Women professors protested on Aug. 9 in Brasilia in front of the Ministry of Education, demanding better salaries in a sector where women are the vast majority, but face many barriers to promotion to better paid jobs, such as university teaching and scientific research, which in Brazil are concentrated in public universities. CREDIT: Joédson Alves/Agência Brasil-FotosPúblicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 22 2023 (IPS)

“I thought of studying journalism, because of the example of Gloria Maria,” a famous black TV journalist who died of cancer in February 2023, said mathematician Luciana Elias, while discussing the scarce female participation in exact sciences research in Brazil.

“There are no visible examples, female role models in scientific research, where there are white men, not women, let alone black women,” she said. This lack of representation blocks girls’ access from childhood to academic careers that are still perceived as “masculine,” the 52-year-old professor pointed out."There are no visible examples, female role models in scientific research, where there are white men, not women, let alone black women." Luciana Elias

Because she loved mathematics, Elias followed her vocation. She graduated in 1995, and earned a master’s degree and doctorate in exact mathematics at several Brazilian universities, later becoming a professor of this pure science at the Federal University of Jataí.

“At the graduation ceremony, there were only three women and I was the only black woman,” she told IPS by telephone from Jataí, a city of 105,000 people in the midwest Brazilian state of Goiás.

Women have excelled in educational advancement in Brazil, a country of just over 203 million people. In 1970 they made up only 25.6 percent of Brazilians graduating from university. By the year 2000 they represented 52.8 percent. This trend has continued, although at a slower pace.

Lagging behind in mathematics

But in mathematics, applied and computational mathematics and statistics, there was a small reduction in female participation between 2009 and 2019, according to a special bulletin released in May by the Gender and Diversity Commission of the Brazilian Societies of Mathematics (SBM) and Applied and Computational Mathematics (SBMAC).

From 53 percent of female graduates in 2009, the proportion dropped to 47 percent in 2019.

The percentage of women is even lower in the so-called baccalaureate, which in Brazil refers to a bachelor’s degree required to practice a profession, while a different kind of bachelor’s degree trains future professors.

Female baccalaureate degree holders in mathematics and related fields dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent between 2009 and 2019, according to the study, while those graduating specifically to teach dropped from 55 percent to 48 percent in the same period.

In computer science the situation is worse: “I know a student who was the only woman in her group of 40 students at graduation,” said Marilaine Colnago, PhD in computational mathematics and professor of that discipline at the Paulista State University (UNESP) in Araraquara, a city of 242,000 inhabitants in the state of São Paulo.

“Many female students drop out because they feel isolated,” she lamented, saying that the lack of women in careers such as engineering and computer science is the first barrier to women’s entry into universities to take courses in the exact sciences.

“There were many women in the beginning, when there were only the big computers, for calculations and secretarial services. Then, with personal computers and advances in computing, it became a purely male area,” said Colnago, the head of SBMAC’s “Women in Applied and Computational Mathematics” committee.

Women have been a majority in Brazilian universities since the end of the last century. But in addition to being a minority in higher income professions, such as engineering and computer science, they suffer from the so-called “scissors effect”, which prevents them from moving up the career ladder, especially in scientific research.

“At graduation, we make up about half of the students; at the doctoral level, women are down to 20 percent,” said Colnago, 34.

Luciana Elias is a professor of exact mathematics, a discipline in which she holds a PhD, at the Federal University of Jataí in midwest Brazil. She represents a small minority in pure science, especially in mathematics, where women have a scarce presence and are mainly engaged in teaching primary and middle school. CREDIT: UFJ

Maternity as a stumbling block

Maternity is one of the notable factors in the low presence of women in research. The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, electrical engineer Luciana Santos, the first woman to hold this position in the country, announced that she would promote “affirmative action” to ensure postgraduate scholarships for women scientists.

In addition to specific resources for women researchers equivalent to 20 million dollars over the next four years, she promised to modify the criteria for scholarships, respecting, for example, the question of maternity.

Until now, pregnant women lose points for productivity-based scholarships, because their evaluation considers the period of pregnancy and maternity leave as an interruption of their work.

Women researchers are faced with the dilemma between motherhood and a career, since the still dominant culture assigns women to care work and teaching, which is less well paid. They are also in the majority in nursing, but in the minority among physicians.

Added to that are “invisible barriers,” such as sexual harassment, a male environment with its prejudices, jokes and the silencing of female voices.

There have been advances in combating these issues, which previously “could not be spoken up about,” but they continue to hinder the promotion of women in the academic world, said Colnago, who is married and has no children.

She personally felt the difference in treatment between the master’s degree, where she had an understanding and friendly adviser, and the PhD that she earned in a more masculine world, as it was in computer science, “where there is different treatment for men and women.”

A meeting in Brasilia of the rectors of Brazil’s public universities with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which shows that most of the top university authorities are men, despite the fact that the majority of the university population is female. Luciana Santos, the first woman to hold the post of Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, next to the president in the foreground, represents a hope for a greater female presence in the exact sciences. CREDIT: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

Losses

“Scientific research, like all innovation projects, loses the diversity of views, the different visions of gender and race, which are fundamental,” by excluding a more effective participation of women and different ethnicities, said the professor of computational mathematics in the chemistry course at UNESP.

“We are losing female researchers with good projects because they see motherhood as a negative and because of a lack of incentives and public policies,” Colnago complained.

It is necessary to give visibility to female advances in the scientific area, to highlight women who made good contributions to science “that will inspire other women to follow their vocations,” she said.

This is what the SBM/SBMAC Gender and Diversity Commission, created in 2019, seeks in order to reduce gender differences and promote the diversity of actors in mathematics in Brazil.

A positive measure taken by SBMAC at its annual congresses was to set up a space to care for the children of the participants, so that their fathers and mothers could have equal conditions to discuss the topics of their work.

In Elias’s view, the first step, already partially accomplished with the bulletin on “gender and race” in mathematics, is to recognize existing gender disparities in the exact sciences.

The next would be to propose “institutional, public” actions to overcome inequalities, dismantle the myth that “men are more capable,” disseminate positive examples of women, and increase forums for debate on the subject.

It is also necessary to reduce regional imbalances, the professor said, pointing out that her city, Jatai, is more than 300 kilometers from an airport and has few resources to promote science.

“Society is losing brilliant minds that fail to fulfill their vocations and Brazil is giving up potential intellectuals” by failing to address gender and racial inequalities in scientific development as it should, she argued.

Women produce more than 50 percent of the food in the world but are disadvantaged when it comes to access to resources such as land and financial services. Credit: Busani Bafana, IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Sep 17 2021 (IPS)

Women, key contributors to agriculture production, are missing at the decision table, with alarming consequences, says Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg in an exclusive interview with IPS.

Giving women a seat at the policymaking table could accelerate Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and keep the world fed and nourished. This necessitates a transformation of the currently lopsided global food system, she says.

Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg.

Nierenberg, a top researcher and advocate on food systems and agriculture, acknowledges that women are the most affected during environmental or health crises. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global food production, affecting women farmers and food producers who were already excluded from full participation in agricultural development.

“We still have a long way to go in making sure that policies are not gender blind and include the needs of women at the forefront when mass disasters occur,“ Nierenberg told IPS, adding that policymakers need to understand the needs of farmers and fisherfolk involved in food systems.

“I think it is time we need more people who are involved with agriculture to run for political office because they understand its challenges,” she said. “If we had more farmers in governments around the world, imagine what that would look like. If we had women farmers running municipalities, towns and even countries, that is where change would really happen.”

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), women contribute more than 50 percent of food produced globally and make up over 40 percent of the agricultural labour force. But while women keep families fed and nourished, they are disadvantaged in accessing critical resources for food production compared to men. They lack access to land, inputs, extension, banking and financial services.

“Until we end the discrimination of women around the globe, I doubt these things will change even though women are in the largest part of the world’s food producers,” said Nierenberg, who co-founded and now heads the global food systems think tank, Food Tank.

Arguing that COVID-19 and the climate crisis were not going to be the last global shocks to affect the world, Nierenberg said women and girls had been impacted disproportionately; hence the need to act now and change the food system. Women have experienced the loss of jobs and income, reduced food production and nutrition and more girls are now out of school.

“It is not enough for me to speak for women around the globe. Women who are actually doing the work need to speak for themselves; they need to be included in these conversations,” Nierenberg said.

“What happens is that in conferences, there are a lot of white men in suits talking on behalf of the rest of the world. But we need the rest of the world, and women included, to be in the room.”

A food system is a complex network of all activities involving the growing, processing, distribution and consumption of food. It also includes the governance, ecological sustainability and health impact of food.

Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted invisible issues, like the interconnectedness of our food systems, she said it was urgent to invest in regional and localized food systems that included women and youth. Food Tank and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) work collaboratively to investigate and set the agenda for concrete solutions for resetting the food system.

Divine Ntiokam, Food Systems Champion and Founder and Managing Director, Climate Smart Agriculture Youth Network Global (GCSAYN), agrees. While youth are ready to engage in promoting a just and inclusive transformation of rural areas, it was unfortunate they were rarely involved in decision-making, she said. They are excluded from the household level to larger political institutions and companies and need better prospects of financial security to remain in the farming sector.

“Young men and women need to be given special attention in formulating legislation to purchase land and receive proper land rights,” Ntiokam told IPS.

“International donors and governments need to invest in youth, particularly young women and girls, for their meaningful participation along with the food systems value network,” he said.

“Youth need to have a ‘seat at the table’, as they have at the Summit, in terms of decision-making on where governments and international donors invest their resources to make agriculture and food a viable, productive and profitable career.”

Researchers say current food systems are unfair, unhealthy, and inequitable, underscoring the urgency to transform the global food system. According to the FAO, more than 800 million people went to bed hungry in 2020, and scores of others are malnourished.

Jemimah Njuki, Director for Africa at IFPRI and Custodian for the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Lever of the UN Food Systems Summit.

For food systems to be just, there is an urgency to close the gender resource gap, says Jemimah Njuki, Director for Africa at IFPRI and Custodian for the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Lever of the UN Food Systems Summit.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will, on September 23, 2021 host the UN Food Systems Summit during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week. The Summit is billed as a platform to push for solid support in changing the world food systems to help the world recover from the COVID-19 pandemic while spurring the achievement of the SDG by 2030.

The Summit, the UN says will “culminate in an inclusive global process, offering a catalytic moment for public mobilization and actionable commitments by heads of state and government and other constituency leaders to take the food system agenda forward”.

“They (food systems) must also transform in ways that are just and equitable, and that meaningfully engage and benefit women and girls,” Njuki told IPS. She added that harmful social and gender norms creating barriers for women and girls by defining what women and girls can or cannot eat, what they can or cannot own, where they can go or not go should be removed.

“This transformation has to be driven from all levels and all sectors in our food systems: global to local, public to private, large scale producers to smallholder farmers and individual consumers,” Njuki said.

Leaders should enact policies that directly address injustices – such as ensuring women’s access to credit, markets, and land rights, Njuki said, noting that individual women and men need to confront social norms and legal prejudices and demand changes.

Njuki believes that current food systems have contributed to wide disparities among rich and poor.

“These negative outcomes are intimately linked with many of the biggest challenges facing humanity right now – justice and equality, climate change, human rights – and these challenges cannot be addressed without transforming how our food systems work,” Njuki told IPS.

“We are at a pivotal moment on the last decade before the deadline for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This must be the decade of action for food systems to end hunger.”

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Data by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), shows that only 35 percent of students studying STEM in higher education globally are women. At primary and lower secondary levels, less than half of schools in sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity, computers or even access to the internet. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
DJIBOUTI CITY, Jan 28 2020 (IPS)

Dr. Anne-Maria Brennan loved science as a young girl. But instead of encouraging her, those around her made attempts to steer her in the “right direction”. “The right direction was in nursing, teaching and secretarial courses. I was told that girls do not study physics,” she tells IPS.

“These voices were so loud that I seriously considered becoming a music teacher. But then someone sensibly told me that I could become a scientist and an amateur musician, but there was nothing like an amateur scientist who was also a professional musician,” she says.

That was in the seventies, today Brennan is the vice-president of Science Engagement at the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation in the United Kingdom.

Brennan previously served as an associate professor in Bioscience and Forensic Biology, at the School of Applied Science, London South Bank University.

“It turns out that girls could in fact study physics, or mathematics, science, technology and engineering,” she quips.

It has been five decades since Brennan swam against the tide, pursuing a career in science. But data by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), shows that globally only 35 percent of students studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – or STEM – in higher education are women. Further confirming that girls are still being steered towards domestic and caring career paths.

“Gender balance in enrolment as well as inclusivity in both participation and achievements in STEM education remains a global south challenge,” Professor Kalu Mosto Onuoha, President of the Nigerian Academy of Science, tells IPS.

“Education systems will never be balanced and inclusive when half of the population is not participating at per with their counterparts in STEM education,” he adds.

Similar sentiments were shared by other delegates participating in the 3rd International Summit on Balanced and Inclusive Education currently being held in Djibouti City, Djibouti. Organised by the Education Relief Foundation (ERF), over 200 delegates and government representatives from over 35 countries are currently in the Horn of Africa nation where state leaders are expected to sign a Universal Declaration on universal inclusive education.

• Unfortunately, low female representation in STEM education is a narrative that knows no boundaries. According to UNESCO, Sweden has the highest share of women graduates from STEM programmes among Nordic countries, but STEM attainment among female students in Sweden stands at 16 percent, compared to male students at 47 percent.

Brennan affirms that the numbers are similarly low in the United Kingdom but notes some improvements in the fields of general practice and dentistry, where women have taken a lead.

She says there are few women in surgery and even fewer in engineering because men in these fields are considered unfriendly and the sectors too involved and dirty.

“These wide gender gaps in developing countries are purely out of choice. Students in these countries are making the choice to pursue other interests. In developing countries the choice is made for our students by a patriarchal culture and through socialisation,” says Onuoha.

He says that these inequalities are first rooted in the exclusion and marginalisation of girls in education enrolment.

“Girls who eventually made it to school were encouraged to undertake feminine subjects like teaching. They were socialised to believe that they could only be good mothers if they took on lighter subjects,” Onuoha expounds.

• But the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 indicates that these inequalities are not limited to the lagging behind of girls at the enrolment level.
• In countries such as the Southern Africa nation of Namibia where girls outpace boys in school enrolment at all levels, the gap widens in STEM education. Here, about eight percent of female students have attained STEM education, compared to 21 percent of male students.
• Nonetheless, the report shines a spotlight on countries with impressive levels of STEM education uptake among their female students.
• In Mauritania, for instance, attainment in STEM is at 29 percent among female students, and 31 percent among male students. In the South Asian nation of Myanmar, female students outpace male students in attainment of STEM education.
• A few other countries such as the Arab country of Oman are slowly and surely closing the gender gap in STEM uptake, with 41 percent of female students and 55 percent of male students.

“In developing countries there are many concerted efforts to address the first part of  the problem, even though painfully slowly, we are slowly closing gender gaps in education enrolment, retention and in some cases, achievements,” Professor Mahouton Norbert Hounkonnou, from the Benin National Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, tells IPS.

Hounkonnou is a full professor of mathematics and physics, and called for the demystification of sciences. “STEM education is taught as if only a few people are meant to understand but science and math is for all of us. Everybody does math on a daily basis without even knowing it.”

Hounkonnou says that balanced and inclusive education systems call for an overhaul in what is taught in STEMs, who teaches it and how it is taught. “Learners love to be engaged. Our classrooms must become more interactive. We also need a gender component, currently lacking, in many of our educational interventions,” he adds.

He called for investment in infrastructure and learning materials to improve the environment in which STEM education is provided.

U.N. research shows that countries in the sub-Sahara Africa face the biggest challenges. At the primary and lower secondary levels, less than half of schools have access to electricity, computers and internet.

“This forum provides an opportunity for us to define the shape a balanced and inclusive STEM education system should take, and make concerted efforts to build that system. It will take financial and technical resources, including the training of teachers to better interact with female learners,” says Hounkonnou.

Maths and physical science teacher Peter Tabichi (far right) in class. The Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School teacher has been nominated for the one million dollar Global Teacher Prize. Courtesy: Peter Tabichi

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Mar 20 2019 (IPS)

Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School in Nakuru County, situated in a remote, semi-arid part of Kenya’s Rift Valley, could pass for an ordinary secondary school in any part of Africa. But ordinary it is not.

Maths and physical science teacher Peter Tabichi’s love for science is changing the lives of Keriko’s 480 students for the better.

In a region frequently blighted by drought and famine, Tabichi’s students come from poor families–almost a third are orphans or have only one parent–with many going without food at home. The students have mixed experiences from drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, early school dropout, young marriages and there have been cases of suicide.

Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School reflects the challenges of education access in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa; lack of teaching and learning resources, high student to teacher ratios, high drop-out rates and teacher demotivation.

According to the United Nations Education and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO), of all regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion, with over one-fifth of children between the ages of about 6 and 11 not attending school.

Further, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) data states that almost 60 percent of youth between the ages of about 15 and 17 are not in school. The organisation warns that without urgent action, the situation will likely get worse as the region faces a rising demand for education due to a still-growing school-age population.

Filling the education gap with science

Tabichi, a member of the Franciscan Brotherhood, donates 80 percent of his monthly income to help his students in need.

But it is his dedication and passionate belief in his students’ talent, that has embolden the poorly-resourced learners to take on Kenya’s best schools in national science competitions.

Through his mentorship, Tabichi’s students participated in the 2018 Kenya Science and Engineering Fair where they displayed an invention that allows blind and deaf people to measure objects.

Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School came first nationally in the public schools category competition organised by the science fair. The maths and science team qualified to participate at the INTEL International Science and Engineering Fair in 2019.

Using the school’s only computer, and despite the poor internet connection and a student-teacher ratio of 58:1, Tabichi has impacted his student’s impoverished lives. He started a Talent Nurturing Club and expanded the school’s Science Club, helping pupils design research projects that are of such a high standard that 60 percent of them now qualify for national competitions.

“My four colleagues and I also give low-achieving pupils one-to-one tuition in Maths and Science outside class and on the weekends, where I visit students’ homes and meet their families to identify the challenges they face,” Tabichi told. “I use ICT in 80 percent of my lessons to engage students, visit internet cafes and cache online content to be used offline in class.”

In February 2019, Tabichi was named one of the top 10 finalists for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize 2019. The one million dollar award recognises an exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession and highlights the important role of teachers.  Tabichi and nine other finalists were selected from over 10,000 nominations and applications from 179 countries around the world.

The Global Teacher Prize was established five years ago and aims to recognise the exceptional work of teachers all over the world.

