A view of the Altos de Florida neighborhood in Bogotá, Colombia. Overcoming poverty is the first of the Sustainable Development Goals, and in the Latin American and Caribbean region there is not only slow progress but even setbacks in the path to reduce it. CREDIT: Freya Mortales / UNDP

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Sep 15 2023 (IPS)

The Latin American and Caribbean region is arriving at the Sustainable Development Goals Summit on the right track but far behind in terms of progress, at the halfway point to achieve the SDGs, which aim to overcome poverty and create a cleaner and healthier environment.

“We are exactly halfway through the period of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but we are not half the way there, as only a quarter of the goals have been met or are expected to be met that year,” warned ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs."We are exactly halfway through the period of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but we are not half the way there, as only a quarter of the goals have been met or are expected to be met that year." -- José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs

However, the head of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) stressed, in response to a questionnaire submitted to him by IPS, that “the percentage of targets on track to be met is higher than the global average,” partly due to the strengthening of the institutions that lead the governance of the SDGs.

The 17 SDGs include 169 targets, to be measured with 231 indicators, and in the region 75 percent are at risk of not being met, according to ECLAC, unless decisive actions are taken to forge ahead: 48 percent are moving in the right direction but too slowly to achieve the respective targets, and 27 percent are showing a tendency to backslide.

The summit was convened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres for Sept. 18-19 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, under the official name High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

The stated purpose is to “step on the gas” to reach the SDGs in all regions, in the context of a combination of crises, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, new wars, and the climate and food crises.

The SDGs address ending poverty, achieving zero hunger, health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry, innovation and infrastructure, and reducing inequalities.

They also are aimed at sustainable cities and communities, responsible production and consumption, climate action, underwater life, life of terrestrial ecosystems, peace, justice and strong institutions, and partnerships to achieve the goals.

Drinking water is distributed from tanker trucks in the working-class Petare neighborhood in eastern Caracas. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is another of the goals that are being addressed with a great variety of results within Latin American and Caribbean countries, and there is no certainty that this 2030 Agenda target will be reached in the region. CREDIT: Caracas city government

Progress is being made, but slowly

“In all the countries of the region progress is being made, but in many not at the necessary rate. The pace varies greatly and we are not where we would like to be,” Almudena Fernández, chief economist for the region at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS from New York.

Thus, said the Peruvian economist, “there is progress, for example, on some health or energy and land care issues, but we are lagging in achieving more sustainable cities, and we are not on the way to achieving, regionally, any of the poverty indicators.”

Salazar-Xirinachs, who is from Costa Rica, said from Santiago that “the countries that have historically been at the forefront in public policies are the ones that have made the greatest progress, such as Uruguay in South America, Costa Rica in Central America or Jamaica in the Caribbean. They have implemented a greater diversity of strategies to achieve the SDGs.”

A group of experts led by U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs prepared graphs for the UN on how countries in the various developing regions are on track to meet the goals or still face challenges – measured in three grades, from moderate to severe – and whether they are on the road to improvement, stagnation or regression.

According to this study, the best advances in poverty reduction have been seen in Brazil, El Salvador, Guyana, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, while the greatest setbacks have been observed in Argentina, Belize, Ecuador and Venezuela.

In the fight for zero hunger, no one stands out; Brazil, after making progress, slid backwards in recent years, and the best results are shown by Caribbean countries.

In health and well-being, education and gender equality, there are positive trends, although stagnation has been seen, especially in the Caribbean and Central American countries.

In water and sanitation, energy, reduction of inequalities, economic growth, management of marine areas, terrestrial ecosystems, and justice and institutions, Sachs’ dashboard shows the persistence of numerous obstacles, addressed in very different ways in different countries.

Many countries in Central America and the Caribbean are on track to meet their climate action goals, and in general the region has made progress in forging alliances with other countries and organizations to pave the way to meeting the SDGs.

Young people in a Latin American country share a vegetable-rich meal outdoors. The notion of consuming products produced with environmentally sustainable techniques is gaining ground, and a private sector whose DNA is embedded in the search for positive environmental and social repercussions is flourishing. CREDIT: Pazos / Unicef

A question of funds

Even before the pandemic that broke out in 2020, Fernández said, the region was not moving fast enough towards the SDGs; its economic growth has been very low for a long time – and remains so, at no more than 1.9 percent this year – and growth with investment is needed in order to reduce poverty.

In this regard, Fernández highlighted the need to expand fiscal revenues, since tax collection is very low in the region (22 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 34 percent in the advanced economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), “although progress will not be made through public spending alone,” she said.

Salazar-Xirinachs pointed out that “in addition to financial resources, it is very important to adapt actions to specific areas to achieve the 2030 Agenda. The measures implemented at the subnational level are of great importance. Specific problems in local areas cannot always be solved with one-size-fits-all policies.”

Fernández underlined that the 2030 Agenda “has always been conceived as a society-wide agenda, and the private sector plays an essential role, particularly the areas that are flourishing because it has a positive social and environmental impact on their DNA, and there are young consumers who use products made in a sustainable way.”

ECLAC’s Salazar-Xirinachs highlighted sensitized sectors as organized civil society and the private sector, for their participation in sustainable development forums, follow-up actions and public-private partnerships moving towards achievement of the SDGs.

Finally, with respect to expectations for the summit, the head of ECLAC aspires to a movement to accelerate the 2030 Agenda in at least four areas: decent employment for all, generating more sustainable cities, resilient infrastructure that offers more jobs, and improving governance and institutions involved in the process.

ECLAC identified necessary “transformative measures”: early energy transition; boosting the bioeconomy, particularly sustainable agriculture and bioindustrialization; digital transformation for greater connectivity among the population; and promoting exports of modern services.

It also focuses on the care society, in response to demographic trends, to achieve greater gender equality and boost the economy; sustainable tourism, which has great potential in the countries of the region; and integration to enable alliances to strengthen cooperation in the regional bloc.

In summary, ECLAC concludes, “it would be very important that during the Summit these types of measures are identified and translate into agreements in which the countries jointly propose a road map for implementing actions to strengthen them.”

Experts say proper hygiene, especially during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life is critical. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Feb 15 2022 (IPS)

For two days in a row back in 2018, four-year-old Calvin Otieno suffered from diarrhoea and vomiting, and his mother responded by giving him a salt solution.

Pearl Otieno tells IPS that diarrhoea among children in Kibera, the largest urban informal settlement, is commonplace. A mixture of salt and warm water is often the go-to remedy.

“He did not seem to get worse, but he was not getting better either. He lay on the floor too weak to play,” she says.

It was too late by the time Otieno realized the magnitude of the situation and rushed her son to the nearby Mbagathi Hospital.

Kibera has long been synonymous with ‘flying toilets’, where residents relieve themselves in bags during nighttime and throw them away at dawn because they lack toilets inside their homes and fear using public toilets due to insecurity.

“Open defecation, flying toilets, lack of water and money to buy soap, people dumping household and human waste in open spaces is the life that children in the slums are exposed to,” says Nelson Mutinda, a Community Health Volunteer working hand-in-hand with a local NGO.

But Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) challenges are not limited to informal settlements in this East African nation.

Overall, even though Kenyans have access to safe drinking water at 59 percent, according to UNICEF statistics, only 29 percent of the population has access to basic sanitation.

In all, five million Kenyans practise open defecation, a problem that statistics by the World Bank show is similarly prevalent in many low- and middle-income countries.

Open defecation is prevalent in Chad, Benin, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Madagascar, Niger, Namibia, and Sao Tome and Principal. Only a handful of countries such as South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Seychelles, Mauritania, and the Gambia have successfully addressed access to sanitation.

World Health Organization (WHO) data indicates that Africa is not on track to achieve universal access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation in keeping with global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In the absence of increased investments in WASH interventions, the health body stresses that Africa will remain off track due to the added pressure from climate change and projected growth in population.

Against this backdrop, WHO says children in Sub-Saharan Africa are at least 14 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than children in developed nations.

According to government statistics, in Kenya, at least 64,500 children die every year before reaching the age of five. Three-quarters of these deaths occur before their first birthday.

Mary Wanjiru, a pediatric nurse at Mbagathi Hospital, tells IPS that, like Otieno, many die from preventable diseases because the primary cause of death is diarrhoea, pneumonia, or neonatal complications.

“It is very important for mothers to understand that proper hygiene, especially during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life, is a very important pillar of child health. Poor hygiene can lead to death or a child failing to reach their full developmental and growth potential,” she says.

“WASH interventions are pillars of maternal, newborn and general child health because they prevent life-threatening infections such as tetanus, diarrhoea, sepsis and helps reduce stunted growth.”

According to USAID research, proper hygiene is a fragile pillar in Africa’s low- and middle-income countries.

In all, 50 percent of health care facilities lack piped water, 33 percent lack improved sanitation, 39 percent lack handwashing soap, 39 percent lack adequate infectious waste disposal, and 73 percent lack sterilization equipment, research shows.

While WASH interventions, such as safe drinking water, proper handwashing practices, and even basic sanitation, could prevent an estimated 297,000 global deaths among children under the age of five every year, this goal is not within reach for many Sub-Saharan African countries.

Hand washing, says the WHO, is the single most cost-effective strategy to prevent pneumonia and diarrhoea in young children successfully.

Still, data from UNICEF and WHO Joint Monitoring Programme released in August 2020 shows that an estimated 818 million of the world’s children lacked basic handwashing facilities within their schools. Of these children, 295 million live in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Overall, seven out of 10 schools lacked basic handwashing facilities in the least developed countries worldwide.

It is within this context that UNICEF paints a dire picture. Over 700 children worldwide under the age of five die daily of diarrheal diseases because of a lack of appropriate WASH services.

Children in conflict situations are especially vulnerable because they are nearly 20 times more likely to die from diarrheal diseases than in conflict.

“For ten years, I have worked in four slums in Nairobi. I find it very shocking that people have not understood how serious diarrhoea in children is. But small children will be given a mixture of water and salt, and sometimes some herbs and people just take the situation very lightly,” Mutinda observes.

Wanjiru agrees. She says that diarrhoea can escalate to a fatality within a matter of hours, “by the time mothers rush to the hospital with children suffering from acute watery diarrhoea, it is sometimes a losing race against time. Any form of illness among children should never be a wait-and-see situation. Seek immediate medical attention.”

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Gabino Martínez cleans the "Tláloc", the tank that filters dust from the rainwater collection system in his home in the Tehuixtitla neighborhood in the Xochimilco district in southern Mexico City. During the May to November rainy season local residents collect the water they use for washing, bathing and cooking, due to the lack of access to piped water. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 5 2021 (IPS)

In neighbourhoods like Tehuixtitla in southern Mexico City, rain brings joy, because it provides water for showering, washing dishes and clothes, and cooking, by means of rainwater harvesting systems (RHS).

“When it starts to rain, we feel so happy. We clean and sweep so that there is no dust on the roof and gutters, and so the water doesn’t get dirty or clogged,” said Gabino Martínez, a resident of Tehuixtitla, part of the touristy municipality of Xochimilco, one of the 16 districts that make up Mexico City.

This is what the 63-year-old man told IPS, pointing to the roof of his house to show the infrastructure that makes it possible to collect rainwater to meet the family’s basic needs for part of the year.

Martínez, a married father of three who works as a handyman, still has a little water left from last November’s rains, and is counting the weeks until May brings the first drops, provided the climate crisis doesn’t modify the normal seasonal rainfall."A market and promotion policies have been developed. Rainwater harvesting relieves some of the demand in an autonomous fashion, reducing pressure on the government to provide the service. "Sometimes water is abundant in this country, but it is seasonal. That is why it is becoming increasingly important to harvest rain, because we cannot afford to waste what falls from the sky.” -- Enrique Lomnitz

“We don’t waste water here. Everything we store, we use,” said Martínez, who installed his system in 2008 at a cost of about 270 dollars and whose neighbourhood was the first in Xochimilco to have RHS, since the public water supply system does not reach this area nestled between hills.

Before rainwater began to be harvested, the people of Tehuixtitla, who today number some 2,500 spread over 11 streets, collected rainwater with makeshift systems and filtered it through cotton cloths. They also bought water from tanker trucks, known locally as pipas, which they then carried in jerry cans to their homes.

“Utilities” was just an abstract term in the dictionary. But through community organising, they have obtained electricity, telephone and internet services, essential for working and studying during the COVID pandemic.

The RHS consists of a receptacle, called “Tlaloc” because of its physical resemblance to the Aztec rain god, which filters dust out of the water before it runs into a 5,000 litre tank, to be distributed to the local supply network. The collectors allow two or three downpours to pass through first so the harvested water is cleaner.

Rain is the salvation

Rainwater can help this Latin American country of 126 million people face the water crisis which experts project will start in 2030, while it currently causes floods and landslides and generally ends up in the drainage system.

Rainwater harvesting reduces the need to obtain or import water from conventional sources, allows the creation of supply at specific points and does not depend on the traditional system.

At the same time, it can help Mexico achieve the goal of clean water and sanitation for the entire population, the sixth of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set for 2030.

The situation in greater Mexico City, home to more than 21 million people, is particularly delicate, as the metropolis is heading towards the so-called “Day Zero”, when it will no longer have enough water to meet its needs.

The city is the third most water-stressed of Mexico’s 33 administrative divisions, after the states of Baja California Sur, an arid territory in the extreme northwest of the country, and Guanajuato, located in the center-north and strained by agricultural activities.

Purchasing jerry cans of water transported by donkey is the alternative left to the inhabitants of Tehuixtitla and other neighbourhoods in the hills of the Xoxhimilco district, in the south of Mexico City, when the rainwater collected during the rainy season runs out and the supply of water from tanker trucks, locally known as “pipas”, is delayed. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Drought is raging this year in Mexico, especially in the capital, whose main source of water – the Lerma-Cutzamala dam and reservoir system in the neighbouring state of Mexico – is below half its capacity.

As a result, the local government has had to ration water in a city already under pressure from shortages.

In Mexico City, the largest metropolis in Latin America, some 15,000 people suffer from poor access to water and marginalisation, in eight municipalities in the south and southeast of the city, according to the 2019 study “Captación de lluvia en la CDMX: Un análisis de las desigualdades espaciales” (Rain catchment in Mexico City: An analysis of spatial inequalities), the latest edition published.

In addition, approximately 70 percent of the city’s residents have water available for less than 12 hours a day.

Government programmes have been operating in Mexico City since 2016 to provide RHS to neighbourhoods affected by a lack of water.

The “Rainwater Harvesting Systems in Mexico City Homes” programme, which in 2020 gave families about 900 dollars in subsidies, has installed more than 20,000 devices since 2018 in five municipalities on the outskirts of the city to the south and southeast.

By 2021, it will reach 529 neighbourhoods in eight municipalities in the capital. However, the programme only includes homes in urban areas. Households in shantytowns outside the city are considered to be located on land earmarked for conservation, and the classification of these neighbourhoods as occupying public land means they are denied services.

Mexico City’s constitution, in force since 2017, stipulates that the city will “guarantee universal water coverage and daily, continuous, equitable and sustainable access” and that it will incentivise rainwater harvesting.

But on the hills of the southern municipality of Tlalpan, for example, that constitutional article has not been enforced. That is why, for residents like Silvia Ávila, RHS systems have been the salvation.

“The situation was very difficult, we had no water. It was a big problem. The authorities at the time sent a tanker truck once a month, but we had to walk about a kilometre and pipe the water to our homes using hoses,” she told IPS during a visit to her house.

“It wasn’t enough water even for our basic needs. There were people who didn’t even have a water tank to store water. This was a desert because of the lack of water and services,” she said, explaining the transformation that RHS has meant for families in the neighbourhood.

With the installation of a 10,000-litre system in 2011, for which she paid about 230 dollars, much more than her access to water changed.

“When it rains, we can meet our basic needs,” said Ávila, a widowed homemaker and mother of four. “Every house has a system. It has allowed many to live off their own crops. We have become sustainable, little by little. After arriving here, the programme was expanded to several nearby towns.”

Water storage containers are part of the landscape in the streets of Tehuixtitla. Residents of this neighbourhood in southern Mexico City keep them next to their homes to supplement their water supply by buying water from tanker trucks, which they store in jerry cans, some faded by the sun and others new, and then pump it into their homes. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Paraje Quiltepec resembles an ecovillage. Its 30 families use biodigesters, make vermicompost, recycle water, raise chickens and grow fruits and vegetables.

In the dry season, neighbourhoods like Tehuixtitla and Paraje Quiltepec buy tanker truckloads of between 6,000 and 10,000 litres for 50 dollars per household. In the former, the local government also helps, distributing 800 litres a week.

