By Roberto Azevêdo
NAIROBI, Dec 23 2015 (IPS)

World Trade Organization (WTO) members concluded the Tenth Ministerial Conference in Nairobi on 19 December by securing an historic agreement on a series of trade initiatives. The “Nairobi Package” pays fitting tribute to the Conference host, Kenya, by delivering commitments that will benefit in particular the organization’s poorest members.

Roberto Azevêdo

The elimination of agricultural export subsidies is particularly significant.

WTO members, ¬especially developing countries,¬ have consistently demanded action on this issue due to the enormous distorting potential of these subsidies for domestic production and trade. In fact, this task has been outstanding since export subsidies were banned for industrial goods more than 50 years ago.

WTO members’ decision tackles the issue once and for all. It removes the distortions that these subsidies cause in agriculture markets, thereby helping to level the playing field for the benefit of farmers and exporters in developing and least-developed countries.

This decision will also help to limit similar distorting effects associated with export credits and state trading enterprises.

And it will provide a better framework for international food aid ¬ maintaining this essential lifeline, while ensuring that it doesn’t displace domestic producers.

There are also important steps to improve food security, through decisions on public stockholding and towards a special safeguard mechanism, as well as a package of specific decisions for Least Developing Countries (LDCs).

This contains measures to enhance preferential rules of origin for LDCs and preferential treatment for LDC services providers.

And it contains a number of steps on cotton, such as eliminating export subsidies, and providing duty-free-quota-free market access for a range of LDC cotton products immediately.

In addition, we have approved the WTO membership of Liberia and Afghanistan, and we now have 164 member countries.
And I think we are all committed to supporting these two LDCs to boost their growth and development.

We also saw continued commitment to help build the trading capacity of LDCs through the excellent support shown at the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) pledging conference.

And, finally, a large group of members agreed on the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Again, this is an historic breakthrough. It will eliminate tariffs on 10 per cent of global trade ¬ making it our first major tariff cutting deal since 1996.

While we celebrate these outcomes, we have to be clear-sighted about the situation we are in today.

Success was achieved here despite members’ persistent and fundamental divisions on our negotiating agenda – ¬ not because those divisions have been solved.

We have to face up to this problem.

The Ministerial Declaration acknowledges the differing opinions. And it instructs us to find ways to advance negotiations in Geneva.

Members must decide, the world must decide, about the future of this organization.

The world must decide what path this organization should take.

Inaction would itself be a decision. And I believe the price of inaction is too high.

It would harm the prospects of all those who rely on trade today ¬ and it would disadvantage all those who would benefit from a reformed, modernized global trading system in the future ¬ particularly in the poorest countries.

So we have a very serious task ahead of us in 2016.

We came to Nairobi determined to deliver for all those we represent ¬ and particularly for the one billion citizens of Africa.

At the outset, I warned that we were not looking at a perfect outcome. And what we have delivered is not perfect. There are still so many vital issues which we must tackle.

But we have delivered a huge amount. The decisions taken in Nairobi this week will help to improve the lives and prospects of many people ¬ around the world and in Africa.

When we left Geneva, the international media had already written their headlines:

-‘WTO talks break down’

-‘Another failure at the WTO’

That’s exactly how it was in the Ninth Ministerial Conference in Bali two years ago. And we saw it again this year.

Well, we’re getting used to proving those catastrophic headlines wrong.

In the past, all too often, WTO negotiations had a habit of ending in failure.

But, despite adversity ¬ despite real challenges ¬ we are creating a new habit at the WTO: success.

(End)

Excerpt:

Governments continue to subsidise exploration for fossil fuels despite pledges to support the transition to clean energy. Credit: Flickr/Leszek Kozlowski

By Shelagh Whitley
LONDON, Nov 11 2014 (IPS)

Just a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave its starkest warning yet that the vast majority of existing oil, gas and coal reserves need to be kept in the ground, a new report reveals that governments are flagrantly ignoring these warnings and continuing to subsidise exploration for fossil fuels.

The report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Oil Change International (OCI) shows that G20 governments are propping up fossil fuel exploration to the tune of 88 billion dollars every year through national subsidies, investment by state owned enterprise and public finance.

Shelagh Whitley, Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

And this is only a small part of total government support to producing and consuming fossil fuels, which is estimated at 775 billion dollars a year.

The G20 continues to provide these subsidies – mostly hidden from public view – in spite of repeated pledges to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, address climate change, and support the transition to clean energy.

The subsidies provided to exploration by the G20 alone are almost equivalent to total global support for clean energy (101 billion dollars), tilting the playing field towards oil, gas and coal.

The report also shows that G20 governments spend more than double what the top 20 private companies are spending to look for new oil, gas and coal reserves. This suggests that companies depend on public support for their exploration activities.“Fossil fuel exploration subsidies are fuelling dangerous climate change; this support is increasingly uneconomic; and oil, gas and coal will not address the energy needs of the poorest and most vulnerable”

As finding fossil fuels gets more risky, expensive and energy intensive, and the prices of oil, gas and coal continue to fall, companies are only likely to become more dependent on tax payers’ money to continue exploration.  This was also demonstrated by the recent request by the United Kingdom’s oil and gas industry for further tax breaks to address rising operating costs in the North Sea.

Some will claim that although these subsidies are uneconomic, exceptions can be made. After all, the arguments go, we need fossil fuels to provide energy access – and we can keep burning oil, gas and coal if we just use carbon capture and storage.

This simply isn’t true. Doing so will drive dangerous climate change, with the impacts falling first on the most vulnerable people in the poorest countries and regions.

First, when it comes to energy access, it is actually through clean energy that we will be able to provide heat and electricity to the poorest.

According to the International Energy Agency, most new investment needs to be in distributed energy, including in mini-grid and off-grid options that most often rely on renewable energy sources. If G20 governments redirected 49 billion dollars a year – just over half of what they currently provide in support to fossil fuel exploration – we could achieve universal energy access as soon as 2030.

Second, there has only been very limited application of carbon capture technology so far.

The first and only full-scale ‘commercial’ carbon capture and storage project, launched this year in Canada, relies on government subsidies and sells the captured carbon to the oil industry, which uses it to extract even more fossil fuels. It is not a sustainable model.

In short: fossil fuel exploration subsidies are fuelling dangerous climate change; this support is increasingly uneconomic; and oil, gas and coal will not address the energy needs of the poorest and most vulnerable.

The G20 countries have the resources to support a transition to clean energy. They can set an example for the world by shifting national subsidies, investment by state-owned enterprise and public finance away from fossil fuels and toward renewables and efficiency.

G20 leaders meeting in Brisbane this week must recognise this and make good on their existing pledges. Immediately phasing out fossil fuel exploration subsidies would be the right place to start.

(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. 

Excerpt:

The planet has lost an estimated 52 percent of its wildlife in the last four decades. Experts say that more funds are needed to scale-up conservation efforts. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

With governments, activists and scientists tearing their hair out over the world’s impending crisis in biodiversity, the outgoing president of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) delivered a simple message to participants at the 12^th Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP12) currently underway in the Republic of Korea’s northern Pyeongchang county: honour the promises you made last year.

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of the meeting, running from Oct. 6-12, Hem Pande, chairman of the Biodiversity Authority of India, which has held the presidency of the Conference of the Parties for a year, said finance continues to be a weak link in global efforts to safeguard the earth’s fragile ecosystems, with parties failing to deliver on their pledges.

“There is a huge requirement for financing resources. The budget for environmental conservation is ever shrinking. It’s time for the parties to walk the talk." -- Hem Pande, chairman of the Biodiversity Authority of India
Pande recalled that at the 11^th meeting of the parties (COP11), held in the South Indian city of Hyderabad in October 2012, states had promised to double funding for conservation by 2015.

However, after two years, this promise remains largely undelivered. Unless countries keep their word, it will be difficult to make significant progress in achieving the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, agreed upon at a meeting in Nagoya, Japan, in 2011, the official added.

“There is a huge requirement for financing resources. The budget for environmental conservation is ever shrinking. It’s time for the parties to walk the talk,” Pande told IPS.

Countless issues are calling out for an injection of monetary resources: from coastal clean-up projects and scientific research to public awareness campaigns and livelihood alternatives, conservation is a costly undertaking.

According to an estimate by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an annual expenditure of 200 billion dollars would be required to meet all 20 of the CBD goals for 2020, including eliminating harmful subsidies, halving the rate of ecosystem destruction, sustainably managing fisheries, increasing protected areas, restoring 15 percent of the world’s degraded ecosystems, and conserving known endangered species.

Thus the agreement to boost funding was one of the most celebrated outcomes of COP11. Using a baseline figure of the average annual national spending on biodiversity between 2006 and 2010, developed countries had said they would double their giving by 2015.

Although no numbers were put on the table, observers expected that a doubling of the resources then would mean around 10-12 billion dollars a year.

Now, as the convention does its mid-term review, it appears that figure is far from becoming a reality.

Paul Leadly, lead author of ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 4’ (GBO-4), a progress report on global efforts towards the Aichi Targets released here Monday, acknowledges that finance is “definitely insufficient.”

“The good news is there is a slight increase in the funding. The bad news is, it’s not anywhere near doubling the amount,” he told IPS.

According to him, given the current slowdown in the global economy, it is difficult to say how nations will fulfill their promises in another two years.

“It doesn’t help that a lot of countries are not [doing] very well financially. For example, in Brazil, there is economic stagnation,” Leadly added.

Others believe the global financial climate should not act as a deterrent to swift action on conservation and environmental protection.

Countries like India have allocated substantial amounts of state funding to the conservation effort, in the hopes of leading by example.

“Since 2012, we have been spending two billion rupees [about 32.5 million dollars] each year just on managing and maintaining our biodiversity hubs such as our national parks and sanctuaries […]. We have reported this to the CBD as well,” Pande claimed, adding that all 191 parties to the convention are bound to do the same.

Although the budget allocation to India’s ministry of environment and forests has seen a decline from 24 billion rupees (391 million dollars) in 2012-13 to 20.4 billion rupees (325 million dollars) this year, Pande says the combined total budgets of all ministries involved in the conservation effort – including departments that oversee land restoration, soil conservation, water, fishers and ecological development – represent a sum that is higher than previous years.

Still, India is just one country out of nearly 200. Given that international agreements on biodiversity are not legally binding, no country can be “forced to pay”, so holding parties accountable to their financial commitments is no easy task.

Pande also said that a large number of governments had not submitted their national reports to the CBD in time, resulting in inadequate data in the GBO-4 regarding finances and financial commitments.

Mobilising resources will be a major topic at the meeting currently underway in Korea. Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told IPS that an expected outcome of COP12 was a clear resource mobilisation strategy to tackle the dearth of funds.

Another factor to keep in mind is that state parties can increase allocations for biodiversity conservation efforts without necessarily making huge investments.

One of these “non-economic” ways of generating the necessary resources, according to Leadly, is to end subsidies.

“Governments are spending so much money on providing subsidies: in agriculture, fuels, fisheries, fertiliser. Ending those subsidies doesn’t cost money. In fact, [governments] could use that money for other things, like channeling it into conservation of biodiversity,” he asserted.

Leadly pointed to India’s on-going efforts to phase out subsidies of synthetic fertilisers as an example others could follow, adding, “If you look at China, their fertiliser is massively subsidised, which is not matching the needs of their crop plants. But political will is needed.”

Some states do appear to be prioritising the issue: Thailand this year added 150,000 dollars to its annual budget in order to jumpstart forest conservation; Guatemala has earmarked some 291 million dollars for biodiversity efforts, Namibia spends about 100 million dollars a year on similar endeavours, while Bangladesh and Nepal have allocated 360 and 86 million dollars respectively.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A group of developing countries brought a tectonic shift at the World Trade Organization on Friday by turning the tables against the industrialised countries, when they offered a positive trade agenda to expeditiously arrive at a permanent solution for food security and other development issues, before adopting the protocol of amendment of the contested Trade Facilitation Agreement.

Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and India inflicted a huge blow on the dominant actors in global trade by refusing to join consensus on the protocol required for full implementation of the TFA that is being pushed through the WTO with carrots and sticks.

“This is unimaginable, that New Delhi would decide the fate of decisions at the WTO, which has been a preserve of the United States and the European Union for the last 50 years,” said a trade envoy from a Western country.The mismatch, in terms of progress, between the TFA on one side, and lack of credible movement in agriculture and development on the other, especially in arriving at a permanent solution for public stockholding programmes, has come into the open at various meeting in Africa and elsewhere

Only seven months ago, the industrialised countries were triumphant at the WTO’s ninth ministerial meeting in Bali, Indonesia, after having succeeded in clinching the TFA. At one go, that agreement would harmonise customs procedures in the developing world on a par with the industrialised countries. It would offer enhanced market access for companies in the rich and leading developing countries such as China, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.

According to former WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, the TFA would cut tariffs in developing countries by 10 percent

The developing and poor countries, in return, were offered half-baked outcomes in the Bali package on agriculture and development, including an interim mechanism for public stockholding for food security with a promise of a permanent solution in four years, an agreement on general services in agriculture, transparency-related improvements in what are called tariff rate quota administration provisions, and most trade-distorting farm export subsidies and export credits.

The poorest countries, as part of the “development” dossier, secured a set of best endeavour promises concerning preferential rules of origin for exporting to industrialised countries, preferential treatment to services and services suppliers of least developed countries, duty-free and quota-free market access for least-developed countries, and a final monitoring mechanism for special and differential treatment flexibilities.

The TFA has witnessed perceptible progress since the Bali meeting, while other issues raised by developing and poor countries have taken a back seat at the WTO.  The mismatch, in terms of progress, between the TFA on one side, and lack of credible movement in agriculture and development on the other, especially in arriving at a permanent solution for public stockholding programmes, has come into the open at various meeting in Africa and elsewhere.

“Even seven months after Bali, we do not have the required confidence and trust that there will be constructive engagement on issues that impact the livelihood of a very significant part of the global population,” Indian Ambassador Anjali Prasadtold WTO’s General Council, which is the organisation’s highest decision-making body, during the ministerial meetings, on Friday.

Prasad said “the Trade Facilitation Agreement must be implemented on as part of a single undertaking including the permanent solution on food security.” Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela took the same stand as India that all issues in the Bali package have to be implemented on the same and equal footing.

“Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed in the Bali package,” India’s trade minister Nirmala Sitaraman told the Financial Times last Friday.

Against this backdrop, India finally pulled the plug at the General Council meeting by saying that “the adoption of the trade facilitation protocol be postponed until a permanent solution on public stockholding for food security is found.”

Without the protocol, it is difficult to undertake rapid liberalisation of customs procedures as set out in the TFA.  Effectively, the Indian stand has put paid to an early adoption of the trade facilitation protocol.

“Today, we are extremely discouraged that a small handful of Members in this organization [WTO] are ready to walk away from their commitments at Bali, to kill the Bali agreement, to kill the power of that good faith and goodwill we all shared, to flip the lights in this building back to dark,” Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Michael Punke lamented at the General Council meeting.

Trade envoys from Japan, the European Union and a group of 25 industrialised and developing countries slammed India for its move to oppose the TFA until all other issues, particularly, the permanent solution on food security, are resolved.

“But the TFA cannot be divorced from the other issues, including food security, which need to be converted into a binding agreements on a priority basis,” India’s former trade envoy Ambassador Jayant Dasgupta told IPS Saturday.

Dasgupta, who played a major role in providing the rationale for exempting public distribution programmes for food security from WTO disciplines, offered several reasons why food security must trump over the hard core mercantile trade agenda embodying the TFA.

First, he said, ” the debate on food security exposed the insensitivity of trade negotiators of some major industrialised countries (pushed by seven or eight transnational corporations that dominate global food trade) to address food security issues, arising out of static interpretations of trade rules framed many decades ago, when such problems were not conceived.”

Second, the objections raised by the United States, Canada and Australia in addressing food security  are unacceptable because they do not want to concede that there has been more than 650 percent inflation in India since 1986-88.

The WTO agreement on agriculture uses the references prices of 1986-88 for determining domestic support commitments. “Any economist worth his salt would be aghast at the idea that the calculation of subsidies should take place without reference to the current market prices but to market prices which existed twenty six to twenty eight years,” the former Indian trade official argued.

Third, the problem of public procurement and stockholding for food security purposes is resorted to by not only India, but China, Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Kenya and many other developing countries.

“Because of the way the agreement on agriculture provisions is worded, most of these developing countries could be held to be in violation of the WTO rules,” said Dasgupta, pointing out that “India is articulating not only its own problems but also those of other developing countries.”

And fourth, “by seeking to push India into a corner on this extremely sensitive issue for many developing countries, the United States and its handful of supporters are seriously jeopardising the credibility of the WTO in terms of latter’s ability to correct its mistakes and to be sensitive to the needs of a majority of its developing members.”

The “fragility” of the World Trade Organization’s ‘Bali package’ was brought into the open at the weekend meeting in Sydney, Australia, of trade ministers from the world’s 20 major economies (G20).

The Bali package is a trade agreement resulting from the 9th Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Bali, Indonesia, in December last year, and forms part of the Doha Development Round, which started in 2001.

The G20 group of countries includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.“… the Bali package is not just about trade facilitation and it also includes other issues ... That was the premise on which the developing countries agreed to trade facilitation and it has to be self-balancing” – South African trade minister Rob Davies

During the Sydney meeting, India and South Africa challenged the industrialised countries present to come clean on implementation of the issues concerning the poor countries in agriculture and development, according to participants present at the two-day meeting.

Ahead of the G20 leaders meeting in Brisbane, Australia, in mid-November, Sydney hosted the trade ministerial meeting to discuss implementation of the Bali package, particularly the trade facilitation agreement (TFA). The TFA has been at the heart of the industrialised countries’ trade agenda since 1996.

More importantly, Australia, as host of the November meeting, has decided to prepare the ground for pursuing the new trade agenda based on global value chains in which trade facilitation and services related to finance, information, telecommunications, and logistics play a main role.

“I said the Bali package is not just about trade facilitation and it also includes other issues,” South Africa’s trade minister Rob Davies told IPS Monday. “That was the premise on which the developing countries agreed to trade facilitation and it has to be self-balancing.”

Davies said that “the issue is that while South Africa doesn’t need any assistance, many developing and poor countries have to make investments and implement new procedures [because of the TFA]. What was there in the [TF] agreement is a series of best endeavour provisions in terms of technical and financial support together with best endeavour undertakings in terms of issues pertaining to least developed countries in agriculture and so on.”

Over the last few months, several industrialised countries, including the United States, have said that they can address issues in the Bali package concerning the poor countries as part of the Doha Single Undertaking, which implies that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

The specific issues that concern the interests of the least-developed countries include elimination of cotton subsidies and unimpeded market access for cotton exported by the African countries, preferential rules of origin for the poorest countries to export industrial products to the rich countries, and preferential treatment to services and services suppliers of least developed countries, among others.

“Even if there is an early harvest there has to be an outcome on other issues in the Bali package,” the South African minister argued.

There is lot of concern at the G20 meeting that if the trade facilitation protocol is not implemented by the end of this month, the WTO would be undermined.

“What we said from South Africa is to commit on the delivery of the outcomes in the Bali package,” Davies told IPS. “And a number of developing countries present at the meeting agreed with our formulation that there has to be substantial delivery of the outcomes in the Bali package.”

At the Sydney meeting, the industrialised countries pushed hard for a common stand on the protocol for implementing the Trade Facilitation Agreement by July 31. The TF protocol is a prerequisite for implementing the trade facilitation agreement by the end of July 2015.

The United States also cautioned that if there is no outcome by the end of this month, the post-Bali package would face problems. “Talking about post-Bali agenda while failing to implement the TFA isn’t just putting the cart before the horse, it’s slaughtering the horse,” U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Michael Froman tweeted from Sydney.

The industrialised countries offered assurances that they would address the other issues in the Bali package, including public distribution programmes for food security, raised by developing countries. But they were not prepared to wait for any delay in the implementation of the TF agreement.

Over the last four months, the developing and poorest countries have realised that their issues in the Bali package are being given short shrift while all the energies are singularly focused on implementing the trade facilitation agreement.

