Faced with starvation, hordes of jobless Zimbabweans in towns and cities here have turned to vending on streets pavements to put food on their tables. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

As unemployment deepens across this Southern African nation and as the country battles to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ahead of the December 2015 deadline, thousands of urban Zimbabweans here are facing starvation.

The MDGs are eight goals agreed to by all U.N. member states and all leading international development institutions to be achieved by the target date of 2015. These goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.

Zimbabwe has a total population of just over 13 million people, according to the 2012 National Census – of these, 67 percent now live in rural areas while 33 percent live in urban areas.

According to the Poverty, Income, Consumption and Expenditure Survey report for 2011-2012 from the Zimbabwe Statistical Agency (ZIMSTAT), 30.4 percent of rural people in Zimbabwe are “extremely poor” – and are also people facing starvation – compared with 5.6 percent in urban areas.“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe being able to afford three meals a day nowadays” – Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers

Social workers find the stay of urban dwellers in Zimbabwe’s cities justifiable, but ridden with hardships.

“Remaining in towns and cities for many here is better than living in the countryside as every slightest job opportunity often starts in urban areas in spite of the expensive living conditions in towns and cities,” independent social worker Tracey Ngirazi told IPS.

According to Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers, urban starvation is being caused by loss of jobs – the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates unemployment in Zimbabwe to be at 60 percent of the country’s total population.

“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe affording three meals a day nowadays,” Bohwasi told IPS.

True to Bohwasi’s words, for many Zimbabwean urban residents like unemployed 39-year-old qualified accountant Josphat Madyira from the Zimbabwean capital Harare, starvation has become order of the day.

“Food stores are filled to the brim with groceries, but most of us here are jobless and therefore have no money to consistently buy very basic foodstuffs, resulting in us having mostly one meal per day,” Madyira told IPS.

Madyira lost his job at a local shoe manufacturing company after it shut down operations owing to the country’s deepening liquidity crunch, thanks to a failing economy here that has rendered millions of people jobless.

Asked how city dwellers like him are surviving, Madyira said: “People who are jobless like me have resorted to vending on streets pavements, selling anything we can lay our hands on as we battle to put food on our tables.”

The donor community, which often extends food aid to impoverished rural households, has rarely done the same in towns and cities here despite hunger now taking its toll on the urban population, according to civil society activists.

“Whether in cities or remote areas, hunger in Zimbabwe is equally ravaging ordinary people and most of the donor community has for long directed food aid to the countryside, rarely paying attention to towns and cities, which are also now succumbing to famine,” Catherine Mukwapati, director of the Youth Dialogue Action Network civil society organisation, told IPS.

Apparently failing to combat hunger in line with the MDGs, over the years Zimbabwe has not made great strides in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger due to the economic decline that has persisted since 2000.

As a result, earlier this year, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with the Zimbabwean government, extended its monthly cash pay-out scheme to urban areas.

Under this scheme, which started at the peak of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis in 2008, families living on less than 1.25 dollars a day receive a monthly pay-out of between 10 and 20 dollars, depending on the number of family members.

Economists and development experts here say that achieving the MDGs without food on people’s tables, especially in cities whose inhabitants are fast falling prey to growing hunger, is going to be a nightmare, if not highly impossible for Zimbabwe.

“Be it in cities or rural areas, Zimbabwe still has a lot of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day, which is the global index measure of extreme poverty, a clear indication that as a country we are far from successfully combating hunger and poverty in line with the U.N. MDGs whose global deadline for world countries to achieve is next year,” independent development expert Obvious Sibanda told IPS.

According to the 2013 Human Development Index of the U.N. Development Programmer (UNDP), Zimbabwe is a low-income, food-deficit country, ranked 156 out of 187 countries globally and UNDP says that currently 72 percent of Zimbabweans live below the national poverty line.

Although hunger is now hammering people in both urban and rural areas, government sources also recognise that the pinch is being felt more by urban dwellers.

“The decline in formal employment, mostly in towns and cities, with many workers engaged in poorly remunerated informal jobs, has a direct bearing on both poverty and hunger, which is on a sharp rise in urban areas,” a top government economist, who declined to be named, admitted to IPS.

For the many hunger-stricken Madyiras in Zimbabwe’s towns and cities, meeting the MDGS by the end of next year matters little.

“Defeating starvation is far from me without decent and stable employment and whether or not my country fulfils the MDGs, it may be of no immediate result to many people like me,” Madyira told IPS.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Syrian mother and child near Ma'arat Al-Numan, rebel-held Syria, in autumn 2013. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Jul 19 2014 (IPS)

Gaunt, haggard Syrian children begging and selling gum have become a fixture in streets of the Lebanese capital; having fled the ongoing conflict, they continue to be stalked by its effects.

Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.

By the end of January, almost 40,000 Syrian children had been born as refugees, while the total number of minors who had fled abroad quadrupled to over 1.2 million between March 2013 and March 2014.Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.

Lack of proper healthcare, food and clean water has resulted in countless loss of life during the Syrian conflict, now well into its fourth year. These deaths are left out of the daily tallies of ‘war casualties’, even as stunted bodies and emaciated faces peer out of photos from areas under siege.

The case of the Yarmouk Palestinian camp on the outskirts of Damascus momentarily grabbed the international community’s attention earlier this year, when Amnesty International released a report detailing the deaths of nearly 200 people under a government siege. Many other areas have experienced and continue to suffer the same fate, out of the public spotlight.

A Palestinian-Syrian originally from Yarmouk who has escaped abroad told IPS that some of her family are still in Hajar Al-Aswad, an area near Damascus with a population of roughly 600,000 prior to the conflict. She said that those trapped in the area were suffering ‘’as badly if not worse than in Yarmouk’’ and had been subjected to equally brutal starvation tactics. The area has, however, failed to garner similar attention.

The city of Homs, one of the first to rise up against President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, was also kept under regime siege for three years until May of this year, when Syrian troops and foreign Hezbollah fighters took control.

With the Syria conflict well into its fourth year, the U.N. Security Council decided for the first time on July 14 to authorize cross-border aid without the Assad government’s approval via four border crossings in neighbouring states. The resolution established a monitoring mechanism for a 180-day period for loading aid convoys in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.

The first supplies will include water sanitation tablets and hygiene kits, essential to preventing the water-borne diseases responsible for diarrhoea – which, in turn, produces severe states of malnutrition.

Miram Azar, from UNICEF’s Beirut office, told IPS that  ‘’prior to the Syria crisis, malnutrition was not common in Lebanon or Syria, so UNICEF and other actors have had to educate public health providers on the detection, monitoring and treatment’’ even before beginning to deal with the issue itself.

However, it was already on the rise: ‘’malnutrition was a challenge to Syria even before the conflict’’, said a UNICEF report released this year. ‘’The number of stunted children – those too short for their age and whose brain may not properly develop – rose from 23 to 29 per cent between 2009 and 2011.’’

Malnutrition experienced in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life (from pregnancy to two years old) results in lifelong consequences, including greater susceptibility to illness, obesity, reduced cognitive abilities and lower development potential of the nation they live in.

Azar noted that ‘’malnutrition is a concern due to the deteriorating food security faced by refugees before they left Syria’’ as well as ‘’the increase in food prices during winter.’’

The Syrian economy has been crippled by the conflict and crop production has fallen drastically. Violence has destroyed farms, razed fields and displaced farmers.

The price of basic foodstuffs has become prohibitive in many areas. On a visit to rebel-held areas in the northern Idlib province autumn of 2013, residents told IPS that the cost of staples such as rice and bread had risen by more than ten times their cost prior to the conflict, and in other areas inflation was worse.

Jihad Yazigi , an expert on the Syrian economy, argued in a European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR) policy brief published earlier this year that the war economy, which ‘’both feeds directly off the violence and incentivises continued fighting’’, was becoming ever more entrenched.

Meanwhile, political prisoners who have been released as a result of amnesties tell stories of severe water and food deprivation within jails. Many were detained on the basis of peaceful activities, including exercising their right to freedom of expression and providing humanitarian aid, on the basis of a counterterrorism law adopted by the government in July 2012.

There are no accurate figures available for Syria’s prison population. However, the monitoring group, Violations Documentation Centre, reports that 40,853 people detained since the start of the uprising in March 2011 remain in jail.

Maher Esber, a former political prisoner who was in one of Syria’s most notorious jails between 2006 and 2011 and is now an activist living in the Lebanese capital, told IPS that it was normal for taps to be turned on for only 10 minutes per day for drinking and hygiene purposes in the detention facilities.

Much of the country’s water supply has also been damaged or destroyed over the past years, with knock-on effects on infectious diseases and malnutrition. A major pumping station in Aleppo was damaged on May 10, leaving roughly half what was previously Syria’s most populated city without running water. Relentless regime barrel bombing has made it impossible to fix the mains, and experts have warned of a potential humanitarian catastrophe for those still inside the city.

The U.N. decision earlier this month was made subsequent to refusal by the Syrian regime to comply with a February resolution demanding rapid, safe, and unhindered access, and the Syrian regime had warned that it considered non-authorised aid deliveries into rebel-held areas as an attack.