Tabichi is excited about his nomination for the prestigious award, describing it as a God-given honour.

“I did not anticipate it,” Tabichi, told IPS. “But I feel that I deserve it since I have transformed the lives of many students. Also, the nomination makes me view all the hard-working teachers throughout the world as superheroes that the world needs to give recognition for bringing a positive change to society.”

Turning challenges into opportunities

Raised in a family of teachers, Tabichi said he recognises the great contribution teachers bring to their communities through their dedication and passion. He added that he was inspired by his father to perceive a teacher’s role as that of enlightening others on how to tackle the challenges of life.

On what can be done to make education, especially at early and primary level accessible to all, Tabichi believes that making it free, equitable and raising the quality of education is a start.

Asked what he will do with the Global Teacher Prize, should he win?

“The main focus will be on the community and school. For example, I would strengthen the Talent Nurturing Club, the Science Club and inter-school science project competitions,” said Tabichi. He added, “I would also invest in a school computer lab with better internet connectivity. In the community, I would promote kitchen gardening and production of drought tolerant crops.”

Congratulating Tabichi for his nomination, Founder of the Varkey Foundation and the Global Teacher Prize, Sunny Varkey hoped Tabichi’s story would inspire those looking to enter the teaching profession.

“The thousands of nominations and applications we received from every corner of the planet is testimony to the achievements of teachers and the enormous impact they have on all of our lives.”

The hi-tech radio room that works with Google Earth maps at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya where some of the 1,000 rangers of Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) trained in GPS use lead anti-poaching surveillance. Photo takes May 2016. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Sep 19 2016 (IPS)

Every November, India’s Gahirmatha beach in the Indian Ocean region develops a brownish-grey rash for 60 to 80 days. Half-a-million female Olive Ridley turtles emerge out of the waves to lay their eggs, over a hundred each. For the sheer numbers, this arrival is hard to miss.

However, knowledge about this IUCN’s endangered species’ exact migration route across oceans has remained fragmentary for conservationists seeking to protect its globally declining population owing to destruction of habitat, global warming and trawl fishing.Migrating songbirds, beetles and dragonflies can soon be hooked up to space satellites helping to predict natural disasters and the spread of zoonoses - diseases that jump from animals to humans like swine flu and avian influenza.

As pressures from climate change, ecosystem loss and wild life crime threaten biodiversity and wildlife around the globe, scientists are responding by harnessing the power of sophisticated space technologies.

Migrating songbirds, beetles and dragonflies can soon be hooked up to space satellites helping to predict natural disasters and the spread of zoonoses – diseases that jump from animals to humans like swine flu and avian influenza. Radars will help locate poachers through infrared, detect through an elephant’s agitated movements, its imminent poaching. Cameras orbiting in space can capture the presence of crop diseases and invasive species in remote locations. The realm of science fiction has already stepped into the real world.

The International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) project, whose trial phase starts in 2017, is developing solar-powered sensors weighing 1 to 5 grammes which can be attached to migratory songbirds, even dragonflies, beetles. The transmitted data will inform not simply the geo-positions and movements but provide important clues about the body functions or senses of the animal, giving significant indicators about impending natural disasters.

By 2020, ICARUS sensors could be small enough to fit into locusts, possibly even to use the micro-sensors to control the locust flight path to divert the swarm from valuable crops, say its researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

Scientists working on ICARUS say battery life is a major limiting factor for tracking small animals since the miniature batteries they can carry do not last long.

However, Russian space agency Roscosmos’s International Space Station, on which ICARUS hardware will be installed, is closer to the Earth than satellites, thus decreasing the amount of power required to upload data. Saving more battery life, the Station will wake the bird-mounted mini transmitter from its energy-saving mode only when it has visual contact to the in-flight bird. It’ll take only a few seconds to transmit all data back to the Station.

The urgency to go beyond manual patrolling to advanced space-based technology to combat poaching and illegal wildlife trade comes strongly from the World Wildlife Crime Report 2016.

The report builds on the data platform World WISE (The World Wildlife Seizures) that contains over 164,000 seizures related to wildlife crime involving 7,000 species from 120 countries spanning 2004 to 2015.

Trafficking of wildlife is now recognised as a specialised area of organised crime and a significant threat to many plant and animal species. The focus of the upcoming 17th Conference of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is set to be the illegal wildlife trade. According to a 2016 UN Environment Programme report, the wildlife trade is estimated at 7 to 23 billion dollars annually.

With poachers increasingly using more sophisticated technology, wildlife rangers need to be equipped too. When a poacher moves in for the kill, elephants and rhinos will often behave unusually. Animal sensors help detect such behavior and send alerts to law enforcement, giving them time to act.

Other high-resolution constellations (10 or more) of radar satellites, unlike optical Earth observation satellites, are powerful enough to penetrate dense forest canopies, clouds and cover of darkness that aid poachers from detection. Infrared sensors attached to drones controlled by Global Positioning Systems (GPS) can also be used to detect campfires or warm bodies hiding in African bush land, say researchers.

Sophisticated satellites are already monitoring the extent of illegal logging, rate of deforestation and even soil moisture. The launch of hyperspectral imaging satellites that record detailed images in hundreds of electromagnetic wavelengths can assess the extent of disaster, crop growth and diseases, availability of water in remote locations and glacier melts, besides general biodiversity.

Development experts say the role that space tools can play for achieving the SDGs is broad and diverse, specifically Goal 15 to protect, restore and promote sustainable management of ecosystems, forests, soil and biodiversity, monitor not just wildlife but assess whether management practices put in place are having the desired effect.

“There are many types of satellites flying in space,” said Werner Balogh, a programme officer at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). “But how are they being used, is there more that can be done? Can we find joint mechanisms to share this data? It’s an exciting field and there’s still lots that needs to be explored.”

There has emerged consistent demand from developing countries who host rich biodiversity that mutual partnerships, free technical assistance, knowledge transfer, adequate resources and capacity building in space-based technologies to developing countries will significantly help achieve the 2030 Agenda.

But the high cost of technology solutions and access to the latest science and knowledge remain major constraints for the global South.

“In India, we use radio-collars to track movement for large animals like tigers and elephants. However, permits costs and taxes add to the already high cost of obtaining wildlife collars; for example, satellite collars to be used on elephants are available for 2,500 dollars each, plus annual subscription costs of 500 dollars,” Shashank Srinivasan, spatial analysis coordinator of World Wildlife Fund, India, told IPS.

The South Asia region, with 40 percent forest cover in Bhutan and Nepal and precious biodiversity, is very vulnerable to illegal traffic and wildlife crimes mainly because there exist easier traffic routes to large markets like China.

“The international community must design low-cost space-based appliances for sharing with developing countries like the solar transmitter chips (ICARUS) Germany is developing. It would be of great conservation value if we could procure it for 50 to 100 dollars,” Saroj Koirala, geospatial technologies expert with the World Wildlife Fund, Nepal, told IPS.

“Even if international commercial companies can provide us with, for example, hyperspectral images as old as of year 2010, this would still help country research. The process to access these are conditional and time-consuming,” Koirala added.

Srinivasan said except for initiatives like wildlabs.net that allow for the sharing of conservation-relevant technology, he knew of no other national, regional or international technology sharing or funding.

Experts say awareness of the importance of space-based technologies needs to be created among law makers for need-of-the-hour policies and fund allocation. Koirala said since nature conservation is linked to livelihoods, people themselves will pressurise democratic governments to set aside funds for latest technologies.

CTBTO Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo introducing the panel discussion on 'Citizen Networks: The Promise of Technological Innovation' at SnT2015 in Vienna, June 2015. Photo credit: CTBTO

By Ramesh Jaura
VIENNA, Jun 30 2015 (IPS)

An international conference has highlighted advances made in detecting nuclear explosions,tracking storms or clouds of volcanic ash, locating epicentres of earthquakes, monitoring the drift of huge icebergs, observing the movements of marine mammals, and detecting plane crashes.

The five-day ‘Science and Technology 2015 Conference’ (SnT2015), which ended Jun. 26, was the fifth in a series of multi-disciplinary conferences organised by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which has been based in the Austrian capital since 1997.

The conference was attended by more than 1100 scientists and other experts, policy makers and representatives of national agencies, independent academic research institutions and civil society organisations from around the world.“With a strong verification regime and its cutting edge technology, there is no excuse for further delaying the [Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty] CTBT’s entry into force” – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

SnT2015 drew attention to an important finding of CTBTO sensors: the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was the largest to hit Earth in at least a century.

Participants also heard that the Air Algérie flight between Burkina Faso and Algeria which crashed in Mali in July 2014 was detected by the CTBTO’s monitoring station in Cote d’Ivoire, 960 kilometres from the impact of the aircraft.

The importance of SnT2015 lies in the fact that CTBTO is tasked with campaigning for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which outlaws nuclear explosions by everyone, everywhere: on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, underwater and underground. It also aims to develop reliable tools to make sure that no nuclear explosion goes undetected.

These include seismic, hydro-acoustic, infrasound (frequencies too low to be heard by the human ear), and radionuclide sensors. Scientists and other experts demonstrated and explained in presentations and posters how the four state-of-the-art technologies work in practice.

170 seismic stations monitor shockwaves in the Earth, the vast majority of which are caused by earthquakes. But man-made explosions such as mine explosions or the announced North Korean nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013 have also been detected.

CTBTO’s 11 hydro-acoustic stations “listen” for sound waves in the oceans. Sound waves from explosions can travel extremely far underwater. Sixty infrasound stations on the Earth’s surface can detect ultra-low frequency sound waves that are emitted by large explosions.

CTBTO’s 80 radionuclide stations measure the atmosphere for radioactive particles; 40 of them also pick up noble gas, the “smoking gun” from an underground nuclear test. Only these measurements can give a clear indication as to whether an explosion detected by the other methods was actually nuclear or not. Sixteen laboratories support radionuclide stations.

When complete, CTBTO’s International Monitoring System (IMS) will consist of 337 facilities spanning the globe to monitor the planet for signs of nuclear explosions. Nearly 90 percent of the facilities are already up and running.

An important theme of the conference was performance optimisation which, according to W. Randy Bell, Director of CTBTO’s International Data Centre (IDC), “will have growing relevance as we sustain and recapitalise the IMS and IDC in the year ahead.”

In the past 20 years, the international community has invested more than one billion dollars in the global monitoring system whose data can be used by CTBTO member states – and not only for test ban verification purposes. All stations are connected through satellite links to the IDC in Vienna.

“Our stations do not necessarily have to be in the same country as the event, but in fact can detect events from far outside from where they are located. For example, the last DPRK (North Korean) nuclear test was picked up as far as Peru,” CTBTO’s Public Information Officer Thomas Mützelburg told IPS.

“Our 183 member states have access to both the raw data and the analysis results. Through their national data centres, they study both and arrive at their own conclusion as to the possible nature of events detected,” he said. Scientists from Papua New Guinea and Argentina said they found the data “extremely useful”.

Stressing the importance of data sharing, CTBTO Executive Secretary, Lassina Zerbo, said in an interview with Nature: “If you make your data available, you connect with the outside scientific community and you keep abreast of developments in science and technology. Not only does it make the CTBTO more visible, it also pushes us to think outside the box. If you see that data can serve another purpose, that helps you to step back a little bit, look at the broader picture and see how you can improve your detection.”

Photo credit: CTBTO

In opening remarks to the conference, Zerbo said: “You will have heard me say again and again that I am passionate about this organisation. Today I am not only passionate but very happy to see all of you who share this passion: a passion for science in the service of peace. It gives me hope for the future of our children that the best and brightest scientists of our time congregate to perfect the detection of the bomb instead of working to perfect the bomb itself.”

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon set the tone in a message to the conference when he said: “With a strong verification regime and its cutting edge technology, there is no excuse for further delaying the CTBT’s entry into force.”

South African Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, pointed out that her country “is a committed and consistent supporter” of CTBTO. She added: “South Africa has been at the forefront of nuclear non-proliferation in Africa for over twenty years. We gave up our nuclear arsenal and signed the Pelindaba Treaty in 1996, which establishes Africa as a nuclear weapons-free zone, a zone that only came into force in July 2009.

Beside the presentations by scientists, discussion panels addressed topics of current special interest in the CTBT monitoring community. One alluded to the role of science in on-site inspections (OSIs), which are provided for under the Treaty after it enters into force.

This discussion benefited from the experience of the 2014 Integrated Field Exercise (IFE14) in Jordan. “IFE14 was the largest and most comprehensive such exercise so far conducted in the build-up of CTBTO’s OSI capabilities,” said IDC director Bell.

Participants also had an opportunity to listen to a discussion on the opportunities that new and emerging technologies can play in overcoming the challenges of nuclear security. Members of the Technology for Global Security (Tech4GS) group joined former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry in a panel discussion on ‘Citizen Networks: the Promise of Technological Innovation’.

“We are verging on another nuclear arms race,” said Perry. “I do not think that it is irreversible. This is the time to stop and reflect, debate the issue and see if there’s some third choice, some alternative, between doing nothing and having a new arms race.”

A feature of the conference was the CTBT Academic Forum focused on ‘Strengthening the CTBT through Academic Engagement’, at which Bob Frye, prestigious Emmy award-winning producer and director of documentaries and network news programme, pleaded for the need to inspire “the next generation of critical thinkers” to help usher in a world free of nuclear tests and atomic weapons of mass destruction.

The forum also provided an overview of impressive CTBT online educational resources and experiences with teaching the CTBT from the perspective of teachers and professors in Austria, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Pakistan and Russia.

With a view to bridging science and policy, the forum discussed ‘technical education for policymakers and policy education for scientists’ with the participation of eminent experts, including Rebecca Johnson, executive director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy; Nikolai Sokov of the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies; Ference Dalnoki-Veress of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies; Edward Ifft of the Center for Security Studies, Georgetown; and Matt Yedlin of the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia.

There was general agreement on the need to integrate technical issues of CTBT into training for diplomats and other policymakers, and increasing awareness of CTBT and broader nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament policy issues within the scientific community.

Yet another panel – comprising Jean du Preez, chief of CTBTO’s external relations, protocol and international cooperation, Piece Corden of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas Blake of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, and Jenifer Mackby of the Federation of American Scientists – looked ahead with a view to forging new and better links with and beyond academia, effectively engaging with the civil society, the youth and the media.

“Progress comes in increments,” said one panellist, “but not by itself.”

[With inputs from Valentina Gasbarri]

Edited by Phil Harris    

The writer can be contacted at headquarters@ips.org

“Poor and rural communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It is them – who did the least to create this problem – who are suffering the most from it”. Photo credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

By Dipti Bhatnagar and Susann Scherbarth
BRUSSELS/MAPUTO, Apr 1 2015 (IPS)

World governments expect to agree to a new global treaty to combat climate change in Paris in December. As the catastrophic impacts of climate change become more evident, so too escalates the urgency to act.

Mar. 31 should have marked a major milestone on the road to Paris, yet only a handful of countries acted on it. Unfortunately, the few plans that were announced before that date show that our leaders lack the ambition to do what it takes to tackle the climate crisis.

National plans for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will most likely form the basis of the Paris agreement. These plans – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – are meant to indicate a government’s self-stated commitment to solve the global climate crisis through domestic emission reductions as well as through support for the poorest and most vulnerable countries.“People on the frontline of climate impacts are burning while governments fiddle. People are paying and will pay for the devastation of climate change with their lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, communities and culture”

This architecture will result in an agreement that is weaker than each country being legally mandated to reduce emissions based on their fair share, determined through science and equity.

Yet, even with this architecture, the idea was that national governments would declare these plans by the end of March so that they could then be scrutinised.

Only six pledges had been received by the United Nations by the deadline – from the European Union, the United States, Norway, Mexico, Russia and Switzerland. These nations, with the notable exception of Mexico, are among the worst historical carbon emitters, yet these pledges do not reflect that immense historical responsibility and do not show any real willingness to address the scale of the climate crisis.

The commitments are well below what science and climate justice principles tell us is urgently needed to avoid hitting climate tipping points. The European Union announced target to cut emissions by ”at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030” is merely re-hashed from last year’s announcement.

The United States has cobbled together a plan for a meagre reduction of 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, by 2025. If these insignificant pledges are an indication of what is to come, we are on track to a world which will be 4-6°C warmer on average. To put this into context, the climate impacts we are facing today are the consequence of a planet which is only 0.8°C warmer than it was.

So far, none of these countries’ announcements would contribute their ‘fair share’ according to science and equity. All parties are capable of much greater ambition, and it is high time to bring it to the table.

The deadlines that matter most are not set by governments, but by our planet and its natural boundaries, which have already been stretched considerably by the impacts of the climate crisis, for instance by the lethal and extreme weather events from Vanuatu to the Balkans to the Sahel.

Climate change is already happening now, bringing more floods, storms, droughts, rising seas and more devastating typhoons and hurricanes.

The mockery made of this latest Mar. 31 deadline is just another revelation of our governments’ inaction – under the influence of powerful polluting corporations – in the face of impending disaster.

People on the frontline of climate impacts are burning while governments fiddle. People are paying and will pay for the devastation of climate change with their lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, communities and culture.

Poor and rural communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It is them – who did the least to create this problem – who are suffering the most from it.

We need a just and drastic transformation of our societies, our energy and food systems, and our economies. Proven and workable alternatives exist and are already being implemented.

Key decisions about our energy systems are made regularly, and will of course be made long after the Paris summit. Take for instance U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring planet-wrecking tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

A decision is expected soon and a rejection of the pipeline project would send a strong signal that our long-term future is not founded on the exploitation and burning of more and more fossil fuels.

European Union governments announced their INDCs back in February with their new ‘Energy Union’ vision for meeting the region’s energy needs. The bloc has recognised the need to reduce energy consumption and help citizens take control of clean, local renewable sources. But these moves towards the good must not be negated with new investments in the bad – new gas pipelines are also on the menu.

Throughout 2015, Friends of the Earth International and others will be bringing more and more people together to fight against the power of the polluters and make sure politicians hear the voices of the voiceless and take real action.

In the run-up to Paris, and along the road beyond, we, together with thousands of others, will be promoting the wealth of real solutions and proven ideas that are already delivering transformation around the world.

We will be on the streets throughout 2015, in 2016, and as long as it takes to realise community-owned renewable energy solutions that benefit ordinary people, not multinational corporations.

The Paris deadline will come and go, like others before. But the energy transformation is under way and, whatever our governments will pledge or not pledge at the climate summit in Paris, the transformation will not be stopped.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* Dipti Bhatnagar is Climate Justice & Energy Co-coordinator for Friends of the Earth International, based in Maputo.

* Susann Scherbarth is Climate Justice & Energy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, based in Brussels.