Not only Mexico City suffers from water shortages

The Mexican capital reflects the water problems in this vast country with an area of 1.96 million square kilometres, 67 percent of which is arid and semi-arid and 33 percent of which is humid.

In 2020, Mexico received more than 722 millimetres of rainfall per day, below the average of 779 in recent years.

Although Mexico had a low degree of pressure in 2017 – 19.5 percent – its risk of water stress is high, according to the Aqueduct platform, developed by the Aqueduct Alliance, made up of governments, companies and foundations.

In fact, it is the second most water-stressed country in the Americas, behind Chile. It may suffer from water stress in 2040 all the way from the center to the north.

Enrique Lomnitz, founder of the civil association Isla Urbana, a pioneer in rainwater harvesting that installed the systems in Tehuixtitla and Paraje Quiltepec, pointed to the progress made in the last decade with regard to the adoption of rainwater harvesting.

“A market and promotion policies have been developed. Rainwater harvesting relieves some of the demand in an autonomous fashion, reducing pressure on the government to provide the service,” the promoter of the initiative explained to IPS.

“Sometimes water is abundant in this country, but it is seasonal. That is why it is becoming increasingly important to harvest rain, because we cannot afford to waste what falls from the sky,” he said.

Lomnitz noted that downpours increase the availability of water and are the only source of water in several areas of the capital.

Since 2009, Isla Urbana, the winner of several international awards, has installed some 21,000 RHS throughout the country.

The National Programme for Rainwater Harvesting and Ecotechnics in Rural Areas (Procaptar) was launched in 2016, benefiting 4,500 people in 114 municipalities between 2018 and 2020. In 2021, it will help 11,500 inhabitants in 63 municipalities.

The 2019 report estimated that the installation of 105,000 RHS would improve conditions for about 41,500 people.

The 2019 “Internal Evaluation of the Rainwater Harvesting Systems in Mexico City Homes Programme” concluded that the programme met its physical goals in the installation of systems, and reported good acceptance and satisfaction among beneficiaries.

In addition, it recommended improving adoption of the system, especially in maintenance, performance indicators and gender perspective. The 2020 review has not yet been published.

In Tehuixtitla people are not waiting. Local residents are designing a pumping system with the state-owned National Water Commission to provide them with drinking water, at a cost of about 1,750 dollars per household.

“It’ll improve living conditions here,” Martinez said enthusiastically.

Lomnitz suggested creating incentives for rainwater harvesting, reviewing service subsidies and encouraging wastewater treatment and reuse.

“In the city the situation is very serious, so measures are needed to take care of water,” he said. “There is a range of possible solutions, such as recycling water or using water-saving devices. Rainwater harvesting is one of several elements that need to be worked on to address the crisis. But it alone will not solve the problem.”

High-density polyethylene pipe is laid on a street in the Cuban capital, where the Aguas de La Habana water company is upgrading the water supply networks in the municipality of Centro Habana. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

With the construction of aqueducts, water purification and desalination plants, and investments to upgrade hydraulic infrastructure, Cuba is seeking to manage the impacts of droughts and floods that are intensifying with climate change.

The “initiative to strengthen hydrological monitoring” in Cuba, signed in Havana on Feb. 11, aims to boost capacities to measure, transmit, process and analyse hydrological variables and systematically assess water availability at the national level.

According to water sector authorities, the modernisation and optimisation of hydrological observation networks will be an essential component of early warning systems for floods and droughts.

The initiative will be implemented by the National Water Resources Institute (INRH), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and funding from Russia.

It also plans to redesign the observation network for both groundwater and surface water quality, explained INRH Director of Hydrology and Hydrogeology Argelio Fernandez.

The initiative is in line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which calls on governments to ensure availability and sustainable management of water, as well as sanitation.

It also responds to national policies and priorities contained in “Tarea Vida”, the government plan in place since 2017 to address climate change.

Among its multiple strategic guidelines, the plan aims to ensure the availability and efficient use of water to cope with droughts, based on the application of technologies to save water and meet local demand.

It also urges the optimisation of hydraulic infrastructure and its maintenance, as well as the introduction of actions to measure water efficiency and productivity.

The Ejército Rebelde reservoir is located near the Parque Lenin recreational complex in Havana. Cuba has more than 240 dams with a reservoir capacity of over nine billion cubic metres of water, as part of the infrastructure designed to guarantee a water supply to the population and promote industrial development plans, agricultural irrigation and flood control. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Pathways for water

The long, narrow shape of the island of Cuba, the largest in the Cuban archipelago, means many rivers are short and the water flow is low and highly dependent on rainfall, more abundant in the May to October wet season and during the passage of tropical storms.

With average annual rainfall of 1,330 mm, the records show that rains are increasingly scarce, particularly in the eastern region where the country’s longest and largest rivers, the Cauto and Toa, respectively, are located.

From 2014 to 2017, the country faced the greatest drought in 115 years, affecting 70 percent of the national territory.

Studies predict that Cuba’s climate will tend toward less rainfall, higher temperatures and more intense droughts, and that by 2100 water availability could be reduced by more than 35 percent.

Another consequence of climate change is that sea levels are projected to rise, a phenomenon that will aggravate saltwater intrusion, to which 574 human settlements and 263 water supply sources are currently vulnerable, according to official figures.

Law No. 124 of the Land Water Law has been guiding the integrated and sustainable management of water since 2017, while the new constitution in force since April 2019 protects the right of Cubans to drinking water and sanitation, with due remuneration and rational use.

Since 1959, the government has promoted an ambitious engineering programme for artificial water reservoirs, to guarantee the water supply for a population that almost doubled to 11.2 million inhabitants since then, and to promote plans for industrial development and agricultural irrigation.

The data shows that from just over a dozen small reservoirs six decades ago, there are now more than 240 in the 15 provinces and the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud – the second largest island in the archipelago – with a storage capacity of more than nine billion cubic metres.

According to the 2020 Statistical Yearbook, more than 95 percent of the Cuban population has access to drinking water, but only 86.5 percent of the urban population and 42.2 percent of the rural population receives piped water at home.

Workers of the Aguas de La Habana water company lay a high-density polyethylene pipe to supply drinking water in the Peñas Altas district, near Guanabo beach, in eastern Havana. Part of the hydraulic investments made by Cuba in the sector are supported by international cooperation through projects and funds from other countries and international organisations. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Despite the economic crisis the country has suffered for three decades and the impact of the U.S. embargo since 1962, in recent years millions of dollars have been invested to mitigate the water deficit and improve water quality.

Among the engineering works, the water transfer aqueducts stand out, with more than a dozen throughout the country, considered strategic pillars in building resilience to the effects of climate change.

These interconnected systems of dams, canals, aqueducts, tunnels and bridges transfer water hundreds of kilometres from places where it is abundant to agricultural and industrial areas and human settlements.

They also make it possible to control floods, lessen the impact of drought and allow the siting of hydroelectric power plants.

Cuba has three plants that produce high-density polyethylene pipes 1,200 mm in diameter for laying new aqueducts and to replace the aging and leaking hydraulic infrastructure that in some cities is over 100 years old.

It also seeks to prioritise the manufacture of fittings and parts for domestic water supply networks, where almost a quarter of the piped water is lost.

Of the total investment in the water system, which in recent years has averaged more than 400 million pesos (16.5 million dollars) a year, more than half comes from the government budget for construction and assembly.

The rest comes from international cooperation through projects and funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, Spain, France and the OPEC Fund for International Development.

Thanks to these investments, in the 2018-2020 period, desalination plants were inaugurated in the provinces of Havana, Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba, Granma, Guantánamo and the municipality of Isla de la Juventud, in order to create easy access points in populations affected by high levels of salinity in their water supply sources.

Meanwhile, in Camagüey, the third most populated city in Cuba located 538 km east of the capital, a water treatment plant with a capacity to process 1,800 litres of water per second is nearing completion, which will make it the largest in the country.

Although the water that reaches most homes is treated and chlorinated, people remain concerned about the presence of microorganisms or salt that require boiling.

“It would be useful if shops sold water filters more frequently and at affordable prices, because they help protect our health,” a Havana resident, Yolanda Soler, told IPS.

However, building resilience also involves encouraging a water culture in the business and private sectors and among citizens as a whole, hydroeconomics engineer Luis Bruzón, who lives in the western province of Mayabeque, told IPS in a telephone interview.

“Do we know how much water is used to produce a ton of a given agricultural or industrial product or to provide a specific service?” asked Bruzón, who believes that having such data would improve decision-making in a nation that must increasingly optimise and save water.

Employees work on the solar panels of the El Romero plant, with a capacity of 196 megawatts, in the desert region of Atacama in northern Chile, a country that has set out to develop its solar power potential. CREDIT: Acciona

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 29 2020 (IPS)

The oil slump, global recession and uncertainty about the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic will fuel the appetite for cheaper fossil fuel energy and delay investments in renewables, affecting the targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The countries of the developing South, and in particular oil exporters, will be affected as suppliers to shrinking economies and as seekers of investment in clean energy, in a world that will compete fiercely for low-cost recovery, warned experts consulted by IPS.

The crises, “in view of the abundance and low prices of oil, far from accelerating a change of era that would leave behind fossil fuels and embrace renewable energies, will postpone for a long time that aim, outlined in the SDGs,” said Venezuelan oil expert Elie Habalián.

One of the targets of SDG 7, which calls for affordable clean energy, is to “increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix” by 2030.

This is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change, signed in 2015, which enters into force at the end of this year. The accord includes energy transition measures: national contributions to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb the increase in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

These commitments are undermined by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will cause a severe recession, with the global economy projected to shrink three percent this year and six percent in large countries in the North like the United States and in the South like Brazil.

With that forecast, “it seems that the efforts of governments will tend to sustain and deepen the extractivist model, including hydrocarbons,” said researcher María Marta di Paola, of Argentina’s Environment and Natural Resources Foundation.

In 2018, according to British oil giant BP, global consumption of primary energy (the energy embodied in natural resources before undergoing any human-made conversions or transformations) was 13,865 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe), with a predominance of fossil fuels: oil 33.6 percent, coal 27.2 percent and gas 23.8 percent.

Hydroelectricity represented 6.8 percent and sources strictly considered renewable (solar, wind, geothermal, marine, biomass) contributed just 561 Mtoe, or 4.04 percent.

The Paris Agreement, aimed at adapting to and mitigating the climate emergency, establishes that developing countries will take longer to comply with the agreement and that the reductions to which they commit will be made on the basis of equity and in the context of their fight against poverty and for sustainable development.

But in the face of the crises caused by the pandemic, many of the 196 signatory countries, “seeking to take advantage of their installed capacity and regulate impacts on employment and consumption, will relax environmental standards and miss the opportunity to begin a clean, fair and inclusive energy transition,” said Di Paola.

Lisa Viscidi of the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue said that “although rates of return are currently higher for renewables than for fossil fuels, there are indications that it will be difficult to attract investment in solar or wind energy before demand recovers.”

View of a gas plant in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, a major oil exporter. The outlook of abundant oil and lower prices in the midst of the crisis points to intense demand for and use of fossil fuels in the short and even medium term. CREDIT: ADNOC

She cited “the plunge in demand for electricity due to the self-isolation (to curb the spread of COVID-19), which strongly impacts the auctions of renewables, leading to their cancellation” – a reference to the mechanism for buying and selling electricity between suppliers and distributors.

With the collapse of oil prices, governments like those of Latin America “will not be inclined towards renewable energy for now, calculating that it could have higher costs,” said Viscidi, head of the energy area in her organisation.

But also when the current world health crisis ends, “the post-pandemic economy will pose insurmountable obstacles for many countries in the global South to achieve a transformation of their energy mix,” said Alejandro López-González, an expert in sustainability from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain.

This, he argued, is because “the transformation of the energy mix in countries of the South depends on trade in commodities with industrialised countries,” that is, on securing good markets and prices for their products, which provide revenue with which to adopt cleaner energy sources.

Throughout the developing South, the global recession will result in fewer exports, business closures, job losses, lower tax revenues and reduced investment, according to projections by multilateral bodies, leaving capital- and technology-intensive initiatives, such as solar or wind farms, without resources.

Currently, in the developing South, only India, with solar and wind energy plants, and Brazil (wind and biomass) are attempting to keep up with the giants that possess large non-conventional clean energy installations: China, the United States, Germany and Japan.

In 2018, renewable energies represented only 9.3 percent, or 2,480 of the 26,615 terawatts (1 Tw = 1 billion kilowatts) of electricity generation in the world, versus 10,100 Tw contributed by coal, 6,189 by gas and 4,193 by water sources.

Peter Fox-Penner, head of Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, said in an article distributed by The Conversation that “Economy-driven demand reductions, which are likely worldwide, will hurt new renewable installations.

“Utilities will tighten their budgets and defer building new plants. Companies that make solar cells, wind turbines, and other green energy technologies will shelve their growth plans and adopt austerity measures,” in the context of the global recession, he wrote.

But “Countervailing factors will partly offset this decline, at least in wealthy countries,” Fox-Penner said. “Many renewable plants are being installed for reasons other than demand growth, such as clean power targets in state laws and regulations,” and public pressure that forces utilities to close down coal-fired power plants, he added.

The outlook for oil

Along these lines, Venezuelan economist José Manuel Puente predicted that “the energy transition will happen, there are more and more regulations, electric and hybrid cars, and the problem for Venezuela, Nigeria or Mexico is that we will remain poor countries with deposits of black sludge underground.”

López-González is also in favour of countries like Venezuela – with an enormous potential for wind energy due to the strong, constant trade winds that blow in the northwest – fully exploiting their hydrocarbon resources in order to finance changes in their energy mix.

But these strategies were suspended for members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and for other crude oil producers, when oil prices collapsed to the point that on Apr. 20 they reached negative values, for the first time in history.

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate was quoted that day on the New York futures market at -37 dollars per barrel, 50 dollars below its opening price that day of 13 dollars.

The prices plunged because, as stockpiles overwhelmed storage facilities, buyers did not want to be forced to receive agreed shipments for delivery on that “Black Monday”, and preferred to assume the cost of getting out of the commitment.

That day illustrated the decline in demand that had already started before the arrival of coronavirus in Europe and the Americas, and which gave rise in March to a supply reduction agreement between the 11 OPEC partners and 10 other exporters.

The recession triggered by COVID-19 will mean that the world will consume 30 percent less this year: 70 million barrels a day of oil, down from 100 million in 2019.

This oil crisis “brings very bad news for producers in the Gulf, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and others: it is the end of absolute income, and the extreme minimisation of the differential income of oil,” said Habalián, a former Venezuelan ambassador to OPEC.

For years, oil exporting nations benefited from setting reference prices for oil before it reached the markets. And in addition, due to the wide gap between costs and prices, they piled up profits that are being pulverised by the current crisis.

Also affected are dozens of companies facing bankruptcy since the growing demand and strong oil prices had allowed them to extract, mainly in the United States, shale oil and gas by means of fracking (hydraulic fracturing), an environmentally questionable technique.

Finally, the energy landscape will be impacted by the behaviors that consumers adopt in the wake of the pandemic – such as their use of energy or demand for travel – or by changes in labour relations after the extensive experiment in off-site work as a result of the COVID-19 self-isolation.

Workers produce charcoal in Andrequice, a town in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. The activity employs large numbers of workers who are subjected to modern slavery, in addition to damaging the environment by deforesting large areas. It was a frequent target of inspections carried out by the Mobile Inspection Team for Combating Slave Labour, especially during the first decade of this century. Credit: Courtesy of João Zinclar/CPT

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 5 2020 (IPS)

“Slave labour is not declining; it has taken on new forms and is growing; it expanded to new sectors where it did not previously exist,” said Ivanete da Silva Sousa, an activist in the fight against modern-day slavery in northern Brazil.

This scourge expanded from livestock farming, charcoal and sugar production and other rural activities to urban areas: the construction and textile industries, among other sectors, she told IPS.

As one of the founders of the Centre for the Defence of Life and Human Rights (CDVDH), created in 1996, Sousa has monitored the evolution of contemporary slavery, characterised by forced labour, excessive working hours, degrading conditions, and restrictions on freedom of movement, as typified by the Brazilian Penal Code.

The Centre was born in Açailandia, in the west of the state of Maranhão, because this municipality of 112,000 inhabitants was a hub of slave labour to produce the charcoal consumed by the local iron and steel industry, which exports pig iron, a product of smelting iron ore that is used in the production of steel."The discovery of slave labour in new parts of Brazil and new branches of activity revealed situations that probably existed already, but which until then no one had reported or which had not been sufficiently or properly investigated.” -- Xavier Plassat

It was also a hotbed of trafficking of virtually captive workers, as it was located on the border of Maranhão, the largest supplier of labour for degrading and illegal work, together with Pará, the Amazon jungle state where slavery conditions are rife.