The African countries are the first to point out the glaring mismatch between implementation of the TFA on the one hand and lack of any concerted effort to address other issues in the Bali package on the other. The African Union has suggested implementing the TFA on a provisional basis until all other issues in the Doha Development Agenda are implemented.

The industrialised countries mounted unprecedented pressure and issued dire threats to the African countries to back off from their stand on the provisional agreement. At the AU leaders meeting in Malibu, Equatorial Guinea, last month, African countries were forces to retract from their position on the provisional agreement.

However, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Uganda insisted on a clear linkage between the TFA and the Doha agenda.

India is fighting hard, along with other developing countries in the G33 coalition of developing countries on trade and economic issues, for a permanent solution to exempt public distribution programmes for food security from WTO rules in agriculture.

New Delhi has found out over the last six months that the industrialised countries are not only creating hurdles for finding a simple and effective solution for public distribution programmes but continue to raise extraneous issues that are well outside the purview of the mandate to arrive at an agreement on food security.

India announced on July 2 that it will not join consensus unless all issues concerning agriculture and development are addressed along with the TF protocol.

India’s new trade minister Nirmala Sitaraman, along with South Africa, made it clear in Sydney that they could only join consensus on the protocol once they have complete confidence that the remaining issues in the Bali package are fully addressed.

Against this backdrop, the G20 trade ministers on Saturday failed to bridge their differences arising from their colliding trade agendas.

The developing countries, particularly India, want firm commitment that there is a permanent solution on public distribution programmes for food security along with all other issues concerning development, an Indian official told IPS.

Framing rules at the World Trade Organization for maintaining public stockholding programmes for food security in developing countries is not an easy task, and for Ambassador Jayant Dasgupta, former Indian trade envoy to the WTO, “this is even more so when countries refuse to acknowledge the real problem and hide behind legal texts and interpretations in a slanted way to suit their interests.”

“The major problem is that the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) was negotiated in early 1990s and there are many issues which were not taken into account then,” says Ambassador Dasgupta, who played a prominent role in articulating the developing countries’ position on food security in the run-up to the WTO’s ninth ministerial meeting in Bali, Indonesia, last year.

“If the WTO has to carry on as an institution catering for international trade and its member states, especially the developing and least-developed countries, the rules have to be modified to ensure food security and livelihood security for hundreds of millions of poor farmers,” Ambassador Dasgupta told IPS Thursday.

Ironically, the rich countries – which continue to provide tens of billions of dollars for subsidies to their farmers – are insisting on inflexible disciplines for public stockholding programmes in the developing world.“Credible disciplines for food security are vital for the survival of poor farmers in the developing countries who cannot be left to the vagaries of market forces and extortion by middlemen” – Ambassador Jayant Dasgupta, former Indian trade envoy to the WTO

The United States, a major subsidiser of farm programmes in the world and charged for distorting global cotton trade by the WTO’s Appellate Body, has called for a thorough review of farm policies of  developing countries seeking a permanent solution for public stockholding programmes to address food security.

“Food security is an enormously complex topic affected by a number of policies, including trade distorting domestic support, export subsidies, export restrictions, and high tariffs,” says a United States proposal circulated at the WTO on July 14.

“These policies [in the developing countries],” continues the proposal, “can impede the food security of food insecure peoples throughout the world.” The United States insists that food security policies must be consistent with the rules framed in the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations that came into effect in 1995.

“Public stockholding is only one tool used to address food security, and disciplines regarding its application are already addressed in the Agreement on Agriculture,” the United States maintains.

The agriculture agreement of the trade body was largely based on the understandings reached between the two largest subsidisers – the European Union and the United States – which culminated in what is called the Blair House Agreement in 1992. The major subsidisers were provided a “peace clause” for ten years (1995-2005) from facing any challenges to their farm subsidy programmes at the WTO.

The AOA also includes complex rules regarding how its members, especially industrialised countries, must reduce their most-distorting farm subsidies.

In the face of increased legal challenges at the WTO and also demands raised for steep cuts in subsidies during the current Doha trade negotiations, several industrialised countries shifted their subsidies from what are called most trade-distorting “amber box” measures to “green box” payments which are exempted from disputes. Jacques Berthelot, a French civil society activist, says that the United States has placed some of its illegal subsidies into the green box.

When it comes to disciplines on food security, however, the United States says it is important to ensure that “[food security] programmes do not distort trade or adversely affect the food security of other members.”  The United States has suggested several “elements” for a Work Programme on food security, including the issue of public stockholding programmes, for arriving at a permanent solution. Washington wants a thorough review of how countries have implemented food security in developing countries.

The U.S. proposal, says a South American farm trade official, is aimed at “frustrating” the developing countries from arriving at a simple and effective solution that would enable them to continue their public stockholding programmes without many hurdles. “The United States is interested in preserving the Uruguay Round rules but not address the issues raised by the developing countries in the Doha Round of trade negotiations that seek to address concerns raised by developing countries,” the official adds.

The G-33 group – with over 45 developing and least-developed countries – has brought the food security issue to the centre-stage at the WTO. Over the last two years, the G-33, led by Indonesia with China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Cuba and Peru among others, has called for updating the external reference price based on 1986-88 prices to ensure that they can continue with their public stockholding programmes under what is called de minimis support for developing countries.

Following the G-33’s insistence on a solution for public stockholding programmes for food security, which became a make-or-break issue at the WTO’s Bali ministerial meeting, trade ministers had agreed on a decision “with the aim of making recommendations for a permanent solution.” The ministers directed their negotiators to arrive at a solution in four years.

Over the last six months, there has been little progress in addressing the core issues in the Bali package raised by developing countries, including food security. “We are deeply concerned that the Ministerial Decision on Public Stockholding for Food Security Purposes is getting side-lined,“ India told members at the WTO on July 2.

“In this and other areas, instead of engaging in meaningful discussion, certain members have been attempting to divert attention to the policies and programmes of selected developing country members,” says New Delhi, emphasising that “the issues raised are in no way relevant to the core mandate that we have been provided in the Bali Decisions.”

At a time when the industrialised countries want rapid implementation of the complex agreement on trade facilitation, their continued stonewalling tactics on the issues raised by developing countries has created serious doubts whether food security issue will be addressed in a meaningful manner at all.

“Credible disciplines for food security are vital for the survival of poor farmers in the developing countries who cannot be left to the vagaries of market forces and extortion by middlemen,” says Ambassador Dasgupta. “The delay in addressing food security will pose problems for millions of people below poverty who are dependent on public distribution programmes.”

Civil society activists from five Arab countries are urging the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ease pressure on their governments to reduce food and fuel subsidies until stronger social-protection schemes and other basic reforms are implemented.

In a new report, the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) and the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR) argue that social safety nets in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen are inadequate – or, in some cases, too corrupt — to compensate for the loss of critical subsidies on which the poor and even the middle class depend."The pressure should be on the global community that is pushing these austerity measures without considering the actual context or impact on low-income people." -- Leila Hilal

Indeed, in the absence of stronger safety nets, even the gradual removal of subsidies for key commodities may contribute to continuing unrest across the region as the three-year-old “Arab Awakening” plays out, according to the 20-page report.

“In the near term, the unwinding of subsidies cannot serve as the panacea for the serious budgetary and fiscal difficulties facing most Arab states,” according to the report, which was released here Thursday by the Middle East Task Force of the New America Foundation (NAF), a non-partisan think tank.

“By continuing to press Arab governments to remove subsidies, the IMF has inadequately responded to the sweeping social and political changes stemming from the 2011 uprisings and subsequent period of unrest,” it said.

The report also called on the IMF to urge national governments to take other measures, notably instituting progressive tax systems and cutting the military budget, in order to increase revenues and cut spending. Governments must also be encouraged to consult more with civil-society organisation (CSOs), labour unions, and local authorities regarding economic-reform programmes, according to the report.

Jo Marie Griesgraber, who directs New Rules for Global Finance Coalition, welcomed the report, saying it was the latest indication of growing interest by grassroots groups both in the Arab world and in other countries in transition, such as Ukraine and Burma, in the IMF and of their understanding that national economic problems need to be addressed at the global level.

At the same time, she noted that the authors may be overstating the leverage the IMF enjoys over national governments with which it is required under its charter to negotiate agreements.

Bakeries struggled to produce bread in the face of Egypt’s 2011 wheat shortage. Credit: Emad Mekay/IPS

“I’m sure, if given a choice, the IMF would prefer that reducing subsidies would not be the first policy option they would want to implement to reduce deficits,” she told IPS. “It’s a government policy, and the government is going to agree to cut subsidies to the poor before it agrees to cut military expenditures.”

“The IMF can’t do everything; you need the World Bank; you need regional banks; you need an international court to throw corrupt officials in jail; you need a national political commitment for people to pay taxes,” she said. “The IMF is too limited in what it alone can do, although it serves as a convenient scapegoat for governments.”

Leila Hilal, NAF’s Middle East task force director, agreed that states “are engaging the IMF bilaterally without consulting the affected populations.”

With the recent uprisings, she told IPS in an interview from Jordan, “people feel that their voices are more valuable, that they have more agency, and that there’s much more at stake in terms of policy, and they want to be heard.

“So the idea is that the pressure should be on the global community that is pushing these austerity measures without considering the actual context or impact on low-income people,” she said.

While the mass demonstrations, violence, and political upheavals across the Arab world continue to capture the headlines, relatively little attention has been paid to the underlying economic problems that many analysts believe lie at the root of the continuing regional turbulence.

The Washington-based IMF, which is dominated by the wealthy Western nations, has long been involved in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, particularly in the five low- and middle-income countries that are the subject of the report.

The lender of last resort for failing economies, it provides short-term loans that are subject to recipient governments’ compliance with conditions designed to reduce, if not eliminate their fiscal deficits.

Over much of its history, it acquired a controversial reputation for pushing severe austerity on governments as part of “structural adjustment” programmes which hit the poor and most vulnerable sectors of society the hardest, often as a result of cuts to food and fuel subsidies, as well as social services, including health and education.

The IMF said it was unable to comment before deadline.

Cuts in subsidies have been particularly controversial because of their immediate impact on the population. In 1977, for example, a cut in bread subsidies in Egypt provoked widespread unrest, as did Jordan’s attempts cut subsidies in 1989 and again in 1996. When the IMF sent a mission to Egypt in April last year, it was greeted with protests by civil-society groups, labour unions, and political parties anticipating that the agency would demand similar cuts as a condition for much-needed loans.

In much of the region, food and fuel subsidies make up a large percentage of government spending; in 2012, for example, they accounted for 10 percent of the Egyptian budget.

As the report itself notes, the Fund – as well as its development sister agency, the World Bank — has become increasingly sensitive to these criticisms and sought to persuade governments with which it negotiates the loan conditions to mitigate the impact on the poor by reducing subsidies more gradually and, with the Bank’s help,  strengthening social-safety nets for the most vulnerable.

But the report, which was based on interviews with more than a dozen prominent civil-society activists from the five countries, as well as analyses of IMF staff reports and other IMF documents, argues that these efforts are sometimes based on faulty assumptions.

“Theoretically, the IMF proposes the expansion of social safety nets as a way to offset the negative impact of subsidy removal on the poor,” it said. “In practice, however, social protection schemes are underdeveloped and often nonexistent in Arab countries, and are thus incapable of cushioning the poor against rising prices. In many instances, corruption and the absence of transparency mechanisms further complicate the task of distribution social welfare benefits.”

“Subsidy reform should only occur upon the establishment of sustainable and comprehensive social protection schemes, and can only proceed with broad support from a variety of stakeholders,” according to the report.

“Our analysis highlights the need for the IMF and the G8 countries to adapt their advice to the changing political and socio-economic conditions in the Arab region,” said NAF’s Abdulla Zaid, one of four the report’s co-authors. “The Fund’s one-size-fits-all advice prioritising fiscal austerity measures over social and economic rights fails to account for the harmful impact subsidy removal would have on low and middle-income individuals, and thus, stability.”

A Caribbean Airlines Airbus A340-300 takes off from London Heathrow Airport, England. The airline has come under fire from other regional carriers for its fuel subsidies. Credit: Adrian Pingstone/public domain

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

Four decades after they signed the treaty establishing the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), government leaders are gathering in Trinidad and Tobago, the birthplace of the integration process, as they seek to give greater meaning to the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) that encourages the free movement of nationals across the 15-member grouping.

“There is no doubt that efficient transportation within the region, especially in the context of fulfilling the dream of unfettered movement of people and goods within the CARICOM Single Market, and facilitating the growth of tourism that is so germane to the development of the Caribbean, is of critical importance,” the Guyana-based CARICOM Secretariat said in a statement."Everywhere in the world you have airline alliances...in our region we don’t have it. These things defy logic." -- CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Rocque

The special session of the 34th summit slated for Jul. 3-6 in Trinidad and Tobago will be largely devoted to transportation, particularly what it called “the vagaries of air and sea transport and border control policies”.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is now assisting in the development of a comprehensive regional transportation plan.

However, for as long as the regional integration grouping has been around, Caribbean governments have found it extremely difficult to establish a single airline to facilitate trade and the movement of people, even though there are at least six national airlines traversing the region.

“We are trying to find solutions and in my own personal view it defies logic why is it we have all these airlines, all of them struggling, and they can’t cooperate,” CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Rocque told IPS.

“There ought to be cooperation between the airlines. For whatever reasons, perhaps the business models, and there is a notion of airlines just like currency being a symbol of nationhood, which is a lingering thing from the past,” he added.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica, the owners of the island-hopping airline LIAT, have long been unhappy with oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago, which provides a subsidy to its own national airline, Caribbean Airlines (CAL).

While he insists that he does not want a public squabble with Port of Spain, St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, the chair of the LIAT shareholder governments, said he intends to raise the matter during the summit here with Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar, who will also assume the chair of the regional grouping for the next six months.

“I just want to say that I have received a confidential legal opinion concerning the fuel subsidy…so we can have an informed discussion on this. Not a fight, but to have an informed discussion on this question,” Gonsalves told IPS.

Gonsalves said LIAT paid an average of 127 dollars per barrel of jet fuel over the 2008-12 period, while CAL for the same period paid an average price of 53 dollars.

“That is on the fuel subsidy side. It is estimated by the management that during that five-year period we lost 78,000 passengers to CAL because of their subsidy, and the revenues which we would have lost as a result of that unfair competition would have been 10.2 million dollars,” he added.

Earlier this year, Trinidad and Tobago Finance Minister Larry Howai said CAL received a subsidy of 40 million dollars in 2012, a situation Gonsalves said is a violation of the CARICOM treaty and Common Air Services Agreement among member countries.

La Rocque told IPS that the summit will consider recommendations from a special Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED), comprising transport ministers from the region who met last month to discuss the issue.

“Everywhere in the world you have airline alliances…in our region we don’t have it. These things defy logic and I don’t think we are going to get a solution at the heads (regional governments) but at least a process for bringing it forward.

“One of the recommendations is that the shareholders of the respective airlines be encouraged to sit and have a discussion,” he said. “Rather than working at odds with each other, they ought to sit down and have a discussion and come up with a model. The bigger airlines are doing it, so why can’t we do it in our Caribbean?”

Transportation woes aside, the regional integration process also faces an uphill task to convince the Caribbean population of its relevance in a changing global environment.

“I simply say, just think about it – if there wasn’t a CARICOM. We do not have a perfect situation, but if we did not have a CARICOM for us to cooperate and do all the many things that we put in place to do. This year is 40 years since the Caribbean Examination Council has been around, it is the same heads of government that created CXC,” La Rocque said.

“We have had some successes. We tend to forget that because obviously there is an impatience given the pace of integration, one recognises that…CARICOM is here to stay.”

In an editorial critiquing CARICOM’s record, the Jamaica Observer newspaper noted that despite being the world’s second oldest integration movement after the European Union, the bloc has been unable to advance significant trading opportunities among the 15 countries.

“The facts show that intra-regional trade has grown in every trade bloc except CARICOM,” the paper said, asking the question “will CARICOM remain the bloc that the builders reject?”

La Rocque disagrees. He said the movement has always “recognised that because of the nature of our economies that trade would be limited and it could never be as high as what obtains in the European Union”.

He told IPS there are many factors for that, such as small economies, small productive bases and, in most cases, economies that are similar “in terms of what we produce”. Despite that, intra-regional trade has grown by 16 percent, “but there is still room to grow and now we have to focus on what are these elements that would allow it to grow,” he said.

The agenda for the four-day summit will for the first time pay special attention to the differently-abled community in the region, as well as discuss possible reparations for slavery.

Regional leaders will also hold talks with the newly elected President of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, as well as President of the Dominican Republic Danilo Medina and President of Equatorial Guinea Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

In Egypt, some families are turning to bio-gas digesters that convert organic waste into methane for fuel. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

The bio-gas digester on the roof of Hussein Farag’s apartment in one of Cairo’s poorest districts provides a daily supply of cooking gas produced from the kitchen waste his family would otherwise discard in plastic bags or empty into the clogged sewer below his building.

Constructed of two large plastic tubs and mostly recycled materials, the zero-emissions bio-gas unit saves his family about LE 20 (three U.S. dollars) a month in gas bills. And in the ramshackle Darb El-Ahmar district where Farag lives, that works out to nearly a day’s wage.

Farag’s bio-gas digester converts organic waste fed into its 1,000-litre plastic tank into methane gas that can be used to heat water or cook food. Ordinary kitchen waste – everything from food scraps, to stale tea and mouldy bread – is soaked overnight in water to soften, then poured into the tank’s bacteria-rich soup to decompose. A pipe carries the methane gas produced to the family’s kitchen stove.

“I just empty my kitchen waste into it, but anything organic will work as feedstock,” Farag told IPS.

The digester produces about two hours of gas a day in the summer, and slightly less in the cooler winter months, according to Farag. Every week he drains a few litres of dark effluent from the tank.

“I bottle the residue and sell it as organic fertiliser to garden shops,” he explains.

Farag says the unit, which he built for less than LE 1,000 in 2008 (180 U.S. dollars at the time), requires virtually no maintenance, as it has no mechanical parts.

“Egypt needs a system like this, because there is a lot more organic waste now that all the pigs are gone,” he says, referring to the nation-wide pig cull that the Egyptian government carried out in April 2009 in a knee-jerk reaction to the swine flu pandemic."Most families produce enough kitchen waste each day to produce enough gas to meet all their cooking and water needs."
--Hanna Fathy

Pigs were the linchpin of Cairo’s traditional waste management system, consuming up to a third of the 20 tonnes of daily waste produced by the city’s 18 million residents. Without them, the volume of “wet” waste has swollen, clogging sewers and landfills and piling high in city streets and empty lots.

The rotting heaps of organic rubbish attract flies and rats, creating vectors for disease.

Farag says initial support and funding for building bio-gas digesters came from Solar CITIES, a non-profit initiative to develop sustainable energy solutions for low-income families. The non-governmental organisation (NGO) helped build more than half a dozen bio-gas units in Cairo, as well as rudimentary solar water heaters constructed from local recycled materials, before its funding dried up.

In Manshiyet Nasr, another low-income Cairo district, Solar CITIES coordinator Hanna Fathy constructed his own bio-gas digester in 2009. He has since travelled extensively instructing residents of poor and off-grid communities on how to achieve energy independence through home bio-gas production.

“Most families produce enough kitchen waste each day to produce enough gas to meet all their cooking and water needs,” Fathy says.

Fathy, currently working on environmental projects outside Egypt, says the government’s energy subsidies discourage Egyptians from investing in sustainable energy solutions. Recovering the initial capital cost of a bio-gas digester can take up to ten years but would take just one year if subsidies were dropped.

“The government doesn’t provide incentives for families to switch to clean energy, so they stick with the cheapest short-term solution, which is to buy gas cylinders,” Fathy told IPS in an earlier interview.

More than 12 million Egyptian households rely on butane cylinders, which retail for LE 8 (1.15 dollars). The tanks last about two weeks and are not without problems.