Excerpt:

Moselyn Muchena, one of the girls being given a chance under the TechWomen initiative. Credit: Mary Kashumba/IPS

By Mary Kashumba
HARARE, Jul 10 2014 (IPS)

For 22-year-old Moselyn Muchena, a final year computer science student at the University of Zimbabwe, it seemed obvious to create a mobile application offering easy access to services in the local catering industry, largely because of the huge number of female entrepreneurs in that sector.

“The kinds of problems these women are going through inspired me to come up with an innovative application for the industry called ORDER NOW, through which they can [post] their menus and specials, as well as their location and the prices of items.

“The application is also interactive, allowing customers to share [their reviews] on other social networks platforms … and it offers a platform for feedback, which is vital for businesses,” Muchena told IPS. The app also allows for advertising.“We want to tap into the creative and innovative base of 52 percent of the population. Imagine what the world has lost in innovation due to the lack of or fewer women in these creative spaces” – TechWomen Zimbabwe

“I am grateful to get this opportunity to create a culinary application that can be used by restaurants, where mostly women dominate the field,” she said, adding that she hoped her app will have a global reach.

According to Farai Mutambanengwe, president of the Small to Medium Scale Enterprises Association of Zimbabwe, women dominate the catering industry in Zimbabwe. He told IPS that while the association had no actual analysis “on the number of women who are in the culinary industry compared with men, generally women continue to grow in dominating this field.”

Muchena sees herself as paving the way for other girls to enter the fields of science and technology. “Being the only girl doing computer science in my class, I used to feel like an outcast and it took me time to blend in to become part of the class and not ‘the woman’ in the class. I said to myself I would also pave the way for young girls who aspire to have a career in technological innovations.”

The young innovator is just one of over 100 girls and women aged between 10 and 23 who are creating innovative technologies to address community problems in Zimbabwe. They are part of a U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs initiative called TechWomen, a programme designed to empower, connect and support the next generation of women leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Referring to her own experience in developing her software, Muchena pointed out that there was an urgent need for investors in the field of science. “Our plight as young science entrepreneurs is that there are no investors willing to engage youths who are coming up with innovations.” However, lack of investment in the science sector has dwindled as a result of a restrictive economy.

According to a 2008 report in the Economic Reform Feature Service  of the Centre for International Enterprise (CIPE), “the education system in Zimbabwe has long suffered from an insufficient focus on teaching practical skills, limited access to higher education opportunities, and unequal access for girls to specialised fields such as science.”

“Successful educational reform is a necessary step to create the basis for sustained economic growth and requires the involvement of all stakeholders, ranging from families and civil society into national and local governments as well as the private sector,” said the report.

National Zimbabwean statistics for 2012 show that the number of women who enrolled in faculties of engineering, computer science and science technology at university level were 17 percent, 35 percent and 22 percent respectively in 2009. A year later, women’s enrolment in these faculties were 17. 5 percent, 39 percent and 18 percent respectively.

Chemical technologist Aretha Mare, one of the members of TechWomen Zimbabwe, founded by five Zimbabwean women who graduated from the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen initiative, told IPS that its vision is to see gender parity, or 50 percent representation of women in all STEM professions.

“We want to tap into the creative and innovative base of 52 percent of the population,” says TechWomen Zimbabwe. “Imagine what the world has lost in innovation due to the lack of or fewer women in these creative spaces.”

Mare said that under the TechWomen initiative, “the women act as role models, mentors and teachers, creating a networking platform and peer-to-peer interaction with sharing of knowledge to keep them motivated and sharing of opportunities, thus avoiding the leaky pipe where a few women who pursue STEM careers also switch careers or leave due to frustrations in the workplace.”

According to Mare, “the girls’ programme aims to expose girls to STEM fields through experiential learning, where they identify problems, use STEM to solve them, recalibrate and ideate again. We try to do it in hands on, fun and engaging way.”

“We believe we are causing a revolution, transitioning Zimbabwe into a tech power house through girls and women as we target girls from marginalised backgrounds (both in school and out of school), some of them with no prior computer experience and most with limited access to technology. So far we have trained over 100 girls,” she added.

Meanwhile, under its Strategic Plan (2011-2015), Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in partnership with the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has embarked on a massive programme to revive science teaching in the country. The programme is being funded through the Education Development Fund (EDF), a multi-donor funding mechanism.

The programme has already distributed 2,449 sciences kits and is currently working on the re-training of more than 5,000 science teachers from the 2,336 secondary schools in the country on the safe use and maintenance of the equipment in the kits.

For Muchena, it all comes down to convincing parents and the government to strive to ensure that talent is given a chance. “I encourage parents and the authorities to understand that sometimes it is not about the academic aspects but about realising a child’s ability and nurturing it into something big.”

El Morado Superior glacier in the Andes mountain chain in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Ruz/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Feb 24 2014 (IPS)

The idea sounds like harebrained science-fiction, but the accelerated retreat of glaciers due to global warming and the effects of mining is leading scientists to seek to restore or recreate these valuable reservoirs of fresh water.

“There are a number of technologies for saving and creating new glaciers,” Chilean glaciologist Cedomir Marangunic told Tierramérica.“To create a new glacier the natural process must be simulated, that is, winter snow accumulation must be greater than the summer melting. And that is not difficult to achieve; the main thing is to do it at minimum cost and in an environmentally sustainable way.” – Cedomir Marangunic

This sounds like a sweet promise for Chile, a mining country with at least 3,100 glaciers, most of which are clearly retreating, according to official data.

Glaciers, huge masses of ice and recrystallised snow, store 69 percent of the planet’s fresh water. They form when annual snowfall exceeds the amount of snow melted in summer, and accumulate enormous amounts of material over geologically short time frames.

But when it comes to the work of human hands, the time needed to create a glacier depends on the money invested, Marangunic said. The minimum time for a sufficient mass of snow to turn completely to ice is three years, he said.

“The natural process must be simulated, that is, winter snow accumulation must be greater than the summer melting. And that is not difficult to achieve; the main thing is to do it at minimum cost and in an environmentally sustainable way,” said Marangunic, a geologist at the University of Chile who holds a doctorate in glaciology from Ohio State University in the United States.

The techniques he has tested “aim at reducing melting on the ice surface, or at increasing snow accumulation,” he said.

In experiments in Chile, an artificial deposit of ice was covered with rocky detritus, which reduced ablation (the loss of ice mass) to one-quarter or one-fifth of normal, the expert told Tierramérica.

Marangunic heads a company that carries out research projects on glaciers, snow and avalanches. In 2007 he did an experiment transporting a mass of ice from one place to another.

Using mining trucks, 30,000 tonnes of ice were taken in one day to a pre-prepared site. In its original location, the ice was retreating 15 cm per year, while in the new site it retreated 30 cm the first year, but then less and less, as expected. In 2012, the ice retreated only three centimetres.

The expert tried transforming an ice field into a small glacier, by putting up barriers like those used for avalanche protection or on ski pistes, and modifying them to change wind direction during storms. This had the effect of doubling snow accumulation.

Among the most frequently used techniques is “covering part of the glacier surface with geotextile sheets, which reduces surface ablation,” the glaciologist said.

Marangunic pointed out that care was needed, for example, when a glacier suffers impacts and “water flows into the glacier’s basin due to rapid melting of the ice mass, but is then removed for artificial snow accumulation.”

The whole process, he said, “may affect the local ecosystem, which must be managed in order to avoid harm.”

In the view of Matías Asun, the head of Greenpeace Chile, these studies are inconclusive and “provide no basis to indicate they may be viable, sufficient, successful, cost-effective technologies, let alone that they may be applicable to all areas where there are glaciers.”

In a dry winter, for instance, there would not be enough snow for the accumulation a new glacier needs. And, because of climate change, it is expected that there will be increasingly more dry winters, Asun said.

“I don’t doubt the good intentions of those who are trying to develop strategies to protect glaciers, because it is a fact that many of the risks could be minimised,” Asun told Tierramérica.

“The key thing is to protect existing glaciers effectively. The glaciers are there, and they should stay there,” he said.

In Latin America, 82 percent of the reserves of fresh water in glaciers are in Chile, according to Greenpeace. But a large proportion of Chilean glaciers are, or will be, threatened by climate change and the actions of the mining industry.

“They are a strategic water reserve and an important part of the region’s heritage, yet at the moment they are not protected by law,” as they are in neighbouring Argentina, Asun said.

Current legislation allows a productive project to encroach on a glacier, if the impact is stated in the environmental impact study and some form of compensation is made.

In a recent appearance before parliament, glaciologist Alexander Brenning, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, said the magnitude of interventions on glaciers in Chile was unparalleled in the world, and he urged that the cumulative effects be assessed.

Parliament is studying a bill that would include a clear definition of glaciers and a permanent register of them.

In Marangunic’s view, it is essential that the definition does not close off a large part of the territory to all kinds of activities, such as tourism or development projects, “without contributing anything to the permanence of glaciers.”

The ownership status of glaciers must be established, especially those situated on private land, he said.

“Will they be able to be purchased and traded, as happens with water rights?” asked the expert, referring to the Water Code of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which made water a private resource.

Mining projects like the Anglo American company’s Los Bronces, the state Chile Copper Corporation’s Andina 244 and Escalones, and Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama, are the main threat to several glaciers in this country, according to environmentalists.

For Marangunic, in contrast, while “some mining” may damage glaciers, “environmental pollution in big cities like Santiago, or smoke from burning pastures and forests,” also affect the ice masses.

Therefore, in his view, the future law must be even-handed for all. “How can Santiago be penalised for producing the smog that affects the glaciers in the mountains?” he asked.

Stopping the retreat of a relatively small glacier can be achieved in a year. “But getting a glacier that has been shrinking for decades or centuries back to its original size will surely take as long again,” although a large investment may accelerate the process, he said.

In Asun’s view, “the urgent thing now is not to wait thousands of years to reproduce a glacier, to see if it works, but to proteet what is already there.”

Playing God “turns out like we saw in Jurassic Park. Since the glaciers are there, let’s protect them,” he concluded.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Many people in Cuba have avocado trees in their yards, for family consumption. Credit: Ivet González/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Dec 20 2012 (IPS)

During some parts of the year, a layer of salt can be seen on the ground in eastern Cuba, which makes it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to farm. Since agronomist Orlando Coto saw this with his own eyes, he has been searching for salt-tolerant fruit trees.

“The main causes of this phenomenon are associated with climate change, like drought and penetration by seawater,” said Coto, of the governmental Tropical Fruit Research Institute (IIFT). “Alternatives have to be found that come up with faster results than the traditional plant breeding techniques, to deal with this problem.”

Coto, a university professor, discussed with IPS the extent of the problem of saline soils in Cuba and a project of induced mutation to produce cultivars of avocado and citrus trees that would be more resistant to hostile conditions.

Q: What is salinisation of the soil? What causes it?

A: It’s the concentration of salt in the soil, a complex problem that has multiple causes. It can be caused, for example, by drought, whether due to lack of rainfall or high temperatures, the penetration of the sea in low-lying areas, the availability of nutrients in the soil, or the contamination of the aquifers because of the overuse of agrochemicals.

In the case of Cuba, the main causes of salinity in the soil are the lengthening of the dry periods and seawater intrusion, factors associated with climate change. As the amount of water available in the soil declines, the concentration of compounds like sodium and chloride – which are naturally found in the soil separately, but together make up salt – increases.

For that reason, farmers would welcome new cultivars of all kinds, especially fruit trees, that are tolerant of salinity and drought, and that would make it possible to save water and to use other irrigation methods.

Q: What parts of Cuba are hit hardest by this phenomenon?

A: Soil salinity is bad in the entire southern stretch of Guantánamo (at the eastern tip of the island), because of drought and because it’s very low-lying land, and the seawater penetrates through the aquifers. The entire southern portion of eastern Cuba is dry and thus tends to have high levels of salinity.

In this country, we don’t have any extremely dry or saline areas. The ones that have the driest, most saline conditions are the abovementioned part of Guantánamo and the region north of Santa Clara (east of the Cuban capital). The latter has a kind of clay in the soil that creates lumps, which make it difficult for plants to absorb water and nutrients.

In the 1990s, I took part in a multidisciplinary study carried out in the south of Guantánamo, where rapid changes were detected in the salinity of the soil, and in a smaller area, very different – that is, contrasting – concentrations of salt were found.

Q: What challenges does this ever-changing reality pose for research into new saline- and drought-resistant varieties?

A: So-called precision agriculture, which consists of applying scientific-technical advances in much more localised areas to obtain specific results for small farmers or agricultural businesses, is gaining more and more ground.

On the other hand, science requires time to come up with solutions, while the changes and the effects of climate change on crops are occurring faster and faster.

Q: What does the search for more tolerant varieties imply, in the case of fruit trees?

A: Fruit trees have specific requirements. Crossbreeding is nearly impossible, because of biological limitations, as can be done in the case of vegetables. In addition, they have a long juvenile period. Orange or avocado trees do not start producing until they are three or five years old on average.

Only after resistance has been transmitted for three generations (in vitro or in the countryside) can it be stated that a new cultivar has been found. In the IIFT we have been experimenting since the last decade with irradiation and in vitro culture of avocado seeds, through a method aimed at accelerating fruit improvement programmes.

Q: What are the goals of the study? Who participated in it?

A: We have worked since 2000 with the Centre for Technological Applications and Nuclear Development and the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, among others in Cuba, and with financing from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supporting the search for solutions against climate change in agriculture, specifically in terms of drought and salinity.

We started with the irradiation of avocado seeds, to obtain mutant seeds that might possibly be resistant to drought, salinity and a disease (Phytophthora, a group of plant-damaging pathogens) that affects the roots and the trunk of avocado trees, or others like papaya and orange trees.

We chose the only kind of avocado stock used commercially in Cuba. Lately we have incorporated citrus trees in the research in which induced mutation techniques are applied.

Q: How much progress have you made? How much longer will it take?

A: It has been a long process, but we already have the half-lethal dose of radiation to apply on seeds and buds, and we have also adapted an international methodology for improving avocados to our conditions here.

We have established an in vitro selection system where we simulate the average conditions of drought and salinity found, for example, in some soils in southern Guantánamo.

A group of possible mutants were obtained – they’re currently in the study phase – which in the in vitro conditions showed certain levels of tolerance of salinity. But it will still take at least seven years to obtain a cultivar.

Q: What problems to be solved has your centre identified, in order for Cuba to be able to meet local demand for fruit?

A: The main problem is the availability of high-quality, certified seedlings for the entire community of farmers. More knowledge about their cultivation also has to be disseminated through pamphlets and other printed materials, to which small farmers would have better access.

Excerpt:

An educational stimulus programme launched in Argentina is aimed at doubling the number of engineering graduates by 2021, in an attempt to fulfil unmet growing demand from industry.

The goal set by a Strategic Engineering Plan drafted by the Education Ministry and the Federal Council of Deans of Engineering Faculties (CONFEDI) is to increase the average annual number of graduates from around 5,000 today to 7,500 by 2016 and 10,000 by 2021.

“Today we only meet 50 percent of industry’s demand,” said CONFEDI president Jorge Del Gener, the dean of the Avellaneda Regional Faculty of the National Technological University.

Del Gener told IPS that “with the economic development that Argentina is experiencing today, the boom in industry, and full employment for students, there just aren’t enough graduates.”

He added that it was necessary to stimulate interest in engineering, and take measures to ensure that engineering students continue their studies until they earn a degree.

The head of CONFEDI said advanced students are recruited by companies at an average starting salary of 9,000 pesos a month (some 2,000 dollars) before they graduate, which delays their studies or even keeps them from completing their degrees.

To turn that tendency around and cater to demand, the Education Ministry and CONFEDI propose, in first place, to awaken interest in engineering among secondary school students.

“The number of people who apply to study the different branches of engineering has basically remained steady for a long time,” Del Gener said. “We believe that is because there is a myth that engineering programmes are very difficult and very long, with a great deal of mathematics.”

To change that negative image, a publicity campaign was designed for the Education Ministry’s 24-hour Encuentro TV station, as well as a spot that will be aired during professional football matches on the channel 7 public TV station.

The ad will show the engineering works underway in Argentina, and the important role that engineering students play, in terms of contributing to the country’s development, Del Gener explained.

A new effort has also begun to strengthen links between secondary schools and universities. The Education Ministry has created a financing plan so that each engineering department will begin to build relationships with a score of nearby secondary schools.

“We want students to see the work and the tests that are done in laboratories,” Del Gener said. “Because since the 1990s, many high schools no longer have laboratories, or offer training in technology.”

CONFEDI also drew up a document to show secondary school students the math skills they need, in order to be admitted to engineering departments.

With respect to the advanced students who join the labour market before they graduate, Del Gener said that many of them fail to complete the final three or four courses, and give up after working for a year or a year and a half.

“They tell us it is frowned upon in the companies to ask for a day off to study for or take an exam,” he said. “That’s why we met with (authorities in) the Ministry of Industry, so it will intercede with the companies to get them to make it easier for their employees to complete their studies.”

In Argentina, there are 21 engineering degrees. The most popular are in chemical, industrial, civil, mechanical, electronic, electrical, metallurgical, materials and systems engineering.

There are also petroleum, mining, and nuclear energy engineering degrees, although the numbers of students in these programmes are much smaller. However, the recovery of state control over YPF, Argentina’s biggest oil company, will increase the influx of students into these degree programmes, Del Gener said.

The government of Cristina Fernández is seizing a controlling stake in YPF from Spain’s Repsol.

The dean also said they are working with the Women in Engineering Forum to fight the myth that engineering is for men. Currently, he said, there are more women than men studying chemical engineering, while there are equal numbers of women and men in industrial engineering programmes.

Del Gener said that CONFEDI is not worried that the campaign to foment interest in engineering will trigger a large influx of engineers from countries in crisis, such as European nations.

“The shortage of engineers is a problem in Latin America as a whole, and around the world. My department has exchange programmes with France, and when the scholarships end, our students are hired to work there,” he said.

To keep students from leaving Argentina after receiving a tuition-free education financed by the state, his department now has students sign an agreement promising to return and share their experience with their colleagues for four years, after their scholarships abroad end.

Without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, sunlight is to kill an unknown number of ocean phytoplankton, the planet’s most important organism, a new study reports this week.

Phytoplankton is a vital component in the ocean's food chain, and generates at least half of the oxygen we breathe. Credit: NOAA/public domain

In the not so distant future, sunlight, the very source of life for phytoplankton, will likely begin to kill them because of the ocean’s increasing acidity, researchers from China and Germany have learned.

