A boat on Pasig River in the Philippines. The Philippines has the highest mortality rate from the coronavirus in Southeast Asia. Credit:Kara Santos/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 31 2020 (IPS)

Southeast Asia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been efficient, but some areas such as data privacy, measures to go back to normalcy after lockdown is lifted, and resources for migrant or transient populations will need addressing. 

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said while the pandemic has introduced new challenges in the region, including threats to peace and security, “containment measures have spared Southeast Asia the degree of suffering and upheaval seen elsewhere”. 

Speaking at the launch of a U.N. policy brief exploring the impact of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia on Thursday, Jul. 30, Guterres lauded the efficient methods adapted by leaders in the region, while highlighting the ways in which the region has fallen short in its response to the pandemic. 

“Already, hate speech has increased and political processes have stalled, leaving several long-running conflicts to stagnate and fester,” Guterres said during a video call marking the launch. He noted that while governments in Southeast Asia had supported his appeal for a global ceasefire, the region had much work to do, “but has formidable capacities at its disposal”.

• According to the think-tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Philippines has the highest mortality rate from the coronavirus in the region, followed closely by Indonesia.   
• The U.N. policy brief noted that Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Timor Leste and Vietnam had recorded zero fatalities at the time of its publication.

COVID-19 worsening weak systems

As in most regions, COVID-19 has affected the most vulnerable communities and worsened pre-existing concerns. In Southeast Asia, the report identified some of the most pressing issues: weak healthcare systems, conflict in areas such as Myanmar, as well as the plight of migrant workers. 

The Asia and Pacific region hosts about 20 percent of the world’s 163.8 million migrant workers globally, according to a 2017 report by the International Labour Organisation. 

The U.N. policy brief raises alarms that migrant and transient workers in some Southeast Asian countries have been left out of the host country’s pandemic response. For many migrant workers, living in close quarters leaves them little option to maintain social distancing or other protective measures. With concerns over the spread of the virus, some governments have also capitalised on this fear to deny entry to asylum seekers, according to the U.N. brief. 

“Non-nationals are at particular risk of exclusion from public health responses due to legal or practical barriers. This creates a systemic vulnerability for disease control in the subregion,” the brief notes.

The pandemic, as in all other regions, is disproportionately affecting women, in part because of limited access to sexual and reproductive health services as well as due to increased hours of domestic labour — the burden of which falls on women in the region. This is especially prevalent in the Philippines and Thailand, says the policy brief, claiming that women in these countries “are more likely to face increased unpaid domestic and unpaid care work because of COVID-19, exacerbating mental and emotional health concerns”. 

Meanwhile, illegal drug smuggling has not decreased in the region despite the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, while human smuggling has actually increased at the Bay of Bengal, the policy brief claims. 

The pandemic response, while prompt, was further exacerbated by an already weak healthcare system in the region. 

“More than half of the subregion’s countries are vulnerable because of weak health systems, including Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines and Timor Leste,” says the brief. This, added with other social issues; such as temporarily stopping measles vaccination campaigns in the Philippines, as well as other limited humanitarian assistance due to the lockdown, has only added to the layers of the crisis. 

Challenges brought upon by measures

There are also concerns raised by the measures introduced by governments in the region to contain the virus. 

“Vaguely worded provisions without necessary safeguards and limitations have the potential to restrict the rights to information, privacy, and freedom of movement, expression, association, peaceful assembly and asylum,” the policy brief claims. 

At the core of these concerns is the issue of personal freedom, and experts are already raising alarms that some of the responses have the hallmarks of authoritarianism.

A June analysis by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) claims there are concerns of Southeast Asian countries inching towards authoritarianism as governments use the pandemic as an excuse to enforce strict measures and to attack opponents.

The analysis also points out some might be associating the success of containing the virus with authoritarian ruling. 

“There is a perception that authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have better managed the pandemic than the region’s democracies, a narrative buoyed by China’s diplomatic efforts to propagate its own accomplishments despite even greater success stories in South Korea and Taiwan,” says the analysis. 

Regional cooperation

Despite some of the challenges, the countries within the region have supported each other. According to CSIS, many of the Southeast Asian countries have exchanged, provided and accepted donations from and to each other. China has faced criticism from countries outside the region for attempts to start a “mask diplomacy” which caused countries in Europe to be cynical of her donation offers, but her neighbours accepted them. 