Apart from the enormous burden the heavily subsidised gas cylinders put on the economy, shortages of imported butane have resulted in long queues at distribution outlets. Disputes over cylinders have even led to fatalities.

The poorly maintained gas cylinders also have an alarming tendency to explode, resulting in catastrophic kitchen fires and injuries.

Electrician Mohamed Rageb, whose wife was severely burned when the gas cylinder she was cooking with exploded in 2010, says the accident pushed him to consider switching to a bio-gas digester. Using a design he found on the Internet he plans to build a compact unit on his balcony.

“I think they are safer, and save time [spent queuing for gas cylinders],” he says.

While instalment plans are available for purchasing energy-consuming kitchen appliances and air conditioners, no credit facilities exist for families switching to green energy bio-gas. Rageb must borrow the full amount to buy the parts for his homemade digester. It could take years to recover the costs, but he is confident his gas bill savings will grow as Egypt’s cash-strapped government phases out energy subsidies.

“Without subsidies, a gas cylinder would cost about LE 100 (14 dollars) to fill,” he points out.

Rageb maintains that if the government would subsidise clean energy technologies instead of unsustainable conventional energy use, price-conscious low-income Egyptians would be the first to make the switch.

Protestors at a Jan. 17 rally sing songs against Malawi’s president, Joyce Banda. Credit: Mabvuto Banda/IPS

By Mabvuto Banda
LILONGWE, Jan 22 2013 (IPS)

She has taken a personal pay cut, promised reforms, resumed aid flows from Western donors and put her predecessor’s private jet up for sale.

Malawi’s president Joyce Banda seems to be making all the right moves to win over the hearts and minds of this impoverished southern African nation’s roughly 14 million people.

With over 65 percent of the population living below the poverty line, 1.4 million children involved in child labour and 74 percent of the country scratching out a living on less than 1.25 dollars a day, Malawi is desperate for change, and Banda has been the face of it for nearly a year.

Riding on a groundswell of popular support, the president came into office in April 2012 after the sudden death of her mercurial predecessor, Bingu wa Mutharika; but that popularity is eroding fast as she implements painful austerity policies to fix a sputtering economy.

The aid-dependent country teetered under the late Mutharika, whose squabbles with international donors led to a freeze in major assistance packages amounting to about 500 million dollars.

The cut in aid, which has traditionally accounted for 40 percent of the country’s budget, coincided with a steady decline in tobacco sales, Malawi’s main export earner, which have gone down by more than 50 percent since 2010.

In fact, experts here say that the high-level visit early this month by IMF Chief Christine Lagarde may have done more harm than good for Banda’s waning popularity.

Already the president has capitulated to unpopular reforms demanded by the IMF and other Western donors on whom Malawi is heavily dependent, such as devaluing the currency by 49 percent, increasing petroleum prices three times in her presidency and cutting off subsidies by moving to an automatic fuel price adjustment mechanism.

These reforms have had devastating domino effects on the country’s poor, affecting people like Shadreck Kumwembe, a primary school teacher who earns less than a dollar a day.

“My real income has halved in the last few months because of the devaluation, and yet food prices have been going up — I can’t afford to pay for everything,” Kumwembe, who also disclosed that he has not received his salary from the government in the last three months, told IPS.

Commodity prices have soared and pushed inflation to 33.3 percent in December – far higher than the government’s forecast of around 18 percent for 2012.

The latest data from the Centre for Social Concern, a local research institution focusing on the cost of living in urban Malawi, showed that since Banda took over, a family of six now needs an average of 200 dollars per month to meet basic food demands – bad news in a country where the minimum monthly wage is about 20 dollars.

On Jan. 17, just a few days after Lagarde’s visit, thousands of Malawians took to the streets peacefully in all three major cities of the country for the first large-scale protests under Banda, against what they described as “the IMF’s wrong economic prescriptions”.

“I blame IMF policies for all these high prices and job losses we are experiencing. Lagarde’s insistence that Malawi continues on this path underlines how out of touch the IMF is with reality,” said James Chivunde, a civil servant who joined the protests last week.

“Late President Mutharika refused to listen to them (IMF) to devalue the kwacha (the local currency) because he knew exactly how that was going to impact us,” Lloyd Phiri, another protestor, told IPS.

According to John Kapito, head of the watchdog known as the Consumers Association of Malawi, Banda has “transferred power” to the IMF and the World Bank.

“Like many leaders of poor countries, the problem with Joyce Banda is that she doesn’t think on her own. She is listening to everything that the IMF and the World Bank are telling her. She (agreed) to devalue the kwacha, agreed to remove subsidies on fuel without considering the impact of these decisions on the poor,” said Kapito, who helped organise the latest demonstrations.

Meanwhile, the IMF is adamant that the only way out of the cycle of poverty is for Malawi to continue to abide by the Fund’s prescriptions.

“There have been huge efforts undertaken by the Malawian government and the Malawi population and it is really important to stay the course,” Lagarde said during a press conference held in the capital Lilongwe on Jan. 5.

She assured that the country is at a tipping point, that soon inflation will start dropping and prompt the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) to revisit the base lending rate.

“Investors will return and we are confident that growth will resume,” she added.

Some local economic experts are inclined to agree with these sentiments.

“There will be no quick fixes, but any U-turn from the current course will be disastrous,” said Ben Kalua, professor of economics at Chancellor College, part of the University of Malawi.

“What is needed is a credible and consistent policy aimed at making economic growth more inclusive by ensuring the development and protection of social safety nets and expanding access to financial services so that everybody, including the poor, has access to credit,” he said.

Executive director of the Malawi Economic Justice Network, Dalitso Kubalasa, also backed the IMF and blamed the late Mutharika for delaying implementation of economic reforms.

“We are now paying the cost of the previous administration’s (policies) but we have to stay the course to (solve) the economic problems,” Kubalasa told IPS.

While admitting that the government underestimated the impact of austerity policies on the masses, Finance Minister Ken Lipenga stressed that donor support is enabling the government to implement a fiscal budget that provides adequate resources for the delivery of social services and to increase resources allocated for cushioning the most vulnerable.

“We have introduced food for work programmes aimed at assisting the poorest in our communities to cope with the unintended effects of the reforms,” Lipenga told IPS.

But Banda’s waning popularity may affect successful implementation of the reforms as she prepares for an election next year. Her biggest test will come when the parliament convenes in February, when she will be forced to reckon with the fact that many members of her governing party are losing faith in her leadership.

(END)

A rum distillery in St. Lucia. Credit: Gary J. Wood/cc by 2.0

By Bert Wilkinson
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Caribbean governments have begun a quiet lobbying effort to convince Washington to rethink the subsidies it grants to the rum industry in U.S. territories, or face a formal complaint in the World Trade Organisation.

At the heart of Caribbean fears are two companies, UK-based Diageo Plc brands and U.S.-owned Cruzan Rums, which like many Caribbean distilleries, export millions of gallons of white and dark rums to the U.S. mainland each year.

Irwin LaRocque, chief of the regional trade bloc Cariforum, told IPS the U.S. subsidies “have the potential for damaging the market for our rum producers in the region, a market that we have been cultivating over the years, a market which they are seeking to upgrade by exporting brand rum rather than bulk rum.

“This is a matter of grave concern and it is agreed there needs to be some intervention of some sort to inform the United States of our concerns,” he says.

The problem, says the Barbados-based West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers Association (WIRSPA), is that the U.S. has granted millions in annual subsidy payments to the two producers to build new distilleries and other equipment in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

The subsidies allow them to export rum to the U.S. market at a rate so much cheaper than their neighbours in the English-speaking Caribbean that WIRSPA’s own producers find themselves unable to compete.

Rum and spirits production date back nearly 400 years to the European colonial era. Collectively, the sector is worth more than 500 million dollars to the Caribbean’s economy.

The Dominican Republic, Guyana, Barbados and Jamaica are among the key exporting nations. About 80,000 people benefit directly and indirectly from the sector.

The issue appears headed to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) unless the Barack Obama administration and the U.S. Trade Representative’s office are prepared to sit down to review the policy in a way that is mutually beneficial, industry players say.

Thus far, the row has stayed relatively low key. Officials at the Guyana-based Caribbean trade bloc secretariat said that it came up briefly at the hemispheric Summit of the Americas this year in Colombia, with President Obama present at the meeting table.

Washington-based Caribbean ambassadors have also floated the topic to various tiers of administrative officials in the past year.

By all indications, they have made little headway. WIRSPA, and producers in the Dominican Republic who are also affected, say the road is being cleared for a trip to the WTO in Geneva if all else fails.

“We find that it is extremely difficult to compete and it is a challenge at this point in time. We feel that this is an iniquitous and pernicious use of subsidies for multinational spirit companies and their rum production,” Frank Ward, the head of WIRSPA, told IPS.

In the event that the U.S. digs in its heels – as it has done with the now destroyed banana and internet gaming sectors – WIRSPA and Cariforum say they have already done their legal homework and anticipate a favourable ruling at the WTO.

“We have had so far three legal opinions of the legality at the WTO of these subsidies which are being given by U.S. territories and all of them stated that there is a case to be made against the subsidies,” Ward said.

“One of the opinions came from the advisory centre on WTO law which is a body set up to advise individual countries on issues related to WTO laws. So we have a clear case there. We now need the political will to take it forward and time is not on the side of the industry,” he added.

The clearest indication that talks are a possibility has come from U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson, who said the U.S. preferred dialogue to legal action.

Industry officials and diplomats say frustration is rising in Cariforum because of the mixed signals from various levels in Washington.

The grouping of regional diplomats in the U.S. capital had earlier this year written to the office of the U.S. trade representative, Ron Kirk.

In the letter, they outline their case and detail the subsidies they allege are “covering 100 percent of all costs to build a state of art production plant in St. Croix and then providing an operating subsidy that would approach or exceed 100% of the cost of production of all rum exported to the United States.

“The generous tax breaks and incentives” could entirely destroy Caribbean rum as most have known it, the letter warns.

Ironically, some of the regional distillers like Guyana sell bulk rum to their now British and U.S. trade nemeses for onward production to bottled rum. They now have to face the possibility of a decline in business at the expense of their buyers if the matter is not resolved in the short term.

“Several rum producers have lost long-term contracts to supply bulk rum,” noted a recent editorial in the Jamaica Observer. “This trend will continue because subsidised production capacity is larger than the existing market share of Caribbean rum exports. This excess capacity will first disrupt the U.S. market then inevitably affect all export markets.”

Artisanal fisheries are being hit by subsidised, foreign vessels. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

Calls are mounting for the world’s big fishing powers to stop subsidising international fleets that use destructive methods like bottom trawling in foreign coastal waters, drastically reducing the catch of local artisanal fishers who use nets and fishing lines.

Such subsidies total 27 billion dollars a year, with nearly two-thirds coming from China, Taiwan and Korea along with Europe, Japan and the United States, according to a University of British Columbia study.

Most go to building the ever-more-efficient ships that are required to catch ever-dwindling populations of fish around the world, with yet more subsidies going to offset their growing consumption of fuel as they venture ever farther and deeper to fill their holds.

The result, says Dr. Rashid Sumaila, lead author of the UBC study, is that taxpayers are funding the depletion of the world’s fish populations and the impoverishment of coastal communities abroad.

“A lot of the fish eaten in Europe, the United States and Japan comes from other countries, mostly poor ones,” because the developed countries long ago overexploited their own waters, he told IPS in a telephone interview.

“The more their fleets fish out an area, the harder it gets to keep fishing there and the more they ask for subsidies,” he added. “It’s crazy.”

A senior United Nations official agrees, charging last week that developed countries, which eat three times as much fish per capita as poor ones, are are depleting the oceans and depriving coastal fishermen in developing countries of their livelihood and coastal populations of food.

“Without rapid action” to stop destructive practices, “fisheries will no longer be able to play a critical role in securing the right to food of millions,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, said.

Calling for an end to the subsidies, he added, “Future generations will pay the price when the oceans run dry.”

The U.N. report, entitled “Fisheries and the Right to Food“, notes that international conventions ranging from the Law of Sea to the World Trade Organisation have long called for the ban of subsidies to fleets that fish unsustainably, as most today do.

Meanwhile, the money the industrial fleets pay developing countries to fish in their waters goes to often corrupt governments, while the impact is felt by poor coastal communities.

Not only are most industrialised ships uneconomical if they aren’t subsidised, they also provide far fewer jobs: 200 for every 1,000 tonnes of fish caught, versus 2,400 jobs for 1,000 tonnes caught with artisanal methods using small boats, according to another study cited in the U.N. report.

Globally, that translates to a half-million industrial fishermen catching 30 million tonnes of edible fish, discarding at sea another 15 million tonnes, and burning 37 million tonnes of fuel.

The artisanal fisheries also catch about 30 million tonnes of seafood. But they employ 12 million people, discard almost nothing, use a seventh of the fuel and receive a fifth of the subsidies. Also, the nutrition they provide plays a much bigger role in the health of their local populations than the more expensive fish sold in developed countries.

Indeed, nearly all of the fish the small-scale fishers catch is eaten, while the industrial ships, in addition to the 30 million tonnes of edible fish they take, also haul out another 35 million tonnes of everything from other fish to plankton for transformation into oils or fish meal, which are used for fertiliser and feed.

The result: many of the non-food fish that the edible fish depend on have disappeared, along with vast amounts of plankton, the base of the food chain.

While on average 95 percent of rice and 80 percent of wheat are consumed in the country in which they were grown, only 60 percent of the world’s fish is sold in the country in which it was caught, according to the report.

The rest is exported. The industrial fleets pay governments anywhere from two percent (Guinea Bissau) to six percent (the Pacific islands in whose waters half the world’s tuna is caught) for the right to fish in their waters. In comparison, governments receive 30 to 70 percent of the value of oil extracted from their land from the foreign oil companies that extract it.

Some countries have fought back. In May, Senegal’s 50,000 artisanal fishermen, angry that their catch was reduced by destructive European trawler fleets and backed by NGOs like Greenpeace, forced a new government to cancel fishing licenses to foreign fleets granted by the previous one.

Namibia, for its part, has largely banned foreign fleets from its rich waters since it became independent in 1990 and has developed its own industrial fishery.

The Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, have closed its tuna fishery to foreign industrial fleets in favour of small-scale pole-and-line vessels, which yield better-quality fish.

The U.N. report called on coastal governments to negotiate new agreements with foreign fishing fleets that would keep those away from the coasts so the sea bottoms can heal while small-scale fisheries recover.

“These resources must be turned away from over-exploitation and toward the benefit of local communities,” de Schutter said.

By Stephen Leahy and - -
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 10 2011 (IPS)

Countries have chained themselves to a fossil fuel train that is headed straight off a cliff, warns the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The signpost in Switzerland warns of glacier retreat. Credit: Ray Smith/IPS

Sounding very much like Greenpeace, the conservative IEA called for urgent action by governments to massively shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy and boost energy efficiency. Without a major shift in priorities in the next five years, there will be enough fossil fuel infrastructure in place to guarantee a two-degree C rise in temperatures, it warned.

“Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven.

“We cannot continue to rely on insecure and environmentally unsustainable uses of energy,” van der Hoeven said in a release.

“Delaying action is a false economy,” the World Energy Outlook report emphasises. Every dollar of investment in cleaner technology before 2020 avoids the need to spend an additional 4.30 dollars after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions, it said.

No climate scientist considers a two-degree C temperature increase “safe”. In fact, many experts, along with more than 100 countries, want overall global warming to be limited to less than 1.5 degrees C.

The burning of fossil fuels has already pushed the global average temperature 0.8 C higher, triggering a number of documented large- scale changes, including record numbers of extreme weather events, record melt of Arctic sea ice, spring arriving two to four weeks earlier, and much more.

The IEA’s urgent recommendations come on the heels of a U.S. Department of Energy announcement last week that global carbon emissions jumped six percent in 2010, the biggest increase ever. That puts the world on the road to a worst case scenario of six degrees C of global warming by 2100.

The IEA is anything but radical or unconventional. Created in 1974 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) after the 1973 oil crisis, its focus was providing reliable and scientific information on the global oil supply. The Paris-based IEA now provides information and research on all forms of energy. In 2007, it awoke to the role energy plays in the climate change crisis.

“Every year, the IEA moves closer and closer to our energy scenarios,” said Sven Teske, senior energy expert at Greenpeace International.

However, it still under-represents the role of energy efficiency and over-represents the role of nuclear and carbon capture and storage in meeting future energy needs, Teske told IPS.

“IEA has been driven by political agendas to keep a prominent role of nuclear power and CO2- capturing coal power plants in its scenarios, despite their obvious failure to deliver against false expectations,” he said.

The IEA World Energy Outlook is a projection of world energy demands from 2010 to 2035 and offers scenarios on how government and industry can meet those demands.

The first main scenario is a “New Policy Scenario” that assumes current government commitments to limit carbon emissions are met, combined with a 33-percent increase in global energy demand. Nearly all of that increase in energy will be from non-OECD countries.

The “New Policy” scenario is by no means a worst case scenario, but it still results in global temperature increase of 3.5 degrees C by 2100. Doing nothing brings us to a cataclysmic six degrees C, it acknowledges.

The other IEA scenario, called the “450 Scenario”, has the goal of keeping global temperature increases to a maximum of two degrees C. It calls for the same levels of renewable energy infrastructure as the Greenpeace basic “Energy [R]evolution” report projection, Teske told IPS.

The Greenpeace report offers a detailed blueprint for cutting carbon emissions while achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency.

“The IEA is still moving far too slow,” Teske said. It continues to underplay the role of solar, and the idea that carbon capture and storage (CCS) can adequately reduce emissions from coal is nonsense, he said.

Most CCS pilot projects have been shuttered due to high costs and it is almost impossible to pump carbon underground in Europe.

“It is illegal to do it in Germany,” he noted.

However, the IEA continues to foster the perception that there is still a major role for the fossil fuel sector in meeting the world’s energy needs for many decades to come. That indirectly assures the financial industry that continued investments in existing and new fossil fuel infrastructure are a good bet, Teske said.

The European Union and countries like China are shifting quickly to renewable energy sources. Wind and solar now account for 11.4 percent of China’s electricity, and that figure will be 20 percent by 2020, Liu Qiang, a researcher at the Energy Research Institute of the National Development Reform Commission in China, told IPS previously.

Other detailed energy studies have found that 100-percent renewable energy for the entire planet is doable by 2050. The cost is about two to three percent of global GDP (gross domestic product) from now until 2035, and then the costs decline and begin to generate a return, said Niklas Hoehne of Ecofys, an energy consulting company based in the Netherlands.

Ecofys published a technical study in 2010 called “The Energy Report” that demonstrates how the world could reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

“If you ask me one single policy item which could help us to get there, I would say (eliminating) the fossil fuel subsidies in major non-OECD countries,” said Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist.

The World Energy Outlook has previously called on governments to end their annual 409-billion-dollar subsidies handout to the fossil fuel industry. However, no governments have substantially reduced those subsidies, demonstrating one of the major challenges of getting off the fossil fuel train.

“As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the ‘lock-in’ of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals,” concluded Birol.

Excerpt:

Lesotho’s textile sector – the country’s largest employer – is regarded by many as the only way out of the poverty trap in a tiny kingdom where more than half of the population lives on less than 1.25 dollars a day. But what many do not know is that the government and the World Bank have unofficially turned their backs on the sector and will soon cut important subsidies.

Workers at Shinning Century Ltd in Maseru fear for their jobs. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Makhoase Lethibelane, 30, works 10 long hours each day as a label printer at the Shinning Century Limited textile factory in Lesotho’s capital Maseru. Her work is repetitive, draining and badly paid. At the end of each month, Lethibelane takes home a meagre salary of 122 dollars.

Her income not only has to support herself and her eight-year-old daughter, but also her unemployed parents. Still, Lethibelane says she feels “lucky to have a job, since many others have lost theirs.”

Lesotho is one of Africa’s largest textile manufacturers, with the majority of its exports destined for the United States. The country boasts some 40 textile and apparel plants. But since the global economic crisis caused textile exports to dwindle, many of this country’s 60,000 textile workers lost their jobs.