For these reasons Carmen Bascarán, a Catholic lay missionary from Spain, chose Açailandia as the headquarters of the CDVDH, to put into practice her ideas to help the poor. She was the soul and leader of the Centre, which added her name to its own when she returned to her home country in 2011.

Street vendors of hammocks made in Ceará, another neighbouring state to the east, are recent examples of workers in slavery-like conditions identified in Maranhão, Sousa said from Açailandia in her dialogue with IPS.

Stores are also taking advantage of the new facilities provided by the use of the “hour bank”, adopted in the 2017 reform of the labour laws, to force their employees to work many extra hours and give up their weekly day off, without the obligatory compensation.

“Hours worked accumulate,” but the compensation in hours off in later days, as stipulated by the law, “never arrives,” said the activist, the administrative secretary of the CDVDH for the past six years.

The 2017 reform, defended as an adaptation to the current conditions in the economy and labour relations, offered new opportunities for the “modernisation” of slave labour: “It became more difficult for people to detect slave labour,” Sousa said.

A poster from the latest gathering of workers rescued from neo-slavery conditions. Since 2014, the Centre for the Defence of Life and Human Rights has been organising these annual meetings, which are held in different locations in the state of Maranhão every year on May 13, the day the abolition of slavery in Brazil (in 1888) is commemorated. In the gatherings, workers discuss their experiences and how to overcome poverty and inequality in order to eradicate slave labour. Credit: Courtesy of CDVDH

The statistics collected by different government agencies engaged in the fight against slave labour also point to a complex picture which has evolved over time.

The Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) processed the data gathered from 1995 – when Brazil acknowledged the problem and began to combat it systematically – to 2019.

In the past 25 years, a total of 54,778 workers were rescued from slavery or degrading conditions by the authorities, especially the Mobile Inspection Team, which brings together people from the ministry of labour, the labour prosecutors office, and the police.

The crackdown on modern-day slavery intensified in the 2003-2010 period, when more than 3,000 workers were freed each year, with a record 6,001 rescued in 2007. Since then the number has dropped steadily, to 1,050 last year.

In this process, the rescue operations that were concentrated in the agricultural frontiers of the Amazon jungle states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Maranhão spread throughout the country, to the wealthier and more industrialised southern and southeastern regions as well.

Since 2006, the phenomenon has been expanding in urban areas, especially the construction and textile industries.

“The discovery of slave labour in new parts of Brazil and new branches of activity revealed situations that probably existed already, but which until then no one had reported or which had not been sufficiently or properly investigated,” Xavier Plassat, who coordinates the CPT’s campaign against contemporary slavery, told IPS.

“These statistics have to be analysed carefully”, because they can lead to misleading conclusions, Plassat, a Dominican friar, warned in an interview.

Xavier Plassat, a French friar of the Dominican Catholic order, who has lived in Brazil since 1989, gives Pope Francis, during an audience at the Vatican in April 2019, a booklet from the Brazilian Pastoral Land Commission’s campaign against slave labour, which he coordinates. Credit: Courtesy of the Pastoral Land Commission

The large number of workers rescued in the first decade of this century, for example, was due to inspections in the sugar industry, which identified in one fell swoop hundreds of workers subjected to abusive conditions during the sugarcane harvest, he pointed out.

That situation changed quickly with the mechanisation of cane cutting, imposed by local governments in response to air pollution in nearby cities, created by the practice of pre-harvest sugar cane field burning.

In the sectors of cattle breeding and farming, where some employers are abusive, there was a similar attempt to reduce the workforce by means of mechanisation, and to reduce the use of agrochemicals as well, said Plassat, who is from France and has lived in Brazil for 31 years.

In the charcoal industry, modern-day slavery was reduced by the heavy scrutiny and inspections triggered by multiple complaints, as well as by the loss of a large part of its market due to the crisis in the pig iron trade.

Finally, Plassat added, the economic recession in Brazil, which began in 2015, led to high unemployment, which made it less likely for workers afraid of losing their incomes – even when earned in terrible conditions in poor-paying jobs – to report abuses.

Complaints, and thus inspections and rescue operations, also fell off, possibly because employers resorted to different tactics to circumvent the crackdown on this form of trafficking in persons.

“They started to use smaller groups of workers, in short-term tasks, to avoid the risk” of being caught, said the friar, who also explained that employers abandoned the practice of transporting workers in large groups over long distances, to escape detection.

In the Amazon, “there is ‘surgical’ deforestation, which is on a smaller-scale and takes place in protected areas, where satellite images reveal nothing,” he said.

The result is that fewer workers in slavery conditions are detected, even though inspection operations have not been reduced.

Efforts to combat the phenomenon now require “more intelligence in the inspections, examining the companies’ books,” for example, he said.

The central government reduced the budget for the agencies fighting slave labour. However, the rescue operations continue because local authorities in some states are making a great effort, albeit with limited resources, to fight the problem.

Minas Gerais, Bahia, São Paulo and Goiás are the states that presented the best results in recent years, said Plassat from Araguaina, the city of 180,000 inhabitants where he lives in the central state of Tocantins, near Maranhão and Pará, the areas where the most numerous rescue operations were carried out in the first decade of the century.

The CPT and the CDVDH, which form part of the Integrated Action Network to Combat Slavery (Raice) that promotes initiatives aimed at “breaking the cycle of slave labour” in the heavily affected states of Maranhão, Pará, Tocantins and Piauí, stress the need for prevention rather than merely repression.

Addressing the vulnerabilities and lack of local alternatives that drive people into migration and forced labour, and training rescued victims to keep them from falling back into the trap, are necessary measures to effectively eradicate the new types of slavery.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Teenage girls harvest tomatoes on a farm in the state of Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. It is in this part of the country that migrant workers, mainly from the southern states, work in exploitative conditions facing serious violations of their rights. Credit: Courtesy of Instituto Sinaloense para la Educación de los Adultos (Sinaloa Institute for Adult Education)

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 9 2019 (IPS)

“They mislead the workers, tell them that they will be paid well and pay them much less. The recruiters and the employers deceive them,” complained Marilyn Gómez, a migrant farm worker in Mexico.

Gómez, a member of the Mixteco Yosonuvico of Sonora Cerró Nublado cooperative and the mother of two girls, told IPS that the migrant workers are forced to buy whatever they need in their employers’ stores – “where everything is super expensive” – because they aren`t allowed to leave the farm.

“There’s no social security, no contracts, we work very long hours. They take advantage of the fact that people need work,” said Gómez, who began to work in the fields with her family at the age of 13, picking grapes and vegetables in the northern state of Sonora."There is a recruitment chain in which the recruiters offer people work and an advance payment to draw them in, but there is no contract. In some places, they don't get paid until the end of the work period." -- Mayela Blanco

The 27-year-old migrant worker and activist, who has worked sick and has frequently worked for more than 12 hours a day for just a few dollars, has harvested fruit and vegetables near the town of Miguel Aleman, part of the municipality of Hermosillo, about 1,600 kilometers north of Mexico City.

Her account illustrates the working conditions of migrant farm workers, who provide substantial returns to their employers and who put vegetables and fruit on the tables of Mexican and U.S. consumers.

They are generally peasant farmers who migrate temporarily or permanently from the southern states to harvest export crops in central and northern Mexico.

They routinely suffer violations of labour rights, and of their rights to housing, education, health and a healthy diet.

And they lack work contracts, adequate working conditions, social security and overtime pay, according to the report “Violations of the rights of agricultural day laborers in Mexico“, launched on Mar. 21 in Mexico City by the National Network of Agricultural Day Labourers, to which Gómez belongs.

In Mexico, migrant farm workers or day labourers are the main victims of slave or forced labour, according to this and other local and international studies. The National Network, made up of workers’, indigenous and academic organisations, has identified cases of labour exploitation, human trafficking and forced labour and/or services.

The latest National Survey of Occupation and Employment, from 2017, placed the number of migrant farm workers at 2.9 million, while the governmental Programme of Care for Agricultural Day Laborers put the figure at 1.54 million, plus 4.41 million family members who follow them as they move about.

The government of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office on Dec. 1, dismantled the programme and has not yet put in place its successor.

Regional context

There are 1.95 million victims of slave labour in the Americas, five percent of the world total, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, produced by the non-governmental Walk Free Foundation, based in Australia.

Forced labour represents 66 percent and persons, especially women, in forced marriage, account for 34 percent. The region has, on average, a prevalence of 1.9 people living in modern-day slavery per 1,000 inhabitants.

Participants in the Network of Agricultural Day Labourers – including Marilyn Gómez (C) – take part in the Mar. 21 presentation in Mexico City of a report that illustrates the modern-day slavery conditions faced by migrant workers in Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

And one-third of the victims of forced labour were in debt bondage, while the Latin America and Caribbean region accounted for four percent of all exploited labourers in the world.

While Haiti, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic had the highest rates, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia had the absolute largest numbers of people in situations of slavery.

In Brazil, Latin America’s giant, with a population of 208 million, 369,000 people were living in modern-day slavery, representing 1.8 per 1,000 inhabitants.

In Mexico, the second largest regional economy with 129 million inhabitants, 341,000 people were living in slavery conditions, or 2.71 per 1,000 people, while in Colombia, the fourth largest regional economy with a population of 45 million, the figure was 131,000, or 2.7 per 1,000.

Modern-day slavery includes human trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, and commercial sexual exploitation, according to the Walk Free Foundation.

For Mayela Blanco, a researcher at the non-governmental Center for Studies in International Cooperation and Public Management, migrant farm workers in Mexico are vulnerable to falling prey to trafficking for labour exploitation.

“There is a recruitment chain in which the recruiters offer people work and an advance payment to draw them in, but there is no contract. In some places, they don’t get paid until the end of the work period,” Blanco told IPS.

There are a growing number of studies on this phenomenon in the Mexican countryside, and there has been no improvement for day labourers.

The “2018 List of goods produced by child labor or forced labor“, published by the U.S. Department of Labor, includes reports on people forced to work in the production of chili peppers in Mexico.

“Many of these victims report being recruited by middlemen, called enganchadores, that lie to workers about the nature and conditions of the work, wages, hours, and quality of living conditions,” the document states.

Cases of forced labour in chili peppers production predominantly occur on small and medium-sized farms and have been found in states such as Baja California, Chihuahua, Jalisco, and San Luis Potosi, according to the report.

“Once on the farms, some men and women work up to 15 hours per day under the threat of dismissal and receive subminimum wage payments or no payment at all,” it adds.

Meanwhile, “Some workers face growing indebtedness to company stores that often inflate the prices of their goods, forcing workers to purchase provisions on credit and limiting their ability to leave the farms,” the report says.

In Mexico, the company stores on factories and rural estates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were known as “tiendas de raya”, where the workers were forced to buy their provisions – just like the company stores of today.

The U.S. list also includes cattle ranches and peanut farms in Bolivia, textile factories and logging companies in Brazil, and Brazil nut harvesting and the logging industry in Peru.

Washington bans the entry of goods produced with forced labour, under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, in force since 2016 and based on the old Tariff Act of 1930.

Since 2015, the governmental National Human Rights Commission has issued at least six recommendations for violations of the rights of migrant farm workers, which are non-binding proposals.

In one of them, issued in 2018 for violations of several human rights for trafficking in persons, such as child labour in the form of forced labour, the Mexican Commission highlighted abuses against at least 62 migrant workers belonging to the Mixtec indigenous people, including 13 adolescents.

The members of the indigenous group, originally from the central state of Guerrero, were harvesting cucumbers in the western state of Colima.

Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, number eight, which promotes decent work, sets among its targets the implementation of “immediate and effective” measures to eradicate forced labour, ban modern forms of slavery and human trafficking, and ensure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour.

Despite some advances and international commitments, Latin America and the Caribbean are making only moderate progress in the fight against this phenomenon.

The Global Slavery Index gave the region an average rating of “B” and indicated that Argentina, Chile and Peru improved their status compared to 2016, while Brazil, Mexico and Central American countries remained the same.

Blanco says the conditions faced by migrant workers in Mexico are seen as normal and that they are not considered victims. “They run the risk of losing their jobs. We have not seen a response from the authorities,” she said.

Gómez, who is still a migrant worker harvesting fruit and vegetables but now in decent conditions, said the government should intervene. “The institutions don’t do what they are supposed to do; we are asking that they take action and ensure our rights,” the activist said.

The National Network made recommendations such as a census of employers, the monitoring of working conditions, a comprehensive programme to address the issue and a census of migrant workers.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) http://gsngoal8.com/ is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rohingya girls taking religious education lessons at a Madrasah in the camps. Globally, 75 percent of refugees of secondary education age are not in school. In Bangladesh, Kenya, and Pakistan, the figure is closer to 95 percent. Credit: Kamrul Hasan/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2019 (IPS)

Globally, youth are being left behind in education and employment, threatening the future vision of sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous societies.

In a new report, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) highlight the need to pay attention to and invest in youth as they are critical to building the world’s future including by helping achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“Youth are being referred to as the “torchbearers” of the 2030 Agenda and have a pivotal role to play both as beneficiaries of actions and policies under the Agenda and as partners and participants in its implementation,” the report states.

“A few years into the implementation of the Agenda, unacceptably high numbers of young people are still experiencing poor education and employment outcomes, and future prospects remain uncertain,” it adds.

Today, there are 1.2 billion young people between 15 to 24 years, representing 16 percent of the global population. Despite advances in technology and information dissemination, attending school remains elusive to many.

Around the world, over 260 million children under the age 19 were out of school in 2014. Of them, 142 million were of upper secondary age.

The disparities between and within countries are even more stark—84 percent of youth in high-income countries are able to complete upper secondary education while the figure is only 14 percent for low-income countries. Additionally, almost 30 percent of the poorest 12 to 14 year olds have never attended school and many others do not have access to primary education.

Displaced and refugee children face particular challenges and are quickly becoming a “lost generation.”

“A lost generation is not only identified by empty classrooms, silent playgrounds and short, unmarked graves. A lost generation is one where hope dies in those who live,” said U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown.

Globally, 75 percent of refugees of secondary education age are not in school. In Bangladesh, Kenya, and Pakistan, the figure is closer to 95 percent.

In Nigeria alone, where conflict has ravaged the north, over 13 million children are out of school, the highest proportion in the world.

If nothing changes, approximately 80 percent of refugee teenagers will never get a secondary school education, and 99 percent will not be able to access higher education.

With no hope for a formal education or future prospects, some children have turned to suicide.

At the Moria refugee camp in Greece, Medicins Sans Frontières (MSF) found that a quarter of children had self-harmed, attempted suicide, or thought about committing suicide.

“At 10, when life should be in front of you – full of hope and excitement at every new dawn – young boys are so devoid of hope that they attempted to take their own lives,” Brown said.

“These young people are no longer only the lost generation, they are the invisible generation. And we must do more,” he added.

Without accessible and quality education, youth also end up being left out of the world of work.

Youth unemployment has worsened in recent years, with 71 million young people unemployed around the world.

Even those that are employed often find themselves living in poverty.

U.N. DESA pointed to the need to ramp up action on youth education and employment, especially as it relates to all of the SDGs including gender equality, health, and inequality.

However, such policies and programmes must address specific individual and socioeconomic contexts.

“It is important to recognise that the flourishing of youth is about more than successful transitions to employment. Young people have aspirations that are far broader and need to be valued and supported,” the report states.

“Rather than rating the success of programmes on narrow measures of educational or employment attainment, it is crucial that institutional, programme and policy evaluations be more firmly grounded in young people’s own accounts of what they value for their human development and for the sustainable development of their communities and this shared planet,” it adds.

For instance, the Young Rural Entrepreneurs Programme in Colombia helps aspiring entrepreneurs set up innovative, productive, and sustainable businesses in rural areas.

The programme provides targeted skills development and vocational training to unemployed youth in high-demand sectors, particularly targeting vulnerable groups such as displaced persons and indigenous communities.

The report highlighted the need to invest in such capacity building, providing youth with life skills such as effective communication and problem solving as well as skills that match the demands of the job market.

Lebanon has seen success in the double-shift school system which helps provide education to Syrian refugees. Of the 400,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon who are in school, 300,000 attend double-shift schools.

“The only way to reach the SDG of every child at school is for a child’s real passport to the future stamped in the classroom – and not at a border check post,” said Brown.

“The 2030 Agenda offers a positive vision for youth development; however, a great deal of effort will be needed to realise this vision,” U.N. DESA said.

Men and women from Kalawa ward in Kenya’s Makueni County attended a forum on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Many said that development projects implemented for them didn’t include their views and input. Credit: Justus Wanzala/IPS

By Justus Wanzala
MAKUENI, Kenya, Feb 18 2019 (IPS)

Julia Mutua is a resident of Kalawa ward in the semi-arid Makueni County in Eastern Kenya and a member of a women’s farmers group that runs a poultry project.