The Chinese government, as well as private entities such as Alibaba and Jack Ma foundations, has provided neighbouring countries between 75,000 to two million masks, among other services such as test kits, according to CSIS. 

The Secretary-General applauded the regional cooperation during this time of crisis. 

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Line, WhatsApp and WeChat are the most popular social media sites in Southeast Asia, but their power to spread free speech is declining. Credit: ITU/R.Farrell

By Pascal Laureyn
PHNOM PENH, Feb 15 2018 (IPS)

Researchers recently evaluated 65 countries which represent 87 percent of internet users globally. Half of them experienced a decline of internet freedom. China, Syria and Ethiopia are the least free. Estonia, Iceland and Canada enjoy the most freedom online.

The most remarkable evolution comes from Southeast Asia. A few years ago, this was a promising region. The economy was growing, democracy was on the rise. Malaysia had free elections, Indonesia started an anti-corruption campaign and the social rights of Cambodian garment workers were improving."A few years ago, social media were safe havens for activists. But today these media companies are too cooperative with the autocratic regimes." --Ed Legaspi of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance

“Internet helped these movements grow,” says Madeline Earp, Asia research analyst with Freedom House. “All kinds of organisations and media started using internet more and more. That was hopeful.”

Today, democratisation has faltered. A military coup in Thailand and the dissolution of an opposition party in Cambodia are just two examples of autocratic governments resisting change.

Censorship, arrests and violence

According to the report, seven of the eight Southeast Asian countries researched have become less free in the last year.

“Censorship is on the rise and internet freedom is declining,” Earp says. “Myanmar and Cambodia were the biggest disappointments.”

Recently, journalists were arrested in Myanmar. Fake news spreads hate speech and incites violence against Muslims. Today, Myanmar has more journalists in prison then in the last years of the military regime.

In Cambodia, an independent newspaper was shut down. Activists who denounce illegal activities of companies are being arrested. In Thailan,d the strict lese-majeste law is used to silence opponents. The Philippines has a growing number of ‘opinion shapers’ to push pro-government propaganda.

The only country that has improved its score is Malaysia. But Freedom House says that is mostly because of increasing internet use. Repression is not keeping up with the rapid growth. This shows that Malaysia is following a trend in Southeast Asia. The restriction on freedom of speech starts when internet use goes up.

“The Malaysian government has censored news websites. At least one Malaysian has been sentenced for a post on Facebook,” Earp adds.

The Chinese example

Part of the cause is to be found in China. The influential country has the world’s least free internet for three years, according to the Freedom House report. It uses a sophisticated surveillance system, known as the ‘Great Firewall’. An army of supervisors check on the internet use of the Chinese, from messaging apps to traffic cameras.

Undesirable messages are being deleted by Chinese censors. Sometimes that can lead to absurd situations. A newly discovered beetle was named after President Xi Jinping. But messages about this event were deleted because the predatory nature of the beetle could be insulting to the leader.

These practices play an important role in the decline of democracy in Southeast Asia. “Vietnam is copying the techniques of China,” says researcher Madeline Earp. “More bloggers and activists are being arrested because of their social media use.”

Fake news

Not only censorship is an issue. In Southeast Asia, fake news is being used to eliminate opponents or to manipulate public opinion. This is what Ed Legaspi, director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, explains in The Bulletin.

“Worryingly, many governments have taken advantage of existing mechanisms in social media to spread rumours and combat critical voices,” says Legaspi. “Thailand’s lese majeste law, Malaysian’s sedition act and Indonesia’s blasphemy law have all been used to curtail online speech.”

In Myanmar, inflammatory and racist language against Muslims provokes violent outbreaks regularly. Fake news sites spread rumours about a Buddhist woman who supposedly was raped by a Muslim. This contributed to the violence towards the Rohingya, a Muslim minority. And it helps the army to get support from a large part of the public.

The role of social media cannot be underestimated. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Line, WhatsApp and WeChat are the most popular in Southeast Asia, but their initial power to spread free speech is declining.

“A few years ago, social media were safe havens for activists. But today these media companies are too cooperative with the autocratic regimes,” says Legaspi. “They do nothing to protect their users.”