At Shinning Century, half of the factory’s machines stand idle. Managing director Jennifer Chen says she had to lay off two-thirds of her staff over the past couple of years. She only employs 500 to 600 workers at the moment.

“We lost many orders due to the financial crisis,” explains Chen. Some of her main customers, well- known U.S. brands GAP and Banana Republic, moved their business to China or Vietnam when the economic meltdown hit in order to save money on lower salaries in Asia, she says.

For the past few years, Lesotho had been a favourite textile-manufacturing destination due to the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA), a tariff-preference programme designed by the U.S. government in 2004 to attract business to Africa.

The impact was immediate: numerous Asian investors took advantage of AGOA benefits and set up their factories in Lesotho. The number of textile jobs tripled in a country where nearly half the population is unemployed and one in four is HIV-positive.

“AGOA secures us business because it offers duty-free supply without quota limitations,” says Chen, who hails from Taiwan. In addition, textile manufacturers have been receiving heavy subsidies from Lesotho’s government to keep the country attractive compared to Asian countries, where minimum salaries and worker’s rights are seldom observed.

Even though who benefits most from AGOA remains questionable – almost all of Lesotho’s clothing factories are owned by Asian immigrants who reap the main profits while Basotho workers scrape by on survival wages – both factory owners and the Basotho people have firmly placed their hopes on the revival of the local textile industry, eager to emulate Mauritius’ success in creating a competitive, high- end export market for textiles.

Poverty levels in this small Southern African constitutional monarchy have reached dramatic levels after the economic crisis caused a 60 percent decline of Lesotho’s share of Southern African Customs Union revenue and a drop in global diamond prices. Alternating floods and droughts have ruined subsistence agriculture, leaving tens of thousands food insecure.

According to the World Bank, Lesotho’s Gini coefficient – which measures inequality and ranges from 0, or perfect equality, to 1, or perfect inequality – is at 0.63 among the highest in the world. It has by far surpassed the threshold of 0.4 at which serious inequality could lead to social unrest.

With AGOA poised to expire in 2015, and Lesotho’s preferential status with the U.S. thereby under threat, textile manufacturers as well as textile unions have been trying to come up with alternatives to rescue an industry on which the livelihoods of 40,000 workers and their families depend. “We have to find ways to develop a regional supply chain in the Southern African Development Community (SADC),” reckons Chen.

Union representatives demand diversification and expansion of the industry to stay competitive. “We need to start manufacturing production materials locally, like fabric, zips, hangers, buttons,” says United Textile Employees general-secretary Bahlakoana Lebakae. “At the moment all our raw materials come from the East.”

But unbeknown to unions and manufacturers, Lesotho’s government has made different plans.

“The textile sector lacks profitability. It’s no longer competitive internationally. Government has given up on it and clearly indicated to us it can’t subsidise the textile (industry) any longer,” World Bank Lesotho senior operations officer Macmillan Anyanwu told IPS.

After consultation with the World Bank, Lesotho’s government decided to ditch the textile sector, to eventually cut the subsidies and instead invest in agriculture, horticulture, water management and tourism. “We need to diversify away from textiles into other areas,” hinted Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili in February.

With the help of the World Bank, the government has been piloting new sector development since 2009.

“We are trying to find markets for (agricultural) products and water supply in and outside the (SADC) region. We also focus on increasing the capacity of small to medium-sized businesses and improving border services to boost economic growth,” says Anyanwu, explaining some of the steps government has taken with the support of the World Bank.

By 2013, when the pilot phase comes to an end, government will officially adjust its economic policy to invest in the most promising sectors. What will become of the thousands of textile workers and their families remains unclear.

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 2011 (IPS)

As a light drizzle fell Saturday, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu pointed to solar houses constructed by students on the National Mall park in Washington as evidence that the U.S can compete internationally in the renewable energy market to create jobs and win “the war against climate change”.

Three-year-old Henry Shales, visiting from New York, takes a close look at a solar panel on display at the DOE Solar Decathlon 2011. Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

The homes were on display for about one week from the end of September through Sunday, Oct. 3.

Four thousand students working on 20 teams from around the world designed the homes, and the DOE, which has sponsored the event since 2002, estimated that by Saturday more than 200,000 people had visited them.

Energy efficiency with market appeal

On Saturday, gray light filtered into the kitchen through a “living wall” of plants and herbs on shelving as crowds shuffled through a house designed and constructed by a team from Middlebury College in Vermont.

The home, inspired by New England farmhouses, featured south-facing windows, skylights, front-loading washer and dryer, Vermont White Oak decking, and student-designed furniture. In the hours before the much-anticipated award ceremony, Middlebury students were busy guiding visitors through the home they had worked on for two years.

Alison Thompson, an environmental studies major with a focus on geology, said she was proud the team from her small liberal arts school – without any engineering team members – had made it to the competition.

“This embodies the spirit of what we are trying to do (at Middlebury)”, Thompson told IPS. “The fact that we showed up here and we are a serious contender, we are thrilled,” she said.

The team, a diverse mix of students including English and political science majors, met once per week in their spare time over a period of two years to fundraise, design, and plan the house after a student’s mother suggested entering the competition.

Later at the awards ceremony, the Middlebury College team erupted in raucous shouts of joy when organisers announced Middlebury had won first place in the market appeal contest. The University of Maryland house took first place overall, while Purdue and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand came in second and third, respectively.

Appalachian State University, located in the mountains of North Carolina, won the “people’s choice award”, gaining the most visitor votes for its “solar homestead“, a structure with a long, covered porch and a design inspired by the dwellings of rugged Appalachia.

At the Solar Decathlon awards ceremony, Chu said critics of the U.S. solar power and green energy initiatives need only to look at student-built model homes to see that U.S. innovation “is alive and well”.

“Just as there is a fierce competition here (at the Solar Decathlon), there is competition across the world,” Chu said. He said that by 2050, solar power could generate 20 percent of the world’s energy and that countries like China were investing heavily in the sector.

“Some say this is a race America can’t win,” Chu said. “They say we can’t afford to invest in clean energy. I say we can’t afford not to.”

Facts ignored in Solyndra crash

In September, the crash of Solyndra, a California-based solar cell manufacturer with 535 million dollars in federal loan guarantees, provoked widespread speculation about the future of green tech initiatives in the U.S. Critics pointed to the crash to argue that the U.S. renewable energy sector has had its day in the sun and does not merit government support.

Since the crash, reports such as this analysis from the Washington Post have highlighted how a variety of circumstances contributed to the company’s failure. And while critics argue the U.S. can’t compete with China, according to a report from ThinkProgress, the U.S actually exported more than 1.7 billion dollars worth of solar products to China in 2010 and had a net trade surplus of 247 million dollars.

Alexander Ochs, director of the energy and climate programme at the WorldWatch Institute, said the solar industry was actually one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S., with 5,000 companies employing more than 100,000 people. He said Solyndra failed because it made poor investment decisions and was buffeted by price fluctuations in the raw materials market – not because solar power industry is in trouble.

“Solyndra is now used as a scandal to set an example that solar is not working in the U.S. or that it cannot compete on the international market. It is basically used as an attempt to kill the industry as a whole,” Ochs told IPS.

In fact, Ochs said the solar industry grew at a rate of 69 percent in the last year alone, more than doubling in size, and at a rate much higher than the fossil fuel industry, which grows only in the low single digits, or nuclear, the only energy sector with a negative growth rate.

Notwithstanding those facts, Ochs said criticisms of government support for renewable energy did not take into account the comparatively large cost of fossil fuel subsidies.

A study by the Environmental Law Institute estimates that between 2002 and 2008 in the U.S., the fossil fuel energy-producing sector received 72.5 billion dollars in subsidies while, in the same six- year period, renewable energy received 29 billion, a large proportion of that going to biofuels.

According to the World Bank, globally the fossil fuel industry received 557 billion dollars in government subsidies in 2009, while the renewable and biofuel industries combined received 46 billion – just one-twelfth of what fossil fuel industry received.

Arguing that the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies that are direct, indirect, infrastructural – even subsidies in the form of externalised health and environmental costs – Ochs questioned how critics could argue that the renewable energy industry could compete without getting subsidies itself.

Ochs told IPS, “Twenty years after we started taking climate change seriously and in light of all the economic problems and health problems that result from our use of fossil fuels, we are still putting 12 times the amount of money into fossil fuels.”

Excerpt:

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Aug 16 2011 (IPS)

Despite the 2.4 billion emalangeni (342 million dollar) loan from the South African government to its cash-strapped neighbour, Swaziland is sinking deeper into debt.

University of Swaziland students. The university failed to open this term because of a lack of funds from government. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

Most of the Swaziland government’s business creditors feel the money should be used to pay them, while others believe it should go towards the country’s education institutions. The country’s only university and public schools have closed because of a lack of funds.

By the end of May government owed independent businesses 1.4 billion emalangeni (200 million dollars). Businesses feel that their debt should be paid first once government receives the first instalment of about 800 million emalangeni (114 million dollars).

South African Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan said the loan will be released in three instalments – at the end of August, October and February 2012.

“A lot of companies are closing down because government has not paid them,” said Hezekiel Mabuza, vice-president of the Federation of the Swaziland Business Community (FESBC).

“We hope government will use the loan from South Africa to pay us, otherwise more businesses will close down.”

FESBC has a membership of 500 small and medium businesses, and so far over 50 have closed down because government has failed to pay them for supplied goods and services.

“What’s worse, we can’t get stock on credit from South African suppliers because we have outstanding debts,” said Mabuza.

The country’s cash flow problems started in 2010 when Swaziland received 60 percent less of what it used to get from the Southern African Customs Union. The regional customs union used to contribute more than half of Swaziland’s national budget, but the revenue dropped after the global economic meltdown.

But the country’s education sector has also suffered a severe blow because of the lack of funds.

The reopening of the University of Swaziland (UNISWA), the country’s only university, has been put on hold because government does not have adequate funds for scholarships, which are awarded to all students who get accepted to the university.

According to UNISWA registrar, Sipho Vilakati, the institution’s budget for this academic year is 241 million emalangeni (34 million dollars). Government has not paid a cent towards the institution so far and the university, which was supposed to reopen on Aug. 08, after the holidays, is yet to begin lectures. “The date for the start of lectures this academic year is yet to be decided by the (university) senate,” said Vilakati.

Staff salaries have not been paid in recent months because of the lack of adequate funds. Public schools also had to close prematurely on Aug. 5 because government has not paid fees for orphans and vulnerable children and for ordinary pupils under the Free Primary Education Programme (FPEP).

Out of the 148.5 million emalangeni (21 million dollars) owed for orphans and vulnerable children, government was only able to pay schools 37.7 million emalangeni (5.3 million dollars). For the FPEP, which caters for grades one to three in all public schools, government owes schools an estimated 47.7 million emalangeni (6.8 million dollars).

Government is also yet to pay the Examinations Council 3.7 million emalangeni (528,000 dollars) for exam fees for orphans and vulnerable children.

“Unless we get the money to run schools, there is no way we’ll reopen for the third term,” said president of the Swaziland Principals’ Association, Charles Bennett.

Education is not the only sector affected by the economic crisis.

People Living with HIV/AIDS feel the money should be directed to the health sector, particularly to ensure that the country has adequate supplies of ARVs and services of HIV-positive people, such as home-based care.

“Government has repeatedly said the health sector will be prioritised, yet we see it crumbling because there are no drugs in hospitals and boycotts by staff have become the order of the day,” said president of the Swaziland National Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, Vusi Nxumalo.

In July people living with HIV/AIDS took to the streets after the country’s buffer stock of ARVs fell below the prescribed three-month supply.

Since the loan was announced on Aug. 3, the Swazi government has remained silent on how the money will be used.

Instead, Prime Minister Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini commended King Mswati III for obtaining the loan, further fuelling fury among progressives who had called on South Africa to withhold the loan to force Swaziland to democratise. The southern African country is ruled by the monarchy and political parties are not allowed to contest power.

“It goes to show how undemocratic some governments that appear to be democratic on the surface can be,” said Institute of Democracy in Africa programme manager Thembinkosi Dlamini, referring to South Africa.

Also furious about this loan is the Congress of South African Trade Unions whose spokesperson Patrick Craven said workers were disappointed at the vague conditions attached to the loan.

Annually, the Swazi government hosts the Smart Partnership Dialogue where the king and citizens from different sectors of society discuss development issues. However, political parties are excluded from these discussions.

The conditions by the South African government included broadening the dialogue to include all stakeholders and citizens guided by the Joint Bilateral Commissions for Co-operation agreement, which promotes democracy and the respect of universal human rights.

“So long as there are no strict conditions to compel the regime to concede democratic reforms and to share the country’s wealth among the people, the loan will simply be used to maintain the status quo,” said Craven.

And without the conditions for regime change attached to any loan, Swaziland will continue asking South Africa for more money, said secretary general of the Swaziland Federation of Labour, Vincent Ncongwane.

“Without fixing the loopholes, this loan is not going to help us,” said Ncongwane.

Swaziland approached South Africa for the loan after the African Development Bank refused to award Swaziland a 1.2 billion emalangeni (171 million dollar) loan because the country failed to meet the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommendations.

The IMF advised the Swazi government to reduce public servants’ salaries by 4.5 percent and politicians’ salaries by 10 percent to save government 240 million emalangeni (24 million dollars) a year. However, salaries remain untouched after trade unions opposed the move.

The IMF will return to the country at a date yet to be confirmed to further assess the fiscal situation.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 14 2011 (IPS)

The United States should recognise Brazil as a global power and treat it accordingly, concluded a major new report issued by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) here this week.

That treatment should include the full endorsement by the administration of President Barack Obama for Brazil’s permanent membership on an expanded U.N. Security Council, according to the 109-page report entitled “Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations”.

“A formal endorsement from the United States for Brazil would go far to overcome lingering suspicion within the Brazilian government that the U.S. commitment to a mature relationship between equals is largely rhetorical,” according to the report, which was produced by a 30-member CFR task force headed by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn and former U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

Among other recommendations, the report also urged “open and regular communication” between the leaders and senior officials of both countries; the creation both of a separate Office for Brazilian Affairs in the State Department and of a high-level mechanism in the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate the many U.S. agencies that deal with Brazil; and the elimination of the ethanol tariff – a long-standing irritant in bilateral ties – as part of any reform of U.S. biofuels policy.

“Brazil has transcended its status as the largest and most resource- rich country in Latin America to now be counted among the world’s pivotal powers,” according to the report whose lead recommendation called for “U.S. policymakers [to] recognize Brazil’s standing as a global actor, treat its emergence as an opportunity for the United States, and work with Brazil to develop complementary policies.”

That recognition, the report said, also requires that Washington reconcile itself to Brasilia’s independence in the foreign policy arena, including on such issues as Iran’s nuclear programme which, to the Obama administration’s great annoyance, Brazil worked with Turkey to try to resolve last year.

“Because the United States has never really gotten over the idea that Brazil should take a back seat to U.S. policies, …it didn’t treat the difference over this issue like it does its myriad differences with, say, other BRICs,” noted David Rothkopf, a former NSC official who served on the task force.

The BRICs refers to Brazil, Russia, India, and China – the four big emerging powers of the past decade – of which Russia and China are permanent members already of the U.N. Security council, while Obama endorsed India’s permanent membership last year.

“This kind of double standard …is the source of Brazil’s scepticism to date about U.S. sincerity in welcoming its rise,” wrote Rothkopf on his foreignpolicy.com blog. He also stressed that the report’s publication marks “latest rumbling in a tectonic shift with regard to how the United States views the role of emerging powers.”

The new report marks the latest by CFR and other major think tanks, including the Brookings Institution and the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), running over more than a decade, that have called on Washington to give much higher priority to Brazil – as both a regional superpower and an emerging global power – in its policy- making.

Indeed, within a month of the inauguration of George W. Bush in Jan 2001, another CFR task force dominated by prominent U.S. investors, business executives, lobbyists and former diplomats published an open letter urging the new president to “swiftly” establish a “high-level sustained and co-operative strategic dialogue with Brazilian leaders”.

“Brazil,” the signers noted, “is too important to everything that is gong to happen in South America for a policy of benign neglect,” the letter warned, only to be largely ignored by an administration that soon became far more preoccupied with events in the Middle East and South Asia.

But what was true for Brazil in South America a decade ago now applies increasingly to the wider world, according to the report, which stressed Brazil’s key role on a range of global issues ranging from climate change and energy to food security, poverty alleviation, and international peace and security.

“Brazil is and will remain an integral force in the evolution of a multi-polar world,” the report proclaims. “It ranks as the world’s fifth-largest landmass, fifth-largest population, and eight-largest economy,” on track to become the world’s fifth-largest economy in just a few years given estimated growth rates.

“(I)t is in the interest of the United States to understand Brazil as a complex international actor whose influence on the defining global issues of the day is only likely to increase,” according to the task force, which stressed that “the complexities and importance of Brazil are poorly understood and underestimated in Washington.”

Under Obama, Washington appears to be taking Brazil more seriously, the report suggested, although differences over the 2009 coup d’etat in Honduras, the secret negotiation of U.S. access to Colombian military bases, and Middle East policy, among other issues, led then- President Inacio Lula da Silva to express considerable disappointment with the U.S. president just before he handed over the reins to his successor, Dilma Rousseff.

Rousseff’s ascension offered an opportunity to “re-set” relations, and, on Obama’s March visit to Brasilia, he brought with him with him no less than eight cabinet secretaries and other top officials – a signal that the administration indeed desired a much closer and more multi-faceted relationship closer to that which has with other emerging global powers, notably China and India.

“We were particularly encouraged by the Obama visit to Brazil, and fact that Obama said Brazil’s rise was in the U.S. interest,” said Donna Hrinak, Washington’s former ambassador in Brasilia, who, along with the task force director, Julia Sweig, briefed journalists Thursday on the report.

Nonetheless, to the hosts’ disappointment, he withheld his full endorsement of Brazil’s permanent membership to the Security Council, as he had India’s when he travelled to New Delhi late last year.

“What the Brazilians care about most is the Security Council seat, along with the elimination of the ethanol tariff,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue.

The question of the speed with which the U.S. should endorse Brazil’s permanent membership split the task force, with a minority of nine of the 30 members calling for Washington to “immediately begin to lay the (diplomatic) groundwork” for such an endorsement.

The majority called for an immediate endorsement followed by consultations with other region countries and an “intense dialogue” with Brazil itself on “regional and multilateral, and global governance” issues.

The latter course, according to the minority, risked provoking “adverse reactions of key U.S. allies (in Latin America) who would view the choice of Brazil as directly blocking their own multilateral ambitions.”

But five other task-force members, including Hrinak, Sweig, and Rothkopf, said the report’s recommendation for an immediate announcement followed by consultations does not go far enough.

“We feel this sends the wrong message to Brazil and to the world,” they wrote. “If the United States supports, as the Obama administration has said it does, leadership structures in international institutions that are more reflective of international realities, it must support without qualifications Brazil’s candidacy.”

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

Excerpt:

By Kristin Palitza
CAPE TOWN , Jun 17 2011 (IPS)

Access to treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) remains compromised, especially in developing countries, because too few pharmaceutical companies manufacture quality-assured drugs. Lack of competition has led to skyrocketing prices and this means that public health budgets are quickly spent.

Prices for DR-TB drugs remain too high worldwide. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

The situation is particularly severe in countries with high numbers of HIV infections, especially where access to antiretroviral treatment is patchy and HIV-TB co-infections are common. South Africa is one of them.

One of the key access barriers to treatment is the limited availability and high cost of quality-assured medicines to treat DR-TB. For some medicines, there is only one quality-assured manufacturer or a single source of the active pharmaceutical ingredient required to produce the drug.

“There has been little investment in research and development of TB drugs, because TB is seen as a disease of the poor and therefore not a lucrative market for the pharmaceutical industry,” explains MSF South Africa medical coordinator Dr. Eric Goemaere.