“Women are increasingly playing a key role in economically uplifting of their households, unlike before, but they need access to affordable loans from financial institutions and requisite skills to run own enterprise,” Mutua told IPS.

When she looks around she sees the issues of poverty, and access to essential services like running water and healthcare that many in the county grapple with. She notes too that poverty has affected access to education as many parents are unable to pay their children’s school fees.

Mutua is also concerned about ensuring that people living with disabilities are included in development. “People living with disabilities have been marginalised  for long, alongside poor women and girls. To bring everybody on board in the journey to achieve SDGs, they need tailor-made interventions to address their unique challenges,” she told IPS.

But she understands the need for partnership and collaboration in attaining these development goals.
In the early morning at the end of January, she is one of a group of about 100 women and men in Kalawa Township who attended a forum on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

While the dialogue concentrated on effective and local participation in implementing the SDGs, the one-day forum’s main theme was ‘Leave no one behind’. Apart from local participants, also in attendance were representatives from Kenya’s National Treasury State Planning SDGs Unit, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), Islamic Relief and Caritas International.

The initiative is part of the International Civil Society Centre’s programme that involves working with governments, ordinary citizens and civil society to obtain community-driven data on marginalised communities.

The project is still in its pilot phase and is taking place in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Nepal and Vietnam.

Back in Makueni County, the dialogue is the third in a series of five that are taking place across the country. The forums began in December, with the first one taking place Kibera Slums in the country’s capital, Nairobi. A national forum will be held later this February.

But in Makueni the issues discussed included; understanding the conditions that promote the exclusion and marginalisation of various groups in society, categories of marginalised groups, and ways of ensuring their participation in decision making when it comes to the SDGs. Deliberations also included the impact of policy intervention on development outcomes for marginalised groups.

The 100 participants, most of whom are members of community-based organisation tackling development challenges, where in agreement that the dialogue provided a great opportunity to discuss issues affecting marginalised groups.

“Water scarcity affects women and children most,” Patricia Mutuku, an official of a local Water Users Association (WRUA ) called Thwake Kalawa, said. Her association undertakes projects such as creating sand dams, managing water springs, planting trees and reclaiming degraded land.

“We’ve a plan to plant trees specifically for ground water recharge. One of our members visited Ethiopia and learnt how trees can be used to enhance ground water recharge, an initiative we’re keen to replicate,” she said.

Fred Odinga, from VSO, said the dialogue offered his organisation an opportunity to understand how different groups and communities perceive the SDGs.

“We’ve observed in forums across the country that the most marginalised segments of society, like women who have never been heard before in the development process, get a chance to be heard by government officials during such events,” Odinga told IPS.

Odinga, however, said that public participation in undertaking of SDGs projects, although highly appreciated, had flaws that required addressing.

Indeed, participants expressed their frustrations saying views collected at grassroots level for county projects were rarely used in the final plans. Participants lamented that by the time decisions were made, what was aired at the grassroots level was rarely reflected because the process involved many levels of input.

They also said that many people failed to provide this input in the first place because in many cases this was only collected from city centres, which are not easily accessible for many.

“This means that their ideas are never considered in the development process,” Odinga said.

Odinga said as convenors, they were able to demystify the SDGs, “when we started [this morning] not many appeared to comprehend SDGs. Quite a number have had heard about it but couldn’t link it to the challenges they face.”

“Unfortunately, this is just a discussion with 100 people in a county with over a million. We need many similar forums to grasp the issues facing counties as they pursue the attainment of the SDGs,”  Odinga said. He added that everyone had to be part and parcel of the journey, and that nobody should be left behind.

Charles Nyakundi of VSO, who chaired a session on citizen participation when implementing the SDGs, observed that key shortcomings for this are monitoring, evaluation and accountability.

“To ensure positive change we need to let communities [financially] own projects for sustainability instead of initiating, implementing and moving away,” he explained.

Nyakundi said in earlier SDG dialogue forums in other counties they noted that most marginalised groups include the elderly, persons with disabilities and women.

“In some cultures men are the decision makers, women don’t [contribute] ideas,” Nyakundi explained.

His views were reiterated by Fredrick Musau, a resident of Kalawa who said that a bottom up approach in terms of identification and execution of community projects is preferred by residents. Musau is an opinion leader in Kalawa ward—a former teacher who sits in most local county committees that deal with development.

Despite being a drought-prone area, Makueni County is noted to have made huge strides in improving the lives of its people since Kenya adopted devolution six years ago. Devolution is a constitutional arrangement where decision making is vested in local administrative units or counties, with national government allocating resources. The counties are run by governors.

Stephen Odhiambo from the SDG Unit of the National Treasury in the Government of Kenya called for enhanced collaboration and partnership between all levels of government and non state actors.
He explained that an intergovernmental technical working group has been constituted to oversee the implementation of SDGs at national and county services.

Noting that the dialogue forum was successful, Odhiambo said, “Citizens should not cow from demanding for services.”

Odhiambo explained that currently no useable data was available on attaining the SDGs amongst Kenya’s communities and what was mostly used to evaluate this was proxy data.

“We are working on collecting community data. The National Treasury, National Bureau of Statistics, civil society organisations in collaboration with the Germany agency, GIZ, among others, are supporting the initiative. A lot of citizen-generated data is gathered at county level, but is rarely harnessed,” he said.

Odiambo said that there is need for a multi-sectoral approach of mapping and reaching marginalised groups where they are in order to engage them.

Crispus Mwanzoya, a national government sub county administrator was, however, concerned with the sustainability of SDG projects. But he added that contributing to the SDGs could be as simple as enhancing and redirecting a gutter on a house in order to collect rain water.

“We need to change our mindsets to attain SDGs for we’re not poor in resources but poor in mind. The government can’t do everything, we have a central role.”

Manes Feston, flanked by her children, holds her four-month-old son Fedson. He was one of triplets but his siblings died because of a lack of welfare support. High fertility rates can be seen in much of Africa with four or more births per woman. Generally, these countries are poorer with limited access to quality healthcare and contraception. Credit: Travis Lupick/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21 2018 (IPS)

Reproductive choice can transform the world and our goals towards a sustainable society, a new report says.

Every year, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) examines the state of the world population. In this year’s report, the agency focuses on the power of reproductive choice and the role it can play to promote social and economic development.

“Choice can change the world,” UNFPA’s executive director Natalia Kanem said in the report’s foreword.

“It can rapidly improve the well-being of women and girls, transform families, and accelerate global development,” she added.

While progress has been achieved, the international community still has a ways to go, UNFPA’s Washington D.C. director Sarah Craven told IPS.

“There is no country in the world where reproductive rights and choices are enjoyed by all people at all times,” she said.

The State of the World Population 2018 report examines global fertility trends and how they are influenced by choice or the lack thereof.

High fertility rates can be seen in much of Africa with four or more births per woman.

Generally, these countries are poorer with limited access to quality healthcare and contraception.

UNFPA found that over 20 percent of women in the region want to avoid a pregnancy but have an unmet need for family planning.

At the same time, almost 20 million—or 38 percent—of the region’s pregnancies each year are unintended.

Practices such as early marriage, which is associated to an early start to child bearing, is also common.

In sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 38 percent of women are married by the age of 18. In Niger, 76 percent of girls marry by the age of 18.

Child marriage, which is accompanied with the end of education and the lack of opportunities for employment and thus reduced earnings in adulthood, denies girls’ decision-making power and their right to choose.

It also hinders progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as the elimination of poverty, achievement of good health and well-being, and access to decent work.

Countries with high fertility have faster population growth, which poses challenges for governments already struggling to make progress on the SDGs and to provide education, healthcare, and employment opportunities.

On the other hand, while there are trends towards lower birth rates as a result of greater access to services, some women are having fewer children due to constraints rather than choice.

“The gap between desired and actual family size suggests that women and men are not fully able to realise their reproductive rights,” the report states.

For instance, the culture of overwork in East Asia has made it difficult for many to have both a career and a family.

In South Korea, almost 20 percent of employed women worked more than 54 hours a week in 2014.

The East Asian nation has a fertility rate of 1.17 births per woman, below the recommended replacement level of 2.1 and the level needed to sustain the current size of the population.

In Japan, which also has concerning fertility levels, the demanding work environment has even led to “karoshi,” or death by overwork.

In 2013, journalist Miwa Sado died of a heart failure and investigators found that she had logged 159 hours of overtime work one month before she died.

In 2015, 24-year-old Matsuri Takahashi committed suicide. It emerged that she worked for over 100 hours of overtime at her advertising job and had barely slept in the period leading up to her death.

In an effort to address this problem, both countries have started to put policies in place to restrict work hours.

However, women with children also often face discrimination in the labour market, which can be seen in countries such as South Korea and Japan where mothers predominately hold low-salary positions and have limited career options, resulting in vast gender wage gaps.

With fewer children and young adults, the labour force has been shrinking contributing to weaker economies.

At the same time, as older people account for larger shares of the population, governments face challenges to cover health-care costs and social security systems, further weakening economies.

Among the recommendations in the report is to provide universal access to quality reproductive healthcare, including access to modern contraceptives, make available sexuality education, and achieve gender equality.

“Choice can be a reality everywhere. This is something that governments should prioritise,” Craven told IPS.

In high fertility countries, there is a need for education on reproductive rights and employment opportunities for rural women while low fertility countries should implement family-friendly policies such as child care services and parental leave.

Questions and challenges remain as to how governments should achieve such policies as the debate over reproductive choice in many countries is often grounded in religious beliefs.

In the United States, a new set of proposed rules will expand religious exemptions, allowing employers to deny health care access such as reproductive health coverage and access to contraception.

In Saudi Arabia, child marriage is still widespread and often justified by clerics.

Craven expressed concern over any policy that restricts individuals to access information and services, and highlighted the importance of reproductive choice.

“You will not achieve the SDGs if you don’t also achieve reproductive rights of your citizens,” she said.

Kanem echoed similar sentiments in the foreword of the report, stating: “The way forward is the full realisation of reproductive rights, for every individual and couple, no matter where or how they live, or how much they earn…the real measure of progress is people themselves: especially the well-being of women and girls, their enjoyment of their rights and full equality, and the life choices that they are free to make.”

A girl helps her family peeling cassava in Acará, in the northeast of Brazil's Amazon jungle. More than five million children are chronically malnourished in Latin America, a region sliding backwards with respect to the goal of eradicating hunger and extreme poverty, while obesity, which affects seven million children, is on the rise. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 14 2018 (IPS)

For the third consecutive year, South America slid backwards in the global struggle to achieve zero hunger by 2030, with 39 million people living with hunger and five million children suffering from malnutrition.

“It’s very distressing because we’re not making progress. We’re not doing well, we’re going in reverse. You can accept this in a year of great drought or a crisis somewhere, but when it’s happened three years in a row, that’s a trend,” reflected Julio Berdegué, FAO’s highest authority in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The regional representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations said it is cause for concern that it is not Central America, the poorest subregion, that is failing in its efforts, but the South American countries that have stagnated."More than five million children in Latin America are permanently malnourished. In a continent of abundant food, a continent of upper-middle- and high-income countries, five million children ... It's unacceptable." -- Julio Berdegué

“More than five million children in Latin America are permanently malnourished. In a continent of abundant food, a continent of upper-middle- and high-income countries, five million children … It’s unacceptable,” he said in an interview with IPS at the agency’s regional headquarters in Santiago.

“They are children who already have scars in their lives. Children whose lives have already been marked, even though countries, governments, civil society, NGOs, churches, and communities are working against this. The development potential of a child whose first months and years of life are marked by malnutrition is already radically limited for his entire life,” he said.

What can the region do to move forward again? In line with this year’s theme of World Food Day, celebrated Oct. 16, “Our actions are our future. A zero hunger world by 2030 is possible”, Berdegué underlined the responsibility of governments and society as a whole.

Governments, he said, must “call us all together, facilitate, support, promote job creation and income generation, especially for people from the weakest socioeconomic strata.”

In addition, he stressed that policies for social protection, peace and the absence of conflict and addressing climate change are also required.

New foods to improve nutrition

In the small town of Los Muermos, near Puerto Montt, 1,100 kilometers south of Santiago, nine women and two male algae collectors are working to create new foods, with the aim of helping to curb both under- and over-nutrition, in Chile and in neighboring countries. Their star product is jam made with cochayuyo (Durvillaea antarctica), a large bull kelp species that is the dominant seaweed in southern Chile.

“I grew up on the water. I’ve been working along the sea for more than 30 years, as a shore gatherer,” said Ximena Cárcamo, 48, president of the Flor del Mar fishing cooperative.

Julio Berdegué, FAO regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, in his office at the agency’s headquarters in Santiago, Chile, during an interview with IPS to discuss the setback with regard to reaching the zero hunger target in the region. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The seaweed gatherer told IPS from Los Muermos about the great potential of cochayuyo and other algae “that boost health and nutrition because they have many benefits for people,” in a region with high levels of poverty and social vulnerability, which translate into under-nutrition.

“We are adding value to products that we have in our locality. We want people to consume them and that’s why we made jam because children don’t eat seaweed and in Chile we have so many things that people don’t consume and that could help improve their diet,” she explained.

In the first stage, the women, with the support of the Aquaculture and Fishing Centre for Applied Research, identified which seaweed have a high nutritional value, are rich in minerals, proteins, fiber and vitamins, and have low levels of sugar.

The seaweed gatherers created a recipe book, “cooking with seaweed from the sea garden”, including sweet and salty recipes such as cochayuyo ice cream, rice pudding and luche and reineta ceviche with sea chicory.

Now the project aims to create high value-added food such as energy bars.

“We want to reach schools, where seaweed is not consumed. That’s why we want to mix them with dried fruit from our sector,” said Cárcamo, insisting that a healthy and varied diet introduced since childhood is the way to combat malnutrition, as well as the “appalling” levels of overweight and obesity that affects Chile, as well as the rest of Latin America.

The paradox of obesity

“Obesity is killing us…it kills more people than organised crime,” Berdegué warned, pointing out that in terms of nutrition the region is plagued by under-nutrition on the one hand and over-nutrition on the other.

“Nearly 60 percent of the region’s population is overweight. There are 250 million candidates for diabetes, colon cancer or stroke,” he said.

He explained that “there are 105 million obese people, who are key candidates for these diseases. More than seven million children are obese with problems of self-esteem and problems of emotional and physical development. They are children who are candidates to die young,” he said.

According to Berdegué, this problem “is growing wildly…there are four million more obese people in the region each year.”

A seaweed gatherer carries cochayuyo harvested from rocks along Chile’s Pacific coast. The cultivation and commercialisation of cochayuyo and other kinds of seaweed is being promoted in different coastal areas of the country, to provide new foods to improve nutrition in the country. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The latest statistic for 2016 reported 105 million obese people in Latin America and the Caribbean, up from 88 million only four years earlier.

In view of this situation, the FAO regional representative stressed the need for a profound transformation of the food system.

“How do we produce, what do we produce, what do we import, how is it distributed, what is access like in your neighborhood? What do you do if you live in a neighborhood where the only store, that is 500 meters away, only sells ultra-processed food and does not sell vegetables or fruits?” he asked.

Berdegué harshly criticised “advertising, which tells us every day that good eating is to go sit in a fast food restaurant and eat 2,000 calories of junk as if that were entirely normal.”

Change of policies as well as habits

“You have to change habits, yes, but you have to change policies as well. There are countries, such as the small Caribbean island nations, that depend fundamentally on imported food. And the vast majority of these foods are ultra-processed, many of which are food only in name because they’re actually just chemicals, fats and junk,” he said.

He insisted that “we lack production of fruits, vegetables and dairy products in many countries or trade policies that encourage imports of these foods and not so much junk food.”

And to move toward the goal of zero hunger in just 12 years, Berdegué also called for generating jobs and improving incomes, because that “is the best policy against hunger.”

The second of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which make up the 2030 Development Agenda, is achieving zero hunger through eight specific targets.

Poverty making a comeback

“In Latin America we don’t lack food. People just can’t afford to buy it,” Berdegué said.

He also called for countries to strengthen policies to protect people living in poverty and extreme poverty.

According to the latest figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), poverty in the region grew between 2014 and 2017, when it affected 186 million people, 30.7 percent of the population. Extreme poverty affects 10 percent of the total: 61 million people.

Moreover, in this region where 82 percent of the population is urban, 48.6 percent of the rural population is poor, compared to 26.8 percent of the urban population, and this inequality drives the rural exodus to the cities.

