road is necessary, but we must also be capable of recognising progress.

We have brought together in Rome a team of top-level journalists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, who represent more than 400 colleagues from our network spread across 140 countries, and who will give TerraViva a multicultural and pluralistic perspective.

In this regard, I would like to thank the FAO authorities for their continuous support in the preparation of this publication.

TerraViva is also available on-line, in several languages, to millions of readers around the world.

At the same time, TerraViva will follow the impact of the Media Talks organised by IPS TV in its pilot phase, from Monday, June 17 to Friday, June 21 in the Sheikh Zayed Conference Hall. The debates will focus on the MDGs, the new scenario in Africa, food waste, price speculation, and the role of the media in development.

These debates will be reproduced on thousands of web sites so they are not limited to a FAO conference room.

We hope TerraViva lives up to your expectations.

Welcome!

IPS Director General Mario Lubetkin

Jenni Williams (in white cap) addresses Women of Zimbabwe Arise members at Zimbabwe’s parliament building in Harare with the police looking on. The clampdown on civil society spreads far beyond Zimbabwe according to a recent CIVICUS report. Credit: Misheck Rusere/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 29 2013 (IPS)

As Zimbabwe is expected to head to the polls in a little less than two months, clampdowns on civil society in that southern African nation have increased, according to Godwin Phiri, western region chairperson of the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations in Zimbabwe.

Phiri tells IPS that it was very difficult to disseminate information to rural communities about their rights as voters as they were not allowed to hold public gatherings.

“The battle is in the rural communities where, according to the Public Order and Security Act, we need to inform the police four days before if we want to have a meeting. But the police say that you need to seek their permission, and what we have seen over time is that they decide what meetings can be held,” Phiri says.

He adds that as the elections draw nearer, the police have begun prohibiting meetings by civil society organisations in rural areas.

“Ahead of the elections the main thing we are trying to activate is our local structures to use as points of disseminating voter information. But a lot of communities are living in a context where there is a lot of violence and their movements are curtailed by the fear that anything can happen and can be interpreted as anti-government. So they are afraid to talk about issues,” he says.

And Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), an all-female social justice pressure group, has been no exception in the crackdown on civil society organisations, including arrests, over the past year, strongly believed to be a measure by the coalition government to thwart dissent.

Jenni Williams, founder and national coordinator of the group, tells IPS that she and her co-founder Magodonga Mahlangu have been arrested more than 50 times during the past 10 years that their organisation has been in existence. In April, WOZA laid a complaint with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) at the African Union body’s 53rd session.

However, media and democracy campaigner Pedzisai Ruhanya, who is the director of the Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, says nothing will come of it as President Robert Mugabe’s defiant government has ignored other rulings from the ACHPR.

“They have done that before and they will do it again. Actually there is a precedent; they have done it and what has happened to them? They are still there. What happened to them when they…defied other rulings that came from the Banjul court in the Gambia where the ACHPR is based.

“They will continue to do business as usual because that court (the ACHPR) has no teeth, it is a toothless bulldog and cannot enforce its decisions, hence it’s an appendage of the state parties, including Zimbabwe,” Ruhanya says.

But the experiences of civil society in Zimbabwe are not unique to that country. A new report released by CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, states that despite the expectation that the Arab Spring, Spain’s “indignados “and the global Occupy movements could bring radical change, this has not happened.

The report titled “The State of Civil Society 2013”, released on Apr. 29, says the great people’s movements of 2012 were followed by “a range of negative events that make the work of civil society even harder.”

“The ever-growing diffusion of social media and mobile technology, and the mushrooming of digital platforms for self-expression, might suggest that never before has civil society had so many venues to voice its claims and visions,” Mario Lubetkin, director of Inter Press Service (IPS), says in a chapter of the report co-written with Citizen Lab fellow Stefania Milan.

Milan and Lubetkin state, however, that this is not truly the case and note that “the news agenda is today largely dominated by stories from the global North.

“The mediascape is still characterised by growing media concentration, the predominance of ‘infotainment’ and ‘sensationalism’ over information and analysis, and the prevalence of Western voices at the expense of a silenced global South.”

They recommend that “familiarisation with the journalism world, its needs and practices, is essential for CSOs (Civil Society Organisations), and even more so for those people whose task is to reach out to journalists.”

In his introduction to the report, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general and chief executive of CIVICUS, concurs with Milan and Lubetkin.