This has led to extremely high prices for most DR-TB medications. One patient’s treatment can thus cost up to 9,000 dollars, says MSF – nearly 475 times more than the 19-dollar treatment course for drug-sensitive TB.

Alarmingly, prices have increased even further in recent years. “While drug prices usually go down with increased demand, prices for DR-TB drugs have gone up, some by 600 to 900 percent. That’s simply wrong,” says Goemaere, who heads a HIV and TB treatment project in South Africa’s third-biggest township Khayelitsha.

The exorbitant pricing is less an issue of patents, he explains, but rather caused by the lack of a working mechanism to control prices as well as the termination of subsidies that kept prices lower. High prices are also reflection of insufficient market competition. Only six products (for five different DR-TB drugs) have been prequalified by WHO, and only four sources (for two different medicines) are recommended for purchase in 2011.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) responded to the growing need for affordable DR-TB drugs in 2000 by creating the Green Light Committee (GLC), which reviews governmental and non-governmental treatment projects and ‘green-lights’ them for access quality-assured drugs at reduced prices.

Although the GLC is theoretically a helpful initiative, its highly bureaucratic application process has prevented many treatment programmes around the world to become part of it. In 2010, only 12,000 patients were enrolled in GLC-approved treatment programmes, compared to 440,000 new cases and 150,000 deaths, according to MSF. Only 13 percent of the estimated DR-TB drug market is currently channelled through the WHO Global Drug Facility.

“The WHO has a responsibility in this disaster,” believes Goemaere. He says it took years of pressure from NGOs like MSF until the WHO agreed to establish the GLC. But the commission’s strict conditions and long-winded administration processes prevent many health care providers from benefiting from it.

“The GLC offers little incentive because its quality approval process is far too bureaucratic and centralised. The rules are self-limiting, making the WHO a gatekeeper instead of offering support,” says Goemaere.

WHO medical officer for TB in South Africa, Dr. Kalpesh Rahevar, acknowledges the GLC’s administrative barriers, but points out that the WHO has started a process to reform the GLC in early 2010. One of the planned modifications is to make participation in the GLC easier, he promises.

“We are looking at simplifying the GLC application process”, says Rahevar. “The WHO is also planning to broaden its mandate to monitor TB programmes worldwide, not only those participating in the GLC.” But until then, hundreds of NGOs and health departments have to continue purchasing DR-TB drugs from pharmaceutical companies that may offer uncertain quality and substantially higher prices. The South African Department of Health (DoH) belongs to this group. Instead of applying for GLC membership, the DoH purchases drugs at fixed prices directly from South African subsidiaries of American drug manufacturers Sanofi Aventis and Sandoz.

According to DoH acting director for TB advocacy, communications and social mobilisation, Garvon Molefe, the health department decided to purchase drugs exclusively locally, even if at a higher price, to benefit the country’s economy.

“The reason why the DoH is not following the GLC initiative is because, as South Africa is already facing alarming rates of unemployment, the DoH doesn’t want to disadvantage pharmaceutical companies (that employ South Africans) by procuring TB treatment from other countries,” he told IPS.

The DoH currently pays 4,400 dollars for the DR-TB treatment of one patient. Goemaere says, MSF, through the GLC, pays about 30 percent less for those drugs. That means that the humanitarian organisation can treat many more patients for the same amount of money.

Political will – or lack thereof – seems to be another deciding factors for the success of the GLC. “Applying to the GLC is the political decision of each government,” says Rahevar. “As WHO advisor to the South African government, I can only advise and encourage, not impose.” He is hoping the GLC reform measures, which he says will be announced within the next couple of months, will change the South African government’s mind.

Excerpt:

The first-ever official meeting of Ministers of Agriculture from G20 countries, to be held in Paris Jun. 22-23, presents an extraordinary opportunity. Tasked with developing an action plan to address price volatility in food and agricultural markets and its impact on the poor, the ministers are uniquely positioned to not only tackle the immediate price volatility problems, but also to take on a more fundamental and long-term challenge – extreme poverty and hunger.

As experts in agriculture, the ministers no doubt know what extensive research confirms: Investing in agriculture and rural development, with a focus on smallholder farmers, is the best bet for achieving global food security, alleviating poverty, and improving human wellbeing in developing countries. During their upcoming meeting, the G20 ministers should seize the opportunity to call attention to this essential fact and propose a corresponding plan of action.

Three years after the 2008 food crisis, expanding biofuel production, rising oil prices, U.S. dollar depreciation, extreme weather, and export restrictions have once again led to high and volatile food prices, threatening the wellbeing of the world’s poorest consumers, who spend up to 70 percent of their incomes on food. Any plan to curb volatility and protect the poor will require decisive action on a number of fronts, including measures to control speculation on agricultural commodities, promote open trade and export bans, establish emergency food reserves, curtail biofuels subsidies, and strengthen social safety nets, especially for women and young children.

In addition to these critical steps, achieving food security requires long-term investments to increase the productivity, sustainability, and resiliency of agriculture, especially among smallholder farmers, many of whom live in absolute poverty and are malnourished. Millions of poor, smallholder farmers struggle to raise output on tiny plots of degraded land, far from the nearest market. Lacking access to decent tools, quality seeds, credit, and agricultural extension, and being highly susceptible to the vagaries of weather, they work hard but reap little.

These challenges, however, are not insurmountable, and many actually present opportunities. Successes during the Green Revolution in Asia and more recent accomplishments in Africa show that rapid increases in crop productivity among smallholder farmers can be achieved, helping to feed millions of people. When smallholder farmers have equal access to agricultural services, inputs, and technologies, including high-yielding seeds, affordable fertiliser, and irrigation, they have often proven to be at least as efficient as larger farms.

Exploiting the vast potential of small-scale agriculture would increase productivity and incomes where they are most needed – Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The two regions are not only home to the majority of smallholder farmers and people suffering from extreme poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, but they also have rapidly growing populations. Improving smallholder agriculture could take pressure off global food and agricultural markets and cushion the negative impact on poor people who are most vulnerable to volatile markets.

Harnessing the promise of smallholder farmers, however, will require concerted action in a number of areas. First, investments that improve farmers’ productivity – such as better access to high-quality seeds, fertiliser, and extension and financial services – should be increased along with spending on roads and other rural infrastructure to improve farmers’ access to markets. Investments in agricultural research should focus on new agricultural technologies that are well suited for smallholder farmers, as well as other innovations, including insurance schemes that can reduce the risk small-scale farmers face due to extreme weather and high price volatility.

Second, while increasing productivity and incomes is crucial, it is not sufficient. Agricultural development among smallholders should also improve nutrition and health. Growing more nutritious varieties of staple crops that have higher levels of micronutrients like vitamin A, iron, and zinc can potentially reduce death and disease, especially of women and children. Producing more diverse crops, especially fruits and vegetables, can also help to combat malnutrition, and selling more nutritious food could increase incomes and provide additional employment.

Third, since smallholder farmers are extremely vulnerable to weather shocks, including escalating threats from global warming, promoting climate change adaptation and mitigation is important to protect against risks and potential crop loss. With the right incentives and technologies, smallholder farmers can invest in mitigation efforts, including managing their land to increase carbon storage. Sub- Saharan Africa, for example, has 17 percent of the world’s potential for climate change mitigation through sustainable agricultural practices.

Finally, policies and programs need to narrow the gender gap in agriculture and address the specific constraints faced by women. Although female farmers do much of the work to produce, process, and sell food in many countries, they frequently have less access than men to land, seeds, fertiliser, credit, and training. When women obtain the same levels of education and have equal access to extension and farm inputs, they produce significantly higher yields.

When the G20 Ministers of Agriculture develop an action plan to address food price volatility and its impact on the poor, they should focus on both urgent actions and the vital role of smallholder farmers. But before the international community issues any new recommendations, they first need to make good on previous commitments, including the G8’s L’Aquila pledge in 2009 to invest 22 billion dollars in agriculture, which must be targeted to small-scale farmers. When it comes to achieving food security and reducing poverty, poor farmers in developing countries might be part of the challenge, but they are definitely indispensable to the solution.

*Shenggen Fan, is the director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C. IFPRI is one of nine international organisations, including the World Bank and the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that contributed to a report on price volatility of food and other agricultural commodities for consideration by the G20 summit later this month in France. It is also one of 15 centres supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an alliance of 64 governments, private foundations, and international and regional organisations.

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jun 3 2011 (IPS)

For years, European governments and corporations have made use of a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change to make exorbitant profits. According to some sources, this lucrative scheme has caused more pollution than ever before while lobbyists in Brussels have methodically undermined the European Commission’s decision to put a stop to it.

The Kyoto protocol allows European companies to ‘offset’ their excess emissions of greenhouse gases by buying emissions reductions in developing nations. This provision is called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The eligibility of the overseas projects and the issuance of emission credits – which in this case are called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) – are controlled by a council at the U.N., the CDM Executive Board.

In June 2010, two environmental NGOs – CDM Watch, based in Bonn, and Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), with offices in Washington, DC and London – discovered that European governments and corporations were grossly misusing the CDM. Fifty-nine percent of all CERs originated from the same 19 projects, out of a total pool of 2,800 U.N.-registered projects. These 19 projects all produced HCFC-22, a refrigerant gas that is banned in the U.S. and Europe under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer because of its ozone-depleting properties.

Just weeks before the 2010 U.N. COP16 climate talks in Cancún, Europe’s climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard proposed a ban on all HFC-credits in the European system of emissions trading (ETS) to take effect Jan. 1, 2013. On that date, the second phase of the ETS is due to end, after which new rules could apply.

Industry lobby groups and business organisations resisted the ban. Brussels-based NGO Corporate Europe Observatory made use of Freedom of Information Regulations here to obtain documents and reconstructed the full story.

BusinessEurope is the most influential lobby group in Brussels, representing 40 industrial and employers’ federations from 34 European countries. In October 2010, BusinessEurope’s Director- General Philippe de Buck sent a letter to Hedegaard and Commissioner of Industry and Entrepreneurship Antonio Tajani in which he spells out his opposition to limiting the use of credits from the CDM.

BusinessEurope also made use of a new employee, who had just finished three years of work at the European Commission of Enterprise and Industry. In an email to his former colleagues at the Commission, this employee refers to a recent goodbye drink and expresses his wish to keep on working together in his new lobbying function. In an attachment, he forwarded the position paper of BusinessEurope – which opposes the ban.

Italian energy giant Enel is involved as an investor in seven of the 19 HFC-projects receiving CERs. Next to that, the company is one-third owned by the Italian government. In November 2010, the head of European institutional relations at Enel, Roberto Zangrandi sent a letter to several members of European Parliament (MEPs) stating that, “it is critical to trust the system and the procedures of the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] and CDM in order to ensure the integrity and credibility of this mechanism.”

But just two weeks earlier, Zangrandi sent a letter to Antonio Preto, cabinet member for Tajani. In the letter, Zangrandi invites Preto to have a friendly talk about a serious problem: Zangrandi explains that if a ban would come into force on Jan. 1, his company would loose “at least 20 million credits with a significant value”.

In an interview with carbon markets website PointCarbon.com in November, Simone Ruiz, European policy director at the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), states that the Directorate- General for Industry and Entrepreneurship would focus on moving the date forward. According to PointCarbon.com, a delay of just four weeks would mean that 30 to 100 million extra HFC-credits would enter the European market. This way, companies would be able to make full use of the credits they had invested in.

According to Eva Filzmoser, programme director of CDM Watch, lobbyists behaved in a very unethical way. “The right thing to do is: insist on a thorough investigation, wait for the findings and take a decision,” she told IPS. “Many investors only took the decision to invest in these projects after the European Commission had opened the door for possible restrictions in 2008. It was a calculated risk and most investors have already been abundantly rewarded. Furthermore, we have informally been told by investors that they knew Indian and Chinese plants were increasing their production for the sake of credits.”

Eventually the industry got what it asked for – when the Commission released its final proposition on Jan. 21, 2011, the date for the ban had been moved from Jan. 1 to Apr. 30. According to some estimates, this will result in 52 million extra CERs flowing into the European market – allowing companies to emit an amount equal to the annual emissions of Belgium.

*This is the second part of a two-part series on how European governments and corporations are profiting from a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jun 2 2011 (IPS)

For years, European governments and corporations have made use of a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change to make exorbitant profits. According to some sources, this lucrative scheme has caused more pollution than ever before.

The Kyoto protocol allows European companies to ‘offset’ their excess emissions of greenhouse gases by buying emissions reductions in developing nations. This provision is called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The eligibility of the overseas projects and the issuance of emission credits – which in this case are called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) – are controlled by a council at the U.N., the CDM Executive Board.

In June 2010, two environmental NGOs – CDM Watch, based in Bonn, and Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), with offices in Washington, DC and London – discovered that European governments and corporations were grossly misusing the CDM. Fifty-nine percent of all CERs originated from the same 19 projects, though a total of 2,800 projects were registered. These 19 projects all produced HCFC-22, a refrigerant gas that is banned in the U.S. and Europe under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer because of its ozone-depleting properties. In developing countries the gas must be phased out by 2030.

HCFC-22 is also a ‘super green house gas’ that is 1,810 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Furthermore, HFC-23, the unwanted by-product of the manufacture of HCFC-22, is 11,700 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

When the producers of the refrigerant choose to burn the by-product HFC-23 instead of venting it into the air, they are eligible for heaps of credits under the CDM. Burning one tonne of HFC-23 would bring in 11,700 CERs or emission credits for the plant burning the gas.

It turned out this was a very lucrative business. Burning the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide only cost 25 U.S. cents while the credits could be sold on the European market for not less than 19 dollars.

These projects soon attracted Western investment banks that wanted to share in the profits: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Rabobank and Fortis. Next to these banks, the Italian, Dutch and British governments appear several times on the list of investors. Large energy companies including E.ON (Germany), Nuon (Netherlands), RWE (Germany), Enel (Italy) and Electrabel (Belgium) are also involved as project participants.

According to records compiled by CDM Watch and EIA, the offset profits stimulated the increased production of ozone-depleting HCFC-22. According to EIA, the price of a tonne HCFC-22 varies from 1,000 to 2,000 dollars, while the same tonne generates 5,000 to 5,800 dollars in CERs when sold on the European market.

In economics, this is called a ‘perverse incentive’ – when the incentive has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the scope of the policy. On the whole, European companies and governments have financed these projects for no less than 1.5 billion dollars, while the true cost of the gas abatement is only 150 million dollars.

“This money was invested into phony emission reductions,” says Eva Filzmoser, programme director at CDM Watch. “According to the CDM, the earned credits represent emission reductions. Instead of that, more greenhouse gases were being produced while Western companies kept on emitting as much greenhouse gas as before. The resulting damage for the environment is immense,” she told IPS.

According to data from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), from 2004 to 2009, the production of HCFC-22 grew from 15 million to 28 million tonnes.

After complaints by CDM Watch and EIA, the U.N. started its own investigation while blocking the issuance of new CER credits.

This investigation, which was concluded on the Nov. 16, 2010 was marked ‘confidential’ by the U.N. because of the ‘commercially sensitive information’ it contained. The document was however handed over to IPS. It states that some of the investigated production facilities were “maximising credits rather than filling demand for product”. Nevertheless, the report concludes there are only “indications” of perverse incentives and that the evidence is not “conclusive”.

On Nov. 26, the U.N. CDM Executive Board decided to issue another 20 million credits to 12 HFC- projects.

Jos Delbeke is the Director-General of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action that was set up last year. According to Delbeke, the European Commission was already aware of the problem before the NGOs started campaigning against it. “At the U.N., we have been complaining about this problem for several years. You should not earn CERs with gases that are forbidden in Europe,” Delbeke told IPS.

The main problem, according to Delbeke, is not the damage to the environment. “There are usurious profits being made and that is repugnant,” Delbeke said. “We cannot make our climate policy work in this way. We have to ask ourselves: couldn’t we have done much more with the amount of money spent?”

When it was clear the U.N. would not undertake action, the European Commission’s Directorate-General of Climate Change decided to propose a ban on HFC-credits. Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has proposed Jan. 1, 2013 as a start date for the ban.

*This is the first part of a two-part series on how European governments and corporations are profiting from a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Excerpt:

By Emad Mekay
CAIRO, May 13 2011 (IPS)

Egypt is stepping up its wheat production in a bid to stem the country’s rising dependence on foreign imports that escalated during the 30-year rule of former President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in February.

Bakeries struggle to produce bread in the face of wheat shortage. Credit: Emad Mekay/IPS.

“We could easily end dependence on foreign imports of wheat that make the ‘baladi’ bread,” said Abdelsalam Gomaa, an advisor to the government. “The problem will remain the extra wheat flour needed for other products such as pasta and sweets. We’ll continue to import 6 to 7 million tonnes if we do not grow more land with wheat.”

Egypt – whose population grows at an average of 1.3 million people per year – needs to grow 5 million acres to reach full wheat self-sufficiency, Gomaa told IPS.

Mubarak, who maintained power by force and rigged elections, had often offered access to the Egyptian market of 85 million consumers in return for political backing from Western countries – many of which are food and agricultural products exporters.

Egypt has now become the world’s largest wheat importer, and U.S. wheat’s biggest market. France is the second biggest exporter to Egypt.

The country’s move to grow what it needs locally could ease pressure on the domestic budget, create a surplus in the international market, and reduce food prices for other more impoverished global consumers, agriculture experts here say.

The new strategy is centred on offering prices competitive with international rates to lure Egyptian farmers to shift back to growing more wheat, which is essential for making bread, a staple for most people here.

The government said it is buying wheat for 350 Egyptian pounds (59 dollars) per erdab (150 kilogrammes), up from only 270 pounds (47 dollars) last year under Mubarak – a rate so low that farmers had complained that they could not afford new seeds or spend on technologies to compete in the market. Wheat acreage dropped by 5 percent.

According to the ministry of agriculture, under the new pricing system wheat acreage will jump to 3.6 million acres from 2.9 million last year.

Egypt also plans to offer growers disease-resistant, high-yield seed varieties, more regular farming counselling, along with government subsidies for scientific research.

The government promised to remove red tape that discouraged the creation of new agricultural companies that grow grains, especially wheat.

Immediately after that announcement, a group of Egyptian expatriates in the Gulf, Europe and the U.S. announced that they would start a new company that would offer shares directly to the public to raise 3 billion Egyptian pounds. The money will be used to grow 500,000 acres of wheat next year.

Egypt has turned to the neighbouring African nation of Sudan for extra arable land, and Sudan has offered one million acres for wheat growing by Egyptian farmers and companies.

For the first time, Egyptian farmers said Tuesday that they have organised to create their own unions, a step they say will help them communicate better with the local authorities rather than leaving the government susceptible to foreign pressures.

The head of the new union Abderhaman Mohamed Shokry told reporters here that his union has plans to help the country reach wheat self-sufficiency by lobbying to change policies of the previous regime that benefited international companies at the expense of local farmers.

But despite the new atmosphere and the road to greater wheat production is likely filled with many obstacles, experts say.

Bakery owners complain that even if Egypt reaches self-sufficiency in wheat production, there will be other problems with delivery, market mechanisms, and lack of government oversight.

Haj Mahmoud, owner of a bakery in 6 October city, 35 kilometres southwest of Cairo, said that subsidised wheat flour ends up being sold on the black market for profit.

A 50-kilogramme sack of subsidised flour bought for 10 pounds is re-sold to confectionery bakeries in upscale areas for 140 pounds. Confectionery and sweets shops sell to the middle classes and the rich, Mahmoud told IPS.

“Many bread bakeries are unscrupulous. They want huge and fast profit so they sell their portions of flour to those who pay instead of making it bread for the poor as the government requires them to,” Mahmoud said. Mahmoud’s bakery goes through 40 sacks of flour each day to make bread.

“Government officials who monitor the distribution of bread flour are poorly paid and can easily be convinced to look the other way,” Mahmoud said, rubbing his thumb and pointer finger together to indicate the possibility of bribes.

Foreign exporters who fear they may lose one of their biggest and most profitable markets will present other obstacles to Egypt’s march toward wheat independence.