Manipulated elections

Various countries are organising elections this year. How these governments will deal with these moments of tension will determine the evolution of internet freedom.

Cambodia has elections with no opposition, Malaysia’s polls are heavily manipulated. Not much positive news is expected there. In Indonesia, the regional elections in June will be the first test since a fake news campaign against Jakarta’s once popular governor, Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama. He was convicted of blasphemy and jailed.

The growing knowhow of those in power is being used to improve their fortunes when elections come. Some of them already control internet use and silence activists, a sad evolution in a region that only recently seemed to be making progress.

Volunteers taking on fires at Garung village in Pulang Pisau district, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Credit: Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Indonesia

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Oct 10 2015 (IPS)

A regional agreement on managing transboundary haze caused by fires raging in Indonesia’s forests and peatlands appears all but buried in the embers of frustration of its neighbouring countries.

Nearby Singapore and Malaysia, apart from eastern Indonesia, have been hardest hit by the haze, which has been sending air pollution indices soaring to unhealthy levels for more than a month now. In recent days, the winds have blown the haze to southern Thailand as well.

In parts of Southeast Asia, a pall of grey hangs over the skies from morning until dusk, and scenes of residents walking around with masks have become common.

Over the past month or so, schools have been closed at some point, flights delayed or outdoor activities cancelled or limited, with warnings about the risks to children and the elderly, as countries asked Indonesia, with whom they are members in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to address the burning of forests and land in eastern Indonesia.

After months of digging in its heels and saying it can manage on its own, the Indonesian government was quoted as saying this week it believes foreign help would be needed to put out the fires.

“This has proven quite a challenge for us, so we see it as a necessity to work together with countries that have the available resources to extinguish the fires,” foreign ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said on Oct. 8. He said Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno LP Marsud, had talked to Singapore, Malaysia, Russia, China and Australia “to discuss cooperation initiatives to overcome fire hotspots.”

But in these discussions about the fires there has hardly been any mention of the 1997 ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, a legally binding agreement among the 10 member countries of the organisation. These are Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

In truth, activists say, they did not have much hope in the ASEAN haze agreement and ASEAN’s ability – or will – to hold its members to its own commitments.

“The agreement is said to be legally binding, but ASEAN has no court to try offenders,” said Nur Hidayati, head of the advocacy department of the Indonesian Forum for Environment, known by its Indonesian acronym WALHI. She added that the haze accord would likely meet the same fate as the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, which activists see as weak.

Yet this year would have been an opportunity to show the teeth of the haze agreement, which ASEAN has long held up as an example of successful regional cooperation. The haze agreement was the world’s first regional arrangement that binds a group of states to tackle transboundary pollution from land and forest fires.

After years of resistance, Indonesia – whose inability to control the fires for nearly two decades has been an irritant in its ties with its neighbours – finally ratified the haze agreement in September 2014 and became legally bound by it. That is 12 years after Indonesia signed it with other ASEAN countries in 2002, a fact that has raised doubts about ASEAN’s ability to enforce its own decisions.

ASEAN countries are also moving toward deeper economic integration and launching the ASEAN Community in December 2015, but addressing transboundary tensions continue to challenge the 48-year-old organisation.

“If the most powerful three members of ASEAN (Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia) are not able to address a recurring and predictable problem (haze), what hope does the region have for economic integration with the ASEAN Economic Community that is going to be finalized end of this year?” asked a September commentary in the Jakarta Post newspaper by Joseph Cherian of the Centre for Asset Management Research and Investments, Jack Loo of Think Business and Ang Swee Hoon of the National University of Singapore Business School.

Singapore and Malaysia have repeatedly offered assistance to put out the raging fires, but Indonesia’s officials until recently said they could manage on their own.

“For the time being, we are only thinking of exhausting all of our internal resources before seeking external assistance,” J S George Lantu, director of ASEAN functional cooperation of the Indonesian foreign ministry said in an interview earlier in October. “We really appreciate their offers of help, but as a sovereign state we don’t want to seek to external help without trying hard enough to put out the fires. We can handle the fires ourselves,” the diplomat said.

But Indonesia is showing “complete disregard for our people, and their own,” Singapore Foreign Minister K Shanmugan told the British Broadcasting Corporation earlier in October.