“FAO urges countries to rethink social protection policies, particularly for children. We cannot allow ourselves to slow down in eradicating malnutrition and hunger among children,” Berdegué said.

He also advocated for the need for peace and the cessation of conflicts because “we have all the evidence in the world that when you lose peace, hunger soars. It is automatic. The great hunger hotspots and problems in the world today are in places where we are faced with conflict situations.”

“We have countries in the region where there is upheaval and governments have to know that this social and political turmoil causes hunger,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz of the Philippines (3rd left), calls for the full participation of indigenous communities in clean energy projects during the forum Our Village in San Francisco, California. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA , Sep 20 2018 (IPS)

Achuar indigenous communities in Ecuador are turning to the sun to generate electricity for their homes and transport themselves in canoes with solar panels along the rivers of their territory in the Amazon rainforest, just one illustration of how indigenous people are seeking clean energies as a partner for sustainable development.

“We want to generate a community economy based on sustainability,” Domingo Peas, an Achuar leader, told IPS. Peas is also an advisor to the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, which groups 28 indigenous organisations and 11 native groups from that South American country.

The first project dates back to the last decade, when the Achuar people began to install solar panels in Sharamentsa, a village of 120 people located on the banks of the Pastaza River. Currently they are operating 40 photovoltaic panels, at a cost of 300 dollars per unit, contributed by private donations and foundations."Communities have to be at the centre to decide on and design projects that help combat poverty, because they allow electricity without depending on the power grid, and they strengthen the defense of the territory and benefit the people. It's about guaranteeing rights and defining development processes." -- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

The villagers use electricity to light up their homes and pump water to a 6,000-litre tank.

“There is a better quality of services for families. Our goal is to create another energy model that is respectful of our people and our territories,” Peas said.

The Achuar took the next step in 2012, when they started the Kara Solar electric canoe motor project. Kara means “dream” in the Achuar language.

The first boat with solar panels on its roof, with a capacity to carry 20 people and built at a cost of 50,000 dollars, began operating in 2017 and is based in the Achuar community of Kapawi.

The second canoe, with a cost of 35,000 dollars, based in Sharamentsa – which means “the place of scarlet macaws” in Achuar – began ferrying people in July.

The investment came partly from private donations and the rest from the IDEAS prize for Energy Innovation, established by the Inter-American Development Bank, which the community received in 2015, endowed with 127,000 dollars.

The Achuar people’s solar-powered transport network connects nine of their communities along 67 km of the Pastaza river – which forms part of the border between Ecuador and Peru – and the Capahuari river. The approximately 21,000 members of the Achuar community live along the banks of these two rivers.

“It was an indigenous idea adapted to the manufacture of canoes. They use them to transport people and products, like peanuts, cinnamon, yucca and plantains (cooking bananas),” in an area where rivers are the highways connecting their settlements, said Peas.

The demand for clean energy in indigenous and local communities and success stories such as the Achuar’s were presented during the Global Climate Action Summit, convened by the government of the U.S. state of California.

A solar panel exhibit in San Francisco, California, during the Global Climate Action Summit, which showed the expansion of solar and wind energy and micro hydroelectric dams to provide electricity to small communities. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The event, held on Sept. 13-14 in San Francisco, was an early celebration of the third anniversary of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, reached in the French capital in December 2015.

Native delegates also participated in the alternative forum “Our Village: Climate Action by the People,” on Sept. 11-14, presented by the U.S. non-governmental organisations If Not US Then Who and Hip Hop Caucus.

In addition to Ecuador, innovative experiences have also emerged from indigenous communities in countries such as Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Guatemala, Malaysia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and the United States, according to the forum.

For example, in Bolivia there is an alliance between the local government of Yocalla, in the southern department of Potosí, and the non-governmental organisation Luces Nuevas aimed at providing electricity from renewable sources to poor families.

In Yocalla, a municipality of 10,000 people, mainly members of the Pukina indigenous community, “755 families live in rural areas with limited electricity; the national power grid has not yet reached those places,” project consultant Yara Montenegro told IPS.

Thanks to the programme, which began in March, 30 poor families have received solar panels connected to lithium batteries, produced at the La Palca pilot plant in Potosí, which store the fluid.

Each system costs 400 dollars, of which the families contribute half and the organisation and the government the other half. The families can connect two lamps, charge a cell phone and listen to the radio, replacing the use of firewood, candles and conventional batteries.

The development of clean sources plays a decisive role in achieving one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which make up the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Goal seven aims to establish “affordable and non-polluting energy” – a goal that also has an impact on the achievement of at least another 11 SDGs, which the international community set for itself in 2015 for the next 15 years, within the framework of the United Nations.

In addition, the success of the Sustainable Energy for All Initiative (SE4All), the programme to be implemented during the Decade of Sustainable Energy for All 2014-2024, which aims to guarantee universal access to modern energy services, and to double the global rate of energy efficiency upgrades and the share of renewables in the global energy mix, depends on that progress.

But most of the groups promoting an energy transition do not include native people, points out the May report “Renewable Energy and Indigenous Peoples. Background Paper to the Right Energy Partnership,” prepared by the Indigenous Peoples’ Major Group for Sustainable Development (IPMG).

That group launched a Right Energy Partnership in July, which seeks to fill that gap.

For Victoria Tauli-Corpuz of the Kankanaey Igorot people, who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, energy represents “a problem and a solution” for indigenous people, she told IPS at the alternative forum in San Francisco.

“The leaders have fought against hydroelectric dams and I have also seen projects in the hands of indigenous peoples,” she said.

Because of this, “the communities have to be at the centre to decide on and design projects that help combat poverty, because they allow electricity without depending on the power grid, and they strengthen the defense of the territory and benefit the people,” she said.

“It’s about guaranteeing rights and defining development processes,” she summed up.

Examples of projects that can be replicated and expanded, as called for by the U.N special rapporteur, are provided by communities such as Sharamentsa in Ecuador and Yocalla in Bolivia.

Sharamentsa operates a 12 kW battery bank that can create a microgrid. “A power supply centre is planned that allows the generation of value-added products, such as plant processing,” Peas said.

In Yocalla, the plan is to equip some 169 families with systems in December and then try to extend it to all of Potosí. But Montenegro pointed out that alliances are needed so that the beneficiaries can pay less. “In 2019 we will analyse the impact, if the families are satisfied with it, if they are comfortable,” she said.

This article was produced with support from the Climate and Land Use Alliance.

General view of the plenary session of the World Conference on “Religions, Creeds and Value Systems: Joining Forces to Enhance Equal Citizenship Rights”, held June 25 in Geneva, with the participation of the director general of the IOM, William Swing, as a special guest. Courtesy of the GCHRAGD

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jun 25 2018 (IPS)

The world is “basically at odds with itself,” International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Director General William Swing said Monday, June 25, describing the critical state of human migration between countries and continents.

“I have to say that we are not only living in turbulent and troubled times; I have never known a world such as the one we have today,” said the veteran U.S. diplomat who this year ends his second five-year term at the helm of the IOM.

Swing was addressing the first World Conference on “Religions, Creeds and Value Systems: Joining Forces to Enhance Equal Citizenship Rights”, organised by the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue (GCHRAGD), which brought together academics and religious and political leaders on June 25 in Geneva."We have, in addition to that, more people on the move than at any other time in recorded history, owing to the demographic oddity that the world’s population quadrupled in the last century." -- William Swing

Swing’s warnings come at a time when the European Union is trying, so far in vain, to come up with a common policy with regard to the arrival of thousands of immigrants each week, and when U.S. President Donald Trump is not abandoning his government’s policy of separating immigrant children – more than 2,000 so far – from their undocumented parents – a procedure widely described not only as “cruel” but as “torture”.

“I’m not aware of any significant negotiations or political processes underway right now, and with all of this, we have a countercyclical reaction by the world community — basically, fear of the other, anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment, that not only is putting human life at stake but denying us the contributions these migrants make,” Swing said.

“So my first point is: I believe that we are in the middle of a perfect storm. We have a dozen conflicts from the western bulge of Africa to the Himalayas, with absolutely no hope in the short and medium term of resolving any of these,” he added.

The IOM head also said: “We have, in addition to that, more people on the move than at any other time in recorded history, owing to the demographic oddity that the world’s population quadrupled in the last century.”

“Unfortunately, while most of this is occurring regularly, orderly and safely, we have at least 65 million people who have been forced to move,” Swing stressed.

Furthermore, he said, “We have the impact of violations of international humanitarian law on all sides, a serious decline of international law of tort…and an absence of any leadership on the major issues.”

The GCHRAGD, where Swing was speaking, is an institution under the patronage of Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.

Bin Talal gave the opening speech at the global conference, in which some 50 religious leaders from the world’s different religions and faiths, as well as international experts on migration, participated.

International Organisation for Migration Director General William Swing speaks at the World Conference on “Religions, Creeds and Value Systems: Joining Forces to Enhance Equal Citizenship Rights”, held June 25 in Geneva. Credit: GCHRAGD

The prince said that “Together we can share the responsibility of challenging conventional thinking about the underlying causes of loss of human dignity, marginalisation and oppression.”

The conference, held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, was a contribution to the celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and approved a global 10-point strategic plan to achieve its aim of promoting equal citizenship rights.

The document unveiled by Idriss Jazairy, executive director of the GCHRAGD and co-host of the conference, who stressed that it would be presented to different U.N. bodies.

The veteran Algerian diplomat said that one of the points in the declaration was “To preserve the diverse ethnic, cultural and religious heritages of transit and host countries, while, at the same time, offering opportunities for integration to arriving refugees and migrants.”

Jazairy added that the aim of the initiative, as stated in the document, “is to promote mutual contributions and respective resilience, thus avoiding forced assimilation of migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons, in line with the proviso set forth in Sustainable Development Goal 16 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

The IOM director general applauded the incorporation of this proposal in the conference’s strategic plan.

“It seems that (the document) underlines the importance of respecting diversity and promoting the contributions that migrants and refugees have generally made,” Swing told IPS.

“And I’m very pleased to see that it deals with the question of integration, which is at the heart of the issue. And very often people get there and they’re not properly integrated. So I think that’s important,” he emphasised.

During the conference, Swing criticised those who ignore the contributions to society made by immigrants.

He noted, for example, that a study by the IOM and the McKinsey Global Institute “determined that although only 3.5 percent of the world’s population are migrants, they are producing nine percent of global wealth measured in GDP terms, which is four percent more than if they had stayed at home.”

“So, if we’re in a storm, we need to find the high ground. We do this by following the teaching of all faiths, that men, women and children are all children of God and members of the universal family,” Swing told the religious leaders drawn together by the GCHRAGD.

“If we are to prevent future storms, we obviously have to make some changes. We have three challenges, in my view. Number one, is the challenge of changing the public narrative, which, right now, is toxic. We’ve become used to building walls rather than bridges….Until we can change that narrative, people will continue to be abused and have their rights disrespected,” he said.

The second challenge, he added, is the challenge of demography. With a rapidly declining population, the global north “is in need of skills and persons to do the jobs. At the same time, we have a rapidly expanding largely unemployed youthful population in the global south — the median age in Africa is 25, while in Europe it is 50.”

“That has to be addressed through programmes of public education and public information,” Swing recommended.

Lastly, “we have to learn to address the challenge of inexorably growing ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic diversity,” he said.

“…I would simply leave you with the message that movement of people, human mobility, is not an issue to be resolved, it is a human reality, as old as humankind, that has to be managed,” he concluded.

A satellite image shows the great concentration of ships along the boundary of the Argentine Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), taking advantage of the lack of regulations to poach huge quantities of seafood. Credit: Courtesy of Milko Schvartzman

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 13 2018 (IPS)

The capture of a Spanish vessel illegally fishing in the so-called Argentine Sea made headlines, once again, although it is not news that hundreds of boats regularly pillage the South Atlantic, taking advantage of the lack of regulations and controls.

The Playa Pesmar Uno vessel was captured by the Argentine Naval Prefecture – the country’s coast guard – on Feb. 4 while fishing without a permit in the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – up to 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the coast – within the area known here as the Argentine Sea. It had 320 tons of fresh fish in its holds: Argentine hake, pollock, squid and ray.

The ship was transported with its crew of 34 to the Comodoro Rivadavia port in the southeast of the country, where it was released in late February, after paying a fine of just over one million dollars."All of the boats that fish inside the EEZ are subsidised by China, South Korea or Spain or other countries that years ago depleted their own fishing resources and, to keep these fishing fleets active, they send them to fish elsewhere.” -- Milko Schvartzman

“The capture of this and other boats is just the tip of an iceberg of a very serious problem. There are hundreds of ships from different countries poaching along the boundary of the EEZ. Although there is no specific data, it is evident that they are overfishing,” said Santiago Krapovickas, a conservation biologist who works in Puerto Madryn, in the southern province of Patagonia.

These boats – mainly from China, South Korea and Spain, according to information from the Under-Secretariat of Fisheries – take advantage of the fact that there is no regional regulation of fisheries outside the Argentine EEZ and therefore they do not have catch or seasonal limits or zonal quotas.

Sometimes, however, they cross the boundary and enter the EEZ, perhaps in search of better fishing, in a country with 5,000 km of Atlantic shoreline, to the east.

It is along the boundary of the EEZ that the Argentine Naval Prefecture captures boats, despite the fact that some of their vessels are over 30 years old.

The highest-profile case occurred in March 2016, when the Naval Prefecture reported that it shot and sank a Chinese fishing vessel and rescued the crew, after the vessel failed to obey repeated orders to stop.

“The border of the EEZ coincides with the edge of the Argentine continental shelf,” Krapovickas told IPS. “In this area, the ocean, due to its depth and the different marine currents, has abundant nutrients and there is a rich ecosystem, making it very easy to fish, especially Argentine shortfin squid (Illex argentinus), a species in high demand in the international market.”

“In the scientific community we have warned about this for years. But we have not managed to get anybody to do anything,” he added.

The Argentine State does not take action, but it knows where the fishing vessels are: since 2012, the National Institute for Fisheries Research and Development (Inidep) has been keeping track of them through satellite images from its headquarters in the port of Mar del Plata, 400 km south of Buenos Aires.

“It looks like a floating city. At around the 45th parallel south there is so much activity that sometimes it seems like they cover a bigger surface area than Buenos Aires,” computer engineer Ezequiel Cozzolino, who is in charge of the satellite system, told IPS.

A fishing boat stocks up in the port of Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina. Only vessels with permits to fish in Argentine waters can dock at the country’s ports. Credit: Estremar

“From mid December to June of the following year there are usually between 270 and 300 boats in the area. Eighty to ninety percent are jigging vessels, fishing only for squid. They fish at night, attracting squid with artificial lights,” he explained.

Marine conservation specialist Milko Schvartzman, who carries out his own satellite monitoring, said that sometimes there are more than 500 vessels.

“They are highly predatory of squid, which is one of the pillars of the marine ecosystem, because they are eaten by other species,” Schvartzman told IPS.

Schvartzman is working on a project for the protection of the South Atlantic for Oceans 5, an organisation linked to the foundation led by U.S. actor Leonardo Di Caprio.

The environmental organisation has denounced that the boats not only affect the marine environment but also violate human rights, as the crews sometimes work in slavery conditions.

There are no known studies on how these boats affect legal fishing in Argentina, which is a major source of foreign exchange, because most of the catch is exported.

According to official figures, seafood exports brought the country 1.978 billion dollars in 2017, and 1.724 billion dollars in 2016.

Schvartzman was one of the activists from European organisations who came in December to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires to publicly pressure for the elimination of subsidies for fishing practices that are destructive for the environment and small-scale fishers.

This is one of the targets within goal 14 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which addresses the sustainable use of the oceans.

This target sets out, by 2020, “to prohibit certain forms of fisheries subsidies which contribute to overcapacity and overfishing, eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and refrain from introducing new such subsidies.”

Schvartzman says that “all of the boats that fish inside the EEZ are subsidised by China, South Korea or Spain or other countries that years ago depleted their own fishing resources and, to keep these fishing fleets active, they send them to fish elsewhere.”

But the WTO has not adopted any measure against the fishing subsidies. “It was India that raised opposition in Buenos Aires, which is incomprehensible since that country is also a victim of these fishing fleets which poach their resources,” said Schvartzman.

In Argentina, this issue is also worrying fishing companies, some of which formed an NGO at the end of last year, which they named Organisation for the Protection of Resources in the Southwest Atlantic (Opras).

“Our aim is to get international organisations to regulate this issue that has to do with marine resources, but we need support from the Argentine government which we do not have today,” said Alan Mackern, president of Estremar, a Norwegian fishing company based in Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina.