Egypt grew more dependent on wheat imports under agricultural programmes encouraged by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and industry lobbies of U.S. exporters.

U.S. Wheat Associates, a U.S. lobbying group, often holds marketing conferences in luxury sea resorts frequented by rich Western tourists. Poorly paid officials from the Government Authority for Supply of Commodity here – the official wheat buyer in Egypt – are almost permanent fixtures of these events.

USAID has often submitted research that promotes the idea of freeing up wheat land for cash crops. Washington also deploys important promotional tools such as export credit guarantees that facilitate U.S. wheat sales to Egypt. The result has been that Egypt imports at least 10 million tonnes of wheat every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO).

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that Egypt imported 3.7 million tonnes from the U.S. alone in 2010/2011. That figure is expected to rise in the short-term even with Egypt’s attempts to free itself from foreign wheat.

Excerpt:

Subsistence farmers in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s southwestern Bandundu Province are seeing their harvests double, thanks to an ambitious programme of support by the government.

Drying cassava: improved seed varieties and agricultural extension are boosting farmers' yields in DRC. Credit: Ken Wiegand/Wikicommons

The Agriculture Sector Support and Rehabilitation Programme, known by its French acronym PARSAR, is providing smallholders with access to improved seed and advice on agricultural techniques as well as upgrading roads to ease their access to markets. The results have been strongly positive.

“Before 2008, our association worked hard and produced little: only one tonne of cassava or rice per hectare. But when PARSAR began to back us, the whole production picture changed. Every year since 2008, we have produced four or five tonnes per hectare of the Nsansa variety of cassava,” says Guy Lasere, coordinator of a group of 44 farmers in a district 140 kilometres from the provincial capital, Kikwit.

Lasere says the Mulele group belongs to a Village Seed Association, a grouping of 28 farmers’ collectives set up by PARSAR.

“PARSAR has set up 15 such seed associations, each comprised of between 20 and 40 smallholder organisations. These associations produce improved seed varieties and distribute them to farmers. They are coordinated by the Bandundu Smallholders’ Network which functions as a kind of union for these structures,” explains Amede Mungwele, another coordinator at PARSAR.

“We have four collective fields, each covering 16 hectares. Since 2009, with the j124 groundnut variety, we have produced three tonnes per hectare, compared to one tonne in previous years. The same thing happened with the irat12 rice variety, which is currently yielding four tonnes per hectare, compared to only or two tonnes in previous years,” says the president of Nsimulungu’s association, Nestor Nkama.

Unlocking farmers’ potential

The population of Bandundu province – and the DRC in general – has long endured food insecurity, despite conditions naturally suited to agriculture. This is due to long years of civil war as well as the lack of effective agricultural methods.

The 2008 strategy document that sets out the Congolese government’s national programme for agriculture through 2013 states that nearly 17 million people in the DRC are going hungry. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 73 percent of the Congolese population lives with food insecurity.

“The country has about 135 million hectares of agricultural land, which takes up 34 percent of the national land, and only 10 percent of this has been developed,” says the document.

It is in answer to this challenge that the Congolese government introduced the PARSAR development project in 2008.

“This project revolves around four components: institutional support, capacity building, support for agricultural production, and the rehabilitation of basic socioeconomic infrastructure. All this is being done thanks to the financial support of the African Development Bank amounting to nearly 30 million dollars,” explains Lambert Diango, president of PARSAR’s Bandundu branch.

“Every quarter, we show the subsistence farmers new production techniques,” says Jean Misiwense, a supervisor at PARSAR. “We give them the improved seeds provided by the National Agricultural for Study and Research in Agriculture, and monitored by the National Seed Service (SEMASEM). We also give them tools and equipment, and we carry out monitoring.”

According to Misiwense, the improved seeds have short growing cycles and high productivity levels. They are are also more resistant to plant diseases compared to other local seeds.

“At present, more than 200,000 households are benefiting from large quantities of good quality agricultural products. And more than 350 kilometres of road have been rehabilitated by the project to allow the smallholders to move their produce,” he adds.

By Mario Osava
PIRACICABA, Brazil, Apr 4 2011 (IPS)

For nearly five hundred years, sugar cane was used almost exclusively for making sugar, with a handful of by-products like rum, alcohol and molasses. Now, in Brazil, it has become a source of multiple derivatives, and the focus of much scientific and technological research.

Ethanol, or fuel alcohol, has become a major product, rivalling sugar, over the last three decades. But recently, the waste materials, like bagasse (the fibrous residue after sugar cane is crushed), straw and vinasse have grown in importance.

Vinasse, the liquid residue left over from ethanol distillation, can be used to feed the growth of microscopic algae that can produce biodiesel, a process being developed over the next few years by researchers at the Agricultural Sciences Centre (CCA) of the Federal University of São Carlos in Araras, 170 kilometres from São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil.

The nutrients in the vinasse accelerate proliferation of the algae, which are rich in fatty acids that in turn can be used to produce biofuels.

Fertilisers will also be produced, as “the algae capture up to 64 percent of the potassium present in the vinasse,” the head of the CCA’s Department of Agro-Industrial Technology, Octavio Valsechi, told IPS.

Using algae to produce biodiesel has the advantage that it avoids the monoculture of oilseed crops on extensive areas of land. However, it is still not clear whether the cost of biodiesel made from algae will be higher than that made from vegetable oils.

Bagasse is increasingly used to generate electricity in the sugar mills themselves. But a biomass Gasification Centre being built over the next three years in Piracicaba, 160 kilometres from São Paulo, offers even more promising prospects.

Synthetic gas, or syngas, produced at this pilot plant will generate three times the electricity currently generated from bagasse, and can also be converted into liquid fuel or a precursor material for plastics, according to the Institute for Technological Research (IPT), the São Paulo state government agency that set the project in motion and forged partnerships with several public and private bodies to make it a reality.

Syngas is normally produced from coal, but the technology to gasify biomass is only now being tested on an industrial scale.

The potential for electricity generation from bagasse with current technology, by burning it directly in furnaces, is equivalent to “one Itaipú,” a reference to the 14,000 megawatt hydroelectric complex shared by Brazil and Paraguay, according to the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA) which represents the largest companies.

But using this traditional method, “we are losing half the potential energy of the cane,” because of the humidity content of the bagasse when it is burned, Valsechi pointed out.

Increasing mechanisation of harvesting, which by 2014 will extend to the whole sugar cane crop in the state of São Paulo, that accounts for 60 percent of national production, will do away with the practice of burning the cane fields. Studies are still under way to determine the best way of collecting the straw.

“Anything that can be derived from oil can also be extracted from sugar cane,” Tadeu Andrade, head of the Centre for Sugarcane Technology (CTC) established in 1969 by Copersucar, a cooperative of São Paulo sugar mills that has expanded into other states, told IPS.

Sugar cane is the closest thing to “a perpetual motion machine, because there is so much recycling and feedback,” he said, pointing out that it has the capacity to produce its own fertiliser to grow it and energy to process it, and it yields more biomass than other major crops like maize or soybeans.

The potassium-rich vinasse, together with the residues trapped in industrial filters and the straw left on the ground, fertilise new crops, he said, although he acknowledged additional input of chemical fertiliser was also needed.

Unprocessed sugar cane juice is a good medium for growing microorganisms that are a source of countless substances, including polymers for bone regeneration, various foods, medicines and cosmetics, and even components for artificial blood plasma, Valsechi said, adding he regrets the scarcity of sugar cane researchers to fill the huge demand.

Sugar cane may also provide a pathway towards hydrogen-based energy, he said. Great strides have been taken in researching the chemistry of alcohol in Brazil, and a large petrochemical company is already producing “green”, or biodegradable, plastics.

Even aviation fuel can be made from sugar cane. EMBRAER, the Brazilian Aerospace company, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of small and medium-sized passenger planes and military aircraft, has announced that the first test flight fuelled by biokerosene made from sugar cane will take place in 2012.

Diversification of sugar cane products and scientific exploration of their potential arose from the National Alcohol Programme (PROALCOOL), launched in 1975 to find gasoline substitutes and reduce imports of oil during the 1970s oil crisis, when prices rose fourfold.

Since then, production of sugar cane increased sevenfold in Brazil, reducing demand for oil, but generating other problems. Vinasse, for example, caused an environmental disaster in the early days of the PROALCOOL programme in the 1980s, when it was discarded into rivers and killed millions of fish by starving them of oxygen.

The environmental threat receded when discovery of the high potassium content of vinasse led to its being used as a fertiliser.

Production of ethanol from sugar cane is still resisted in many Latin American countries where the soil already contains plenty of potassium, and shallow water tables are at risk of pollution from “fertigation” – irrigation with dissolved fertilisers – said Valsechi, an agronomist who has done research on sugar cane since his graduation in 1980.

For every litre of ethanol distilled, 10 litres of vinasse are produced, so its disposal can be costly. Algae that capture potassium could provide a solution.

In Argentina, where the soil has a lot of aluminium and the climate is less favourable than Brazil’s, it is particularly difficult to produce ethanol from sugar cane, said Marcos Vieira, another CCA professor and head of the Inter-University Network for the Development of the Sugar/Alcohol Sector (RIDESA), where researchers are funded by the national government to carry out genetic improvement of sugar cane.

The varieties developed by RIDESA, identified by the code RB, are planted on 60 percent of Brazil’s sugar cane area and have helped raise productivity to 85 tonnes per hectare, and in some cases 150 tonnes per hectare, Vieira said. Thirty-five years ago, the average yield was less than 50 tonnes per hectare.

RIDESA seeks out “eclectic varieties” that are adapted to the different climate and soil conditions in Brazil, produce good yields and are resistant to diseases and drought, Vieira said.

In contrast, CTC, which primarily serves the needs of the cooperative’s members, adopted the opposite approach, developing specific varieties for different soils and climates. “There are 25 soil and climate combinations,” and maps of them help farmers select the most productive variety for their lands, Andrade said.

But the advances in genetic engineering that give Brazil an advantage over other sugar cane producing countries “do not by themselves improve productivity in the field,” he said. Good agricultural practices, taught on many CTC courses, and mechanisation are also needed.

A policy adopted in the 1980s, setting the price for sugar cane according to its sucrose content, compelled farmers to use the best sugar cane varieties and cultivation techniques, Andrade said. University professor Roberto Rodrigues, a former agriculture minister, said the policy caused “a revolution.”

Large companies, like U.S. biotechnology company Amyris, have taken up research and development of new sugar cane products. Amyris is keen to secure supplies of Brazilian sugar cane for manufacturing farnesene, a molecular building block used to produce aviation fuel, lubricants, cosmetics and other derivatives.

Excerpt:

By Servaas van den Bosch
WINDHOEK, Feb 16 2011 (IPS)

A universal Basic Income Grant (BIG) would create laziness and dependence among Namibia’s poor, say politicians. A daring pilot project set out to prove that this untrue. IPS spoke to one of the beneficiaries of the BIG.

An income grant enabled Bertha Hamases to find a job. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

Here evicted farm workers gathered in misery. For Hamases, a single mom with four kids aged between 9 and 16, life looked hopeless. Until a coalition of civil society organisations picked Otjivero for a privately-funded pilot project to show that a universal basic income grant can make all the difference.

Q: Can you describe your life before the BIG? A: I came to Otjivero eight years ago. Before that I had been living on a farm, but I fell out with my boyfriend and I had to leave.

So I took my four children and settled in the village. Life was hard, we were suffering. The kids would go to school, but I didn’t have money for the school fees. Because they were hungry the children couldn’t concentrate on their homework and it showed in their studies. The school would keep asking for money.

Once a month I would travel to Windhoek and beg money from relatives. With that I would buy a little food for my children. We lived in a small one-room ‘kambashu’, an iron corrugated shack. I would do nothing all day, maybe visit some neighbours and see what they could spare for me.

Life in the settlement as a whole was tough. Every second day people arrived after being chased away from the neighbouring farms. There was crime because people didn’t have money to buy food. Poaching from the farms was a big problem. There was prostitution, violence against women and a lot of alcoholism. The small settlement had something like five or six shebeens, informal bars.”

Q: In 2008 the BIG project started, how did that change your living conditions? A: Because there were five of us, the four children and I, all of a sudden we received 500 Namibian dollars ($68 U.S.) a month.

For two months I still remained in Otjivero, saving up money. Then I used the BIG money to travel to Windhoek. There, again with the money from BIG, I placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering my services as a domestic worker. After two days I got offered a job.

I now earn N$1000 a month plus housing and food. During the week I stay in Windhoek to work and twice a month I go home to Otjivero. The BIG didn’t stop because I worked elsewhere. That’s to show that the grant can create opportunities. Everyone that originally qualified still receives the money. Although after the pilot ended the grant was lowered to 80 dollars ($11 U.S.)

So the N$1400 (just under 200 U.S. dollars) per month I get now makes it possible to pay school fees and buy uniforms. My eldest goes to school in Windhoek and the other three are at a hostel with their school in Witvlei, which is a small town near Otjivero. The fees are N$200 per child per year and N$130 per term for the hostel.

The beautiful thing is that last year they all passed.I can also pay the bills at the clinic, so the nurses don’t have to confiscate my clinic card anymore. I also use the money to buy shoes, clothes and other goods in Windhoek and then sell them in Otjivero on the weekends. My profit is usually around N$400 ($54). Sometimes I buy wholesale groceries and also sell them, or I recycle bottles that I buy from the little children and sell in Windhoek.

I have extended the one room shack into a house with three rooms and God willing I will soon start a soup kitchen for the elderly and orphans.

Q: What has changed in Otjivero itself? A: The children all buy school uniforms and parents pay the school fees. People buy food and purchase TVs, dvd-players and stoves. Many have extended their houses. Where there few shops before, now there are 10-12 little shops.

The place is much cleaner because people don’t mind cleaning when they are fed and not hungry. Crime has stopped totally, while alcoholism and the beating of women has become much less. There was prostitution because women were hungry, but that has stopped completely.

The only problem is that we have become an attractive place to migrate to. Even people from Windhoek are coming because they think there is money in Otjivero. The population has grown from 1,200 to 2,000 people, which means we have to share the wealth.

Q: The President has said the grant will make people lazy, what do you think of that? A: It’s not true. The president says that people will not work when they get a grant. Well, I didn’t use to work before the BIG, but now I am working.

I used the money to advertise myself and found work. Other ladies in Otjivero also gave me money to place an advertisement in the newspaper for them and now they also work.

I am really proud that I receive the Big Income Grant and it should be continued in the whole country, so we can stop poverty in Namibia. So that others can taste what we have tasted.

Excerpt:

A universal income grant in Namibia would alleviate poverty in one of the most unequal societies on earth, say campaigners. Free handouts only lead to laziness, responds an unwilling government.

Supporters say an income grant lays a strong foundation for economic empowerment, responsibility and ownership. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

In Otjivero, a small settlement some 100 kilometres outside the Namibian capital, a coalition of civil society groups moved to settle the argument: a pilot project demonstrating the Basic Income Grant (BIG) has made a real difference.

With private funding, all inhabitants of the dusty village – over 900 people under 60 – were registered to receive 100 Namibian dollars – $13 U.S. – per month for a period of two years. The thought behind the universal grant is that a minimum income gives people the opportunity to escape the poverty trap.

And poor Otjivero was a trap. Situated at a crossing of roads, the settlement had attracted a steady flow of evictees from surrounding white-owned farms since independence in 1990. Unemployment, crime, alcoholism and prostitution were rife. Parents had no money for school fees and the sick were often unable to pay modest fees at the clinic.

The results of the pilot have been eye-opening. “Malnutrition has dropped from 42 percent to 10 percent,” explained Lutheran bishop Zephania Kameeta, chair of the BIG Coalition.

This remark was ill-received in a country that has topped the list of most unequal societies for many years. When the leadership of the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) last year toed the ruling party line and withdrew from the BIG Coalition, it was called back by its members, signaling broad support for the income grant.

A conference on “Social Justice and the Responsibility of the State”, organised in Windhoek from Feb. 10-11, maintained pressure on the government to implement the measure.

“I sit on the corner of the street every day waiting for someone to come and ask me to clean their yard,” said Bongie /Cuïnatja.

“Namibia is a rich country, but I am scared to have a child here if I don’t know how to feed her. People cannot eat democracy, they cannot feed on independence.”

A guaranteed monthly income would allow /Cuïnatja, now locked in a daily struggle for survival, to buy basic necessities and maybe start a small business.

Immanuel Kadhila, an entrepreneur, testified that he saw the BIG as a way to make money.

“As soon as we heard of the initiative, my cousin and I went to Otjivero and opened a small grocery shop. Yes, we were being opportunists, but [goods in] the shop sold so well that it was empty most of the time. This shows it’s not true that people will simply spend their money on alcohol. If a BIG is introduced elsewhere it will create employment, because people will open shops,” he said.

“The income grant I get every month makes it possible to pay school fees and buy uniforms. All my children passed last year,” says Otjivero resident Bertha Hamases.

“I can also pay the bill at the clinic so the nurses don’t confiscate my clinic card any more. With money from the grant I advertised in the newspaper and found a job. With the money from the job I buy shoes and clothes and make another profit selling them. I have managed to extend the one room shack the five of us lived in into a 3 room house,” the 32-year-old mother of four told IPS.

“The BIG is an efficient and fair measure to establish a just society,” said Kameeta. Referring to the two decades since independence he added: “Peace is not the absence of war. War ended in 1990, but how can a person with no house and sleeping in a riverbed have peace? Rejecting the discussion on what has become an international movement is making yourself poor.”

It’s unlikely a universal grant will be on the government’s budget later this month. But proponents say there are ways to finance a BIG if the political will was there. “The money from the mines and tourism should directly benefit the people, it should be transferred into their bank accounts. This money will stay here, circulate and make us more competitive,” said Kameeta.

“We cannot just nationalise the mines, or grab the land to finance such a system,” cautioned Trade Minister Hage Geingob. Geingob is a fervent supporter of the BIG despite the prevailing scepticism in government. “But we can ask where the private sector in all this is? Can’t the mines contribute to a fund that gives grants to the needy?”

“If you know I am hungry today then feed me today,” said another activist, lamenting the slow pace of decision-making.

“You don’t go debate my hunger in parliament for five years, or insist on experiments with ‘randomised control’ groups. You cannot gamble with someone’s life like that. Where are the ‘randomised control groups’ when it comes to black economic empowerment deals?”

Demonstrations calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt continued for the second day in several Egyptian cities with police cracking down violently, a development that many analysts here say reflects the nervousness of the regime.

Police clash with protestors in Cairo. Credit: Mohammed Omer

At least four people have died so far, 600 have been arrested and many more injured. Protests are flaring up in Cairo, 6th of October City, Suez, Mahal El- Kubra and Alexandria.

“Young people are standing in the way of heavily armed armoured vehicles and stopping them. People are genuinely frustrated,” Khaled Al-Balashy, editor-in-chief of Al-Badil newspaper told IPS.

“That was the first time I see people literally sacrificing their lives in face of police brutality,” Al-Balashy said. “They think nothing worse could happen to them. This is unprecedented. And the changes will be equally unprecedented. It is a matter of time.”

Diaa Rashwan, an analyst with the semi-official Al Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies noted that the protests are now calling for regime change, not for the usual government benefits or reduction in food prices.

“Protesters want the regime out. That in itself has confused the government,” Rashwan said. “They do not know how to respond so far. The only answer has been extra security – I think they are scared.”

The government has stepped up its security response across the country, with armoured vehicles visibly deployed around important buildings in Cairo – including the television and radio building overlooking the River Nile and several ministerial offices.

Hundreds of members of the Egyptian Press Syndicate demonstrated outside their union, where there was a heavy police presence, while hundreds of lawyers were trying to break a blockade by the police of the Bar Association building nearby.

Several women journalists were beaten by the police and were seen crying in pain. Many were seen yelling at officers who had used clubs against women reporters.

“These protests may not bring immediate or quick results,” said Qutb Al- Arabi, an activist with the Egyptian Press Syndicate. “But it is a message to the government that we are truly fed up.”