“There’s a synergistic effect between increased ocean acidity and natural light,” says Ulf Riebesell of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

Riebesell added that it was also possible “phytoplankton could adapt”.

Researchers were surprised to discover that diatoms, one of the most important and abundant types of phytoplankton, fared very badly during shipboard experiments conducted by co-author Kunshan Gao, from the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University, Xiamen China.

Previous experiments in labs like Riebesell’s found that diatoms actually did better in high-acid seawater, unlike most other shell- forming plankton. Burning fossil fuels has made the oceans about 30 percent more acidic researchers discovered less than 10 years ago. Oceans absorb one third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from using fossil fuels.

The good news is this has slowed the rate of global warming. The bad news is oceans are now more acidic and it will get worse as more CO2 is emitted. This is basic, well-understood ocean chemistry.

Gao and his team made several trips into the South China Sea taking samples from surface waters where phytoplankton are found. While still on the research vessel, those samples were made as acidic as the oceans are likely to be in 2100 without major emissions reductions (800-1000 parts per million compared to current 392 ppm).

As expected under these conditions, certain types of plankton like coccolithophores did not do well but surprisingly, diatom productivity also declined.

One possible reason was the much brighter natural light on the ship versus that in science labs, Riebsell and Gao suspected. Followup lab experiments with lights mimicking the intensity of natural light in the subtropical zone of the South China Sea confirmed that the combination of high-acid sea water and light intensity was more than diatoms could handle.

Riebsell speculates that diatoms stressed by high-acid conditions can’t cope with the energy they receive from sunlight at the same time. Their study was published May 6 in Nature Climate Change.

“We don’t know at what point the combination of a certain level of ocean acidity and sunlight leads to the decline of diatoms,” he said.

This is just one of many recent studies finding negative impacts as the oceans become more and more acidic.

By 2040, most of the Arctic Ocean will be too acidic for shell- forming species including most plankton. Significant areas of the Antarctic Ocean will be similarly affected, oceanographer Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK previously told IPS.

The cold waters of the polar regions allow more CO2 to be absorbed faster, turning the oceans more acidic sooner. The oceans haven’t seen a rapid change like this in 60 million years, said Turley.

She warned that global warming is also raising water temperatures and reducing the amount of oxygen in seawater in some regions. This is another potentially dangerous combination.

“Our research suggests the impact of oceanic acidification upon marine plankton could be more serious than previously thought,” said John Beardall from the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University.

Beardall and colleagues from several research centres calculate that without major reductions in CO2 emissions, ocean acidity will have a significant impact on phytoplankton before 2100. Their findings were also recently published in Nature Climate Change.

It’s not just plankton. The large and continuing decline of oysters, both wild and farmed, in the Pacific Northwest have now been linked to increased ocean acidity. Scientists have shown that oyster larvae have difficulty building shells in corrosive waters, according to a study in the journal Limnology and Oceanography published last month.

“For the oceans, the Pacific Oyster larvae are the canaries in the coal mines for ocean acidification,” said Richard Feely, a co-author of the study and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fish and other species are showing changes in their growth, behaviour and reproduction, according to other research.

Not only are the oceans big, covering 70 percent of the planet, they are complex. Recent work by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at San Diego reveals there is huge variability in ocean acidity levels.

That makes “global predictions of the impacts of ocean acidification a big challenge,” said Jennifer Smith, a marine biologist with Scripps.

The only prediction Riebesell is willing to make is about the high likelihood of a major decline in the ocean’s biodiversity (number and types of living things) if rates of fossil fuel emissions continue. Roughly 80 percent of all life is found in the oceans.

“Changes in the oceans are happening too fast for most species to cope,” he said. “It’s clear we are conducting a giant experiment on the planet and we don’t know what we are doing.”

At the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the latest on-site measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography reveal that global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations reached 391.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2011, up from 388.56 ppm in 2010 and from 280 ppm from pre-industrial times.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in order to have a 90 percent chance of avoiding dangerous changes in climate, greenhouse gases (GHGs) concentrations need to be stabilised at 450 ppm, which would roughly translate into an average temperature increase of two degrees Celsius.

This means that to stabilise GHG concentrations at 450 ppm, global GHG emissions will need to peak before 2015 and be reduced to 50 percent of their 2000 level by 2050.

Industrialised countries need to reduce their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020, and 80-95 percent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels, which serves as the reference base year for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Various scientific reports also estimate that developing countries should reduce their CO2 emissions by 15-30 percent by 2020, and 50 percent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels.

In recent years, however, emissions increased in both industrialised and developing economies.

In 2010, member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of industrialised countries, increased their emissions by 3.4 percent, while countries outside the OECD saw an increase of 7.6 percent.

Ten countries constituted around 68 percent of the world’s global emissions. Although China was the world’s largest overall emitter in 2010 (followed by the United States, India, and Russia), an examination of emissions per capita tells a different story.

China ranks only 61st in terms of the CO2 emitted per person. In India – the world’s third largest emitter – emissions per capita rank far below the world average. The United States, in contrast, ranks second overall and 10th in per capita emissions.

Our economies still remain tightly coupled to fossil fuel combustion and carbon dioxide emissions. As the global economy started to recover in 2010, emissions increased massively by 5.8 percent.

More than 70 percent of CO2 emissions result from the burning of fossil fuels for energy use, such as electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, and construction. In 2009, electricity generation and heating alone accounted for 41 percent of all energy related CO2 emissions.

Over the past decade, some countries have developed strong policy regimes to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. By early 2010, 83 countries had adopted some sort of policy to promote renewable energy power generation, up from an estimated 48 countries in mid-2005.

Recent estimates by Deutsche Bank Climate Advisors, however, have stated that even if we implement all the current mitigation policies, there would still be a gap of 5.8 Gigaton (Gt) to the 450 ppm pathway.

The International Energy Agency has warned that the door to two degrees, which is the internationally recognised limit to avoid catastrophic climate change, is closing. And as the four degree scenario is becoming increasingly likely, countries such as the Philippines are starting to set up funds dedicated to national survival and adaptation to extreme events resulting from climate change.

Despite significant actions at a national level, the future of the international effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions is uncertain.

The Kyoto Protocol is an important achievement because it is the only international instrument that sets legally binding targets, yet it is becoming increasingly symbolic as it now only regulates around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Global CO2 levels are now 45 percent above the 1990 level. Several Annex I countries – including the United States, which signed but never ratified the Kyoto Protocol – will be unable to meet their original reductions targets.

Since December 2011, Canada, Japan, and Russia, have decided not to take on additional emissions targets within the second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol in the coming decade.

*Xing Fu-Bertaux is a Research Associate with Worldwatch’s Climate and Energy Team.

Political reforms unfolding in Myanmar (or Burma) are giving health workers a chance to address a resurgence of drug-resistant falciparum malaria in the war-torn ethnic minority enclaves along the country’s eastern borders.

Carrying medical aid in backpacks they have been dodging bullets and avoiding mines to deliver healthcare to villagers in the remote border areas that are home to ethnic minorities such as the Karen, Shan and Kachin.

“Due to recent political changes, our health workers have more freedom to access areas formerly restricted by the Burmese army,” Mahn Mahn, secretary of the Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), a non-profit that has been attending to the health needs of nearly 200,000 ethnic minority people in Myanmar for over a decade, told IPS.

Improved healthcare along eastern Myanmar could not have been timed better because of emerging concern over possible genetic mutation of the Plasmodium falciparum that makes the deadly parasite resistant to artemisinin, the most effective anti-malaria drug.

Researchers from the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, on the Thai-Myanmar border, which is supported by the Tropical Medicine Research Programme of Oxford University and the Bangkok-based Mahidol University, have concluded that there is now a resurgence of the deadly strain of falciparum malaria.

The researchers arrived at that conclusion after studying 3,202 patients with falciparum malaria who were on oral artesunate (an artemisinin derivate). The study, conducted along the Thailand-Myanmar border, spanned a 10-year period that ended in 2010.

According to a study published in the British medical journal ‘Lancet’ in April, the longer time taken for oral anti-malaria drugs to act on parasites in the bloodstream suggested increasing resistance.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called for more attention to be paid to Myanmar – in addition to Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam that are under watch – to manage resistance to artemisinin and its derivates.

WHO stated its concerns ahead of World Malaria Day, on Apr. 25. “The four countries most affected by resistance to artemisinin resistance are Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. Of these Myanmar has by far the greatest malaria burden.”

“Given its extensive migrant population, the widespread use of oral artemisinin-based mono therapies and its close geographical proximity to India, Myanmar is critical to the success of efforts to prevent the emergence of artemisinin resistance globally,” the WHO adds.

But programmes to combat the spread of malaria in remote ethnic areas – often among the most vulnerable – need to address the link between disease prevalence and human rights violations in Myanmar, says Bill Davis, Burma project director for Physicians for Human Rights, a United States-based global campaigner for health and rights.

“Research done in the Karen state a few years ago showed that people who had experienced human rights violations were more likely to be positive with malaria than those who did not experience rights abuse,” he told IPS of a region where government troops and Karen rebels have been locked in an ethnic conflict spanning 60 years.

“Human rights abuses have a direct impact on public health,” he asserted. “Forced labour, having food stolen, forced displacement, all have negative effects on health.”

According to the WHO, there were 2.4 million malaria cases reported in 2010 in South and Southeast Asia, of which three countries accounted for over 90 percent of the confirmed cases. India accounted for 66 percent, Myanmar 18 percent and Indonesia 10 percent.

WHO studies reveal that close to 40 million people, nearly 69 percent of the population, live in malaria endemic zones in Myanmar. Of that, some 24 million people live in high-transmission areas – where BPHT operates.

In 2010, Myanmar reported 650,000 cases and 788 malaria-related deaths, according the WHO.

Myanmar dominated the other two Asian countries in the spike in malaria cases over a 10-year period, from 2000 to 2010, according to the ‘World Malaria Report 2011’. It recorded the highest increase in cases – 250 percent – because of “the changes associated with a large increase in the external diagnostic testing,” the report adds.

The spectre of artemisinin resistance in this corner of Southeast Asia affirms why it has been labelled the “epicentre of drug-resistant malaria in the world.”

The battle to contain the malaria parasite’s resistance to chloroquinine, once the drug of choice, was lost in these parts. Malaria resistance to chloroquinine was first detected in Pailin, a war-torn corner along the Thai-Cambodian border, from where it spread around the world.

“The threat of drug resistance must be taken seriously,” Shin Young-soo, regional director for the WHO’s Western Pacific division, said this week in a message to mark Malaria Day. “A particular concern is that artemisinin resistance will also develop in Africa, which has the world’s greatest malaria burden.”

“Our task is to prevent and to protect the gains that have been achieved by continuing artemisinin resistance containment efforts in the affected areas, and by preventing the development of resistance in other areas,” he added. “In the countries with detected artemisinin resistance, elimination of resistant parasites is vital.”

Mahn Mahn hopes that the government will give border-based organisations like the BPHWT, that have been providing much needed humanitarian assistance for many years, recognition, “so that we can improve our healthcare programmes and activities in remote areas.”

“We are unable to purchase medicines and supplies inside Burma because we are not an organisation registered with the government,” he said.

The White House on Thursday announced the formulation of the National Bioeconomy Blueprint, aimed at shoring up the U.S. commitment to bioscience-related research.

A recent study found that "zero percent" of federal funding of synthetic biology was going into risk assessment. Credit: Horia Varlan/CC By 2.0

But critics warn that the new programme focuses too much on economic concerns, placing too little emphasis on either social issues or on the environment itself.

“We’re disappointed to see what finally came out,” Eric Hoffman, a Washington-based campaigner with Friends of the Earth, an international NGO, told IPS. “This report largely seems to be an endorsement for the biotechnology industry to rush ahead without any real oversight.”

The biotechnology industry “says that it has been calling for this type of legislation for long time,” Hoffman notes. “That makes sense, given that the industry stands to gain the most from the types of policies laid out in the Blueprint.”

Hoffman says that the biotechnology industry includes many of the largest oil and petrochemical producers – ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Monsanto, Dow. The lack of plans for government regulation apparent in the Blueprint leaves him pessimistic that much “clean, green” technology will come out of the new effort.

He also points to a recent study by the Woodrow Wilson Center, based here, that found that “zero percent” of federal funding of synthetic biology was going into risk assessment. “That’s not how you have an honest policy debate,” he says.

The government itself defines the bioeconomy as “economic activity powered by research and innovation in the biosciences”. In the Blueprint, the issue of environmental concerns is dealt with only tangentially, although the general push is to phase out fossil fuels and industrial materials in favour of organically based compounds and “green” approaches.

Of the five strategic objectives laid out in the Blueprint, only one specifically mentions the environment. Even then, it arises only in a call to “Develop and reform regulations to reduce barriers, increase the speed and predictability of regulatory processes, and reduce costs while protecting human and environmental health.”

The bioeconomy has increasingly emerged as a priority for the Barack Obama administration. Thursday’s announcement followed on initial plans announced by the U.S. government in September 2011, building on legislation passed in 2000 called the Biomass Research and Development Act.

Other developed countries are also increasing their focus on aspects of their nascent bioeconomies, particularly in moving beyond fossil fuels. In February, the European Commission publicised a new strategy to ramp up related efforts. The “green economy” is also a central theme at the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro.

While many such efforts are to be lauded individually, there is growing understanding of the dangers of state-backed moves towards relying on ecosystem-based products.

“While the idea of using renewable resources instead of fossil fuels is a good idea in theory, the way in which the bio-economy approach proposes to achieve this goal is at best deeply flawed and inequitable, and at worst downright dangerous,” states a new report released on Thursday by the Global Forest Coalition, an international umbrella group.

The report, “Bio-economy Versus Biodiversity”, notes the spiking demand for land across the world for both food production and human habitat. This has not only led to increased land-based conflict, the report suggests, but has also increased global hunger.

“Without reducing consumption and demand for energy and products, the sheer scale on which biomass would have to produced to meet the demands of a global bio-economy would severely exacerbate these problems,” the report states.

Those technologies currently being lauded in the attempt to move beyond fossil fuels – such as the use of algae in creating electricity – are risky or as yet untested on a wide scale, warns the report. As such, the technologies that would undoubtedly be used in the immediate future – and almost certainly beyond – would be relatively dirty and wasteful, such as burning biomass.

“The bio-economy approach offers politicians in industrialized countries an opportunity to be seen to be doing something about meeting ill-defined ‘renewable energy targets’, while maximizing opportunities for economic growth and securing a constant supply of energy,” the report warns. “There is precious little concern about the environment, or about impacts in other countries, apart from the usual platitudes about providing jobs.”

Concerns over this new push towards the bioeconomy coincide with high levels of international anxiety over food security.

“The current U.S. mandate prescribes a huge increase in the generation of energy from land,” Ujjayant Chakravorty, a professor at the Alberta School of Economics, told IPS. “Forty percent of U.S. corn is already used for energy rather than food, and that number will go up in the next 10 years.”

In the U.S. in particular, any major new push towards mass reliance on biofuels would almost certainly have a direct impact on wellbeing in other parts of the world.

For instance, Chakravorty says that rice, wheat and sugar constitute around two-thirds of daily calories for many people in India, as they do for much of the developing world. If more land in India were to be sown for non-edible biofuels, prices for these necessities would almost certainly rise.

“The U.S. has a quarter of the world’s vehicles,” Chakravorty says. “In India alone, the U.S. biofuel policy could directly result in 15 to 40 million people dropping below the poverty line.”

Young people learning computer skills at Campus Tec. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Apr 26 2012 (IPS)

“We’re making a three-dimensional educational video game. The idea is to create virtual worlds where children can explore and interact with other people and objects,” said Carlos Villagrán, seated at a computer in the Campus Tecnológico in the Guatemalan capital.

The Tec, as it is better known, was conceived as “a physical space where innovation and technology can find a place to flourish at world-class levels of competitiveness,” according to its web site.

The campus is inspired by Silicon Valley, the technology park in California that is home to hi-tech giants like Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.

So far, the Guatemalan campus is thriving. The Tec’s seven-storey building, inaugurated in June 2010, is fully occupied by 100 companies in the information technology (IT) sector, most of whose personnel are young people.

They specialise in producing special effects for movies, video games, and software for mobile telephones and the internet.

The Tec building, located in Cuatro Grados Norte, a cultural district with pedestrian areas, parks and restaurants, also houses the technology institute of the private Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, all of which has generated great anticipation and enthusiasm.

“We were about to throw in the towel because of lack of support, but then we came here and found plenty of people developing their own projects and companies,” Villagrán told IPS.

“There are three dimensional designers and modellers here who are collaborating with us,” he said.

“We have found a place to work, and we are more enthusiastic now,” said this 26-year-old computer science engineer, who wants to see his project “expand all over the world.”

Villagrán participates in the Tec’s “business incubator”, a sort of technological seedbed for entrepreneurial startup companies that is also part of the campus.

The incubator programme “accelerates the process of creation, growth and consolidation of innovative projects and businesses,” María Mercedes Zagui, in charge of business development at the Campus Tecnológico, told IPS.

“We have over 200 enterprise projects that are constantly buzzing around us. These are people who are allied to and interested in us, but we do not have enough space in the building for all of them,” she said.

To cope with the demand, a new 14-storey building is under construction to house more companies, including international firms, while strategies to attract the attention of potential clients abroad are growing.

Zagui said plans are in motion to open a Campus Tec office in the U.S. Silicon Valley technology complex in August.

“That will give us a global presence, because having an address here is not the same as having one in the United States, in the world’s largest business incubator. In addition, there are opportunities for making contacts and securing financial resources there that we do not have here,” she said.

According to the Ibero-American and Inter-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), this impoverished Central American country of 14 million people invests 12 million dollars a year on research and development, equivalent to 0.04 percent of GDP.

Direct government investment in science and technology represents only 27.9 percent of the country’s total investment in this area, while 21.7 percent is contributed by higher education, and the remaining 50.4 percent comes from abroad, the network says.

Meanwhile, the businesses at the Tec continue their struggle to innovate and open up a niche for themselves in the field of technology.

One of them is BigoMo, which does video postproduction and visual effects and is renowned for its work in “The Chronicles of Narnia” film series. Source Tour, meanwhile, has launched a virtual shopfront for tours and tourist activities in Guatemala.

“Being here has been good for our growth. I have met lots of people who work in the same field, but I see them as collaborators, not competitors,” said Mauricio Macal, the head of CG Armada, a multimedia production unit.

But the challenges are great. For one thing, the local market tends to undervalue these technological products, to the point that clients often do not want to pay the real value of their work.

Macal blames this on the fact that many people sell their work at far below market prices.