Attempts to genetically modify food staples, such as crops and cattle, to increase their nutritional value and overall performance have prompted world-wide criticism by environmental, nutritionists and agriculture experts, who say that protecting and fomenting biodiversity is a far better solution to hunger and malnutrition.

Two cases have received world-wide attention: one is a project to genetically modify bananas, the other is an international bull genome project.

In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it has allocated some 10 million dollars to finance an Australian research team at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), working on vitamin A-enriched bananas in Uganda, by genetically modifying the fruit.

On the other hand,  according to its project team, the “1000 bull genomes project” aims “to provide, for the bovine research community, a large database for imputation of genetic variants for genomic prediction and genome wide association studies in all cattle breeds.”“It makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries” – ‘Failure to Yield’, a study by the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists

In both cases, the genetic modification (GM) of bananas and of bovines is an instrument to allegedly increase the nutritional value and improve the overall quality of the food staples, be it the fruit itself, or, in the case of cattle, of meat and milk.

James Dale, professor at QUT, and leader of the GM banana project, claims that “good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food.”

In the ‘1000 bull genomes project’, the scientists involved (from Australia, France, Germany, and other countries) have sequenced – that is, established the order of – the whole genomes of hundreds of cows and bulls. “This sequencing includes data for 129 individuals from the global Holstein-Friesian population, 43 individuals from the Fleckvieh breed and 15 individuals from the Jersey breed,” write the scientists in an article published in Nature Genetics of July 13.

The reactions from environmental activists, nutritionists, and scientists could not be more critical. The banana case has even prompted a specific campaign launched in India – the “No to GMO Bananas Campaign”.

The campaign, launched by Navdanya, a non-governmental organisation founded by the international environmental icon Vandana Shiva, insists that “GMO bananas are … not a solution to” malnutrition and hunger.

The group argues that so-called bio-fortification of bananas – “the genetic manipulation of the fruit, to cut and paste a gene, seeking to make a new or lost micronutrient,” as genetic expert Bob Phelps has put it – is a waste of time and money, and constitutes a risk to biodiversity.

“Bananas are highly nutritional but have only 0.44 mg of iron per 100 grams of edible portion,” a Navdanya spokesperson said. “All the effort to increase iron content of bananas will fall short the (natural) iron content of indigenous biodiversity.”

The rationale supporting bio-fortication suggests that the genetic manipulation can multiply the iron content of bananas by six. This increase would lead to an iron content of 2.6 mg per 100 grams of edible fruit.

“That would be 3,000 percent less than iron content in turmeric, or lotus stem, 2,000 percent less than mango powder,” the spokesperson at Navdanya said. “The safe, biodiverse alternatives to GM bananas are multifold.”

Scientists have indeed demonstrated that the GM agriculture has so far failed to deliver higher yields than organic processes.

In a study carried out in 2009, the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrated that the yields of GM soybeans and corn have increased only marginally, if at all. The report, “Failure to Yield“, found out that increases in yields for both crops between 1995 and 2008 were largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.

“Failure to Yield” also analyses the potential role in increasing food production over the next few decades, and concludes that “it makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries.”

Additionally, the authors say, “recent studies have shown that organic and similar farming methods that minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers can more than double crop yields at little cost to poor farmers in such developing regions as Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Yet another ground for criticism is the fact that Bill Gates has repeated an often refuted legend about the risk of extinction of the banana variety Cavendish, grown all over the world for the North American market.

In his blog, Gates claims that “a blight has spread among plantations in Asia and Australia in recent years, badly damaging production of … Cavendish. This disease, a fungus, hasn’t spread to Latin America yet, but if it does, bananas could get a lot scarcer and more expensive in North America and elsewhere.”

The risk of extinction, however, is practically inexistent, as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), among other institutions, had already shown in 2003.

“What is happening is the inevitable consequence of growing one genotype on a large scale,” said Eric Kueneman, at the time head of FAO’s Crop and Grassland Service. That is, monoculture is the main cause of the fungus.

“The Cavendish banana is a “dessert type” banana that is cultivated mostly by the large-scale banana companies for international trade,” recalled Kueneman, today an independent consultant on agriculture.

On the other hand, as FAO numbers show, the Cavendish banana is important in world trade, but accounts for only 10 percent of bananas produced and consumed globally. Virtually all commercially important plantations grow this single genotype, and by so doing, make the fruit vulnerable to diseases. As FAO said in 2003, “fortunately, small-scale farmers around the world have maintained a broad genetic pool which can be used for future banana crop improvement.”