The head of the environment division of the Jakarta-based ASEAN secretariat, which oversees the implementation of the ASEAN haze agreement, said Indonesia’s responses to the fires were in line with the accord. “Obviously, Indonesia can deal with the fires with its own resources,” division head Ampai Harakunarak said. “All member states are standing by, ready to receive requests from Indonesia.”

The accord aims to “prevent and monitor transboundary haze pollution as a result of land and/or forest fires which should be mitigated, through concerted national efforts and intensified regional and international cooperation.” It requires parties to “cooperate in developing and implementing measures to prevent and monitor transboundary haze pollutions as a result of land and/or forest fires” and “to control sources of fires.”

In truth, “Indonesia ratified the agreement under strong protest from Singapore and Malaysia over haze pollution. It (the ratification) was more as a political gesture than a statement of intent,” said WALHI’s Hidayati.

Significantly, Article 12.2 of the agreement says that external assistance “can only be employed at the request of and with the consent of the requesting party, or when offered by another party or parties, with the consent of the receiving party.”

President Joko Widodo had instructed government agencies to handle the fires in peatlands and forest being cleared by plantations for products like palm oil or paper. Foreign companies run many of them, prompting Singapore’s National Environmental Agency to name five companies with Indonesian concessions suspected to be contributing to the haze.

The Singapore Environment Council and Consumers Association of Singapore have urged consumers to use only products of companies that do not use burning practices in Indonesia.

Satellite images show that 70 per cent of hotspots in Sumatera and Borneo islands in Indonesia are in local plantations. Some 1.7 million hectares of land, more than a third of which are on peatland in Sumatra and Kalimantan, have been burned, Widodo said.

Clearly, Indonesia has a lot of cleaning up to do of the concessions it gives to plantation companies and enforcing of local laws, critics say.

Land and/or forest fires have plagued Indonesia annually over the past 18 years due to unprecedented expansion of pulp and paper companies and oil palm plantations and their conversion into easy-to-burn peatlands, according to WALHI.

“By nature, tropical rain forests are impossible to burn due to high humidity. However, when trees are felled and a monoculture system is introduced in oil palm and rubber plantations or forest estates, their humidity disappears and they become vulnerable to fires,” Hidayati said.

Government officials say they have frozen some oil palm and forest concessions, adding that they have fined some companies and that others are awaiting trial. “Previously, we only charged individuals or corporates violating the 2009 environmental law in criminal and civil courts. Since January 2015, however, we also impose administrative sanctions on them by either freezing or revoking their concessions,” said Muhammad Yunus, director of the criminal law enforcement division of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.

But the government must review all forest and plantation concessions to determine whether companies can handle fires, Hidayati said. “A fire that breaks out in a plantation or forest estate should been seen as a concession holder’s inability to manage the land and thus serve as a ground to revoke the concession, regardless who sets it or whether or not it’s deliberate.”

Untung Suprapto, head of the land and forest fire control sub-directorate of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said his office is drafting a regulation that would require plantation and forest concession holders to have own firefighter teams, trucks and equipment.
(End)

Excerpt:

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

July 2014 floods in Russia but authorities turning blind eye to climate change. Credit: takemake.ru

By Mikhail Matveev
MOSCOW, Aug 30 2014 (IPS)

The recent call from Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev for “tightening belts” has convinced even optimists that something is deeply wrong with the Russian economy.

No doubt the planned tax increases (introduction of a sales tax and increases in VAT and income tax) will inflict severe damage on most businesses and their employees, if last year’s example of what happened when taxes were raised for individual entrepreneurs is anything to go by – 650,000 of them were forced to close their businesses.

Nevertheless, it looks like some lucky people are not only going to escape the “belt-tightening” but are also about to receive some dream tax vacations and the lucky few are not farmers, nor are they in technological, educational, scientific or professional fields – it is the Russian and international oil giants involved in oil and gas projects in the Arctic and in Eastern Siberia that stand to gain.