Mackern told IPS that “what is happening cannot be allowed. Those of us who fish within the EEZ are subject to strict regulations and those that fish on the boundary do not meet standards and regulations and sell fish and shellfish on the market at lower prices, cuasing us harm.”

The companies are also concerned about a bill sent by the Argentine government to Congress to create marine protected areas within the EEZ.

“We have not been consulted. But marine fauna, logically, doesn’t know about limits, and we are concerned that fishing will be banned within the 200 nautical miles and it will end up generating more resources for those fishing outside,” said Mackern.

FAO Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean Julio Berdegué visited the rural school in Pepenance, in western El Salvador, which has become a model in healthy eating, within El Salvador’s programme of sustainable schools. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
ATIQUIZAYA, El Salvador, Feb 5 2018 (IPS)

Eating healthy and nutritious food in schools in El Salvador is an effort that went from a pilot plan to a well-entrenched programme that has now taken off.

The Sustainable Schools programme, initially launched in 2013 in three schools in the rural municipality of Atiquizaya, in the western department of Ahuachapán, surpassed expectations and has now been replicated in all 22 schools in the municipality, and in many others in the country.

“With the 10 menus that we have implemented here, we have changed the student’s expectations about meals,” the director of the Pepenance District Educational Centre, José Antonio Tespan, told IPS before this year’s first parent-teacher assembly.

That institution is one of the three where the programme started, and over time became the flagship of the initiative."This gives us the opportunity to open new doors with other decision-makers to promote more integral projects... there are families who want a school garden, so we’re starting a project of family gardens in the municipality.” -- Ana Luisa Rodríguez

Now it has been implemented in 10 of El Salvador’s 14 departments, and includes 40 of the country’s 262 municipalities and 215 of the more than 3,000 schools in the rural area, benefiting some 73,000 students.

The project has had from the start technical support from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and financing from the Brazilian government. And although it officially ended in December 2017, it will continue because of its success.

“There was a paradigm shift and a sustainable school model was developed in Atiquizaya, it was a pleasure for FAO to have accompanied them,” the U.N. agency’s representative in El Salvador, Alan González, told IPS.

El Salvador is part of a group of 13 countries in the region that, since 2009, have taken part in an initiative executed by FAO and the Brazilian government, extending the programme of sustainable schools, adapting the achievements of that South American country’s National School Feeding Programme.

This Central American nation of 6.5 million people faces serious socioeconomic problems, and child malnutrition has never been eradicated.

Chronic malnutrition in El Salvador was around 14 percent in 2014, in children under five, according to that year’s National Health Survey, the most recent. That exceeds the Latin American average, which is 11.6 percent, according to 2015 data from the World Health Organisation.

The students benefiting from the initiative receive a mid-morning snack, made with products purchased from farmers in the area, as part of the “local purchases” component, a key aspect of the project.

Students of the Pepenance District School in the municipality of Atiquizaya, in western El Salvador, pose for pictures in front of one of the nutritious daily meals offered to the students, which are made with products from local farmers. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“In addition to ensuring a nutritious diet for our students, at the same time we are strengthening the local economy,” said Tespan, the director of the school in Pepenance, home to 3,225 of the 34,000 inhabitants of the 67-sq-km municipality of Atiquizaya, which encompasses 13 districts (villages or small towns).

The school’s cook, 46-year-old Rosa Delmy Fajardo, a native of Pepenance, mixes fruits, vegetables, and eggs with enthusiasm. Her meals have achieved the approval of the students.

She told IPS that of the 10 menus, there was one she had never seen or tasted, the so-called “Chinese rice”, based on that grain, to which is added an egg cake, cut into pieces.

“When I make that, they eat everything, and there are children who ask their mothers to make them Chinese rice,” she said.

She added that she has been in charge of the school kitchen for 11 years, but has worked three years under FAO nutritional guidelines.

Before that, the menu was less nutritious, since it only had staples such as oil, rice, beans, sugar and milk.

“Now we have everything that is needed for the food to have another touch,” Fajardo said.

The success achieved in Pepenance was reflected in November when it became a finalist for the Banco do Brasil Foundation Award, in the international category.

The award promotes low-cost sustainable development initiatives with a major social impact that involve community participation. The categories are aligned with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promoted by the UN’s 2030 Agenda.

“I am overjoyed about this award, for me it is a great achievement, and I feel proud,” added Fajardo.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Atiquizaya, Ana Luisa Rodríguez, said she felt happy and moved by the recognition obtained in Brazil, and hoped it would bring more benefits to strengthen the programme.

“This gives us the opportunity to open new doors with other decision-makers to promote more integral projects… there are families who want a school garden, so we’re starting a project of family gardens in the municipality,” she said in a conversation with IPS.

For the mayor, part of the key to the success obtained in Pepenance has been the work coordinated with all the actors and agencies that have been working towards the same end.

“Having achieved this intersectoral collaboration was momentous: the parents got involved in the construction of a storehouse, kitchen and dining room, and they were also empowered, they are part of the project,” she said.
For his part, the FAO’s González stressed that “in Atiquizaya the involvement by the community and local actors was vital” in achieving the result obtained.

In September 2017, FAO regional representative Julio Berdegué visited Pepenance for a first-hand view of the achievements obtained, and stressed that the small Salvadoran community’s accomplishments are an example to be replicated in other countries.

The IV Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour, held in the Argentine capital, concluded with an urgent call to accelerate efforts to eradicate this major problem by 2025, a goal of the international community that today does not appear to be feasible. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 17 2017 (IPS)

The IV Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour,  which drew nearly 2000 delegates from 190 countries to the Argentine capital, left many declarations of good intentions but nothing to celebrate.

Child labour is declining far too slowly, in the midst of unprecedented growth in migration and forced displacement that aggravate the situation, said representatives of governments, workers and employers in the Buenos Aires Declaration on Child Labour Forced Labour and Youth Employment.

The document, signed at the end of the Nov. 14-16 meeting, recognises that unless something changes, the goals set by the international community will not be met.

As a result, there is a pressing need to “Accelerate efforts to end child labour in all its forms by 2025,” the text states.

In the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), target seven of goal eight – which promotes decent work – states that child labour in all its forms is to be eradicated by 2025."The increase in child labour in the countryside has to do with informal employment. Most of the children work in family farming, without pay, in areas where the state does not reach.” -- Junko Sazaki

“For the first time, this Conference recognised that child labour is mostly concentrated in agriculture and is growing,” said Bernd Seiffert, focal point on child labour, gender, equity and rural employment at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“While the general numbers for child labour dwindled from 162 million to 152 million since 2013, in rural areas the number grew: from 98 to 108 million,” he explained in a conversation with IPS.

Seiffert said: “We heard a lot in this conference about the role played by child labour in global supply chains. But the majority of boys and girls work for the local value chains, in the production of food.”

The declared aim of the Conference, organised by the Argentine Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security with technical assistance from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), was to “take stock of the progress made” since the previous meeting, held in 2013 in Brasilia.

Guest of honour 2014 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Kailash Satyarthi said he was “confident that the young will be able to steer the situation that we are leaving them,” but warned that it would not make sense to hold a new conference in four years if the situation remains the same.

Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in his country, India, in defence of children’s rights, and in particular for his fight against forced labour, from which he has saved thousands of children.

“We know that children are used because they are the cheapest labour force. But I ask how much longer we are going to keep coming to these conferences to go over the same things again. The next meeting should be held only if it is to celebrate achievements,” he said.

Junko Sasaki, director of the Social Policies and Rural Institutions Division at FAO, said “the increase in child labour in the countryside has to do with informal employment. Most of the children work in family farming, without pay, in areas where the state does not reach.”

“We must promote the incorporation of technologies and good agricultural practices to allow many poor families to stop having to make their children work,” she told IPS.

According to the ILO, as reflected by the final declaration, 71 percent of child labour is concentrated in agriculture, and 42 percent of that work is hazardous and is carried out in informal and family enterprises.

“There are also gender differences. While it is common for children to be exposed to pesticides that can affect their health, girls usually have to work more on household chores. In India, for example, many girls receive less food than boys,” said Sazaki.

Children were notably absent from the crowded event, which brought together government officials and delegates of international organisations, the business community and trade unionists.

Their voice was only heard through the presentation of the document “It’s Time to Talk”, the result of research carried out by civil society organisations, which interviewed 1,822 children between the ages of five and 18 who work, in 36 countries.

The study revealed that children who work do so mainly to help support their families, and that their main concern is the conditions in which they work.

They feel good if their work allows them to continue studying, if they can learn from work and earn money; and they become frustrated when their education is hindered, when they do not develop any skills, or their health is affected.

“We understand that children who work have no other option and that we should not criminalise but protect them and make sure that the conditions in which they perform tasks do not put them at risk or prevent their education,” said Anne Jacob, of the Germany-based Kindernothilfe, one of the organisations that participated in the research.

For Jacob, “it is outrageous that the problem of child labour should be addressed without listening to children.”

“After talking with them, we understood that there is no global solution to this issue, but that the structural causes can only be resolved locally, depending on the economic, cultural and social circumstances of each place,” she told IPS.

The participants in the Conference warned in the final declaration that armed conflicts, which affect 250 million children, are aggravating the situation of child labour.

Virginia Gamba, special representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, explained that “modern armed conflicts use children as if they were disposable materials. Children are no longer in the periphery of conflicts but at the centre.”

In this respect, she pointed out that hundreds of thousands of children are left without the possibility of access to formal education every year in different parts of the world. Her office counted 750 attacks on schools in the midst of armed conflict in 2016, while this year it registered 175 in just one month.

“To fight child labour and help children, we have to think about mobile learning and home-based education. Education must be provided even in the most fragile situations, even in refugee camps, since that is the only means of providing normality for a child in the midst of a conflict,” said Gamba.

In the end, the Conference left the bitter sensation that solutions are still far away.

ILO Director-General Guy Ryder warned that the concentration of child labour in rural work indicates that it often has nothing to do with employers, but with families.

It is easy for some to blame transnational corporations or governments. But the truth is that it is everyone’s fault, he concluded.

Canadian economist Eric Usher, director of the United Nations Environment Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), explains to financial sector executives from Latin America and the Caribbean their ideas for its institutions to promote the Sustainable Development Goals, atn a meeting in Argentina´s capital. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 8 2017 (IPS)

Is it possible for the financial sector of Latin America and the Caribbean not only to think about earning money but also to contribute to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development? The answer was sought in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at a regional roundtable on sustainable finance, the United Nations Environment Finance Initiative.

“How to mobilise sufficient funds is obviously one of the critical aspects of the agenda for sustainable development,” said Eric Usher, a Canadian economist with experience in the renewable energies sector and current director of the initiative, known as UNEP FI.

“Of course, profit maximisation is a tool for delivering economic development and it should be. But there’s a role for governments to play, to create the right framework and the enabling environment, to make sure that the private sector makes money doing the right things,” he told IPS, during the roundtable on Sept. 5-6, which brought together dozens of representatives of banks, investment funds and international bodies.

“I don’t think there is any discrepancy or problem with making money on sustainable development. The public and private sectors need to work together so we can deliver in a way that creates the most benefits,” said Usher.

UNEP FI is a global partnership between U.N. Environment and more than 200 financial entities – 129 banks, 58 insurance companies and 26 investment funds – from some 60 countries, created in the context of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. The meeting in Buenos Aires meant a return, after 25 years, to the region where the initiative first emerged.“If the risk assessment is comprehensive, it should not be purely financial and short-term. For example, when a bank carries out an analysis before investing in a renewable energy project, it should take into account the kind of energy mix the country is moving towards.” -- María Eugenia Di Paola

The Latin America and Caribbean round table will be followed by four other regional roundtables this year: North America (in New York), Europe (Geneva), Africa and the Middle East (Johannesburg) and Asia and the Pacific (Tokyo).

Financial bodies and business chambers from many countries explained in Buenos Aires the progress they have made in recent years with regard to the introduction of questions such as environmental and social risk or the calculation of carbon footprints in the assessment prior to granting loans, as well as their own energy efficiency goals or the reduction of paper consumption.

It became clear, nonetheless, that the certainties are still outweighed by the unanswered questions regarding the financial sector’s participation in the 2030 Agenda, which the U.N. member countries have been working towards since 2016, through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

“We are barely at the start of the journey and this is not easy,” admitted Mario Vasconcelos, director of institutional relations of the Brazilian Federation of Banks (Febraban), which represents 123 financial institutions, 29 of which, he explained, have committed to finance productive projects to contribute to reducing carbon emissions.

“There are many business opportunities in the transition towards a low-carbon economy, which has already begun,” Vasconcelos said with enthusiasm.

Forty financial institutions in the region have signed the UNEP Statement of Commitment by Financial Institutions (FI) on Sustainable Development. UNEP FI has been working mainly towards building expertise in the sector about how to identify social and environmental risks in investment projects, so that these can be considered along with the economic risks.

This is perhaps the most difficult task, as Beatriz Ocampo, manager of Sustainability of Grupo Bancolombia, the most important private bank in Colombia, acknowledged to some extent.

“If you tell bankers they have to finance projects that contribute towards the fight against climate change, they will not understand what you are talking about. That is why it is important to establish what sustainable finance means,” she said.

In this sense, the region still has a long way ahead.

In Argentina, for example, questions related to sustainable finance are not a priority for most banks, due to the fact that there is no involvement by the state, and the adoption of these criteria is completely voluntary.

This was the conclusion of a report carried out in 2016 by UNEP FI together with CAF – the Development Bank of Latin America – on the basis of a survey which found that only 39 per cent of Argentine banks have implemented social environmental management systems.

One of the most commented topics during the meeting in Buenos Aires was the speech by Javier González Fraga, president of the Banco de la Nación Argentina, the largest public financial entity in the country.

He was the first speaker in the meeting and was critical of the financial sector while he praised environmentalists, which took many by surprise.

“The financial logic of these days does not allow us to protect the environment. We must not let economists, and especially not financial experts, express their opinion about the planet we are going to leave to our grandchildren,” he said.

González Fraga is a centre-right economist with vast experience, who presided over Argentina’s Central Bank during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and was appointed by the current president Mauricio Macri as head of Argentina’s only national bank.

In dialogue with IPS, González Fraga, who has postgraduate degrees from Harvard and the London School of Economics, expressed a conviction that “we must go about finance a different way, especially public banks.”

“Many years of experience have shown me that the classical or neoliberal theory will in no way solve environmental problems. The government must lead the way and have institutions such as state banks head up the process of change in approach,” he said.

González Fraga also condemned the U.S. government’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“We see on TV what happened in Texas with Hurricane Harvey and it is clear that there is no need to explain what the future might hold, because it is already happening today. Donald Trump can say many things, but the reality in the U.S. can’t be denied, and people on the streets are starting to play an increasingly important role in the environmental issue,” he said.

For María Eugenia Di Paola, coordinator of Environment for the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) in Argentina, financial institutions in the region should not find it so difficult to add social and environmental criteria to economic factors, in risk assessment.

“If the risk assessment is comprehensive, it should not be purely financial and short-term. For example, when a bank carries out an analysis before investing in a renewable energy project, it should take into account the kind of energy mix the country is moving towards,” she told IPS.

“This way, the financial sector will acquire a perspective more attuned to the 2030 Agenda. And the climate catastrophes are already occurring, so that the concepts of medium and long term are very relative,” Di Paola said.

Some of the academics, representatives of international organisations and former government authorities in social areas who took part in the workshop to launch the alliance to end rural poverty in Latin America at the FAO regional headquarters in Santiago, Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Aug 31 2017 (IPS)

Experts in Latin America warned about the serious risk that would be posed if the fight against hunger, still suffered by 33 million people in the region, is abandoned, while proposing new alternatives and insights which include linking social protection with economic growth.

More than 25 high-level experts met in Santiago, Chile on Aug. 28-29 in a workshop to launch the Alliance to End Rural Poverty, sponsored by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

After debating “concrete and feasible proposals” to address the problem, they announced that they would take their initiatives in the next few weeks to the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean, a region with a population of over 640 million.“There are a series of new spaces for policies that are aimed at different purposes, such as social protection or climate change mitigation, but that at the same time can generate pathways out of poverty for the extreme poor.” -- Alain De Janvry

“The Alliance is a group that began to generate knowledge and proposals and to interact with the countries in the region to once again sink our teeth into the challenge of reducing rural poverty,” said Carolina Trivelli, a former Peruvian minister of social development and Inclusion who heads the Peruvian Studies Institute.

“We need a very strong narrative to put the eradication of rural poverty on the agenda of the countries and the region. For many, it is currently a not very attractive challenge because it goes unnoticed and the rural poor are out there in remote areas,” the expert told IPS.

Besides, “the rural poor have declined in number so it’s as if there was no longer a need to worry about them. But the opposite is true. We do need to worry because rural poverty has consequences not only for the lives of the poor but also for the national economies, for inequality and for the possibility of creating more integrated countries,” she added.