“There’s a lot of undercutting in the business. Some young people are making logos for 150 quetzals (20 dollars), and they are competing with companies that have fixed overheads, like office rent, and that use brand-name computers and legal software,” he complained to IPS.

In spite of the hurdles, the IT industry seems to be taking off at the Tec, for instance at Milk ‘n Cookies, another Guatemalan company devoted to multimedia production, web platforms and applications for cellphones.

“We have just tripled our office space,” Nelson Melville, the company’s project developer, told IPS.

The firm created the Minimundi site, an educational tool on the internet that teaches children about recycling and respect for the environment.

The site is sponsored by Ecoembes, a Spanish nonprofit association that works in the management and processing of recycled materials. Other companies like MTV and Discovery Mobile have also contracted services from the Guatemalan firm.

“The creative artists working here are expert at what they do, and their work is a labour of love. We have no reason to envy designers anywhere else in the world,” Melville said.

When Kenya’s newly announced geothermal power generation project comes online, it will turn the East African country into an economic powerhouse in the region.

About 60 percent of Kenya’s power is hydroelectric, however, the supply is unsteady. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

In April, the government launched the Menengai Geothermal Development Project, the first initiative of its newly formed Geothermal Development Company, which has been set up to fast track the development of geothermal resources here.

According to its chief executive officer, Dr. Silas Simiyu, by 2016 the first phase will generate 400 MW, which is enough to light up 500,000 households and run 300,000 small businesses.

“It is situated 180 kilometres northwest of Nairobi, and will have a capacity to produce 1,600 MW of electricity by the time we implement all three phases in 2030,” said Simiyu.

According to Nashon Adero, a policy and economic analyst at the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis, the first phase of the project will have a significant impact on the country as it moves towards industrialisation.

“At the moment, the country consumes 1,600 MW,” Adero said. “Four hundred MW is therefore an additional 25 percent. And given that the country has embarked on other ambitious projects of green power generation, such as the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, which will generate an additional 300 MW, Kenya will become an economic giant within the region.”

Construction on the Lake Turkana Wind Power project will begin in June, and when completed it will be sub-Saharan Africa’s largest wind farm.

Generally, Kenya is perceived as eastern and central Africa’s financial, communication and transportation hub, with the country’s GDP increasing by four to five percent in the last 10 years.

“Kenya’s GDP is currently the largest in the (East African) region given its strong agricultural industry, particularly in tea and coffee production, and floriculture,” said Ezekiel Esipisu, Habitat for Humanity’s regional operations manager for East Africa and the Middle East. “This, coupled with investments at the Nairobi Stock Exchange and the manufacturing industry, means that the country is one of the leading economies in Africa.”

Esipisu told IPS that the country’s investment in power production would propel economic development further.

“All of Kenya’s neighbours have power deficits. The roadmap towards further power production will definitely boost development. We will see Kenya move closer to industrialisation, and it will become a real economic giant in the region.”

About 60 percent of Kenya’s power is hydroelectric, which is generated when falling water from a dam is used to drive turbines. However, the supply is unsteady, as Kenya has been subjected to perennial drought and erratic rainfall. And the power cuts have hampered the country’s growth.

From July to August 2011, the government was forced to implement power rationing after the water levels in the country’s major dams dropped. At the time Kenya was generating about 1,200 MW of power, while demand increased at an average rate of eight percent a year, according to the Ministry of Energy.

The 2011 power cuts reportedly cost the country over 96 million dollars. However, the worst period of power rationing was between 1999 and 2001, which resulted in an estimated loss of four percent of Kenya’s GDP – about 400 million dollars.

“Hydroelectric power generation is solely dependent on climatic conditions,” said John Omenge, the chief geologist at Kenya’s Ministry of Energy. “During a drought, for example, the water levels will definitely drop, reducing the amount of power generated.

“Geothermal power generation is therefore the answer. It is one of the most reliable methods of producing electric energy, because such sources are not affected by environmental calamities such as drought,” he said.

In volcanically active places like the Rift Valley region, water is pumped down an injection well, and then filtered through the cracks in the hot volcanic rocks. The resultant pressurised steam that is formed is used to drive turbines.

Kenya is the first African country to diversify into geothermal power. The country is already generating 209 MW of electricity from the Olkaria Geothermal Projects, which are located in the Rift Valley and are operated by the Kenya Power Generating Company.

And the Menengai Geothermal Development Project is just a small part of the country’s “Vision 2030”, a development blueprint that aims to transform Kenya into an industrialised and middle-income country by 2030 by generating 5,000 MW of electricity from geothermal resources at various sites across the country.

“Power supply is key to any form of development,” said Gabriel Negatu, the director of the East Africa Resource Centre at the African Development Bank. The bank is providing funding for the first phase of the Menengai Geothermal Development Project.

“This project is therefore crucial for a country like Kenya because it is becoming the economic heartbeat of the continent. It is due to such high prospects that the regional office for the African Development Bank is now based in Nairobi. Many other organisations are following suit, making the city a regional economic hub,” he said.

Until this past February, the last time new nuclear power construction was approved in the United States was in 1978. But when the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved two proposed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Georgia, on February 9 in a four to one vote, it took less than a week for the legal action to begin.

The current Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. Lawsuits have been filed against approved proposals to build two more reactors. Credit: Blatant World/ CC by 2.0

Nine environmental groups filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on February 16. The concerns at the heart of their challenge – safety issues and the Fukushima disaster – were similar to those of NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, the sole dissenter in the commission’s vote.

Jaczko argued that Southern Company, whose company Southern Nuclear operates the Vogtle plant, had not proved it would take steps necessary to ensure the reactors could withstand an earthquake like the one that occurred in Fukushima, Japan in March 2011.

“I simply cannot authorise issuance of these licenses without any binding obligation that these plants will have implemented the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident before they operate,” he wrote.

The groups are “working to challenge the NRC’s approval of the reactors because they fail to take into account public comments received by the agency concerning the proposed reactors’ security risks, following the Fukushima disaster”, Sara Barczak, a program director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, one of the groups who filed the lawsuit, told IPS.

A broad case

The other groups include the Blue Ridge Environmental Defence League, Centre for a Sustainable Coast, Citizens Allied for Safe Energy, Friends of the Earth, Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Nuclear Watch South and North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network.

The Turner Environmental Clinic at Emory University Law School has been assisting with much of the legal work on the case.

A related legal challenge regarding the AP1000 reactor design by Westinghouse Electric Company, which would be used in the new Vogtle reactors, argued that the approval of the reactor design also failed to take into account the Fukushima disaster.

Those two challenges have been consolidated into one, and the groups recently filed a motion to stay further construction of the new reactors at Vogtle, which they hope will be heard within a month or so.

“We still have concerns about the ability of that reactor design to deal with seismic issues such as earthquakes….The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that any agency has to recalibrate and reissue an Environmental Impact Statement considering the information,” Barczak said.

“They would have had to do reassessments of doses to the public, reevaluating doses to site workers and the community, the evacuation plan, how the operator would handle a multi-unit meltdown,” she explained. “It would be a fairly substantial review.”

Problematic advance payments

A second lawsuit challenges some of the money that Georgia Power has been collecting from ratepayers for the construction of the new reactors.

In 2009, the Georgia Legislature and the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a controversial programme called the Construction Work in Progress (CWIP), which requires ratepayers to pay in advance for the construction of the project, even though it may not ultimately materialise.

For the last three years, customers have paid an extra few dollars each month on their electricity bills to fund the project, even though it had not yet been approved. According to Barczak, even if the new reactors are never built, customers will not receive a refund.

Georgia State Representative Roger Bruce (D-Atlanta) said he hoped to introduce legislation next year to repeal the CWIP.

Two high-powered former elected officials in Georgia, including Roy Barnes, a former governor, and Glenn Richardson, a former speaker of the house, are suing over the fact that ratepayers are paying sales taxes and municipal franchise fees on the CWIP charges to Georgia Power.

On March 29, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville denied Georgia Power’s motion to dismiss the case.

Some ratepayers have refused to pay the fee, at risk of having their power cut off.

“I stopped paying because I don’t want to support an industry that has the potential of destroying Mother Earth and killing my descendants. Especially when Georgia has so much solar energy that we can fry eggs on rocks, and we have so much wind power offshore, that we should be utilising that,” said Gloria Tatum, who stopped paying about six months ago.

“Initially, I called, and they said they would cut off my utilities,” Tatum said. “It’s like three or four dollars a month. It’s not a great deal at this point.” It appears the unpaid nuclear fees have yet to add up to enough for Georgia Power to cut off the electricity.

“They are just insane. It’s like a death cult. They are sacrificing human life at the altar of profits for a few people.”

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.

In an almost ceremonial manner, Selinah Mncwango opens her big plastic bag and pulls out several smaller packets, each filled with different types of seeds: sorghum, bean, pumpkin, and maize. They are her pride, her wealth, the “pillar of my family,” says the farmer from a village in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

Farmer Selinah Mncwango is proud of her traditional sorghum seeds. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Sixty-five-year-old Mncwango comes from a family of smallholder farmers in the village of Ingwawuma in the east coast province. The crops she grows today are from seeds that have been handed down from generation to generation, over decades, she says. Other seeds come from exchanges with neighbouring farmers. “My seeds are very important to me. I hope the day will never come when I have to buy seeds from a shop,” says the farmer, whose five children and eight grandchildren largely depend on her harvest. She is keenly aware of the fact that seed saving, storing and exchanging promotes crop diversity, saves money and provides smallholder farmers with a safety net in case of harvest failures.

But the traditional farming methods of smallholder farmers – which, researchers say, also help to fight soil depletion, reduce irrigation needs and adapt to climate change – may soon disappear. They are being wiped out by governments focused on promoting commercial monocultures that they hope will bring fast, high yields in order to boost national agricultural sales on global markets.

“The sector is dominated by commercial seed companies and industrial agricultural production,” explains Rachel Wynberg, policy analyst at the Environmental Evaluation Unit of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Small-scale farmers have been systematically pushed out of the system by those who put profits before food security and biodiversity, she says.

“There is a poor understanding of small farmers’ rights. Traditional agricultural practices have thus been eroded over decades,” she adds.

In South Africa, and in most other countries on the continent, the rights of small-scale farmers are regularly violated by governments and commercial entities that push genetically modified (GM) and hybrid seeds – which have been cross-pollinated in controlled environments – on them.

This is common despite a 2006 United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (IT- PGRFA) that protects farmers’ indigenous knowledge, demands rewards for their contribution to maintaining crop diversity, ensures their participation in decision-making about genetic resources, and guarantees their rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds.

South Africa and many other African U.N. member states never signed the treaty, however.

“South Africa’s policy framework on farmers’ rights is fragmented and unclear,” says Wynberg. “Commercial programmes are promoted that contradict and undermine traditional farming practices.”

According to Wynberg, government support of small-scale farmers is incoherent and insufficiently funded, lacks capacity and often ignores the needs of farmers. “Government is unfortunately often not delivering,” she adds.

Smallholders agree. Mncwango, who has actively tried in cooperation with many rural farmers in her community to protect their traditional farming methods, says she is appalled at the South African government’s drive to sideline them.

“The Department of Agriculture regularly comes to give workshops. They hand out GM and hybrid seeds and tell us to throw away our traditional seeds. They also tell us to use pesticides and chemical fertilisers,” the farmer laments. “By corrupting our traditional seeds, they make us lose our seed banks and force us into dependency.”

According to Mncwango, farmers often realise too late that GM seeds cannot be saved for the next season, and that they contaminate traditional seeds. Farmers have had to learn the hard way that hybrid seeds are of inferior quality. “They don’t store well and they rot easily and have less nutritional value,” she says.

“The government keeps forcing seeds on us. Even though we tell them we don’t want seeds. We’d rather have support with fencing, farming equipment and better access to markets,” she explains. “But they just don’t listen.”

Researchers like Wynberg confirm the large disconnect between agricultural policies that are deemed “progressive” and farmers’ needs. “High yields are traded for long-term food security,” she says.

Lawrence Mkhaliphi, agro-ecology manager at Biowatch, a non-governmental organisation promoting sustainable agriculture, has been working with small-scale farmers in KwaZulu-Natal province for many years. He takes the argument a step further.

“Many agro-chemical companies offer governments incentives for pushing their products onto farmers,” Mkhaliphi claims. “They want farmers to buy seeds, not save them. It’s a huge business. Instead of serving the people, departments of agriculture have become the agents of agro-chemical companies.”

South Africa’s Department of Agriculture denies these accusations.

“Replacing traditional seeds with commercial varieties is not an official government policy,” says Julian Jaftha, the department’s director of genetic resources. “The government does not own shares in GM seeds.”

The Department of Agriculture supports both traditional and commercial farming methods, Jaftha says. It ran a national programme to reintroduce traditional seeds in rural areas and has a Plant Genetic Resources Centre in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, to conserve traditional seeds.

“GM (seeds) should never be a farmer’s only choice,” says Jaftha. “They should be another option made available to farmers who wish to use those seeds. We expect that there are democratic processes in place for farmers to voice their concerns and make choices.”

Jaftha acknowledges, however, that national policy has not always been implemented correctly. “Unfortunately, it does happen at provincial level that farmers are not given a choice,” he admits. “We know that there is still a lot of work that needs to be undertaken.”

Maize drying in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 17 2012 (IPS)

Biodiversity and small and medium farms are threatened in Mexico by the looming approval of a reform of the law on plant varieties that will extend patent rights over seeds, activists and experts warn.

The amendment, of the federal law on plant varieties in effect since 1996, was approved by the Senate in November and is now making its way through the lower house of Congress.

“They are trying to expand privatisation in this important sector, as part of an offensive backed by transnational corporations to give more rights to breeders (of plant varieties), which are mainly these big companies,” Adela San Vicente, the head of Semillas de Vida (Seeds of Life), a local NGO, told IPS.

The reform, defended by the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón, would cover all plant material, including harvest products, and would introduce the definition of “essentially derived varieties”, used to protect genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In addition, it extends the period of protection for breeders of plant varieties from 15 to 25 years.

One of the risks posed by the reform is that small farmers who receive and grow hybrid seeds without authorisation could face legal action.

“They are paving the way for the industry to charge patent rights if, for example, native maize is contaminated by transgenic crops, because the native maize would contain the genes of the GMO,” Alejandro Espinosa, a researcher in the maize programme at Mexico’s National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP), told IPS.

“It would be the last nail in the coffin for the Mexican countryside,” complained the scientist, who has developed more than 30 hybrid species at INIFAP and at least a dozen at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, for production by small companies and distribution at the local level.

The amendment would bring Mexico’s legislation into line with the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, as revised in 1991.

The Convention, which is monitored by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), was adopted in 1961 and revised in 1972, 1978 and 1991. Mexico, which joined UPOV in 1978, currently follows the standards outlined by the Convention in that year’s revision.

The UPOV system of plant variety protection provides international recognition of the rights of breeders of new varieties that are distinct, sufficiently homogeneous and stable, according to the criteria outlined by the intergovernmental accord.

It also provides double protection, for both patents and plant variety rights.

The Geneva-based UPOV’s mission is “to provide and promote an effective system of plant variety protection, with the aim of encouraging the development of new varieties of plants, for the benefit of society,” according to its web site.

The 1991 revision of the Convention, which entered into force in 1998, protects Canadian, U.S. and EU property rights, and introduced the novel feature of recognising rights over new genetic traits – an open concession to GMOs.

More than 250,000 tonnes of seeds are produced annually in Mexico, according to the National Service of Seed Inspection and Certification (SNICS), the government agency that oversees some 55,000 hectares of land where seeds for about two dozen crops are produced.

A collective of researchers and NGOs has urged legislators to halt the reform, and to subject it to an open debate with all concerned sectors, including small and medium farmers, who it will affect the most.

“Native seeds are the only input used by peasant farmers, who are left without any rights,” San Vicente said. “And with the problems posed by climate change, they lose seeds or reuse them. Seeds have been a common good of humanity. And (with this amendment, companies) can even go after researchers who use those seeds.”

In this country of 112 million people, Latin America’s second-largest economy, there are approximately five million peasant farmer families, according to official figures.

With the projected reform, SNICS would have the authority to impose fines or even block land use for infractions of patents and plant breeders’ rights.

SNICS has already registered more than 150 breeders from over 20 countries, involving at least 100 plant species. Of that total, 26 percent are ornamental plants, and the rest are agricultural or forestry species.

The countries of Latin America have filed fewer than 1,000 applications for plant breeders’ rights with UPOV.

Meanwhile, the No Patents on Seeds global coalition of NGOs reports that since 1996, farm-saved or “informal seeds” have been on the decline, while industrial seeds are expanding.

“Hundreds and hundreds of varieties are needed to ensure the sustainability of improved and native seeds,” INIFAP’s Espinosa said. “Advances in their yields are environmentally-friendly, because they are genes from the species themselves.

“The improvements are made with the best plants, according to the environment. It’s what farmers have done for decades,” he said.

But Mexico is increasingly lax in protecting that system. The government-run national seed production company, PRONASE, has been in the process of liquidation since the early 2000s, which has left the sector in the hands of private Mexican and foreign companies.

In addition, the 2005 Genetically Modified Organisms Biosafety Law and the 2007 Law on the Production, Certification and Trade of Seeds have given industry more and more maneuvering room.

The National Catalogue of Plant Varieties, updated by SNICS in December, contains 1,827 species, most of which are different kinds of maize, beans, sorghum, wheat and potatoes.

Public research institutes and food corporations like the U.S.-based Monsanto and Pioneer have registered their varieties in the catalogue.

Inclusion in that list is the first requisite for registration in a seed production programme.

There are at least 180 commonly used plant varieties in Mexico, such as the nopal cactus fruit, güisquil or pear squash, avocado, and tomato.

SNICS defends patents on seeds, arguing that they protect the genetic patrimony and facilitate access to plant material, which depends on the fair distribution of economic benefits, while respecting special rules for endemic species, preventing the plunder of resources and biopiracy, and strengthening institutional capacity.

As Malawians celebrate Joyce Banda’s appointment as president on sites, like Facebook and Twitter, the increased use of social media in Malawi comes full circle as her new government takes office.

On Jul. 20, 2011, the peaceful country of Malawi broke out into nationwide anti-government protests. Credit: Katie Lin/IPS

For it was during the country’s civil society mobilisation against the former government that social media first gained popularity as a platform for airing grievances here.

Now, as Banda begins to purge the Malawian government of corrupt officials and woos international donors back in an attempt to ease the country’s economic woes, users on social media have increased.

The news of President Bingu wa Mutharika’s death began circulating as rumours on Facebook newsfeeds in Malawi two days before it was officially confirmed by government officials on Apr. 7.