Al-Arabi said he was demonstrating with other journalists initially for greater press freedoms, but as the police cracked down with violence, the demands have now shifted to request the departure of 82-year old President Hosni Mubarak who has ruled Egypt since 1981.

Mubarak and his government have been losing popularity due in part to implementation of economic policies backed by Western institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development that have led to high prices, rampant unemployment and corruption.

The government has cut or removed subsidies for many staple goods in a country where millions survive on less than two dollars a day.

Just before the protests broke out Tuesday, the government was preparing to cut energy subsidies, a move that would have pushed prices up even further.

The health ministry was also planning to cut its public health care coverage – limiting the hours at public hospitals were patients could be seen for reduced fees.

Politically, more activists are being pushed to the sidelines – including Islamic opposition, secular and independent political leaders.

Several political activists were particularly shocked in November over what they saw as the rigged parliamentary elections, which the ruling National Democratic Party won with an overwhelming majority – leaving very little room for opposition.

“The government’s performance is very weak on many levels, be that socially, politically or economically,” said Gouda Abdel-Khalek, head of the economic affairs committee at the left-leaning opposition Al-Taggammu Party.

But some analysts say that the Egyptian regime is flexible enough to note the demands of the protestors.

“We are talking about a state that is a professional survivor,” Mohamed Abdel-Salam, editor-in-chief of the political periodical Al-Seysa Al-Dawlia told IPS. “They survived many other storms before.”

Abdel-Salam said the size of the protests yesterday and today were clearly larger than what Egypt was used to, but “it is still smaller than protests in Tunisia, Lebanon or Yemen”.

“The political elite are reading the events well and we expect to see some positive response soon because they will strengthen the hand of the reformists inside the ruling establishment. The changes will likely be political rather than economic,” said Abdel-Salam, whose publication is part of the state-run Al-Ahram Institution.

The government however has not indicated it is responding either politically or economically.

The Interior Ministry has been the dominant government voice so far. In a statement Tuesday, the ministry blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the protests – a declaration that positions the government to ignore demands of protesters since the Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed.

Opposition parties say the protests were spontaneous and not organised by the Muslim Brotherhood.

“It was a popular unrest. It wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Abdel- Khalek of Al-Taggammu party. “I hope that the regime will get the real message and won’t believe its own untruths”.

Abdel-Khalek, who also teaches economics at Cairo University, said that the regime will fight hard for its survival because it is “a matter of life and death”.

“They are afraid that once they are toppled, there will be investigations into their corruption and their mismanagement of the country,” he told IPS.

The liberal Wafd Party called Wednesday for a “reconciliation government’ that would include members from outside Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party, and also on Mubarak to dissolve the current “rigged” parliament.

But all analysts agree on one thing; the emergence of a new generation of young Egyptians who are more combative and who are not afraid of the police – who are capable of bringing about more change than previously thought.

By Emad Mekay
CAIRO, Jan 18 2011 (IPS)

Mohammed Bouazizi, the 26-year old Tunisian whose act of self-immolation led to an unprecedented popular revolution in Tunisia, is quickly turning into a symbol for disgruntled Arab youths angry at their autocratic rulers and poor economic conditions – a development that Arab leaders in the region are clearly taking note of.

On Tuesday a third Egyptian who set himself ablaze in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria to protest unemployment died at hospital. This came after a man set himself alight outside the Cabinet offices in downtown Cairo, and another set himself on fire Monday to protest his inability to obtain subsidised bread.

Egypt, a country of 85 million people, has implemented an economic programme, in agreement with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), that includes lowering subsidies for staple foods and energy. The programme has deprived millions of Egyptians of inexpensive bread and pushed prices upwards for several other food items. As a result protests over salaries and lack of benefits have rocked the country over the past five years.

Other Western-backed Arab rulers – under prodding from Western economic institutions – are implementing similar programmes that support corporations and business people, who promise investments and development, at the expense of the poor.

In Algeria, the second country after Tunisia that saw popular street protests against housing shortages, corruption and unemployment, four people committed the same self-immolation act as Bouazizi. At least one person has died so far.

In Mauritania, where fifty percent of the population of 3.5 million live under the poverty line of 2 dollars a day, one man was hospitalised after setting himself on fire outside the presidential palace Sunday.

During a ministerial meeting ahead of an Arab Economic Summit in Sharm El- Sheikh later this week, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa appealed to rich Arab nations – mostly oil-producing countries – to help assist other Arab countries that are “still in need of development”.

The events in Tunisia and the region have forced several autocratic Arab rulers to take note of their peoples’ rising frustrations with their conditions.

In Jordan, King Abdullah II, a key ally of the U.S. and Israel who came to rule with Western backing after the death of his father King Hussein in 1999, ordered new measures to lower food prices and create more jobs for the country’s six million people.

The government announced an unprecedented 225 million dollars worth of cuts in fuel and staple food prices. Nonetheless, Jordanians have protested against rampant unemployment and high food prices in dozens of towns and cities. The country is suffering record deficit and a high unemployment rate.

In Syria, the state-run media reported Tuesday that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad would hand out direct financial support of about 11 dollars a month to some 415,000 families.

After the Tunisia events, the ruling Baath Party in Damascus said it would also reverse its plans to cut subsidies and that it would increase its food subsidies to combat high prices. The government also directed farmers to plant more wheat – a staple food item – the Syrian media said.

Kuwait plans to give free food rations to all Kuwaitis at a cost of 818 million dollars, as well as a one-time cash grant to every Kuwaiti of 3,561 dollars. These measures would take effect Feb. 1.

In Egypt – the largest Arab nation in terms of population, which has also witnessed dozens of labour protests and pay issues for the past five years – the government, which came to office in 2005, said the country’s subsidies were still firmly in place. Local media reported that President Hosni Mubarak, the country’s ruler since 1981, ordered ministers to scale back any talk of cutting energy or bread subsidies.

Speaking ahead of the Arab Economic Summit, Egyptian Trade Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid said that the country’s subsidy system was working and that it shielded consumers in Egypt from the 50 percent increase in world food prices.

He, however, admitted that the Tunisian crisis would act as an accelerator to economic cooperation and integration between Arab states, Al-Ahram reported Tuesday.

In Mauritania, one of the region’s least developed nations, the government announced measures to open 600 stores to sell subsidised rice, sugar, cooking oil and wheat flour. The government also said that it was taking measures to “increase employment opportunities”.

Opposition leaders belittled the measures and said they were not enough to fight “the country’s deliberate starvation, absurd high prices and corruption”, the Mauritanian News Agency reported.

In Algeria, which shares borders and history of French occupation with Tunisia, the government was reportedly studying a measure to put a cap on food prices and impose price restrictions to ease two weeks of violent protests that coincided with the Tunisian unrest.

Algerians are complaining of sugar, oil and flour prices despite a surplus in the government budget of 14.8 billion dollars compared to 4.6 billion a year before. Oil prices rose this year helping boost the country’s revenue.

All across the Arab region, government backers are quick to assert that Tunisia is an exceptional case that cannot be repeated in other Arab countries.

“We are not all angry against the regime like Tunisians were,” said Abdelmonem Saeed, chairman of Al-Ahram, a Cairo-based government- managed foundation that runs several publications.

“Egypt is 84 million people when Tunisia was only 10 million so you’ll find here parts that are for the regime and others that may be against it. Lots of people express their opinions through different channels here,” Saeed said in an interview with Dream TV. “We are not the same.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2011 (IPS)

Touring Iran’s Arab rivals this week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sounded almost triumphant as she asserted that economic sanctions have helped slow Tehran’s nuclear progress.

But U.S. and international efforts to isolate Iran have, ironically, pushed the Islamic government do something it has needed to do for years: phase out costly consumer subsidies that promoted waste and depressed export earnings for oil and gas.

At the end of last year, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad almost doubled the price of petrol to 70 U.S. cents a litre and reduced subsidies on electricity, water, wheat flour and other staples that cost the regime between 70 and 100 billion dollars a year. Despite dire predictions from critics inside and outside Iran, there have been only isolated protests and Iranians appear to be doing what the reforms intended: reducing consumption.

The government cushioned the blow with initial lump sum cash payments of about 80 dollars to 70 percent of Iranian households. Also, most Iranians have not yet received new higher utility bills and many have stockpiled consumer goods.

While it will take time for the shock of higher prices to work through the system, so far “it looks like the plan is proceeding smoothly, which surprised some outside of Iran who see rebellion under every rock,” said Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who travels frequently to Iran.

It is noteworthy that Iran is proceeding with the reforms at a time when price hikes have triggered riots in Tunisia. Pakistan, fearing similar unrest and a government collapse, has backtracked on increasing fuel prices in defiance of the International Monetary Fund.

IMF officials, writing recently in an online publication, the IMF Survey Online, said that ending subsidies “should remove distortions and restore efficiency in the economy” and allow Iran “to export more oil and thus generate more revenue”.

Iranians have learned over the past three decades to adjust to sanctions and pride themselves on their independence. Rationing was introduced during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war – when most of the world sided with Iraq – and oil production collapsed.

Afterwards, the government kept prices for staples and energy low “to appease a war-weary society”, wrote Semira Nikou of the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) in “The Iran Primer”, a recent joint publication of USIP and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

But the burden on the budget became unsupportable as Iran’s population more than doubled after the 1979 revolution. Subsidies in 2009 – about 4,000 dollars for a family of four – cost about a third of Iran’s 335-billion-dollar GDP. Petrol was cheaper than bottled water – a fact reflected in Tehran’s hideous traffic and pollution-choked air.

Recent reports from Tehran suggest a drop of six to 10 percent in traffic volume and similar reductions in the use of electricity and water. The air is more breathable in the capital, although that may reflect recent rain and snow more than subsidy reform.

Middle class Iranians say the cuts are largely directed against them since the wealthy can afford the hikes and the poor consume relatively little. One Tehrani who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity said potential protesters among the lower classes might be intimidated by fear of losing future cash payments if they are arrested.

If the price hikes reduce consumption without stirring social unrest, that could bolster Ahmadinejad, whose popularity has sunk following fraud-tainted elections in 2009, a vicious crackdown on civil society and disputes with parliament and other government bodies. In recent days, Ahmadinejad and his top advisers have noted smugly that his more liberal predecessors – Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – sought to cut subsidies but faltered in the face of domestic political opposition.

Still, Ahmadinejad is blamed for initial economic illiteracy – giving cash handouts to the poor and forcing banks to loan money at artificially low rates – which pushed inflation up to 30 percent during his first term as president.

His rhetoric about the Holocaust and Israel encouraged the imposition of severe foreign economic sanctions – ostensibly directed at Iran’s nuclear programme. Separate U.S. legislation has chased away much-needed investment in Iran’s energy sector, putting future production and prosperity at risk. Unemployment is in double digits and the brain drain of educated professionals, particularly young people, is rising.

Still, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech and an expert on the Iranian economy, said the subsidy phase-out “will ultimately strengthen the Iranian economy for the simple reason that the economy was heading the wrong way bingeing on very cheap energy. What does a person do, who needs to lose weight but has access to free dessert? Lose the free dessert first!”

With the world’s 17th largest economy, minimal foreign debt and underground oil resources estimated by the IMF at 10 trillion dollars and natural gas reserves at four trillion dollars, Iran has enormous potential, especially if it can resolve its quarrels with the international community. (The next round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme is scheduled to take place Jan. 21-22 in Istanbul.)

Salehi-Isfahani, who recently returned from a visit to Iran, predicted that inflation – which had dropped to around 10 percent – would rise to 20 percent in the short term. However, that “does not necessarily mean unrest because of the rather clever way the poor have been compensated in advance,” he said.

“I just came back from Iran and from what I saw and heard most people agreed that this had to be done, but many doubted the government’s ability to implement it well,” he said. “If the government has been able to convince most people that living in an oil-rich country does not entitle them to cheap energy, it has taken a huge step.”

Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii, said the streets remain calm in part because of heavy security and because “people are tired” after months of political tension.

She added, however, that criticism has also been muted because “the announced price increases were way more than expected and there is a very clear sense that if it doesn’t work it will be a disaster for everyone. So everyone is holding their breath, hoping for the best.”

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
BELÉM, Brazil, Dec 30 2010 (IPS)

Brazil hopes to eventually become a major producer of palm oil, thanks to the expansion of this new exotic monoculture crop in the eastern Amazon jungle, where eucalyptus plantations are also mushrooming on broad swaths of already deforested land.

African oil palm plantations in the state of Pará. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The biofuels subsidiary of Brazil’s state-owned oil giant Petrobras has set a goal of producing 420,000 tonnes a year of palm oil, double the country’s current output, with two projects in Pará. Seventy percent of the company’s production will go to Portugal, where it will be turned into biodiesel to supply Europe, in a partnership with the Portuguese state-run oil company Galp Energía.

The subsidiary, Petrobras Biocombustível, is planting oil palm on 6,000 hectares of land, and growing seedlings to cover a total of 74,000 hectares.

“Our focus is the growing biodiesel market,” despite the good prices paid by the food and cosmetics industries, Janio Rosa, Petrobras Biocombustível’s director of agricultural supplies, told IPS.

The Brazilian mining company Vale, the world’s largest producer and exporter of iron ore, launched a project in 2009 to produce 160,000 tonnes a year of biodiesel as of 2014, to reduce transportation costs in its railways and ports by switching from conventional diesel.

To that end the company, which was privatised in 1997, is planting 60,000 hectares of oil palm in six different areas of the state of Pará, where its main mineral reserves are located, in the Serra do Carajás.

But it will take Brazil many years to make significant headway into foreign markets. This year it produced a mere 0.5 percent of the world total of 46 million tonnes. And it takes oil palms three years to begin to produce fruit, and eight years to reach full maturity.

In May, the government launched a sustainable oil palm production programme, which offers incentives like soft loans, and technical support.

An agro ecological survey identified 31.8 million hectares of abandoned and degraded agricultural areas suitable for oil palm production in the country, nearly equivalent to the size of Germany. But it only authorised plantations on 4.3 million hectares, most of which are in Pará.

The high levels of productivity of oil palm in land near the equator opens up the possibility of diversifying the raw materials used to produce biodiesel in Brazil, where 85 percent of the biofuel is now produced with soy, and of making this country a major exporter of the fuel.

Brazil now imports half of the 450,000 tonnes a year of biodiesel that it consumes.

With a projected annual yield of six tonnes per hectare of oil palm, which has an average productive life span of 25-28 years and is harvested year-round, combined with a growing market for biofuels, the profit margin is ensured, Rosa said. Because of this, investment in biodiesel projects makes sense, even though palm oil fetches higher prices today in the food and chemical industries.

But Agropalma, the only large palm oil producer in Brazil today, “temporarily” stopped producing biodiesel in August, because its prices were not competitive in the public tenders for supply contracts, even though it was making use of the waste products from the oil refining process.

In Colombia, Latin America’s leading producer of biodiesel, it took subsidies to get the industry going. When the government purchases biodiesel, it pays the market price for vegetable oil plus the costs of conversion, explained Jens Mesa, executive president of that country’s National Federation of Oil Palm Growers (Fedepalma).

With its output of 800,000 tonnes a year, Colombia also leads the production of palm oil in Latin America, thanks to the persistence of the private sector, organised in Fedepalma since 1962, Mesa told IPS.

The government’s support was “intermittent” until the adoption of a 2004 law stipulating a minimum blend requirement in diesel fuel of 10 percent biodiesel by 2010, he said.

In Brazil, diesel fuel vehicles will have to run on a five percent biodiesel blend as of January. That target had originally been set for 2013.

Colombia has “three million hectares of land highly suitable for the cultivation” of oil palm, as well as the 365,000 hectares already planted, Mesa said.

Oil palm cultivation is “the only rural activity for which an environmental permit is required” in Colombia, and it benefits 6,000 families of small farmers, he said, refuting criticism by environmentalists.

Central and South America have emerged as a new frontier for African oil palm, in response to growing demand.

But Latin America is seeking to avoid the deforestation and social impacts seen in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for 85 percent of global production of palm oil.

The Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was formed in 2004 by a diverse group of stakeholders — oil palm producers, palm oil processors or traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, banks and investors, and environmental and social NGOs — to promote sustainable agriculture, address the environmental impact of palm oil and certify products as environmentally and socially sustainable.

To that end, the RSPO has established environmental, social and legal requirements to curb deforestation, allowing expansion of oil palm plantations only on land that has already been degraded.

Petrobras Biocombustível also puts a priority on social inclusion, setting a goal of contracting 2,250 family farmers to produce half of the raw material in one project and 20 percent in its second project, which is focused on export.

Adherence to the laws, reforestation with native fruit trees, education and awareness-raising, and environmental research will form part of the projects, Rosa said.

“Diversity builds,” he said, stressing Petrobras Biocombustível’s commitment to cooperating with small and large farmers and to restoring forests where the land cleared has exceeded the legal limit.

Under Brazilian law, 80 percent of the forest must be preserved on any property in the Amazon.

Despite these safeguards, environmentalists and social activists are critical of the expansion of oil palm plantations.

“We are opposed to any large-scale monoculture, even trees,” in defence of biodiversity and a more balanced climate, said João Pedro Stédile, one of the leaders of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Via Campesino international peasant movement.

The native rainforest in Pará is vital to the climate in South America, because of the circulation of humid North Atlantic easterly trade winds in the eastern Amazon, which provide a large part of the rain in the jungle, scientists point out.

In addition, the evaporation from the Amazon jungle, diverted to the south by the Andes mountains, irrigates the most productive agricultural lands in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

Another risk involves plant health. Turning Pará into “a sea of palm trees” will make it very difficult to control pests, warned José Stanley de Oliveira, Agropalma’s phytosanitary manager, who with a team of assistants has so far been able to control the numerous enemies of the oil palm.

There are two especially dangerous pests: the Eupalamides cyparissias borer, which bores into different parts of the tree, and the Rhynchophorus palmarum palm weevil, the main vector of the red ring syndrome in coconut and oil palm, which is “incurable,” Oliveira said.

Biological pest control is the chosen method due to environmental concerns and because “there are only two insecticides” registered for oil palm plantations in Brazil, he added.

Demand for vegetable oils will continue growing faster than the world population and economy, and 13 million additional hectares of oil palm will be needed to meet demand in 2050, according to projections by Conservation International researcher Timothy Killeen. Demand for soy, meanwhile, will require an additional 93 million hectares of the crop.

The high oil yield of oil palm trees and the fact that palm oil does not contain unhealthy trans fats explain the dizzying growth of global palm oil production, which has increased more than nine-fold since 1980.

But it will be hard to come up with a surplus for the production of biodiesel.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Dec 30 2010 (IPS)

Just before sunrise 39-year -old Alan Simons, an emerging small-scale farmer, gets ready for his usual nine-hour day of harvesting, packing and deliveries. In his black Nissan van he drives ten kilometres to the seaside town of Strand outside of Cape Town to pick up his six workers, all of who are women.

Vegetable pack from small scale farmers Credit: Fadela Slamdien/IPS

Like other small scale farmers in South Africa, Simons is faced with several challenges. Standing on a strip of a 65-hectare piece of farmland leased by 13 small-scale farmers, Simons spoke about the numerous obstacles he and his colleagues faced.

Simons, who had previously worked as an assistant manager for a big commercial farmer for 14 years, has been farming for six years. He is fully aware of what small farmers need to survive and to be competitive.

“Small farmers need substantial infrastructure to be competitive. If not, we can’t deliver according to our clients’ needs,” said Simons. “Big farmers kill you, they flood the market,” he added.

“As always, bigger farmers have an advantage over smaller farmers because smaller farmers face bigger obstacles to getting into the market,” said Chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Stellenbosch, Professor Nick Vink.

“Geographically they are mostly further away from the market, infrastructure is often geared to working with large quantities of produce, the transaction costs of working with small amounts of product are higher, and last but not least they get no support from the state,” said Vink.

Alvyn Jeptha is a 31-year-old emerging small-scale farmer who does hydroponic farming – where plants are grown without soil but rather in a nutrient solution in a greenhouse. Jeptha farms in Stellenbosch, a viticultural hotspot in the Cape Winelands. He has several greenhouses; one of them is a 1780 square metre one in which he grows tomatoes, green beans and green peppers.