Trivelli, who will draft the workshop’s conclusions, stressed that “because the rural poor of today are not the same as they were 20 years ago, the initiatives to help them cannot be the same either.”

“We need policies to address different kinds of rural poor, in different territories, but they have to be smart policies that allow us to reinforce what already exists,” she said.

According to Trivelli, “there are many social programmes that reach poor people in rural areas, but we can add productive or economic development components that allow us to use the social protection platform to boost economic opportunities for the rural poor.”

Alain de Janvry, a professor from the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of California-Berkeley, cited an example to illustrate.

“Rural poverty in Latin America is increasingly indigenous: 40 per cent of the rural poor are indigenous,” said David Kaimowitz, head of natural resources and climate change at the Ford Foundation, during his presentation at the workshop to launch the alliance to end rural poverty in the region. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

“We have carried out a study on a monetary transference made in Mexico, after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and in compensation for the low prices of maize due to competition from maize imported from the United States,” the academic told IPS.

“A cash transfer was made to all producers of maize and basic grains. These transfers were specifically to farmers – to the male head of the household. The funds were multiplied by two: for every peso received they used it to generate another peso. The second peso was generated by how they used the first peso in a productive investment,” he said.

According to De Janvry, “the potential that is being explored is that social protection can have positive impacts together with economic initiatives, and can eventually generate employment, incomes and economic growth – a strategy to generate profits.”

“Economic efficiency and productivity,” said the expert, stressing the initiative’s intergenerational impact.

“Educating children and giving them better health coverage makes it possible to keep them from falling into poverty because they have poor parents who have not educated them or given them proper healthcare. The idea is to give them the possibility to pull out of poverty thanks to education and improved health,” he said.

De Janvry advocated the promotion of small-scale family farming and rethinking social protection policies in rural areas, but also called for “identifying critical sectors in rural poverty such as indigenous poverty, problems of discrimination and the relation with the preservation of natural resources, such as climate change mitigation.”

“There are a series of new spaces for policies that are aimed at different purposes, such as social protection or climate change mitigation, but that at the same time can generate pathways out of poverty for the extreme poor,” he said.

For Trivelli, the new proposals of policies to end rural poverty “require new institutional arrangements” since “there is no ministry taking care of the rural poor, different sectors and levels of government have to pitch in, besides many private sector actors.”

“Extractive industries, for example, that operate in rural areas, and we have to get these institutions involved, different ministries, public entities, levels of government, private companies and organisations of farmers and rural dwellers themselves to reach agreements,” she said.

But the plans of the emerging Alliance are facing key constraints, such as the backdrop of a difficult decade for the region in terms of economic peformance, as projected by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“The macro-fiscal context in the region is not the most positive. Clearly the battle for public resources is increasingly fierce, and therefore the narrative is very important,” Trivelli acknowledged.

In her opinion, “we have to make a good case for why governments should invest in ending poverty instead of doing a bunch of other things for which there are also lots of interest and pressure groups.”

During the launch of the Alliance,, FAO regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean Julio Berdegué said it was necessary “to not lower our guard” in the fight against poverty in the region, stating that 27 per cent of the rural population living in extreme poverty “is not an insignificant proportion.”

“We cannot evade the link between poverty and inequality,” he said, pointing out the people hit hardest by extreme poverty are indigenous women in remote areas.

Berdegué described the emerging Alliance as “a regional public good that transcends FAO and IFAD,” which will mobilise Latin America’s wealth and experience “to give the best support to the governments of the region interacting with them and with their organisations committed to ending rural poverty.”

Through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)’s Plan for Food Security, Nutrition and Hunger Eradication, the region was the first in the developing South to commit to eradicating hunger by 2025, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) which have set that goal for 2030 at a global level.

IFAD expert in public policies Lauren Phillips told IPS that the joint efforts together with FAO and other institutions that will join the Alliance “aim to propose better solutions to end extreme poverty in the region, which is very important for local people.”

“We are thinking of focusing on some key ideas where there is already evidence of the possibility of public policies achieving benefits, and also focusing on certain countries,” she said.

For Phillips, “we have to think strategically about where are the possibilities of achieving the most… we have to also think about the political situation of the countries and where we have evidence about the routes we need to take to make progress over the next few weeks.”

“We have to always think about what is feasible and realistic and what are the governments’ capacities,” the expert said. “We know that the governments of some countries need more technical support to implement the public policies.”

She believes that “it is a huge challenge faced by all developing regions, including Latin America. Perhaps the capacity to develop strategies exists, but to implement them is always harder due to a lack of resources and capacities.”

A house with a solar panel in the municipality of Tula, in Hidalgo, a state adjacent to Mexico City. Non-conventional renewable sources are considered an instrument to combat energy poverty. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 29 2017 (IPS)

Energy poverty afflicts millions of homes in Mexico, with many social, economic and environmental impacts for the country.

These homes, located in both urban and rural areas in this Latin American country of 122 million people, have difficulty satisfying their needs for energy for cooking, lighting, heating and entertainment.

“Not only is it a problem of access, since the population needs other consumables, to cook, take a bath, for family entertainment. Access to energy is a key indicator of well-being and in this respect it is important to know how many families lack this service,” expert Boris Graizbord told IPS.“We have to regionalise the response, which requires a different combination of inputs and expenses. If we invest in solar water heaters or in other renewable energy sources, we’ll reduce spending on gas, we’ll decrease the power distribution. Those scenarios are possible if there is a decentralisation of power generation.“ -- Boris Graizbord

The academic from the Centre of Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies at the public College of Mexico pointed out that some groups in small localities, even those who have their own incomes or remittances sent home by relatives in the United States, are unable to access natural gas or other energy sources.

The concept of energy poverty is new in Latin America, although it emerged in the 1990s in Britain, to describe the situation when a poor family spends more than10 percent of their income on energy.

But in countries such as Mexico the concept has been adapted to take into account cultural and social differences. Here the concept includes lack of access to energy, poor quality services, or energy inefficiency.

In a pioneering study, Graizbord and his colleague Roberto García, from the public College of the Northern Frontier, found that nearly 37 per cent of households –about 11 million homes– suffer from a shortage of energy in terms of “economic goods” such as thermal comfort, an efficient refrigerator or a gas or electric stove.

The study “Spatial characterisation of energy poverty in Mexico. An analysis at a subnational level,” published in 2016 in the magazine Economy, Society and Territory, found that the main factors behind the phenomenon are income level, the size of the town and of the house, and the educational level and gender of the head of the household.

This “represents a major social problem, due to the effect that the use of clean, affordable energy has on improving the quality of life and reducing poverty among the local population,” points out this study by Graizbord and García, who has worked on this issue in the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The southern states of Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca present the highest average levels of energy poverty, as well as the highest overall poverty rates.

In Mexico, 46 per cent of the population lived in poverty in 2014, when the latest National Survey of Household Incomes and Expenditures was carried out – a rate that has likely increased since then, according to experts.

The Energy Ministry identifies the most important end uses in the residential sector as water heating, cooking, refrigerator, lighting, air conditioning/heat and entertainment.

In 2015, firewood produced 252,840 petajoules. The joule is the measuring unit for energy which equals one watt per second and estimates how much heat is necessary to carry out an activity. A petajoule represents one quadrillion (10^15) joules.

Gabriela Niño, climate change coordinator for the non-governmental organisation Polea, said there is a close link between energy poverty and its social and environmental impacts, such as the emission of polluting gases, soil degradation and deforestation.

“With biomass there is a big health risk, since people are exposed to local pollutants by burning biomass indoors,” she told IPS.

Since August 2014, Mexico has embarked on a major energy reform that opened up oil exploration, extraction, refining, transportation, distribution and sale of oil and its by-products to local and foreign private investment.

But the question remains whether these changes will result in a reduction of energy poverty, insofar as the government leaves important activities of the electricity sector in private hands, who are profit driven, and not focused on social objectives.

Also, the country has committed to the goals set by Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll), the programme to be implemented during the United Nations 2014-2024 Decade of Sustainable Energy for All.

This global initiative intends to guarantee universal access to modern energy services, double the rate of improvement of global energy efficiency and increase the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.

Also, like the rest of the international community, it has adopted one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 7, which aims “to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all,” as part of the 2030 Agenda.

Graizbord proposes a response in Mexico differentiated by region, given the variations, including climatic, in different parts of the country.

“We have to regionalise the response, which requires a different combination of inputs and expenses. If we invest in solar water heaters or in other renewable energy sources, we’ll reduce spending on gas, we’ll decrease the power distribution. Those scenarios are possible if there is a decentralisation of power generation,” he said.

For Niño, addressing energy poverty poses several challenges.

“We have to research, generate indicators, identify causes and possible solutions, on how energy is generated, how it is used,” she said.

In her opinion, “the democratisation of energy should also be promoted, the government should generate actions that respond to a public policy objective, focused on access to new technologies, such as solar panels, for people who are isolated from the grid or who are not able to produce their own power or meet their needs.”

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 97 per cent of the population has access to energy. This means that 23 million people still lack electricity, according to data from late 2016 of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Nevertheless, the IDB predicts that this will be the first developing region to achieve universal energy access.

In Mexico, more than two million people have no electricity. According to the IDB, the countries in the region with the largest proportion of the population lacking energy access are Haiti – where only 40 percent have electricity – Honduras, Peru, and Mexico.

Meanwhile, leading the region in terms of greatest access are Uruguay, Costa Rica and Chile, in that order.

Clean drinking water is available to no more than half of Asia’s population. Water is fundamental to the post-2015 development agenda. Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Mar 21 2017 (IPS)

In Asia, it likely will not be straightforward water wars.

Prolonged water scarcity might lead to security situations that are more nuanced, giving rise to a complex set of cascading but unpredictable consequences, with communities and nations reacting in ways that we have not seen in the past because climate change will alter the reliability of current water management systems and infrastructure, say experts.China plays an increasingly dominant role in South Asia’s water politics because it administers the Tibetan Autonomous Region; the Himalayan mountain range contains the largest amount of snow and ice after Antartica and the Arctic.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 said a water crisis is the most impactful risk over the next 10 years. The effects of rising populations in developing regions like Asia, alongside growing prosperity, place unsustainable pressure on resources and are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways – harming people, institutions and economies, and making water security an urgent political matter.

While the focus is currently on the potential for climate change to exacerbate water crises, with impacts including conflicts and a much greater flow of forced migration that is already on our doorsteps, a 2016 study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) warns Asia not to underestimate impact of industrial and population growth, including spiraling urban growth, on serious water shortages across a broad swath of Asia by 2050.

Asia’s water challenges escalate

To support a global population of 9.7 billion by 2050, food production needs to increase by 60 percent and water demand is projected to go up by 55 percent. But the horizon is challenging for developing regions, especially Asia, whose 3.4 billion population will need 100 percent more food – using the diminishing, non-substitute resource in a warming world said the Asian Water Development Outlook (AWDO) 2016, the latest regional water report card from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

More than 1.4 billion people – or 42 percent of world’s total active workforce – are heavily water dependent, especially in agriculture-dominant Asia, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2016.

With erratic monsoons on which more than half of all agriculture in Asia is dependent, resorting to groundwater for irrigation, whose extraction is largely unmonitored, is already rampant. A staggering 70 percent of the world’s groundwater extraction is in Asia, with India, China and Pakistan the biggest consumers, estimates UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

By 2050, with a 30 percent increase in extraction, 86 percent of groundwater extracted in Asia will be by these three countries, finds the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Together India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal use 23 million pumps with an annual energy bill of 3.78 billion dollars for lifting water – an indicator of the critical demand for water, and to an extent of misgovernance and lack of water-saving technologies (AWDO 2016).

AWDO sounds alarm bells warning that we are on the verge of a water crisis, with limited knowledge on when we will tip the balance.

Analysts from the Leadership Group on Water Security in Asia say the start of future transboundary water conflicts will have less to do with the absolute scarcity of water and more to do with the rate of change in water availability.

Water, known as Blue Gold, provides a broad range of livelihoods to communities as in India’s Kerala state. Here coconut farmers ferry a boatload to sell at tourist spots. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

‘Resource nationalism’ already strong in water-stressed Asian neighbours

With just 30 days of buffer fresh water stock, Pakistan’s renewable internal freshwater resources per capita in 2014 measured a perilous 297 cubic metres, Bangladesh’s 660m³ India’s 1116m³ and China’s 2062m³. When annual water access falls below 1700m³ per person, an area is considered water-stressed and when 1000m³ is breached, it faces water scarcity.

ADB describes Asia as “the global hotspot for water insecurity.

By 2050 according to AWDO, 3.4 billion people – or the projected combined population of India, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2050 – making up 40 percent of the world population, could be living in water-stressed areas. In other words, the bulk of the population increase will be in countries already experiencing water shortages.

Underlying geo-political standpoints are slowly but perceptibly hardening in Himalayan Asia nations over shared river basins, even if not intensifying as yet, seen in the latest instances last year. They are, as water conflict analysts predict, spurts of bilateral tension that might or might not suddenly escalate to conflict, the scale of which cannot be predicted. The following, a latest instance, is a pointer to future scenarios of geographical interdependencies that riparian nations can either reduce by sensible hydro-politics or escalate differences by contestations.

There was alarm in Pakistan when Indian Prime Minister took a stand in September last year to review the 57-year-old Indus Water Treaty between the two South Asian neighbours. India was retaliating against a purportedly Pakistan terrorist attack on an Indian army base at Uri in Kashmir that killed 18 soldiers.

By co-incidence or design (several Indian analysts think it is the latter), at the very same time China blocked a tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo River which is the upper course of the Brahmaputra in India, as part of the construction of its 740-million-dollar Lalho hydro project in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The Yarlung Tsangpo River originates in the Himalayan ranges, and is called the Brahmaputra as it flows down into India’s Arunachal Pradesh state bordering Tibet and further into Bangladesh.

China’s action caused India alarm on two counts. Some analysts believed Beijing was trying to encourage Dhaka to take up a defensive stand against India over sharing of Brahmaputra waters, thereby destabilizing India-Bangladesh’s cordial ally status in the region.

The second possibility analysts proffered is an alarming and fairly new military risk. River water, when dammed, can be intentionally used as a weapon of destruction during war.

Pakistan had earlier raised the same security concern, that India may exercise a strategic advantage during war by regulating the two major dams on rivers that flow through Kashmir into Pakistan. Indian experts say China is more likely than India to take this recourse and will use the river water as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations.

South Asia as a region is prone to conflict between nations, between non-state actors and the state. Its history of territorial issues, religious and ethnic differences makes it more volatile than most other regions. Historically China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have had territorial wars between them. The  wary and increasingly competitive outlook of their relationships makes technology-grounded and objective discussions over the erupting water disputes difficult.

China already plays an increasingly dominant role in South Asia’s water politics because it administers the Tibetian Autonomous Region with the Tibetan Plateau, around which the Himalayan mountain range contains the largest amount of snow and ice after Antartica and the Arctic. The glacier-fed rivers that emanate from this ‘water tower’ are shared across borders by 40 percent of world population, guaranteeing food, water and energy security to millions of people and nurturing biodiverse ecosystems downstream.

The largest three trans-boundary basins in the region – in terms of area, population, water resources, irrigation and hydropower potential – are the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra.

Both India and China have embarked on massive hydropower energy generation, China for industrialization and India to provide for its population, which will be the world’s largest by 2022.

With growing food and energy needs, broad estimates suggest that more than half of the world’s large rivers are dammed. Dams have enormous benefits, but without comprehensive water-sharing treaties, lower riparian states are disadvantaged and this could turn critical in future.

While there are river-water sharing treaties between India and Pakistan, and with Bangladesh, there is none with China except a hydrological data sharing collaboration.

Security threats emerge when it becomes difficult to solve competition over scarce natural resources by cooperation. Failure may result in violent conflicts. A ‘zero-sum’ situation is reached, when violence is seen as the only option to secure use of the resource, says a 2016 report by the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change.

When drivers in Asia, like population growth, the need for economic growth, poverty reduction, energy needs, the impact of high rate of urbanization and changing lifestyles, confront resource scarcity, it could bring a zero-sum situation sooner than anticipated.

Excerpt:

Clean water is still a pipe dream for more than 300 million Africans. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Mar 21 2017 (IPS)

Though key to good health and economic wellbeing, water and sanitation remain less of a development priority in Africa, where high costs and poor policy implementation constrain getting clean water and flush toilets to millions.

A signatory to several agreements committing to water security, Africa simply cannot afford the infrastructure to bring water to everyone, argues water expert Mike Muller.Lack of access to clean water can contribute to famine, wars and uncontrolled and irregular migration.