The subsequent appointment of former Vice President Banda as the new head of state, and the first female president in southern Africa, only amplified the level of online activity as messages of support and optimism sprouted up all over Twitter and Facebook.

July protests stir up online community

But the country’s online community was first stirred to action during last year’s protests. On Jul. 20, 2011, the apparently peaceful country of Malawi broke out into nationwide anti-government protests in response to a deteriorating economy and political mismanagement. Persistent fuel and foreign exchange shortages added to the frustrations.

The protests lasted two days and resulted in 20 deaths.

So when the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) temporarily shut down private broadcasters and popular news websites were blocked, Malawians turned to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for the latest information.

“There’s a tendency among officials — especially government politicians — to control the flow of information,” explains Arnold Munthali, new media editor for Blantyre Newspapers Limited (BNL).

“However, social media has created a socially free and more politically aware population, which the government is helpless to control.”

According to the social media statistics portal, Socialbakers.com, there are currently 132,580 Facebook users in Malawi. While this represents less than one percent of the nation’s 15 million people, the number of Facebook users grew more than 50 percent between March 2011 and March 2012.

Such a remarkable surge in usage over a period of civil unrest indicates that social media has a place in Malawi, despite the country’s low internet penetration. In 2010, the International Telecommunications Union estimated that just 4.5 percent of Malawi’s population was using the internet, with access limited primarily by poor communications infrastructure.

As the days of protest unfolded, however, Malawians across the country took to cyberspace, posting photographs of wounded demonstrators and damaged property on Facebook; alerting protestors of volatile areas and describing the police presence at each location, through Twitter channels; and posting on Youtube cell phone videos documenting the chaos.

Some subscribed to pro-democracy Facebook groups. Others, like 28-year-old Rogers Siula, a media planner who participated in the July protests in Blantyre, took to the blogging sphere.

“We are in an environment where young people, who have incredible potential to flourish and steer Malawi into a dynamic, fresh and energetic country, are being oppressed left, right and centre,” says Siula.

“In this tense political atmosphere, platforms like Facebook, blogs, and Twitter are safe.”

It is this aspect of anonymity that social media offers which appeals to Malawians – but it is also that which affords government officials the ability to disguise their identity online and therefore more easily identify and monitor particularly outspoken individuals.

Online activism gains momentum amidst attacks and arrests

Malawi may have moved into a new year, but old tensions followed, giving rise to new controversies.

On Jan. 17, 2012, a group of market vendors in the country’s capital of Lilongwe stripped women wearing trousers and short skirts after the late Mutharika reportedly voiced concerns about how women were dressing.

Concerned citizens gathered online to condemn the vendors’ actions, including a group of women who launched the campaign, “Stop Violence Against Women in Malawi.”

They advertised in newspapers and on the radio, and also reached out to more than 5,000 people through Facebook – 1,413 of whom accepted an invitation to a peaceful sit-in, according to the group’s page.

More recently, the arbitrary arrest of prominent human rights lawyer, Ralph Kasambara, in February gained international attention through the emergence of support groups on Facebook, such as the “Free Ralph Kasambara” group, where supporters publicly deplored the persecution he faced.

Eight days after his arrest, Kasambara was released on bail. He credits social media with playing a pivotal role in his release.

“It brought the local problem into a global context, and as a result of that, our friends from the International Court of Justice were able to … get information as it was happening around here,” says Kasambara.

Social networking a source of support in the perpetual ‘hunt for fuel’

But social media is not just being used to fuel nationwide political action. On a smaller scale, it is also helping Malawi’s urban population tackle day-to-day battles, such as the ongoing struggle to locate fuel.

Frederick Bvalani is one of the co-founders of Malawi Fuel Watch (MFW), a Facebook group with over 7,400 members that shares information about the location and price of fuel in the country’s cities.

“The relatively low cost of communicating on the internet and the available audience on a forum like Facebook make it ideal for promoting change and connecting people that want to see a different and better Malawi,” says Bvalani.

For Billy Ngoma, 27, the benefits of MFW are obvious.

“You can spend six to eight hours in a long queue to get 25 litres of fuel,” he says. “The fuel watch group has helped those of us who use social networking so we know which gas station will have fuel.”

The future of social media in Malawi

From the online orchestration of the July protests to the buzz surrounding Mutharika’s death, it seems that social media is quickly gaining its bearings in Malawi.

However, the increased use of such speedy information-sharing platforms over the past year has also exposed some misuse of them.

Just as quickly as news of July protests and Mutharika’s death spread, so too did rumours and misinformation.

And on the part of the media, Munthali explains that BNL was simply unprepared to respond to the online community by the time the need to do so arose during the July protests.

“Our initiative was poorly marketed – apart from the feed from our reporters via text messages, we had few else to rely on as our Facebook and Twitter followers were not impressive.”

But such shortcomings are not enough to make the media shy away from embracing these widely used social platforms.

Nor is the threat of censorship.

“With the traditional media constantly hounded by unpopular laws enacted and enforced by the Malawi government, we intend to enhance our online presence by becoming more interactive with our audience,” he says.

And the means by which Malawians might engage with social media are improving. Since 2009, the MACRA has been rolling out Information and Communications Technology centres across the country. This initiative, alongside the installation of fibre optic cables in urban centres by Malawi Telecommunications Limited and the increased use of cell phones, will undoubtedly affect internet usage, and therefore, information access, in both rural and urban areas.

As President Banda transitions into her new role and the challenges that the country faces persist, it is still too early to know what effects this change will have – but Malawians will, no doubt, be talking about it online.

“There is something about the internet that gives people boldness to speak their mind – people are connecting, sharing stories and ideas,” Bvalani says. “Others who have suffered in silence speak out.”

“Social media has given Malawians a platform to have a voice.”

Disruptive diplomacy may be the only way out of the Iran-Israel nuclear crisis, the only way to pierce the hegemony of hypocrisy dominating the power politics of nuclear weapons control, of those who have them, and of those who are accused of developing them.

Otherwise, this weekend’s meeting on Iran’s nuclear programme is likely to be yet another missed opportunity, yet another exercise in futility.

Who will meet in Istanbul this Saturday? Iran and the ‘P5+1’, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and the only “legitimate” nuclear weapons states under the U.N.’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – the United States, China, Russia, France and the UK, plus Germany.

Together, their collective history with Iran and Israel is one of complexity, pain and – so far as nuclear weapons are concerned – utter hypocrisy. There is no easy solution. What is needed is disruptive diplomacy in which both sides put forward something challenging, and in which everyone gives something up to win peace.

Only four countries sit outside the NPT: Israel, India and Pakistan never signed, and North Korea withdrew.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: by joining the NPT Israel can pierce the veil of its policy of “ambiguity”, place its facilities under international safeguards, and begin to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. In this way Israel can help end hypocrisy and build trust. Israel does not need nuclear weapons; these do not offer a safety net, instead they provide a destabilising influence throughout the entire region.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Iran could equally afford to dismantle its entire nuclear programme in favour of smart energy systems, efficient energy use and renewable energy sources. This is not cheap rhetoric. It could be done, and would benefit Iran’s people.

In 2007 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior embarked on a Nuclear Free Middle East tour to address the threat of nuclear weapons in the region and the threat of another “weapons of mass destruction” war.

Greenpeace commissioned a study showing that a combination of decentralised energy systems, renewable energy use and energy efficiency would allow Iran to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, end its nuclear programme and meet the development needs of its people.

At the same time, Greenpeace activists demonstrated outside Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, arguing, “Nuclear developments and nuclear weapons in any country provoke proliferation and undermine security region-wide.”

What about the so-called P5? The high-handed posturing of Iran’s principle accusers requires some scrutiny. They are the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. They are proof that nuclear weapons provide a seat at the top table of global security and thus power politics. Why else would Britain and France still have their own chairs? What right do any of them have to discuss illegal, so- called “preventative” attacks on a country?

Together they stand for over four decades of bad faith. Under the NPT they promised to disarm in return for all other signatories forgoing nuclear weapons. The P5 committed to negotiate away their deadly nuclear arsenals. They have not done so. Instead, they continue to invest; they continue to modernise their nuclear weapons and delivery mechanisms; they continue to undermine global nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Before accusing Iran of duplicity, the nuclear weapons nations need to stop and reflect. In reality the grand bargain of the ‘Atoms for Peace‘ pact at the heart of the NPT was always a dangerous lie. A diplomatic deceit promising to control the spread of nuclear weapons in return for support in developing nuclear power, an abundant power source that was supposed to be clean, safe and reliable, though it turned out to be dirty, dangerous, and expensive. A pact that Iran agreed to, but Israel has not.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are the Janus faces of nuclear technology: you cannot have one without the other. No amount of agreement, treaties and inspection will ever remove the risk and temptation of a nuclear power state becoming a nuclear weapons state.

It can be made harder, but never impossible. Just as the risks of meltdowns are present at every reactor site, the risk of nuclear proliferation is attendant in every nuclear programme and the temptation to balance the possession by others of nuclear weapons is always there. The temptation to enter the arena of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is ever present.

The world does not need nuclear power. Greenpeace’s Energy [R]evolution – developed over many years with leading scientists and engineers – shows how we can avert catastrophic climate change, phase out nuclear power and transition to a clean energy system based on smart, efficient use and renewable energy sources.

As the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear crisis passes it is even more significant to note that this crisis was man-made, predicated on the inherent failures and risks of civil nuclear power. The earthquake and tsunami may have been natural in origin but the profit-before-safety ethos that pervades all industrial activity left the people of Japan and the world vulnerable to multiple nuclear meltdowns. For all its so-called reliability Japan is down to only one operating nuclear plant.

It is hard to see how any plan to bomb Iran into submission will do anything other than protract the problem and threaten to ignite a powder keg of conflict in the Middle East. As ‘The Economist’ has noted, bombing Iran will not eliminate the nuclear threat.

In truth, only a world free of all nuclear technology will help to build a workable trust on which to build a lasting peace. In Istanbul, governments should dare to disrupt the endless cycle of hypocrisy, accusation and counter-accusation and take real steps towards peace.

If we are really concerned about human security, if we are really concerned about our children and grandchildren’s peace and security, then we should be mustering all investments to move us in a direction of green, clean, renewable energy options. We must recognise that our quest for nuclear energy, the attendant threat of nuclear proliferation, and our reliance on fossil fuel-based energy have been the major drivers of conflict, war and flawed foreign policies.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: those from whom we borrow this world, for whom we keep it in trust and who are always caught up as collateral damage in foolish wars and sanctions – our children – deserve a clean, green future free of the threat of nuclear accidents and nuclear war.

*Kumi Naidoo is the executive director of Greenpeace International

Residents evacuate the Sri Lankan coastal suburb of Rathmalana, soon after a tsunami warning was issued on Apr. 11, 2012 Credit: Indika Sriyan/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

The fear was palpable for Mohideen Ajeemal when he heard the news of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia on Apr. 11. The last time an earthquake of similar magnitude hit the same area, Ajeemal lost two of his children, a young daughter and an infant son, when massive tsunami waves crashed onto his house on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004.

“When the police jeep began announcing the evacuations, we were already on the move,” Ajeemal, a resident of the village of Sainathimaruthu, in the eastern Kalmunai region, told IPS.

In 2004 there was no such warning and the monstrous waves left 30,000 dead, a million displaced and a reconstruction bill of over three billion dollars.

“This time people knew what to expect, they knew they had to get away from the beach and do that fast,” Ajeemal said.

In double-quick time, the Meteorological Department issued a warning: “An earthquake near Sumatra Island at 02.08pm (Sri Lanka time) today 11.04.2012 has generated a tsunami that will affect Sri Lanka, those living near and along the Eastern and Southern coastal regions are advised to evacuate to safer places immediately.”

The warning came despite the United States government’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre failing to issue a formal alert, instead limiting its update on the earthquake to a ‘tsunami watch’. However, local radio and television stations picked up the warning, which was also disseminated by SMS alerts and Sri Lanka’s small but active Twitter community.

Those on the coast, like Ajeemal, were advised by the police to move at least 500 metres inland. “We were asked to remain there till around six (o’clock in the evening),” Ajeemal said. The warning period was later extended when aftershocks hit the island about two hours after the initial quake hit Indonesia’s western coast of Sumatra, in Banda Aceh.

“Almost everyone has moved out of the coast, no one is here,” said Reverend G S K Herath, an Anglican priest from the southern town of Matara. He told IPS that security forces and the police had moved into the areas being evacuated to guard against looting.

“The only people who remain now in the town other than the security forces are journalists and cameramen perched on high-rises, waiting for the waves to come,” Herath said.

The media’s swift response is partly due to the shock of 2004 when the tsunami woke the country, which was deep in its Boxing Day stupor, to the utterly destructive power of natural disasters.

Now, the coast that was pulverized by the 2004 tragedy is dotted with small blue boards on the roadside, indicating higher ground to move to in case of a tsunami.

Just months after the 2004 tragedy, in mid-2005, the government enacted the National Disaster Management Act setting up the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) to coordinate disaster response and early warning.

But the systems have not always worked effectively and have, on some occasions, failed abysmally.

In November last year, neither the Meteorological Department nor the DMC issued a warning before gale force winds hit southern Sri Lanka, killing 29 people, mainly fishermen, and damaging over 10,000 buildings. The two state agencies faced heavy criticism for the fiasco.

However, on Apr. 11, the system seems to have worked smoothly.

“We have put so much energy and resources into the early warning systems after the 2004 tragedy, this time we could find out how effective they were,” Mahieash Johnney, communications and reporting manager for the Sri Lankan delegation of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told IPS.

The Sri Lanka Red Cross (SLRC) swiftly mobilised its volunteers in coastal areas to help in the evacuations and requested its staff to be available to assist government agencies.

In some areas like the eastern town of Batticaloa, Red Cross volunteers used boats to move people living on islands, or in areas cut off by floods, to safety.

“We will have drills once every three months or so, to keep the people alert on how to face these kind of situations. This time, we had to do it for real,” Johnney said. The SLRC had invested over 1.2 million dollars on early warning mechanisms, with a focus on the eastern coast that was hit hardest in 2004, he told IPS. “It is good to see the investment (paying off).”

Ajeemal added that villagers like him had undergone awareness campaigns since the tsunami on how to deal with such events.

Nandasa, a resident living on the beach in Rathmalana, a suburb just south of Colombo, expressed a similar sentiment. “In 2004, when waters receded before the tsunami came, people took it for a joke, they went out to collect shells. This time no one was taking things lightly, everyone knew what to do and what to expect.”

Still, there were some lapses. As coastal roads were closed, others became jammed with traffic, mobile networks became overloaded and petrol stations in coastal areas ran out of fuel, leaving many people stranded.

But overall, the harsh lessons from 2004 seem to have been learned.

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.”

Mathieu Djessan looks over the four-hectare expanse of fish ponds with satisfaction. The aquaculture enterprise the 29-year-old runs here near the town of Tiassalé in southern Côte d’Ivoire is quickly proving profitable.

“When we harvest them in May, it will be our third batch of fish in 13 months. We sold the first two lots to reach maturity between December 2011 and February 2012: 5,500 carp and 4,900 catfish. Despite major losses of fry – juvenile fish – we pocketed more than five million francs CFA (around 10,000 dollars),” Djessan told IPS.

Djessan manages three fish ponds along with three friends, here 120 kilometres northwest of the Ivorian commercial capital, Abidjan. Each pond holds 6,000 carp and catfish, growing fat on rice bran.

The four partners started the project with money they scraped together between them, combined with 4,000 dollars borrowed from several private benefactors. They say they’ve already repaid their debt.

“We needed to find something to do to make ends meet,” said Chantal Aya, 26, one of Djessan’s project partners. “So we chose to invest in what looked like a promising sector, not just in this region but also in the north, centre and west of the country which often lack fish.”

Even here in the south, much closer to the ocean, over the past two years fish has seldom been available in the markets in places like Tiassalé and Sikensi. When there has been fish, brought in from Abidjan, it was too expensive for most people.

“Carp which normally costs 1,000 CFA (two dollars) was selling for nearly 2,500 CFA here,” Eugènie Logbo, a fish monger at the Tiassalé motor park or transit hub, told IPS.

Logbo’s two large tables are covered with carp. “These don’t come from Abidjan, they’re from the aquaculture ponds right around here. For two or three months now, there’s been a steady supply of fish from the ponds, and the price has become affordable. The cost of a half-kilo carp has fallen back to 1,500 CFA.”

At Bonoua, on the edge of the Aby Lagoon southeast of Abidjan, Williams Yao Brou has built two ponds covering 2.5 hectares. At the moment they’re filled with 3,800 newly-hatched fish.

Through the whole of last year he sold nearly 3,500 fish, but he expects to sell all the fish now maturing in his ponds within the next three months.

“A maintenance problem cost me 300 hatchlings, but I don’t think that will happen again,” said Yao Brou. He says he earns around 6,000 dollars per production cycle.

“This business has become more exciting as other young people start coming to me for training, and to help me… This will allow us to produce enough to make up for the occasional shortages of fish,” he told IPS.

He learned aquaculture techniques in the early 2000s, when he worked at a massive complex of ponds that were built in 1996 at Mahapleu, in the west of the country. That project, set up with finance from the African Development Bank, was abandoned in 2007 for lack of investment in the upkeep of the ponds.

In addition to supplying fishmongers at the local market, the young aquaculturists are looking for new outlets for their output. “Selling fish at the market or at motor parks won’t yield quick profits. We want to find restaurants to supply directly, so we can shift our fish faster,” said Aya, formerly a management student in Abidjan. Unable to find a job in the city, she opted for self-employment in aquaculture.

“Generally, the problem is finding start-up funds,” Yao Brou told IPS. “But young people nowadays understand the need to share their ideas and projects, and together find some small seed capital to get started.”

According to Dramé Sékongo, an agricultural engineer in Tiassalé, aquaculture requires only minimal equipment, money and know-how. “What Ivorian farmers are starting to do – especially the youth – is digging ponds in low-lying areas, alongside rice fields, to earn a bit of money. But some government support would help a bit,” he told IPS.

In March, Côte d’Ivoire and the International Fund for Agricultural Development signed a 22.5 million dollar agreement to finance a project supporting agriculture and commercialisation in three northern regions – Bouaké, Korhogo and Bondoukou.

According to an IFAD press release, the project’s goal is to help improve food security and boost incomes for small producers, particularly rural youth and women.

Co-financed by the Ivorian government, this project will be carried out by the Agriculture Ministry and IFAD expects it will bring direct and indirect benefits to more than 25,000 poor rural families.