Actually, the most frequent reasons for malnutrition and starvation can be found in food access, itself a consequence of poverty, inequity and social injustice. Thus, as Bob Phelps, founder of Gene Ethics, says, “the challenge to feed everyone well is much more than adding one or two key nutrients to an impoverished diet dominated by a staple food or two.”

The same goes for the genome sequencing of bulls and cows, says Ottmar Distl, professor at the Institute for Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of Hannover. “Some years ago, we thought that it would impossible to obtain more than 1,000 kilograms of milk per year per cow,” Distl said. “Today, it is normal to milk 7,000 kilograms, and even as much as 10,000 kilograms per year.”

But such performance has a price – most such “optimised” cows calve only twice in their lives and die quite young.

And yet, the leading researchers of the “1000 bull genomes project” look at further optimising the cows’ and bulls’ performance by genetic manipulation of the cattle in order to, as they say in their report, meet the world-wide forecasted, rising demand for milk and meat.

Distl disagrees. “Whoever increases the milk output hasn’t yet done anything against worldwide malnutrition and hunger.” In addition, he warned, the constant optimisation of some races can lead to the extinction of other lines, thus affecting the populations depending precisely on those seldom older races.

It goes without saying that such an extinction would hardly serve the interests of the world’s consumers.

The refugee camp of Yarmouk represents one of the most severe examples of the humanitarian crisis in Syria, with foreign aid agencies unable to enter the opposition-controlled area that been effectively besieged since December 2012.

UNRWA food distribution Jan. 31, 2014 in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, Damascus. Credit: UNRWA

Responsibility for the plight of the primarily Palestinian Yarmouk population has been almost exclusively directed toward the Syrian government, whose forces control the periphery of the camp.

Approximately 18,000 residents are besieged within Yarmouk as fighting continues around and sporadically within in the area.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which has been operating in Syria since 1950, is presently the only significant organisation directly providing the civilians of Yarmouk with aid.

The biggest issue has been a lack of cooperation from the parties of the conflict to permit safe access to the camp.

While stressing that UNRWA appreciates that the Syrian government this week permitted some aid to enter the camp, Christopher Gunness, UNRWA spokesperson, told IPS that, “The large crowds of desperate people waiting to receive food parcels attest to the massive needs that have yet to be met.”

Between Jan. 17 and Jan. 21, UNRWA was only able to bring a few hundred aid parcels into the camp. On Thursday, Jan. 30, however, Gunness said that UNRWA had managed to enter Yarmouk and successfully distribute 1,026 food parcels. Aid distribution continued on Friday, and the Syrian government has expressed its intent to facilitate an accelerated distribution process."What is needed at this stage is not simply negotiating for weeks to get a few parcels in, what is needed is a paradigm shift." -- Nadim Houry

Nevertheless, there are still tens of thousands of people whom this aid did not reach. It is virtually a “drop in the ocean compared with need,” explained Gunness.

“As each food parcel contains food for an average family for only 10 days, it is imperative that continuous access to Yarmouk is authorised and supported, so that UNRWA can alleviate the deep and prolonged suffering caused by lack of food,” he said.

The people of Yarmouk face what Gunness describes as “unimaginable human suffering”. Children are experiencing various symptoms of malnutrition, such as rickets and anaemia, women have died in childbirth because of a lack of medial care, there is no clean water nor electricity, and aid deliveries have slowed to a trickle. At present, reports indicate that at least 49 people have died of malnutrition and government snipers have targeted people foraging for food in nearby areas.

Getting aid in is on a “convoy to convoy, day to day basis” says Gunness. Presently, Yarmouk can only be accessed via two main routes, both of which are strictly controlled through a series of tight checkpoints. In addition, fighting in close proximity to aid convoys has thwarted successive efforts to deliver humanitarian assistance. In one case, gunfire hit a bulldozer that was clearing debris for the convoy.

On Jan. 17, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Navi Pillay issued a report describing the humanitarian situation in Yarmouk. In this report, which OHCHR reaffirmed to IPS as still applicable on Jan. 28, Pillay described the situation as “desperate” and indicated that government forces and affiliated militias appear to be imposing “collective punishment on the civilians in Yarmouk”, adding that such actions which impede “humanitarian assistance to civilians in desperate need may amount to a war crime”, and is certainly against international law.

“Aid access is a priority, but what is needed at this stage is not simply negotiating for weeks to get a few parcels in, what is needed is a paradigm shift … that this is not something you negotiate on, this is a right under international law, Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) deputy director for its Middle East and North Africa division, told IPS. “What is needed right now is to establish modalities for repeated and efficient humanitarian aid.”