“In October [2013], Vladimir Putin signed a bill under which oil extraction at sea deposits will be exempt from severance tax. Moreover, VAT will not need to be paid for the sales, transportation and utilisation of the oil extracted from the sea shelf,” noted Russian newspaper Rossiiskie Nedra.“It looks like some lucky people are not only going to escape the ‘belt-tightening’ but are also about to receive some dream tax vacations and the lucky few are not farmers, nor are they in technological, educational, scientific or professional fields – it is the Russian and international oil giants involved in oil and gas projects in the Arctic and in Eastern Siberia that stand to gain”

Some continental oil projects were alsoblessedby the “Tsar’s generosity”: “For four Russian deposits with hard-to-recover oils [shale oil, etc.] – Bazhenovskaya [in Western Siberia] and Abalakskaya in Eastern Siberia, Khadumskaya in the Caucasus, and Domanikovaya in the Ural region – severance taxes do not need to be paid. Other deposits had their severance tax rates reduced by 20-80%.”

In fact, the line of thinking adopted by Russian officials responsible for tax policy is very simple. Faced with the predicament of an economy dependent on oil and gas (half of the state budget comes from oil and gas revenue, while two-thirds of exports come from the fossil fuel industry), they decided to act as usual – by stimulating more drilling and charging the rest of the economy with the additional tax burden.

There have been many warnings from well-known economists about the “resource curse” [the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources] – and its potential consequences for the countries affected: from having weak industries and agriculture to being prone to dictatorships and corruption.

For a long time, however, economists have been keen on separating the economic and social impacts of fossil fuel dependency from the environmental and climate-related problems. But now, these problems are closely interconnected, and Russia might be the first to feel the strength of their combination in the near future.

Medvedev may not have read much about the “resource curse” but he should at least be familiar with the official position of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), whose Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres has said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground in order to avoid the worst possible climate scenario.

One should at least expect this amount of knowledge from Russia as a member of the UN Security Council and it will be interesting to note whether the Russian delegation attending the UN Climate Summit in New York on September 23 will be ready to explain why, instead of limiting fossil fuel extraction, the whole country’s economic and tax policy is now aimed at encouraging as much drilling as possible.

However, it is not just the United Nations that has been warning against the burning of fossil fuels due to the related high climate risks. In 2005, Russia’s own meteorology service Roshydromet issued its prognosis of climate change and the consequences for Russia, stating that the rate of climate change in Russia is two times faster than the world’s average.

Roshydromet predicted a rapid increase in both the frequency and strength of extreme climate events – including floods, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. The number of such events has almost doubled during the last 15 years, and represent not only an economic threat but also a real threat to humans’ lives and their well-being,

Consider this summary of climate disasters in Russia during an ordinary July week (not including any of the large natural disasters such as the floods in Altai, Khabarovsk, and Krymsk, or the forest fires around Moscow in 2010):

“Following the weather incidents in the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk District where snow fell last weekend, a natural anomaly occurred in Novosibirsk, resulting in human casualties … Two three-year-old twin sisters died after a tree fell on them during a strong wind storm in the town of Berdsk, Novosibirsk District.”

“The flood in Yakutia lasted a week and resulted in the submersion of Ozhulun village in Churapchinsky district last Saturday. Due to the rise of the Tatta River, 57 house went under.”

“Flooding in Tuapse [on the coast of the Black Sea] occurred on July 8, 2014 … [and] has left 236 citizens homeless.”

Cars swept away in July 2014 floods in Russia. Credit: takeme.ru

Is it not worrisome that so many climate disasters have to occur before Russian officials start to realise that climatologists are not lying? Or perhaps they are simply not inclined to take the climatologists’ warnings seriously.

Another significant problem could arise for Russia if oil consumers start taking U.N. climate warnings seriously – and there is evidence that this is happening.

The European Union (still the main consumer of Russian oil and gas) has announced an ambitious “20/20/20 programme” – increasing shares from renewables to 20 percent, improving energy efficiency by 20 percent, and decreasing carbon emissions by 20 percent. The United States has decided to decrease carbon emissions from power plants by 30 percent. These are only first steps – but even these steps can help decrease fossil fuel consumption.

Fossil fuel use has only very slowly been increasing in the United States and decreasing in Europe in the last five years. On the other hand, demand for oil has continued to rise in China and Southeast Asia, and it is perhaps this – rather than the recent “sanctions” against Russia over Ukraine – that inspired President Vladimir Putin’s recent “turn to the East”.

But there are serious doubts that Asia’s greed for oil will continue into the future. China recently admitted that it will soon be taking measures to limit carbon emissions – for the first time in its history. China has already turned to green energy andled the rest of the worldin renewable energy investment in 2013.