Over a dozen huge windmills line the roadside of the town of Jhimpir, close to Karachi, in the Sindh province. Credit: Farooq Ahmed/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
JHIMPIR, Sindh, Apr 2 2012 (IPS)

“I still cannot fathom how electricity can be produced by the wind,” said a nonplused Mohammad Ahmed, a 55-year-old local baker, as he gazed up at a row of giant wind turbines.

These huge windmills, over a dozen of them, stand tall over the horizon, visual long before one actually enters the picturesque town of Jhimpir, about 70 kilometres from the southern port city of Karachi, in the Sindh province.

Some reaching 84 metres, others towering at 94 metres tall, weighing approximately 84 metric tonnes (excluding the weight of the towers) their blades slightly longer than the spread of the wings of a Boeing 747, these wind turbines dwarf some of the tallest buildings dotting Karachi’s skyline.

The blades carve through the winds of Jhimpir, producing energy. Four of these, set up by the Turkish company Zorlu Energi, have already been producing and supplying electricity to the government for the last three months.

A year ago, when the entire country was suffering from long hours of power outages and windmills first began producing electricity on an experimental basis in Jhimpir, it was perhaps the only town in Pakistan where the lights never went out.

“It was such a delight but it only lasted a year,” said Khair Mohammad Qasi, a poet and a writer based in Jhimpir. “For the entire town, even electricity generated by one windmill is enough,” he said.

“Our target for 2013 is to produce over 400 megawatts of electricity based on the land that has been made available,” Arif Alauddin, head of the Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB), the entity responsible for facilitating the private sector’s establishment of windmills, told IPS. “If we have more land, we think we can add 400-500 (additional megawatts) every year,” he added.

At the moment, Pakistan is facing a shortage of about 5,000 megawatts of power. Classified as the “best wind regimes” in the country, the energy produced at Jhimpir will go to the national grid, and be spread throughout the country, “wherever it is needed,” said AEDB’s spokesperson.

Alauddin explained, “At the (cut off wind speed of 12 metres per second) or higher, the turbines stop operation.” The turbines also don’t operate below the speed of 3.5 metres per second.

Overall, the Sindh province has the potential to produce 50,000 megawatts of wind energy, whereas the various pockets around the country can produce as much as 350,000 megawatts, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States.

Every few days, a new turbine is seen rising out of the desert-like countryside.

At the moment there are 18 private companies in the field, with projects at various stages of completion. Each project will have a generating capacity of about 50 megawatts, costing 130 million dollars, using different turbines. By next year, eight to ten of these companies will be fully operational.

This means that soon the countryside will be littered with these giant towers, which will catapult Pakistan into the top 20 producers of wind energy.

While work on wind energy has been going on for some years, it is only in the last three years that the sector actually went into high gear.

But now Pakistan seems to be making up for the lost time.

“(Besides) the developed countries with mandatory emission reduction quotas under the Koyoto Protocol, we will be the third, maybe fourth (largest producer of wind energy) after China and India,” estimated Alauddin.

But the rush to produce energy has elicited opposition from local communities. “Work is going on at breakneck speed but local people are not being employed,” said Rasul Baksh Dars, a local teacher. All their hopes that the area would be developed and they would prosper have been dashed, he added.

Anwar Palari, spokesperson of the Kohistan Bachayo Action Committee, told IPS, “They (the companies) justify hiring people from outside by saying they cannot find people with technical know-how locally; but when they launched their projects, why didn’t they train the educated youth?”

Hosh Mohammad Jatial, an engineer with Zorlu Energi, which has recently begun generation, insisted, “We have hired 15 locals out of a team of 32. We can’t increase our manpower,” he said, admitting there is a lot of pressure on his company to increase employment.

He claims that all of the local workers are “non-technical people”, adding, “We couldn’t even find a welder from the town.”

But according to Palari, the few locals who had been hired by these power companies were “qualified engineers who (were given) menial labour-intensive jobs.”

Driving away from the Zorlu wind farm, past the Fauji Fertiliser Company turbines, down a dusty, bumpy road, one finally finds the village of Umar Chang, where Mohammad Tayyeb (55), a local farmer, told IPS, “I don’t think we will ever get the promised electricity produced by these wind mills.”

“They will take it to Karachi, even Nooriabad (the industrial town closest to Jhimpir) but not give even a little bit to our village,” he added.

“It’s our land and it’s our right to benefit from any good thing happening here,” added Noor Mohammad, one of the few literate men in the village.

Tayyeb said the locals possessed land deeds dating back to the period of British colonial rule, proving that their forefathers had lived in that very village.

“We till the soil, and all this,” he waves his hand to indicate the vast expanse of land around him “are pastures for our livestock. When these companies erect more of these windmills, they will also fence the farms, thereby (shrinking) our pastures.”

Hafeez Ahmed Sial, the district coordination officer, the highest government authority in Jhimpir, is quite aware of these concerns but told IPS, “We have only given state-owned land to the investors.” He also pointed out that some people had brought in “fake papers” claiming the land was theirs.

Alauddin acknowledged that among the reasons for delay in unfettered energy production were “claims by the locals to the land”. He said that the matter is now in court.

“We want a win-win situation for all – the investor, the local people and even the government and we definitely don’t want the local people to feel disturbed. We are trying to ensure that their concerns are not left unattended. We are trying to work out how we can bring in health, water and education benefits to the communities while this development project is being carried out.”

Communities in rural Papua New Guinea install their own cost effective and energy efficient solar panels Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
GOROKA, Apr 2 2012 (IPS)

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), which has no national power grid but large river systems and abundant sunshine, renewable energy has tremendous potential to transform remote rural lives with clean and sustainable electricity.

Ten years ago Nick Nait, who lives in a small village near Mount Sion in the Eastern Highlands with his wife and children, introduced electricity to his household for the first time. While working for a missionary organisation Nait learnt how to make solar power systems and subsequently built a small one for his two-room dwelling.

The single solar panel powers a radio, lighting and television.

For Nait, solar power is affordable and dependable. “It depends on the weather, but when there is sun, there is no problem,” he said, “It is very reliable and I rarely have to do repairs.”

After the initial cost of making and installing the solar unit, he has had few ongoing expenses and, once fully charged, the system will provide light in his home for one month.

Like Nait, many people living in the rural Highlands face economic and environmental challenges. Garaio Gafiye of Clean Energy Solutions, a consultancy for renewable energy projects in PNG, told IPS, “The Highlands is a very rugged area and there are so many communities. Renewable energy is very important, especially hydro, there is so much of it, and solar also. But the problem is incomes are very low in the Highlands and managing money can be quite difficult.”

Families have been forced to become very resourceful in order to access energy at minimal expense.

“Solar is very easy to install,” Gafiye continued, “Now if you go to some of the communities, (at least) one or two people have solar systems, just simple ones. They just get the panel and a battery and put it together.”

Obtaining sustainable electricity has made a vital difference to Nait’s family.

“We now have lighting in our home, access to information and the news from radio and TV and my children can do their school work and study in the evenings,” Nait explained, “Although we do not have an electric stove, my wife finds it very helpful to have lighting while she is cooking at home.”

Now he plans to expand the capacity of his solar unit to drive a water pump and eventually bring clean water from a nearby well to his home.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), without access to energy, developing countries become trapped in poverty. The denial of choices to improve human development through energy is known to negatively impact infant mortality, life expectancy and income generation, among many others.

Sadly, this year, the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All, the IEA estimates that 1.4 billion people, or nearly one quarter of the world’s population, remain without access to electricity.

PNG Power Limited, the nation’s only power provider, claims it is unfeasible to construct a national grid system due to dense mountainous topography and long distances between load centres. Therefore, many villages still rely on traditional biomass, such as firewood, for cooking and heating, with diesel generators providing a popular alternative. But the high price of fuel means that generators are used sparingly, often for no more than a few hours each day.

“It is very cheap to purchase a diesel engine, but it won’t last long,” Gafiye said, “It could last four or five years but after that, if you work out the economics, it is not (cost efficient) to keep running it.”

Renewable technologies, which are practical for standalone systems and provide power 24 hours per day, are the best option for those living in remote areas.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the total primary energy supply in PNG is 145.9 petajoules (PJ), of which renewable energy accounts for 115.2 PJ (roughly 79 percent).

Electrical capacity is 699 megawatts, with renewable electricity comprising 271 MW (about 39 percent of the total). Hydroelectricity presently accounts for 65 percent of PNG Power’s electricity provision and also supplies all the electricity required to implement the government’s Rural Electrification Programme.

Jacob Yala, who works for the Rural Electrification Programme in the Eastern Highlands, said it was a very good state initiative, but there were labour and logistical challenges.

“The PNG Power training college in Port Moresby has not been operating for some time,” Yala said. “So for the past five years, we have experienced a manpower shortage. We’ve got five regions in Papua New Guinea to work (but) we cannot develop all the regions at the same time.”

The terrain presents additional obstacles.

“In 2009, we began a 42-kilometre electrification project near Kainantu, but could only energise a seven- kilometre stretch because road access to the area was too difficult,” Yala continued.

The programme now focuses on providing electricity to community service centres, such as medical clinics, hospitals and schools.

Meanwhile, for village households where livelihoods mostly centre on subsistence agriculture, solar can be more viable than hydro power.

“Solar is successful, it is not a problem,” Gafiye said. “But for hydro, one kilowatt in the Highlands will cost 20,000-30,000 kina. In the coastal area, where there are wharves, it is cheaper because transportation costs are almost nil. But once you transport materials up by air and land (into the Highlands), the cost will increase.”

Solar equipment can be readily acquired in PNG, but turbine generators for hydroelectric schemes have to be custom made by an overseas manufacturer.

Renewable energy will be critical to sustainable development in Papua New Guinea, and the wider Pacific Islands, as they confront high fossil fuel costs and the impacts of climate change.

In 2007, the Pacific Islands Greenhouse Gas Abatement through Renewable Energy Project (PIGGAREP) was initiated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP). Funded by the Global Environment Facility and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the project aims to address impediments to the widespread implementation and use of renewable energy technologies by Pacific Island states.

Meanwhile Papua New Guinea’s investment in the renewable sector could significantly expand if a proposed joint venture, between PNG Sustainable Development Programme Limited and the Australian company Origin Energy, proceeds, following a feasibility study. The Purari Hydro-Electric Project would draw on the capacity of the Purari River in the Gulf Province to generate an estimated 1800 megawatts of renewable electricity for rural communities and public service providers.

By Cléo Fatoorehchi
MARSEILLE, France , Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

Numerous non-governmental organisations used the World Water Forum (WWF) held in Marseille last week as an opportunity to remind the international community about the serious global impacts of large dams all over the world.

Defined as dams higher than 15 metres or with a reservoir volume of at least three million cubic metres, large dams number no less than 48,000 worldwide and present numerous issues, not least of which is a considerably negative impact on the livelihoods of local populations.

Three organisations – the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and IRAM, a French institute for research and application of development methods – recently released a study entitled “Sharing the water, sharing the benefits”, which focused on six large dams in West Africa to highlight various population impacts.

Jérôme Koundouno, one of the report’s authors, told IPS that when large dams are built they result in massive displacement of communities, which is a complex process.

He said that the land area required for dams necessitated “relocating people, rebuilding houses, and giving new land to people for farming,” which also means providing support and compensation to displaced families.

Yet, most of the dams built in the 1980s and 1990s did not bring any kind of compensation for the displaced, provoking a slew of detrimental societal consequences.

Taking the example of the Sélingué dam in Mali, built in 1981, Koundouno explained to IPS that the displaced families, who received a plot of land on the new perimeter of the dam, had to leave shortly afterwards because they were used to traditional irrigation techniques and could not adapt to the new ones.

“They had to abandon the plots because they were not able to produce enough and to reach their expected output. So those communities have (effectively been stripped) of their plot of land,” he told IPS.

Another problem sparked by the building of large dams, Koundouno claimed, is the creation of a “genuine growth centre around the reservoirs, whose water is shared by multiple users, leading to conflicts over the (scarce resource). This is because water management is unfortunately often not equitable.”

The conflicts appear on one hand between the fishers, farmers, and breeders, and on the other hand between the native population and migrants, who are lured by the promise of employment in this new growth centre.

The World Commission on Dams estimates that 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by the construction of such dams worldwide.

Large dams also generate environmental impacts such as flooding, deforestation, reduced pastureland, and a fall in the number of large mammals – all of which threaten the food security of local populations.

Jane Madgwick, CEO of Wetlands International, told IPS the flow reduction of the Niger River foreshadows a negative impact on the livelihoods of people downstream who are dependent on fishing.

The conviction is thus spreading that large dams should not be considered a “green energy alternative” if they are not planned in a sustainable way.

Jeremy Bird, soon-to-be director general of the International Water Management Institute, stressed the need for increased awareness on the sustainability of hydropower energy.

With this aim, the International Hydropower Association published the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol to define good practices and try and impose them on new construction projects.

Alternatives to large dams do exist

Many experts are now starting to believe that the problems posed by large dams outweigh their benefits – namely providing water and energy – and should thus be replaced by other forms of renewable energy, such as solar power and wind energy.

“In Latin America and primarily in Chile, for instance, the potential for solar power is infinite,” Juan Pablo Orrego, president of the Chilean NGO Ecosistemas, told IPS, adding the Chilean government should invest in this form of energy.

Alternative solutions were also debated intensively during the Alternative World Water Forum (known by its French acronym FAME), held last week alongside the WWF. In particular, the option of the “mini- hydro”, or small-scale hydropower, was highly promoted.

Focusing on the needs of local populations, experts who attended FAME pointed out the effectiveness of small turbines and small dams.

Ronack Monabay, an activist with Friends of the Earth, commended the decision of the Nepalese government to open the energy market to small producers, in order to implement small- and medium- scale dam projects, capable of generating up to 100 megawatts.

This decision followed a campaign spearheaded by many environmental NGOs and pressure from civil society to halt the World Bank-sponsored project ‘Arun III’, a large dam that would have ravaged the Himalayan forests.

Such a process of heeding the voices of small producers and local communities grants the stakeholders more autonomy in the decision-making process and allows communities to agree what is best for them.

On Mar 14. International Rivers, along with other environmental organisations, campaigned against the “corporate green-washing of dams”.

They told IPS all that is needed now is more political will from decision-makers to implement these alternatives, instead of promoting the large dams projects that represent huge profits for multinational corporations.

The sand dam alternative

In order to avoid the social and environmental problems created by large dams, and with the aim of providing water for everyone, semi-arid areas use another technology, called sand dams.

The NGO Excellent came to the WWF to raise awareness on this effective way of tackling food insecurity and lack of water around the world, particularly in regions where rainfall is intense but over very short periods of time.

Sand dams are able to store enough water for one thousand people to subsist for an entire lifetime. Moreover, sand dams are built and managed by local communities, which is a very cost-effective solution.

Simon Maddrell, CEO of Excellent, told IPS, “The thing about sand dams is that they keep water where the people are, where people need it. Now, the fundamental principle of a large dam isn’t to keep water where people need it, and it certainly is not a method of providing water for people in rural areas.”

While sand dams do not provide populations with energy as a large dam does, Maddrell believes this is not a priority for the affected communities, who first need water and food.

Excerpt:

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 9 2012 (IPS)

The upcoming Rio+20 conference has to be the moment in human history when the nations of the world come together to find ways to ensure the very survival of humanity, many science and environmental experts believe.

Except that governments, the media and the public aren’t paying attention to the “planetary emergency” unfolding around them. The situation is like firefighters yelling “fire” in crowded room and still no listens.

“The situation is absolutely desperate and yet there’s nothing on the front pages or on the agenda of world leaders,” said Pat Mooney, executive director of the ETC Group, an international environmental organisation based in Ottawa.

“The lack of attention is a tragedy,” said Mooney, who has 40 years experience in international environment and development issues.

Humanity is failing in its stewardship of the planet. An incredible 85 percent of the world’s oceans are in trouble, said Susan Lieberman, director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group, a U.S. organisation.

Rio+20 is a major opportunity to turn this around, Lieberman told IPS.

The Jun. 20-22 Rio+20 meet is timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio. The Earth Summit captured world attention, with leaders from most countries and some 10,000 media attending.

It gave birth to the most important environmental treaties on climate change, biodiversity and land degradation and desertification. World leaders also endorsed Agenda 21, a detailed blueprint on how nations can practice sustainable development.

Years of preparation went into the 1992 Summit, while only months have gone into Rio+20.

“There hasn’t been nearly enough preparation to be able to sign treaties,” said Lieberman. It’s been a struggle to get many governments like such as the US to focus on Rio+20 at all she said.

“Governments are not giving this opportunity enough importance given the mess we are in,” said Lisa Speer, director of the international oceans programme at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. NGO.

“Planetary emergency” is how many in the world’s scientific community describe “the mess we are in”. They will detail their comprehensive state of the planet assessment at the “Planet Under Pressure” conference in London Mar. 26-29.

That assessment will summarise the overwhelming evidence that “the continued functioning of the Earth system as we know it is at risk,” conference organisers previously told IPS.

Climate change, which is overheating the planet and making the oceans more acidic, is just one of the major challenges. Another is the ongoing decline of biodiversity, where so many plants and animals are going extinct that the Earth’s living systems on which humanity depends are unraveling.

Fresh water is another “planetary boundary” humanity is pushing up against. Water use has increased six-fold in the past century and in many places the quality of water resources has been degraded. Other challenges include increasing poverty, food and energy security, and the current financial and economic instability.

Given the range of major challenges, deciding what will be on the Rio+20 agenda has taken up most of the discussion so far. Officially, Rio+20 has seven major themes like oceans, food and jobs, and 12 major issue areas, such as trade and the green economy, sustainable cities, and international governance.

With only three months until the 2012 Summit, there is a tremendous amount of work underway now, said Amy Fraenkel, regional director of the U.N. Environment Programme‘s Regional Office for North America.

“There will be a major effort to get some results, to get some agreements,” said Fraenkel.

“Rio+20 is not an endpoint,” she cautioned. “It is a milestone for re-commitment to address the major challenges we are facing.”

One major expected outcome is agreement on the green economy – a transition towards a low-carbon, resource-efficient economy that will alleviate poverty and bring more jobs. Rio+20 is expected to define what the green economy entails and the ways to get there.

A first and essential step in a green transition is for nations to commit to phasing out harmful and unsustainable subsidies for fossil fuels, fisheries and industrial agriculture.

“Governments have come to this late so it’s hard to guess what will happen,” said ETC Group’s Mooney.

The major issue at Rio+20 will be defining exactly what the green economy will be. There is no consensus yet, he told IPS. Civil society organisations from around the world have been discussing this for well over a year and those from “the global South are unanimous in their opposition to the ‘financialisation’ of nature”, he said.