Looking forward, talks between the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition have the potential to open Yarmouk to more comprehensive incoming aid and the exit of civilians. Though a deal has not been reached at the Geneva II talks, both sides have discussed relief for besieged areas, notably the Old City of Homs.

The head international mediator for the U.N., Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, has optimistically called these discussions a positive step forward, necessary for further agreement.

“We want the Geneva II talks to make the issue a priority and to demand that the regime end government sieges imposed on opposition held towns. Humanitarian organisations must have unfettered access to these areas,” Geoffrey Mock, Syria country specialist for Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), told IPS.

“Humanitarian access has really been quite limited,” Houry said. “[HRW workers] have been able to get in [the country], but not the unrestricted access we had asked for.”

This kind of restriction has also been experienced by AIUSA, which has only been able to support the Syrian civilians through their presence in neighbouring countries.

The Syrian mission to the United Nations did not respond to an IPS request for comment on the humanitarian and human rights situation in Yarmouk, as well as the inability for humanitarian groups to enter the country.

A resident in the Palestinian Yarmouk camp in Damascus prepares to slaughter a dog to feed his family as food supplies run out under siege. Credit: Mutawalli Abou Nasser/IPS.

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
DAMASCUS, Oct 25 2013 (IPS)

Acute food shortages have reached desperate levels in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. Leading religious figures in the camps have issued a fatwa permitting the killing and consumption of cats, dogs, mice, rats and donkeys.

“We have been under siege for three months. There is nothing left to eat. This is what has become of us,” said a resident of Yarmouk as he prepared to kill a dog for his family following the fatwa (religious ruling).

Residents are struggling to keep children from dying.“We have been under siege for three months. There is nothing left to eat. This is what has become of us."

Jana Ahmad Hassan is less than three months old. She is severely malnourished and faces starvation. She was born in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Yarmouk. For more than three months the camp has been under siege from the Syrian armed forces. In the face of scarcities this has brought, Jana’s life now hangs in the balance.

“For god’s sake my son, I have a starving baby girl in the camp,” her mother pleaded with one of the soldiers at a checkpoint. “I need to get some milk for her and food for me or she will die.”

Her pleas were violently rebuked. “You think you are a mother? If you understood anything, you wouldn’t have gone out of the camp and left her at home,” the soldier said. She was sent empty-handed back into the camp.

With Jana’s mother failing to produce milk, her father has searched tirelessly for formula for the child but he has repeatedly been told that there isn’t a single box to be had in the south of Syria. Many rebel-held areas such as Yarmouk are suffering from acute shortages of food under the siege.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) aims to bring food assistance to up to 6.5 million Syrians between now and the end of the year. The challenges in doing so are monumental.

The rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Yarmouk and some of the other Palestinian camps in the south, such as Sabina and Sayeda Zeinab, has resulted in a severe breakdown in relations between the residents of the camps and the bodies traditionally charged with their welfare – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

In mid-July residents of all three camps addressed a letter to the PLO and UNRWA requesting they exert all their efforts to have the siege lifted. They also said that if UNRWA could not fulfill its responsibility, it should transfer the refugee camps file to the United Nations General Assembly.

The residents asked for the International Red Cross to be given access to Palestinian refugees. They warned of an impending state of famine.

Months later no meaningful changes have come. The areas under siege in the south continue to expand, engulfing more than half a million civilians in the southern region, including tens of thousands in the Yarmouk Camp.

“Not so long ago people were allowed to bring in a bit of food. Now they have closed the refugee camp with checkpoints and there is a total siege,” Prof. Abu Salma, an official from the Charity Commission for the Relief of the Palestinian People, told IPS.

Since early August there have been a number of demonstrations outside UNRWA buildings, where the organisation’s flag has been burnt. The feelings of discontent among camp residents have been exacerbated by perceptions of corruption and neglect among UNRWA staff.

“We tried as employees to strike against the practices of the director of UNRWA, so he sent us letters stating that all who strike will be fired,” said a senior employee at the agency, speaking on condition of anonymity. Due to some recent revelations about the practices at UNRWA, a director has been arrested and accused of corruption.

The Charity Commission for the Relief of the Palestinian People has succeeded in providing at least some humanitarian relief to the Palestinian camps. But of late it has come under attack from the Syrian armed forces. Protestations that the organisation is politically unaffiliated and purely humanitarian have not spared it the government’s crackdown.

“They have started arresting our cadres, and arrested the general coordinator of the commission, Ali Shihabi. The situation is worse than bad in the camps, it has actually become a matter of collective murder,” Prof. Abu Salma told IPS.