A greenhouse like this can cost a farmer about R650 000 to build. Through hydroponic farming, Jeptha gets extended crop cycles and is able to get a greater yield than his colleagues. “You can use the height of the plants to your advantage,” said Jeptha as he walked through the numerous rows of tomato plants, which can grow up to 14m long.

One of the most important pieces of infrastructure required to maintain a competitive edge is the cold chain infrastructure. “One of the major obstacles (for small farmers) is not having a cold chain,” said Jeptha, who has been farming for eight years.

All big commercial farmers have cold chain infrastructure, which is too expensive for small farmers to purchase, and which allows big farmers to extend the shelf life of their produce.

Being compliant with GLOBALG.A.P. (Good Agricultural Practice) standards are a necessary but costly requirement. GLOBALG.A.P establishes international standards around food safety for the certification of agricultural produce and requires that food producers be inspected regularly.

Being compliant also means that farmers will have to be audited by Pick n Pay a few times a year. “You need to be compliant with the standards but you need money for this. You need to employ people for record-keeping, for item tracing, and to check the quality of your food,” said Jeptha.

Gaining a strong foothold in the market also means that you will need to be able to keep up with suppliers’ demands for a continuous high volume supply of vegetables – which small farmers usually cannot do. In order to make up for his small volume of produce, Simons and other small farmers are sometimes forced to buy from other farmers. “Pick n Pay requires tons of produce a day. I only produce 300 kilos a day,” said Jeptha.

Large retailers are less likely to invest in farmers who can only produce a small amount of produce a day. “Retailers are not going to travel a long distance just to get a small amount of carrots,” said Ian Gilfillian, a director of Ethical Co-op, a Cape Town based online organic market that assists small farmers by buying and selling their produce.

But Kevin Korb, commercial director of Pick n Pay, one of South Africa’s largest retailers, said Pick n Pay’s suppliers include the very small as well. “It is part of Pick n Pay’s philosophy to support small-scale vendors,” he said. But only a small percentage of Pick n Pay’s goods – roughly five percent – are purchased from the fresh produce market where small farmers sell their produce.

So how do small farmers cope? “Marketing holds the key to making profits”, said Jeptha. “You need to have contracts and a proper market. Your produce should be sold before you plant them. You must know where you are going to deliver it before you plant that seed,” he said. Farming short cycle crops is also key.

Simons farms green beans, baby marrows and gem squash – crops that can be harvested within eight weeks. Small farmers don’t venture into fruit farming. It can take up to three years for fruit trees to bear fruit, a major risk for the emerging small farmer who has little start up cash.

To help overcome these obstacles, Simons and Jeptha have decided to form their own small farmers co-operative along with Jeptha’s parents, Christine and Melvyn Jeptha, who are both organic farmers.

By forming a co-op, they hope to cut out the middleman – the agent at the market. In this way it would be more affordable to purchase a cold chain and get bigger volumes on a continuous basis – two aspects, which will help small farmers, get a strong foothold into the market.

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By IPS Correspondents
LILONGWE, Malawi, Dec 26 2010 (IPS)

As the rains start to fall in Malawi, marking the beginning of the growing season, government is continuing to implement the fertiliser and seed subsidy programme which has since made the country a bread basket in the Southern African Development Community, SADC.

Young woman working in a maize field Credit: Claire Ngozo

A 21 -year-old man, Jolam Ganizani, from Malawi’s central district of Ntchisi, is in police custody after he attempted to sell his own mother to use the money to buy fertiliser and seed.

Police prosecutor Sub Inspector Peter Njiragoma told local journalists last month that Ganizani had confessed to the police that he was so poverty- stricken that he felt that selling his mother would be the solution to his problems.

“He had wanted to use the money obtained from selling his mother to buy farm inputs which would assist him to grow a lot of crops and harvest more,” explained Njiragoma.

According to the police, Ganizani was working with a herbalist in Mozambique who advised him that his mother could be used as a slave by businesspeople.

Malawi is highly susceptible to human trafficking because of high levels of poverty, low literacy levels and HIV/AIDS, according to a local NGO, the Malawi Network Against Child Trafficking, MNACT.

MNACT Coordinator Maxwell Matewere told IPS this month that many women and children are facing exploitation and are being trafficked within and outside the country.

But Ganizani is not the only person desperate to access inputs for his agricultural activities. Another man, 22-year-old Pilirani Lazarous, is receiving medical care after he cut off his private parts in November and was offering them for sale in order to use the money to buy fertiliser for his one- hectare garden.

Speaking from his hospital bed at Kamuzu Central Hospital in the country’s capital, Lilongwe, Lazarous, a father of one, told IPS he was not on the list to access the subsidised fertiliser as he had failed to register and had to find a way of buying the “expensive fertiliser”.

He said he had heard that there is a vibrant market for private parts and that made him decide on selling his own. “Unfortunately, the first people I approached reported me to the police. I was immediately taken to the hospital and I am now so sad that I can’t buy fertiliser, despite that I am maimed for life,” said Lazarous.

According to the police both Ganizani and Lazarous are sane. However, without access to the coupons that allow people to access the subsidised fertiliser, many people continue to be desperate. The beneficiaries in the subsidy programme receive two coupons – one for accessing cheap seed and the other for buying fertiliser at a subsidised rate.

With a coupon, one is able to buy a 5 kilogramme bag of seed at just 65 cents and a 50 kilogramme bag of fertiliser at only $3. The normal market price for the same amount of seed is $12 and a 50 kilogramme bag of fertiliser is $33. Up to 60 percent of the country’s 13.1 million population lives below the poverty line, according to the United Nations. They cannot therefore afford to buy the inputs at the normal price and end up fighting tooth and nail to access the commodities.

Early this month two women, also from Lilongwe, were hospitalised with serious injuries after guards shot at them. The women were scrambling to gain access to the subsidised fertiliser.

Police confirmed the incident, explaining that the women were part of a big crowd who thought that the fertiliser had been delivered at the trading area would not be enough for everyone present. “The guards were trying to control the crowd and they ended up shooting some two women by accident,” said a police report released soon after the incident.

There have been many reports on government’s failure to provide enough subsidised inputs for beneficiaries of the subsidy programme to many parts of the country.

During the December 2010 sitting of Parliament, legislators took Minister of Agriculture Peter Mwanza to task on why the commodities were not available in many areas. Mwanza blamed the problems on “transportation problems”.

Principal Secretary in Ministry of Agriculture also said many farmers are rapidly buying the inputs and that this is putting pressure on the supply logistics to the outlets selling the subsidies.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, 1.6 million farming households are to benefit from this year’s subsidy.

Despite challenges at home with the agriculture subsidy programme, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s president, who is also African Union chairperson, is urging African ministers of agriculture and finance to lobby for subsidies in the agriculture sector. “I urge you ministers of agriculture and finance to stand up and fight for subsidies.

There is no way an African farmer can survive without subsidies,” Mutharika told an Africa Agriculture ministers’ summit which took place in Malawi in October 2010

Malawi experienced severe food shortages in 2005, when up to five million people faced hunger but just three years later the agricultural subsidy programme has ended up with a bumper harvest year after year.

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The loss of marine biodiversity is hurtling forward at an unprecedented rate. At present, the FAO calculates that nearly 80 percent of the world’s fishery resources are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted. Furthermore, marine scientists have suggested that if the current pace of exploitation continues, all fish stocks will have collapsed or disappeared by 2048.

Ricardo Aguilar, Oceana Scientific Director. Credit: Courtesy of Oceana

Measures put in place to manage marine resources have failed miserably. They have not only driven oceans into a critical state from an environmental perspective, but have also taken a socioeconomic toll on people and economies around the world. Eight percent of the global population supports itself directly or indirectly through the fishing industry, and over one billion people from the world’s poorest countries depend on fish as their main source of animal protein.

The European Commission acknowledges that 88 percent of stocks for which data exist are being exploited above sustainable levels. Meanwhile, our taste for fish continues to grow, and the biggest challenge that we must now face is how to balance our growing appetite with the proper management of the very oceans that provide for us. The EU has a responsibility to its fishers, its citizens and future generations, to reverse its tendency to overexploit and badly manage our resources.

A comprehensive approach – tackling the factors that contribute to the destruction of marine ecosystems, which include overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and climate change – is essential for turning the tide on the state of European (and global) oceans and fisheries.

The simple solution to overfishing is to fish less and more responsibly, and to start making changes now. By reducing catches today and fulfilling the EU’s commitment to achieve “maximum sustainable yield” by 2015, fishing stocks will be given a chance to recover, thereby increasing tomorrow’s fishing opportunities by up to 80 percent. Unfortunately it is not only a matter of reducing quotas, but also of limiting fleet capacity, enforcing gear selectivity, curbing illegal fishing, developing scientifically sound management plans, and creating marine sanctuaries where endangered populations can rebuild and thrive again.

One logical place to begin is curbing fishing practices that lead to high by- catch and discards rates. Every year, 7.3 million tonnes of catches worldwide are discarded – an amount close to the entire African continent’s annual seafood consumption.

In Europe, the news is just as bad. Recently, disturbing – though not surprising – reports reveal that upwards of 1/4 (some estimate 1/2) of North Sea catches are thrown back into the water, dead or dying.

Improving gear selectivity, such as using larger mesh sizes to allow juveniles to escape, is therefore a critical component of any proper management plan. It also plays an important role in preventing the destruction of habitats. Bottom trawlers, for example, which destroy entire seabeds in search of only a few species, should be phased out.

Meanwhile, illegal fishing still occurs. During annual at-sea expeditions, Oceana has observed and reported numerous ships in the Mediterranean still using driftnets – destructive fishing gear that was banned in 2002 by the EU.

Member States also sometimes overshoot quotas, as was the case with France in 2007, when it fished 5,192.6 tonnes over its annual bluefin tuna quota. Unless we have stricter enforcement of existing rules, objectives for sustainable management simply cannot and will not be met. What is worse is that EU subsidies themselves are sometimes unknowingly funding illegal activities.

With regards to the European fleet fishing illegally outside of EU waters, in addition to the obvious detrimental impact this has on marine ecosystems unable to handle the added pressure, it also prevents developing countries from benefiting from the bounty of their own seas.

To bring stocks back to acceptable levels, it is critical that a network of marine protected areas (MPAs) be developed, particularly in essential habitats. Besides environmental benefits, studies have demonstrated that these areas, which enable the regeneration of habitats and reproduction of species, are also economically profitable in the medium and long term. MPAs have been shown to cause a biomass spill over into surrounding waters as protected populations grow, thus increasing the size and volume of nearby catches.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) requires that a minimum of 10 percent of oceans be protected by 2012 – but countries around the world are failing miserably at meeting these objectives. In fact, the recent CBD meeting in Nagoya pushed back the 2012 target to 2020.

At present, less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans are in some way protected, although barely even 0.1 percent is fully protected. Meanwhile only 4 percent of the world’s ocean surface is considered to be “safe” from human impact.

The fisheries industry, marine ecosystems, and the livelihoods of millions are inextricably linked and must therefore all be considered in management plans. Unfortunately, current measures are simply not up to the task and often ignore scientific advice when it is available. In 2010, 48 percent of scientific recommendations on Total Allowable Catches (TAC) for EU fish stocks were ignored, and recent ministerial decisions on fishing opportunities for 2011 ignored 35 percent of recommendations.

Of course, none of this matters if regulations, quotas and TACs are not enforced. One of the greatest flaws of the current system is that too many countries and vessels are getting away with breaking the rules. This cannot go on any longer.

Finally, another factor affecting the state of the world’s oceans is climate change. Rising temperatures affect the abundance and distribution of species, and threaten vibrant coral reefs, through a phenomenon known as ‘coral bleaching’.

Meanwhile, as more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere, oceans, which act as filters for the planet, absorb too much of the gas, creating a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. This makes it harder for many organisms to build their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons, and prevents coral reefs from growing properly.

Restoring the oceans to their previous glory is a daunting task. The list of bad news seems endless, but real solutions do in fact exist. That is why we must not sit by and do nothing – the time to make these changes is now.

*Ricardo Aguilar is the Scientific Director at Oceana, the largest international conservation organization dedicated exclusively to the world’s oceans.

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Nov 19 2010 (IPS)

Rising food prices have not yet reached crisis levels but they are expected to remain very volatile for about the next decade, researchers said Thursday.

The conclusions were based on a new study of the factors that contributed to the 2007-08 food crisis, which researchers hope will shed light on what actions might be taken to avoid food crises in the future.

“There were many suspects for what caused the crisis, but little evidence,” said Derek Headey, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, who co- authored the report. “Three years on, there is more evidence.”

The IFPRI study cites a “perfect storm” of factors: rising energy prices, demand for biofuels, depreciation of the U.S. dollar, and a variety of trade shocks such as panic purchases, export restrictions and unfavorable weather.

Many of these factors have helped contribute to the rises in food prices that have occurred in the second half of this year, leading some to wonder whether another food price crisis might be on the horizon.

Headey and his co-author, IFPRI director general Shenggen Fan, think that possibility is still unlikely but hope that pinning down the causes of past crises will point out ways to mitigate the damage of future food price spikes before they get out of control.

They say their research disproves several prominent theories for what triggered the crisis, including dramatic increases in demand from India and China, declines in agricultural yields or the amount of grain held in reserve stocks, and speculation on futures markets.

Speculation could have played a role and that role should be examined further because it could exacerbate causes for price spikes in the future, says Headey, but it was not a driving factor in the price spikes.

After these prices peaked in summer 2008, the number of the world’s hungry crossed the one billion threshold in 2009 to reach an all-time high. The U.N.’s World Food Programme estimates that 925 million people will suffer from chronic hunger this year, a reduction of 9.6 percent but still above the pre-crisis number of 830 million hungry.

There have been fears that currently rising food prices could lead to another spike in these numbers.

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said Wednesday that it expects global cereal production to drop two percent this year, rather than rise 1.2 percent as it previously estimated. It also said the amount of food imported globally currently adds up to 893 billion dollars. If it were to pass the $1 trillion mark, it would be at a level not seen since the 2007-08 food price crisis.

Both these factors would have impacts on food prices, the agency said, though it noted that there is still no crisis as yet.

Since June wheat prices have increased by 60 percent and maize prices by 50 percent, but Fan says these increases are have not been rapid enough to warrant the “crisis” label.

He also says that there are larger food stocks in reserve now than in past years.

Food stocks, he says, could play a key role in helping to avoid future crises. Ideally, he would like to see the creation of a global grain reserve system to be administered by an agency like the WFP and have stocks located in geographically strategic locations around the globe in order to ensure that food prices – and the hunger they can lead to – can be avoided.

Fan also sees a need for a global warning system that would track not only food prices but energy prices, which have a lot of influence over the price of some foods, especially grain from the U.S.

“If we only focus on agriculture we’re going to miss the warning signals,” says Headey.

Energy prices have even more influence over food prices and production now with the emergence of biofuels, which siphon land and some crops, like maize, away from food markets. This emergence of biofuels acted as a sort of shock on food markets in 2007-08, helping to rapidly drive up prices, according to the IFPRI report released Thursday.

“It’s clear we need to stop subsidising biofuel,” says Fan. “It’s not a solution to climate change, environmental problems or increasing poor farmers’ incomes.”

He also cites inflation as a result of rising energy prices that can itself result in people being less able to afford food. This, he says, is currently happening in India and China. “If fuel prices continue to rise, I can guarantee you that food prices will rise as well,” he says.

But Fan is just as certain that steps like the creation of a global network of food stocks are critical to head off future emergencies. “I firmly believe that if these actions are taken we can avoid another crisis,” he says.

Even if the current rises in food prices do not turn into a full-blown crisis, the price volatility that is occurring today follows the pattern of past price crises. The spikes in commodity prices that occurred in 1974, for instance, had similar causes as those that led to the 2007-08 food price crisis, says Headey, and were followed by a decade of price volatility.

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By Zukiswa Zimela
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 14 2010 (IPS)

Chronic hunger is intensifying in Africa, despite the world’s commitment to address this Millennium Development Goal and reduce world hunger by half by 2015.

This is according to the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP), which said on Oct. 13 that 75 percent of the world’s ultra poor, those living on living on less than 50 cents per day, are in Africa.

World hunger and the progress of various social protection programmes in Africa and across the world were part of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) International Policy for Inclusive Growth dialogue held in Johannesburg from Oct. 11 to 13. The event brought together experts from 28 countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America for the south-south learning event on long-term social protection for inclusive growth.

Countries shared information on the different social protection programmes that they are implementing. And feedback was given by African countries on the progress they had made since March 2006 when leaders from 13 African countries met in Zambia to discuss ways of coming up with budgets to institute national protection programmes.

The Livingstone Declaration means that governments have to come up with ways to protect vulnerable populations in their countries by providing them with social protection; it also states that social security is a right.

Some governments have been reluctant to implement national social security programs on account of affordability; however, others have already started and seen significant benefits. In many cases not only have the beneficiaries used the money for their survival, but it also allowed them to improve their quality of life. For example; in Zambia and Botswana beneficiaries of cash transfer programmes also started sending their children back to school; and in Kenya children’s health was monitored.

In 2006 Chipata district in Zambia instituted the Chipata cash transfer scheme which benefits 1,101 households. Alfred Chibinga from CARE International, an organisation that works to defend the rights of the world’s poorest people, said that before the introduction of the Chipata scheme many of the poor, particularly the children, would beg on the streets to survive.

These children were too poor to attend school. They did not have enough money for food let alone the money to pay for school fees and school supplies such as uniforms, Chibinga said. But since the implementation of the programme, the benefits have been diverse.

Each household receives between 10 to 12.50 dollars per month. Those households with children of school-going age receive an extra 2.50 dollars per month for school supplies.

“With the coming of the social cash transfer we have seen an increase of these children going back to school, and their uniforms are in good condition. Some of them didn’t have uniforms and now they have uniforms and their faces look brighter,” Chibinga said.

The Chipata cash transfer programme has also raised the nutritional levels of households. Now, twelve percent more households consume proteins daily. Vulnerable families are identified by the community and are then registered to receive this grant.

Botswana’s social security program was implemented 11 years ago by the ministry of local government to benefit orphans under the age of 18. Children who are orphaned are provided with a food voucher worth 69 to 107 dollars per month.

Instead of actual food the beneficiaries are given a card that they swipe at grocery stores to get their parcels.

The country also has school feeding scheme that provides one meal per day to children in primary and secondary schools. These programs aim to minimise child malnutrition and stunting, while enhancing learning.

Papadi Nguvuava, deputy commissioner from the Botswana social benefits ministry says over the last decade these programs have had a positive impact on the number of children going to school.

“The attendance rate at the school was improved because of the feeding at school. Some children were leaving school because they didn’t have any food to eat, so they (were forced) to go and fend for themselves,” she said.

Nguavuava said that over the years, government found that orphans who were recipients of social security were no longer stigmatised. “For the orphans we have reduced stigma because now they look like all the other children.”

Kenya also gave feedback on the progress of one of its schemes. In 2004 the ministry of gender, children and social development in Kenya implemented a cash transfer for orphans and vulnerable children (OVT). Currently the beneficiaries receive 37 dollars every two months.

However, there are conditions attached to the grant. Each child up to the age of one has to attend a health facility for immunisation every two months.

Children aged between one to five years have to be taken to a health facility for growth monitoring and Vitamin A supplements every six months; while children between aged between six and 17 have to attend primary school and should not be absent for more than three days per month. This ensures that the beneficiaries are healthy and get an education.

Jacqueline Odour, the Secretary of Children Affairs at the ministry of gender, children and social development, says that currently 85,000 households are benefiting from the cash transfers.

“By the end of June next year we should cover about 122,000 households,” she said. The country has 2.4 million orphans.

Emmie Chanika from the Civil Liberties Committee in Malawi says social protection may seem expensive but it is much cheaper than having to deal with catastrophes of extreme poverty and hunger.

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