Will other Asian countries follow suit? Perhaps – because they certainly have a very strong incentive. According to Erin McCarthy writing in the Wall Street Journal, South and Southeast Asia’s losses due to global warming may be huge, and its GDP may be reduced by 6 percent by 2060, despite the measures taken to curb its emissions.

What does this mean for Russia?

Well, if the oil-consuming countries meet their carbon emission targets, we can expect a 10-20 percent decrease in oil demand in the next ten years, maybe more. Any decrease in demand usually induces a decrease in price – but not always proportionally. Sometimes, especially if the market is overheated, even a small decrease in demand can trigger a drastic falls in price. Economists call such a situation a “bursting bubble”.

Today, the situation in the oil (and, in general, fossil fuel) market is often called a “carbon bubble”. Because of high oil prices, investors are motivated to make investments in oil drilling in the hopes of earning a stable and long-term income.

But once the world starts taking climate issues seriously and realises that most of the oil needs to be left in the ground, oil assets will fall in value. Investors will try to withdraw their money from the fossil fuel sector, and, facing a crisis, oil companies will be forced to decrease both production and prices.

If the “carbon bubble” bursts, Russia will be left with sustainable businesses (that are being choked by the nation’s own tax politics) and with a perfect network of shelf platforms, oil rigs, and pipelines (which will be completely unprofitable and useless). Thus, by making fossil fuels the core of its economy, Russia is taking twice the number of risks.

First, it risks ruining the climate, and second, it risks ruining its own economy. It looks like Russia will lose at any rate: if the leading energy consumers are unable to decrease their oil consumption, the climate will be ruined everywhere, including Russia. If they manage to decrease their dependence on fossil fuel, the Russian economy will be ruined.

This certainly is not looking pleasant, especially if we add in the high probability of a major disaster like the Gulf of Mexico Oil spill happening in the Arctic, as well as countless minor leaks possibly occurring along the Russian pipelines.

But maybe Russia just has no other alternative to an economy dependent on fossil fuels?

In that case, perhaps it is worth mentioning a recent article by Russian financier Andrei Movchan in the Russian Forbes magazine. Movchan convincingly shows that the Achilles’ heel of the modern Russian economy is its extremely underdeveloped small and medium-sized businesses. And it looks like the current tax plans would literally exterminate them.

If Russia were able to reverse this tax policy and make small businesses play as big of a role in the economy as they do in the United States or Europe, there could be economic growth comparable to the growth expected from oil and gas – without all the frightful side effects of an economy driven by fossil fuels.

Sounds like a dream, but the first step to making it a reality can be simple: get rid of big oil lobbying in the government and try to reform the taxation system to suit the interests of Russian citizens instead of the interests of the big oil corporations.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

* Mikhail Matveev is 350.org Communications Coordinator for Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia and Russia

That Obama is leaving Washington at such a critical moment testifies to the growing importance his administration is placing on its pivot towards Asia. Credit: kurisu/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 16 2012 (IPS)

Highlighting his much-ballyhooed “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to the Asia- Pacific region, Barack Obama leaves Friday for a four-day tour to Southeast Asia, including the first-ever visit by a U.S. president to Myanmar.

The tour, which will be capped by his attendance at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Cambodia, where he also expected to meet outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, comes amid high-stakes negotiations at home with Republicans over the dreaded “fiscal cliff”, and threats that the worst violence between Israel and the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip in four years could escalate into a bigger conflict.

That Obama is leaving Washington at such a critical moment testifies to the growing importance his administration is placing on its pivot – the administration prefers to call it a “re-balancing” – towards Asia, an importance also underlined by the fact that this will be his first overseas trip since his re-election Nov. 6.

“His decision to travel to Asia so soon after his re-election speaks to the importance he places on the region and its centrality to so many of our national-security interests and priorities,” said Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, in a major policy address Thursday designed to set the stage for the trip.

“Our approach is grounded in a simple proposition,” he told an audience at the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) here. “The United States is a Pacific power whose interests are inextricably linked with Asia’s economic, security, and political order. America’s success in the 21st century is tied to the success of Asia.”