“New technologies are making it easier to access information, connect with other like-minded people, and mobilise large numbers of people. But restrictions on websites and social media are increasingly being used as tools to keep citizens in the dark and prevent them from scrutinising corruption.”

The report notes that a number of governments have recently introduced or plan to introduce laws that regulate the formation and operation of CSOs. “Laws in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, for example, give the state the power to declare a CSO unlawful or withdraw its registration.”

However, the report states that CSOs are finding innovating ways of tackling social problems. For example, in Kyrgyzstan, “Public Watch Councils have increased accountability and transparency of central governmental agencies. One of the ways in which they have done so is through several TV discussions and public hearings involving the participation of state officials, CSOs and private sector representatives.”

*Additional reporting by Misheck Rusere in Harare.

Six months have passed since the beginning of the United Nations International Year of the Cooperatives (IYC). There can be no doubt it has fallen far short of its goal of calling the world’s attention to this formidable instrument of social production.

While there has been a rise in the dissemination of information related to cooperatives, it is minuscule in comparison to the vast importance and potential of the cooperative movement worldwide.

Cooperativism emerged in the early 19th century in England where it was promoted by unions opposed to the capitalist expansion driven by the Industrial Revolution. It assumed the function of improving the buying power of salary workers through consumer cooperatives.

Since then the system of cooperative property has spread throughout the world, in industry, the primary sector, trade and other branches of the service sector.

Cooperatives also have a significant presence in the media, with hundreds of outlets dedicated to spreading information about the world of cooperatives. Moreover there are thousands of media cooperatives, including the Associated Press in the U.S., Le Monde, the French newspaper, and the IPS news agency, which, since 1964, has covered the subject of cooperatives as a part of its editorial focus on development and civil society, particularly in countries of the South.

The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), founded in 1895, is comprised of 267 organisations from 96 countries representing approximately 1 billion individuals worldwide. Around 100 million people work for a co-op globally

The Director General of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation, Jose Graziano Da Silva, notes that farmers associations generate huge benefits for producers, increasing their capacity to take advantage of opportunities, gain access to services, get better prices when purchasing inputs and achieve larger margins in sales. Moreover, the benefits generated by cooperatives are an engine of local development, strengthening communities and activating economies, creating jobs, and boosting income.

Da Silva sees cooperatives as a strategic ally in promoting the sort of environmentally-sustainable socio-economic development that the world needs. The concept implies that in order for development to be sustainable, hunger and social exclusion ­which affect more than 900 million people­ must be overcome.

In Costa Rica, a third of economically active people participate in cooperatives. According to the country’s president, Laura Chinchilla, “Cooperativism is a decisive factor for modernisation and the technological development of productive systems. In Costa Rica it is responsible for more than four percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and more than ten percent of the agricultural GDP. Thanks to cooperativism Costa Rica has become a model of social inclusion. Cooperatives play a crucial role not only in economic activities but also in education and health services. For example, 23 percent of the school system is cooperative.”

Brazilian cooperativist Roberto Rodriquez argues that “economic globalisation disturbs peace and democracy because it generates social exclusion and the concentration of wealth, while cooperatives, which work as the economic element of social organisation, counter this tendency. Cooperatives serve as a bridge between the market and collective well-being and are therefore a force for the defence of democracy and peace”.

As we can see, the importance of cooperativism as an alternative to the current crisis-stricken economic models stands in contrast to the failure of the IYC to revive and refresh the media’s interest in the cooperative world. This can be explained in part by the dispersion of the message despite the efforts of the U.N., the IYC, and numerous cooperative media of the world. There has been a failure to effectively coordinate cooperatives and the media in a way that creates real synergy.

It is clear that the cooperative movement needs a more up-to-date strategy for social communication as well as the appropriate instruments to put out its message and conduct its activities. What is needed is a real pool of media cooperatives, which should be brought together to organise and coordinate their information and efforts in a way that will strengthen the impact of their central messages. Similarly they should create common virtual tools to circulate both traditional content and new products of the social media.

But the effectiveness of these instruments will depend on the degree to which they involve journalists that are specialised in cooperativism. As in other branches of journalism, specialisation is a clear necessity.

There are no social or economic needs that cooperativism cannot address. It has an essential role to play both in the major challenges facing humanity and as a form of horizontal, participatory management that is able to generate better results. Indeed, there has never been a time in which cooperativism was more urgently needed as a mode of organisation and as an alternative to the corporate mode of production. No approach is more modern and more necessary than cooperativism. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Mario Lubetkin is director general of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.