This includes opposition to market-based mechanisms for conservation or payments from carbon markets for protecting forests.

According to Mooney, some countries and large corporations see the green economy in terms of a post-petroleum future where resources and energy for industrial production comes from biomass and other living things. Most of those “living resources” are in the global South and local people rightly fear a massive land grab, he said.

Foreign investors have already gained access to more than 35 million hectares in Africa, Asia and South America for food and biofuel production according to GRAIN, a small NGO working with small farmers and farming communities.

“I think it (RIO+20) will be an important meeting,” Mooney said. “The fight over what the green economy will be is key.”

Excerpt:

The brightly painted old shipping container with solar panels on its roof and high-specification filtration devices inside looks out of place in this dusty Angolan village of Bom Jesus, 50 kilometres east of the capital Luanda.

Joaquina Xavier – who currently collects water from the river – in front of the new AQUAtap machine in her village. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

But it will soon be providing nearly 20,000 litres a day of clean, drinkable water to the area’s 500 residents who currently rely on dirty supplies from the nearby river.

Designed by Canadian technology company Quest Water Solutions, the stainless steel drinking station called “AQUAtap” is being globally piloted in this Southern African nation with a view, if it is successful, to start manufacturing the systems locally to roll out across the region.

Using solar energy stored in large batteries, water from the River Kwanza, 50 metres away, is processed through sand and other filters. Then UV is used to sterilise the water to World Health Organisation (WHO) drinking standards ready for it to be dispensed out of a stainless steel tap at the front.

“It is really very straightforward and simple,” explained Quest’s John Balanko as he gently pushed one of two taps at the front of the block to allow the water to come out into a bottle.

“Yes, it looks a little out of place and rather advanced for here, but it’s not, it’s really quite simple and the beauty is it is very low maintenance.

“The machine itself will only need a service once a month and we are training up some Angolans do be able to do that once we have gone back to Canada.”

The stainless steel taps – which dispense a fixed amount of just over one litre per push – and the aluminium platform, have been designed for easy cleaning and there are drains around the edges to collect any spilt water.

Balanko and his business partner Peter Miele, both from Vancouver, have a background in using technology to solve rural water supply issues in Canada.

A chance meeting four years ago with an Angolan resident in Canada, however, gave them a new African focus.

The AQUAtap has been designed specifically for a rural Angolan community where a lack of clean water and limited sanitation is a major contributor to the country’s high childhood mortality rate, which claims one in five youngsters before their fifth birthday.

Since the end of its three-decade civil war in 2002, the Angolan government has spent millions of dollars repairing infrastructure and providing basic services like water to its population of 19 million.

As part of the “Agua para Todas” (Water for All) scheme taps and boreholes have been installed in communities across the country, although according to the government’s own figures, around half the population is still without access to drinking water.

The village chosen by Quest Water Solutions, which was suggested by the municipal authorities, has one of those government-installed taps, but locals, most of whom are subsistence farmers without formal employment, told IPS it had not worked for over a year.

Carlos de Costa Gabriel, 25, welcomed the new machine and made no secret of the fact he wanted a job as its security guard to watch over it at night and prevent the theft of its solar panels.

He said: “We like this project very much. We have been using river water, which causes a lot of problems like vomiting and diarrhoea.

“I have two young girls aged three and five so I am very pleased that now we can get clean water because it will resolve the health problems.”

Mother-of-five Joaquina Xavier, 38, added: “We are very grateful for this. At the moment the water we use is so dirty and it is hard work bringing it from the river in buckets.

“The children get sick from the water, and some in my family have died because of this, but this machine, it’s really going to help.”

Balanko and Miele are working in conjunction with Angola’s Ministry of Industry, which is in charge of sourcing the equipment for the Agua Para Todas programme.

The device, one of two they shipped to Angola at no cost to the government, is being sold for a once- off fee of 150,000 dollars, which comes with a two-year maintenance guarantee.

“We can’t deny we are a for-profit company with a product to sell,” Balanko explained. “But I think you need to be able to make profit so that you can then give back.

“This is a one-off cost for the government, which they will absorb but the villagers will in return get clean, healthy water for at least the next 15 to 20 years.

“It is also very cost-effective in the long-run because our water works out at around 2.30 dollars for 1,000 litres, while at the moment people are paying as much as 30 dollars for 1,000 litres, which is more than 10 times more.”

The water from the AQUAtap will be free for the villagers, Balanko explained, a decision taken by the authorities.

The Canadians accept there are risks involved with the fact the water will be free, that the machine might be vandalised, or hijacked by people who want to sell the water commercially.

But they said they hoped the village would take pride in the new device to stop that happening. Balanko said: “Time will tell, but we believe it will be taken care of. We are going to have a security guard here and possibly flood lights for added security.

“We have told the villagers this is their machine and they must take care of it and we have engaged some elders and respected members of the community to help spread that message.”

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 Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

The Arab world is talking about a revolution; not just out on the streets but in films, in newspapers, in songs – using any means necessary to document events, expose the horrors of war and explore the struggles and possibilities that lie ahead as the Arab Spring feels the wintry chill of post-revolutionary democratic challenges.

During Arab Spring World Cinema day at Berlin’s 62nd international film festival, Arab filmmakers expressed hope, fear, defiance, resolve and resilience.

Caught between repression and the struggle for change, filmmakers have been documenting the tidal wave of transformation sweeping across Arab countries and creating a new, collective culture of resistance.

Many feel the artistic process has been a personal and political quest for reconciling the tensions between Islam, faith, freedom and democracy, but by far the strongest consensus among media makers has been – as Julius Caesar famously remarked while leading his armies across the River Rubicon in Northern Italy – “the die has been cast.”

Image production in war-torn Syria

This was no accident – most authoritarian regimes thrive on placing severe restrictions on the collective imagination of their populations, limiting their ability to conjure up alternatives to the daily routine of repression.

While working on a documentary about the ‘caricature scandal’, a story about freedom of expression circumventing censorship, Syrian producer and film activist Hala Al Alabdallah unearthed a law forbidding the use of “images devoid of commentary”. The discovery highlighted just how insidious repression can be.

But while state forces attempt to control everything from free association to artistic production, resistance and creativity have come together in the squares or “agoras” of the Middle East and North Africa, opening up new public spaces for social solidarity, overcoming collective fears and expressing hope and a new sense of belonging.

For the first time, it seems, the feeling of being a citizen of one’s own country is proliferating among the Syrian masses, buoyed by a cultural resurgence that includes street dancing and turning old folksongs into revolutionary anthems.

“People came to the streets asking for freedom; even in a (muzzled) country like Syria we hear slogans chanting that Syrian people are one. I see the incarnation of freedom in poetry,” said Al Alabdallah pointing out the powerful nexus at work between insurgency, culture and engagement.

Mohamed Ali Atassi, a cultural producer in exile, turned to filmmaking out of psychological necessity, “when I realized I could no longer express the complexity I was feeling without picking up a camera,” Atassi, whose “creative solutions” include obtaining footage from inside the country using the internet and Skype interviews, told IPS.

As revolution and the struggle for change spreads across the Arab World “witness-filmmaking” is emerging, as a formidable art enabled by YouTube – a new form of dissent-inspired ‘auteur’ film. Increasingly, a generation of mobile-savvy youth are becoming gatekeepers of the visual world, archiving that which cannot be denied to people rising up against state power.

Despite her fear, Younis felt compelled to order her newly trained team of young video journalists to “get out there and keep the cameras rolling.” In their toughest assignment yet, the 20-year-olds had to get on the streets and ‘learn by doing’ the dangerous process of reporting a revolution.

One of the video journalists reporters, Ahmed Abdel Fatah, was shot in the eye while filming people being killed on the Qsr el-Nil bridge during the Internet blackout of the 18-day-long Cairo revolution last January.

The resulting dramatic footage was edited into a documentary entitled “Reporting… a Revolution” – a powerful example of witness-filmmaking by six young reporters including Abdel Fatah.

“I am a videographer, my eye is my most precious asset,” he said. “But we will never stop. This is our job, it’s what we know how to do best and we’ll keep doing it.”

Well aware of the contradictions implicit in “guerrilla journalism”, Younis faces a daily struggle with the ethics of journalistic objectivity, as the lines between documenting revolution and revolutionary documentary filmmaking blurred into non-existence.

Arab women face the camera

Many acts of defiance amongst women are increasingly poignant expressions of a new readiness to speak up without fearing the consequences of being heard.

Examples like Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s subversive act of posting a nude photo of herself was seen as a groundbreaking statement on the dignity of the naked female body trapped in a gender power struggle.

“The nude picture is indicative of a new state of fearlessness and this gives me hope because an incident of this kind would not have occurred before the revolution,” pointed out Viola Safik, a German- Egyptian documentary filmmaker talking in Berlin about changing perspectives in the Arab world.

Safik also warned that the opening up of cultural frontiers could lead to an era where art will become more aggressive, potentially engendering violent backlashes, like the power of the regime to label cultural producers as “traitors” or “unbelievers”.

Undeterred, women are slowly and tentatively facing the camera. Long-repressed controversial issues like marriage freedom, the meaning and implications of financial independence, tradition, what to accept and what to refuse, were all central questions in Hanan Abdalla’s debut documentary “In the Shadow of a Man”.

Born in the backstreets of Cairo, 69-year-old Wafaa, the documentary’s protagonist, looks back at the “honour” check she was forced to submit to on her wedding night and has no qualms or regrets about her divorce, though she sadly never recovers a sense of respect for men.

As violence rages throughout the Arab world, with the spotlight largely on Syria and Bahrain, Berlinale Festival jury-member Boualem Sansal, the Algerian novelist and poet, pointed out that Algeria has somehow escaped scrutiny, despite the fact that president Abdelaziz Bouteflika “strangles his people morally and culturally, an act that is tantamount to cultural genocide,” Sansal said on the last day of the Berlin film festival.

His words are a sombre reminder that the die may be cast but crucial dominoes in the Arab world have yet to fall; and when they do, the cameras will be rolling.

Excerpt:

Rising temperatures are drying out northern forests and peatlands, producing bigger and more intense fires. And this will only get much worse as the planet heats up from the use of ever larger amounts of fossil fuels, scientists warned last week at the end of a major science meeting in Vancouver.

“In a warmer world, there will be more fire. That’s a virtual certainty,” said Mike Flannigan, a forest researcher at the University of Alberta, Canada.

“I’d say a doubling or even tripling of fire events is a conservative estimate,” Flannigan told IPS.

While Flannigan’s research reveals forest fire risk may triple in future, a similar increase in peat fires will be far more dangerous. There are millions of square kilometres of tundra and peatlands in the northern hemisphere and they hold more than enough carbon to ramp up global temperatures high enough to render most of the planet uninhabitable if they burn.

A forest fire in Indonesia that ignited peatlands in 1997 smouldered for months, releasing the equivalent of 20 to 40 percent of the worldwide fossil fuel emissions for the entire year, he said.

“There is the potential for significant releases of carbon and other greenhouse gases (from future peat fires),” Flannigan said.

If peat fires release large amounts of carbon, then temperatures will rise faster and higher, leading to further drying of forests and peat, and increasing the likelihood of fires in what is called a positive feedback, he said.

When the increased fire from global warming was first detected in 2006, Johann Goldammer of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany’s Freiburg University called the northern forest a “carbon bomb”.

“It’s sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on,” Goldammer said according to media reports in 2006.

Flannigan’s research is based on climate projections for 2070 to 2090. Forests will be drier and there will be more lightning with rising temperatures. Around the world, most fires are caused by humans, except in remote regions like boreal forest and treeless tundra, he said.

Lightning sparked the 1,000-square-kilometre tundra fire fuelled by peat in Alaska’s Anaktuvuk River region in 2007. Lightning, once nearly unknown in the far north, is becoming more common as the region is now two to three degrees C warmer. Until the past decade, fire had largely been absent from the tundra over the past 12,000 years.

The Anaktuvuk River peat fire burned for nearly three months, releasing about two million tonnes of CO2 before it was extinguished by snow. That’s about half of the annual emissions of a country like Nepal or Uganda. Surprisingly, the severely burned tundra continued to release CO2 in the following years.

Peat can grow several metres deep beneath the ground. In fact, some peat fires burn right through winter, beneath the snow, then pick up again in the spring, said Flannigan.

About half the world’s soil carbon is locked in northern permafrost and peatland soils, said Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at Canada’s University of Guelph. This carbon has been accumulating for thousands of years, but fires can release much of this into the atmosphere rapidly, Turetsky said in a release.

Over the past 10 years, fires are burning far more boreal forest than ever before. Longer snow-free seasons, melting permafrost and rising temperatures are large-scale changes underway in the north, Turetsky and colleagues have found.

Other researchers have shown that the average size of forest fires in the boreal zone of western Canada has tripled since the 1980s. Much of Canada’s vast forest region is approaching a tipping point, warned researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Germany’s largest research organisation.

This “drastic change” in normal fire pattern has occurred with a only a small increase in temperatures relative to future temperatures, the German researchers concluded in a study published in the December 2011 issue of The American Naturalist.

Worldwide, fires burn an estimated 350 to 450 million ha of forest and grasslands every year. That’s an area larger than the size of India.

The first-ever assessment of forest and bush fires’ impact on human health estimated that 339,000 people die per year from respiratory and other fire-related illness.

“I was surprised the number was this high,” said Fay Johnston, co-author and researcher at University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.

Half of the deaths were in Africa and 100,000 in Southeast Asia. Deforestation fires in the tropics are the worst when it comes to human health impacts, she said. Heavy smoke contains high volumes of tiny particles that are very damaging to the lungs and cardiovascular system and can produce heart attacks.

“It takes humans to burn a rainforest. This would be the easiest to stop compared to other fires,” Johnston told IPS.

Forest and bush fires result in many billions of dollars in material losses every year. Last year, fires in drought-stricken Texas resulted in at least five billion dollars in losses, while the Slave Lake, Alberta fire was Canada’s second worst disaster at 750 million dollars.

Future fires will be bigger and more intense and largely beyond our abilities to control or suppress, said Flannigan.

“Virtually all of Russia, Canada, the U.S.” will be impacted, he said.

Kazuya Tarukawa, 36, left a secure job in the Japanese capital to tend to his family’s organic farm located 100 km away from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor.

Although falling outside the evacuation zone, set at 60 km from ground zero by the Japanese government, the Tarukawa farm is not immune to suspicions of radiation contamination as consumers grow increasingly wary.

Ten days after the disaster at the Fukushima plant on Mar. 11, 2011, Tarukawa’s 74-year-old father, Hisashi Tarukawa, committed suicide in despair.

“My father was devastated after the meltdown in the Fukushima nuclear reactor and reports of radiation contamination spread. He felt hopeless about not only his future but also for agriculture in Japan,” the younger Tarukawa told IPS.

The farm, that produces a variety of vegetables in the summer, has been carefully tilled for eight generations, a legacy that in the past decade included organic farming under the devoted efforts of the now deceased Tarukawa.

“The nuclear accident has wiped all our efforts away,” said Tarukawa’s son and successor, who struggles with bouts of deep despair himself.

Farmers in the area are still struggling to come to terms with the fact that one of the worst fallouts of the Fukushima nuclear accident is the blow it dealt to the Japanese food industry, once respected worldwide for quality standards.

“Japanese marine and agricultural products are reeling from domestic and international rejection due to radiation fear,” says Prof. Ryota Koyama, an expert on food safety at Fukushima University.

“The time has come to develop new safety policies that are based on both scientific evidence and social concerns, a critical step towards dealing with this issue,” said Koyama.

The past few months have seen the government scrambling to regain public trust with food grown in Fukushima and the neighbouring areas by scraping away contaminated top soil from local farms.

Other measures include pledges to conduct new testing for cesium 137, a dangerous radioactive material, on more than 25,000 farms, establishing more stringent safety ratings from April this year and also intensifying screenings for the element in stores.

Cesium 137 has a half-life of around 30 years and is a known cause of cancer.

This month, the Japanese health ministry proposed a special limit of 50 becquerels (measure of radioactivity) per kilogram for milk and food items for infants, to lower exposure to radiation.

A panel of scientists has already approved the proposal, while pointing out in a release that new measures for all food items have “secured special considerations for children.”

But anti-nuclear activists and parents who are continuing to lobby for better protection standards for children in Fukushima insist they will not be satisfied until the government takes steps to evacuate the entire younger generation to fully safe areas.

According to estimates made by the influential Asahi Shimbun newspaper in September 2011, an area of more than 8,000 sq km had accumulated cesium 137 levels of 30,000 becquerels per sq metre.

The estimated contaminated area covered almost half of Fukushima prefecture, the third largest in Japan, covering 13,782 sq km. It included 1,370 sq km in Tochigi, 380 sq km in Miyagi and 260 sq km in Ibaraki – prefectures adjacent to Fukushima.

Asahi Shimbun calculated the size of the contaminated area based on a distribution map of accumulated cesium 137 levels measured from aircraft and released by the science ministry on Sep. 8, 2011.

Fukushima and the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl are both rated at ‘level 7’, the worst on the International Nuclear Event Scale because the quantities of radioactive materials released exceeded several tens of thousands of terabecquerels.

“Testing that indicated unsafe contamination level was initially done by farmers rather than the government,” observed Masai Shiina, spokesperson for the Fukushima Mothers Network to Protect Children. “Trust is broken with officials.”

According to Koyama, increasing public angst and mistrust of the government has raised the importance of developing nuclear safety standards that are based not on scientific measurements alone.

“The public refusal to be appeased by scientific safety levels proposed by the government supports the dire need for the inclusion of a social approach to the current nuclear contamination,” he pointed out.

A prospect that Koyama pushes in his research on food contamination is developing a variety of safety levels for different food items to replace the current limit set at 100 becquerels.

At issue is the development of tougher standards on staples such as rice while fruits can stay at current levels, following a system practised in Ukraine.

Koyama advocates dissemination of clear information on the dangers posed by various kinds of radioactive contamination such as the fact that cesium can be controlled over several decades whereas radiation exposure from plutonium at Chernobyl lasts much longer.

Farmer Kitaburo Tanno, who gave up his eight-hectare farm in Nihonmatsu, located 45 km from the damaged reactor, agrees that honest information from the government is the only way to save Japanese agriculture.

“I decided to move away from my farm soon after the accident because I could no longer trust information from the government. I would have appreciated an honest assessment for farmers who could then move on with the support of public funds. This did not happen,” he explained to IPS.

More than 100,000 people, mostly younger people, have left Fukushima to escape radiation contamination.

The mass migration is bound to affect agriculture production in the rich farming areas of the northeast prefectures that are a major agricultural base for Japan, leaving the government with having to make tough choices and decisions.

(END)