Obama’s trip, which will also take him to Thailand, caps what seemed like an almost-constant series of visits by top U.S. officials to Asia over the past several months. It includes a joint tour this past week by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Pentagon chief Leon Panetta to Thailand and Australia, which has agreed to host up to 2,500 U.S. Marines at one of its bases in the northern part of the country closest to the South China Sea and the strategic Straits of Malacca.

Clinton, who has been intensively involved with the still-uncertain reform process driven by the unlikely couple of the president, Gen. Thein Sein (ret.), and long-time dissident, Nobel Peace Laureate, and, most recently, elected member of parliament, Aung San Suu Kyi, in Myanmar for more than a year, will join Obama when he arrives in the region.

According to the ‘Cable’ blog on foreignpolicy.com, Suu Kyi, who met the president at the White House two months ago, initially opposed Obama’s visit as premature, particularly in light of the government’s failure so far to release as many as 200 political prisoners who remain behind bars, the ongoing violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Rakhine State, and the failure to reach a ceasefire with the long-running Kachin ethnic insurgency.

The transition in Myanmar – and the fact that Obama’s visit there will constitute a historic first – is gaining the most attention here, with some human rights groups and independent analysts arguing that Washington’s strong embrace of the process – notably his decision last July to lift the ban on U.S. investment in the country, including its controversial state oil and gas company – has been too hasty.

At a rally outside the White House Thursday, Amnesty International called for Obama to stress human-rights concerns during his meetings in the Yangon with Myanmar’s leaders, who will include Thein Sein and Suu Kyi.

Demonstrators said Obama, who will also be speaking to students and civil society groups at Yangon’s university, should challenge U.S. corporations to “put human rights before profits” as they invest in Myanmar’s plentiful energy and mineral resources and seek to exploit a largely untapped market of nearly 50 million people.

Rights activists also stressed that Obama should take up human rights issues with his other two hosts on this trip, particularly Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose government has long been accused of suppressing opposition parties and popular movements against corruption, and impunity for its security forces, and even Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

In a release issued Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed concerns about a lack of accountability for abuses by Thai security forces, particularly in connection with counter-insurgency efforts against Muslim separatists in the south and about the increasing use of prosecutions against individuals, including activists, journalists, and bloggers, critical of the monarchy or the government.

“President Obama doesn’t need to tread lightly in discussing Thailand’s rights record,” said Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director.

In his speech Thursday, Donilon insisted that Obama will deliver a consistent message on human rights and democratic reform to all of his hosts. But he singled out Myanmar – which Washington officially refers to as Burma – for special attention.

While re-affirming the progress that has already been made, Donilon said, Obama will also insist on the release of all remaining political prisoners, an end to ethnic conflicts, and access by relief workers and human rights observers to conflict areas in the country.

But most of Donilon’s remarks were devoted to defending and elaborating on the administration’s “re-balancing” toward Asia and the Pacific, insisting at one point that Washington’s alliances in the region “are as strong as, or stronger than, they have ever been”.

Washington’s “long-term vision” of Asia, he said was to see “a region where the rise of new powers occurs peacefully, where the freedom to access the sea, air, space, and cyberspace empowers vibrant commerce; where multi-national forums help promote shared interests; where citizens increasingly have the ability to influence their governments and universal human rights are upheld.”

A key element of U.S. strategy, he said, was “pursuing a stable and constructive relationship with China” whose relationship, he conceded, has “elements of both co-operation and competition”.

Although he noted U.S. support for Beijing’s integration into regional and global institutions, including the EAS which he said should be the main regional political forum, he also stressed Washington’s determination to “move ahead with the high-standard Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),” an economic initiative that has thus far excluded China.

He called it “the most significant negotiation now underway in the global trading system”.

China has expressed growing concern about the speed with which Washington has been upgrading its military ties with Beijing’s neighbours, some of which – including Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea – have clashed increasingly openly with Beijing over conflicting territorial claims in the South and East China Seas.

Washington has also been conducting more joint exercises with Southeast Asian nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as Vietnam, the Philippines, and increasing its access to ports in Singapore and Vietnam, as well as Australia.

Even as Beijing as expanded military-to-military exchanges with Washington, some senior Chinese officials have accused the administration of pursuing a policy of “containment” and even of provoking tensions between Beijing and its neighbours.

Last month, Washington invited Myanmar for the first time to observe “Cobra Gold”, the world’s largest multilateral military exercise in what U.S. officials described as a milestone in improved relations.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.