Sub-Saharan Africa uses less than five percent of its water resources, but making water available to all can be prohibitively expensive, Muller, of the Wits University School of Governance in South Africa and a former director general of the South African Department of Water, told IPS.

“Domestic water supply is a political priority in Africa and sanitation has grown in importance,” he said, “but the services cost money.”

According to the World Water Council, a global body with over 300 members founded in 1996 to advocate for world water security, the world needs to spend an estimated 650 billion dollars annually from now to 2030 to build necessary infrastructure to ensure universal water security.

Water woes still running

Africa is still far from enjoying the returns from investments in the water sector; for example, it has more citizens with mobile phones than access to clean water and toilets. A 2016 report published by Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network, which explored access to basic services and infrastructure in 35 African countries, found that only 30 percent of Africans had access to toilets and only 63 percent to piped water – yet 93 percent had mobile phone service.

Governments need to invest in water projects that will avail clean water to all in a world where over 800 million people currently do not have access to safe drinking water, and where water-related diseases account for 3.5 million deaths each year, said the World Water Council in a statement ahead of the World Water Day. The WWC warned that water insecurity costs the global economy an estimated 500 billion dollars annually.

“World leaders realize that sanitation is fundamental to public health, but we need to act now in order to achieve the UN’s Global Sustainable Development Goal Number 6 – to deliver safe water and sanitation to everyone everywhere by 2030,” World Water Council President Benedito Braga said in a statement. “We need commitment at the highest levels, so every town and city in the world can ensure that safe, clean water resources are available.”

Noting the key impact of water access, Braga warned that lack of access to clean water can contribute to famine, wars and uncontrolled and irregular migration.

“Water is an essential ingredient for social and economic development across nearly all sectors. It secures enough food for all, provides sufficient and stable energy supplies, and ensures market and industrial stability amongst others benefits,” he said, adding that the world has missed the sanitation target, leaving 2.4 billion people without access to improved sanitation facilities, necessitating the investment in water and sanitation which the World Water Council said brought an estimated 4.3 dollars in return for every dollar invested through reduced health care costs.

Children fetch water from a canal at the Magwe irrigation scheme in south Matabeleland, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Wealth from wastewater

World Water Day 2017 focuses on waste water, which the United Nations inter-agency entity UN-Water says is an untapped source of wealth if properly treated.

The United Nations defines wastewater as “a combination of domestic effluent consisting of blackwater (excreta, urine and faecal sludge) and greywater (kitchen and bathing wastewater) in addition to water from commercial establishments and institutions, industrial and agricultural effluent.”

According the fourth World Water Development Report, currently only 20 percent of globally produced wastewater receives proper treatment, and this was mainly dependent on a country’s income. This means treatment capacity is 70 percent of the generated wastewater in high-income countries, compared to only 8 percent in low-income countries, according to a UN-Water Analytics Brief, Waste Water Management.

“A paradigm shift is now required in water politics the world over not only to prevent further damage to sensitive ecosystems and the aquatic environment, but also to emphasize that wastewater is a resource (in terms of water and also nutrient for agricultural use) whose effective management is essential for future water security,” said UN-Water.

Muller said Africa cannot talk of waste water without first delivering adequate clean water.

“The focus on waste water reflects the rich world’s desire to reduce pollution, protect the environment and sell technology,” Muller said. “There are some major cities and towns where ‘used’ water is treated and reused, in others untreated water is sought after by peri-urban farmers because it provides valuable fertilizer as well.

“But in places without adequate water supplies or sewers to remove the wastewater, waste water treatment is not yet a priority, [and] without water supply there can be no waste water.”

According to the World Water Council, about 90 percent of the world’s wastewater flows untreated into the environment. More than 923 million people have no access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion others do not have adequate sanitation.

“Nearly 40 percent of the world’s population already faces water scarcity, which may increase to two-thirds of the population by 2025. In addition, approximately 700 million people are living in urban areas without safe toilets,” the Council said.

Waste water can be a drought-resistant source of water especially for agriculture or industry, nutrients for agriculture, soil conditioner and source of energy.

Some impurities in wastewater are useful as organic fertilizers. With proper treatment, wastewater can be useful in supporting pasture for grazing by livestock.

Clever Mafuta, Africa Coordinator at GRID-Arendal, a Norway-based centre that collaborates with the UN Environment, says an integrated and holistic approach is needed in water management across the world.

“Making strides in safe drinking water alone is a temporary success if other elements such as sanitation and wastewater management are not attended to, especially in urban areas,” Mafuta told IPS. “Wastewater often ends up in drinking sources, and as such if wastewater is not managed well, gains made in the provision of safe drinking water can be eroded.”

The UN estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa alone loses 40 billion hours per year collecting water – the same as an entire year’s labour by the population of France.

The Africa Water Vision 2025 launched by a number of UN agencies and African regional bodies in 2000 noted extreme climate and rainfall variability, inappropriate governance and institutional arrangements in managing national and transactional water basins and unsustainable financing of investments in water supply and sanitation as some of the threats to water security in Africa.

African ministers responsible for sanitation and hygiene adopted the Ngor Declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene in May 2015 in Senegal, committing to access to sanitation and eliminating open defecation by 2030. However, this goal remains extremely distant.

African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW) has developed an African monitoring and reporting system for the water and sanitation sector. Executive Secretary Canisius Kanangire calls it an important step in ensuring effective and efficient management of the continent’s water resources and the provision of adequate and equitable access to safe water and sanitation for all.

Excerpt:

Two women working in a textile plant in the capital of Colombia. Nearly half of women of working age in Latin America and the Caribbean, 126 million, form part of the labour force. But they face a growing rate of unemployment, which could climb above 10 percent this year, a level not seen in two decades. Credit: J. Bayona/OIT

By Jose Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs
LIMA, Mar 6 2017 (IPS)

The participation of women in the labour market in Latin America and the Caribbean has steadily grown over the last few decades. But in 2017, as unemployment and informal work are on the rise, there is a continued need to push hard for gender equality in order to create more and better employment for the 255 million women of working age in this region.

Almost half of these women, 126 million, are already part of the labour force – a very important achievement that took many years to reach. Once more, however, it must be stressed that we cannot let down our guard.

Over the past year, as the wave of slow growth and in some cases of economic contraction which struck the region impacted on the labour market, generating a sharp rise in unemployment and also a decline in the quality of employment with respect to some indicators, it has become evident that this situation affects women to a larger extent.

The regional average unemployment rate for women shot up to levels not seen for over a decade in Latin America and the Caribbean, to 9.8 per cent – on the brink of two digits. If projections of slow economic growth for this year prove correct, the average rate could climb above 10 per cent in 2017.

José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, ILO regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: ILO

The unemployment rate for women grew 1.6 percentage points, compared to 1.3 percentage points for men. Of the five million people who joined the ranks of the unemployed, 2.3 million were women. This means that about 12 million women are actively looking for work, without success..

The participation of women in the labour force has continued to expand over the last year. At a national level (rural+urban), women’s participation has gone from 49.3 per cent to 49.7 per cent. An increase is always good news. However, it still remains well below the participation of men, which is 74.6 per cent.

The downside was that the demand for labour fell from 45.2 to 44.9 per cent in the case of women. It also dropped in the case of men, although the level remains much higher, at 69.3 per cent.
The latest ILO (International Labour Organisation) Labour Overview of Latin America and the Caribbean also noted that the decline in economic activity has been reflected in a drop in the number of wage-earners, a rise in the number of self-employed workers, and a decrease in formal sector wages, all of which are signs of an increase in labour informality.

The most recent estimates available regarding informality among women indicate that almost half of the female labour force works under these conditions, which generally mean labour instability, low incomes, and a lack of protection and rights.

Several aspects to be taken into account when analysing women’s labour participation have been identified, such as the fact that about 70 per cent of women who work do so in the retail trade and services sector, often in precarious conditions, for example, without contracts.

In addition, 17 million women in the region work as domestics. Women make up 90 per cent of domestic workers. In this sector, the levels of informality are still very high, around 70 per cent.

This description of the characteristics of women’s insertion in the labour market would not be complete without pointing out a notable aspect mentioned by the regional report on “Decent work and gender equality” by several United Nations agencies presented in 2013: in this region, 53.7 per cent of female workers have more than ten years of formal education, in contrast to just 40.4 per cent of men.

Moreover, 22.8 per cent of women in the labour force have tertiary education (complete or incomplete), by comparison to 16.2 per cent of men.

However, this does not prevent the persistence of a significant wage gap. A report by ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) noted that in 2016, according to available data, women earned 83.9 per cent of what men earned in similar jobs. The gap is still wider among men and women with higher educational levels.

These figures should serve as a wake-up call.

This issue is already part of the sustainable development goals set for all countries in the 2030 Agenda. Particularly, in Goal #5: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, and is key for Goal #8 on economic growth and decent work. For the ILO, gender equality is a cross-cutting objective, present in all its activities.

We are facing a structural challenge, which must involve economic, social, and, as we know, cultural changes as well. It is necessary for governments as well as social actors to make the achievement of greater equality between men and women a top priority.

Formulas have to be sought to improve women’s productivity, stimulating their participation in more dynamic sectors, of medium to high productivity, while at the same time identifying the causes of labour market segregation.

To continue advancing towards equality in the labour market, it is necessary to resort to a combination of actions aiming at gender equality, including: active employment policies; network and infrastructure for caregiving and new policies for services for child care and care of dependent persons; strategies to promote the division of household responsibilities; improved education and vocational training; incentives for women entrepreneurs; increased social security coverage; and determined action to prevent and combat violence against women, including in the workplace.
Equality in employment remains one of the most important challenges for achieving a better future for workers in the region.

Excerpt:

Juna Bhujel (looking at the camera) at the Mankha VDC office to complain about non-payment of disaster relief funds to reconstruct housing. She lost her home in Nepal’s April 2015 earthquake. Credit: Renu Kshetry/IPS

By Renu Kshetry
KATHMANDU, Feb 21 2017 (IPS)

Juna Bhujel of Sindupalchowk District, 85 kilometres northeast of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, lost her daughter-in-law in the Apr. 25, 2015 earthquake. Fortunately, she managed to rescue her two-year-old grandson, who was trapped between her mother’s body and the rubble.

Soon after the devastating earthquake, her son, the family’s sole bread-winner, left for Malaysia to seek work, taking out a loan with high interest rates to fund his trip. He has neither returned, nor sent any money back home.“Since 65 percent of the total income of Nepali people goes to food consumption, these programs should be linked with food security." --Janak Raj Joshi, former vice chairman of the Poverty Alleviation Fund

Bhujel, a member of the Mankha Village Development Committee (VDC), now lives in a makeshift dwelling with a family of five. Their only source of income is when her husband gets menial work in home construction. To make matters worse, she has not received any money from the government to build a house.

“I was already poor, with a small plot of land that produced enough food for only three months, and now I don’t even have a house,” said Bhujel, 55. “If my government does not support me, then who will?”

Bhujel is just one of tens of thousands of earthquake victims who lost their family members and homes, but are still waiting to be formally identified as “poor” by the government.

Nepal has set a target of reducing poverty to five percent by 2030, per the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. In this central Himalayan country, 25.2 percent of the population now lives below the national poverty line.

The government is planning to distribute Poor Identity Cards to 395,000 families in 25 districts starting in April, providing social security entitlements and benefits with the aim of achieving the targets.

Hriday Ram Thani, Minister for Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation, told IPS that with this new identity card, the government will be able to implement more concentrated programs. The ministry is planning to expand the distribution of identity cards to 50 more districts. Nepal has 75 districts.

But the government’s ambitious plans to alleviate poverty face the challenge of weak programming, planning and coordination between various line ministries to successfully implement the proposed programs.

Nepal already has 44 programs to alleviate poverty run by various ministries. For example, the Poverty Alleviation Constituency Development Program run by the Ministry of Federal Affairs and Local Development has a budget of Rs one billion (9.29 million dollars), and the 9,290,000.00 USD 9,290,000.00 USDPoverty Alleviation Fund under the Prime Minister’s office has a Rs 3.82 billion (2.6 million) budget for this year.

The Youth Employment Fund under the Finance Ministry has Rs 90 million (836,100 dollars), and the Poor with Bishweswor program under the Ministry of Local Development has Rs 160 million (1.486 million) for this year with the mandate to run programs in 483 VDCs in 75 districts.

While the Youth Council Program aims to provide one industry per 10 youth under the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Rural Independent Fund run by Nepal Rastra Bank under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock also has a similar aim to reduce poverty.

Minister Thani said that in order to achieve the target and make it more results-oriented, he has already asked Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal to integrate all these poverty-related projects so that the outcome can be measured — or else to close down the ministry.

“Apart from results documented in reports from any of these ministries, the impact cannot be observed in any of their target areas,” he said.

He added that there is a need to establish a high-level poverty alleviation board under the chairmanship of the prime minister and the Poverty Alleviation Ministry should be the focal ministry that links all the projects under various ministries. “There is a need for an internal expert team within the ministry with 3-5 subject group experts,” he said.

While the Poverty Ministry is complaining about a lack of programs and projects, high-level officials at National Planning Commission said that since poverty is a cross-cutting issue, all the ministries are running their own programs and discussions are being held with the Poverty Ministry on how to integrate these programs.

Apart from these initiatives, about two to three percent of the government budget is spent on nine categories of Social Security Entitlements each year for 8 percent of the total population.

Janak Raj Joshi, former vice chairman of the Poverty Alleviation Fund, said that it is sad that the government’s programs have been expanding but failed to go deeper and lack sustainability. He also blamed various international organisations for launching time-bound poverty alleviation projects.

“Since 65 percent of the total income of Nepali people goes to food consumption, these programs should be linked with food security,” he said. “The government lacks a vision of proper distribution of resources and the programs have failed to address the core issues. Each program should directly link to the people living under the poverty line.”

Around two-thirds of Nepalis rely on agriculture for their livelihood, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The National Planning Commission (NPC) aims to introduce various programs to help improve the overall development of agriculture from this year.

Mahesh Kharel, Under-Secretary of the NPC’s Poverty Alleviation Division, said that they have planned an Agriculture Development Strategy from this year. He said that under the prime minister’s chairmanship, the project will focus on agriculture, infrastructure, local development and agricultural roads, livestock and irrigation to promote marketing of agricultural goods.

The government has allotted Rs 58 billion (541 million dollars) for the project. Similarly, the government has also allotted Rs six billion (56 million) to focus on an Agriculture Modernization Project. The program has already started in Kailali, Jhapa and Bara districts, where super zones of wheat, rice and fish have been announced.

Kharel agreed that poverty alleviation needs an integrated approach with some focused programs that directly affect the poor and bring positive changes to their lives. “By making improvements in the agriculture sector, we can help improve the living standards of people living under the poverty line,” he said.

More girls in rural Bihar, India are going to school after mini-grid-powered household lights give mothers and children two extra hours of evening work and study time. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Feb 16 2017 (IPS)

Jaipal Hembrum runs three one-man home enterprises – a bicycle repair shop, a tiny food stall and a tailoring unit in Kautuka, a remote village in eastern India. Sewing recycled clothes into mattresses late into the evening, the 38-year-old father of three girls says two light bulbs fed by a solar power system have changed his life.

Given the trajectory of development India is currently pursuing, energy access for its rural population could bring dramatic economic improvement. Yet 237 million people — a fifth of its 1.3 billion people, many of them in remote villages with few livelihood options — do not have any access to it.The challenge India faces is how to meet its energy requirements while also meeting its emission reduction commitment to the global climate deal.

The Delhi-based research organisation Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) stipulates that if even half of households deemed electrified through the national power grid are not receiving the guaranteed six hours uninterrupted supply, the number of people who are electricity-poor in India totals 650 million.

In this scenario, renewable energy-based mini-grids, particularly in remote villages, are considered the best option to manage local household and commercial energy demand efficiently by generating power at the source of consumption.

This is being proven true by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Smart Power for Rural Development (SPRD) initiative in two of India’s poorest states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where 16 and 36 percent of households respectively are electrified. In India, 55 percent rural households have energy access, often of unreliable quality.

Started in 2014, the SPRD project has helped set up close to 100 mini-grid plants, covering the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and lately, in Jharkhand too. According to Rockefeller Foundation sources, these plants are serving a customer base of around 38,000 people. Over 6,500 households are benefitting, along with 3,800 shops and businesses, and over 120 institutions, telecom towers and micro-enterprises.

Over 2014 – 2017, the Rockefeller Foundation aims to make a difference to 1,000 energy-poor villages in India, benefitting around a million rural people. For this effort, the Foundation has committed 75 million dollars, partnering and funding Smart Power India (SPI) a new entity designed to work closely with a wide range of stakeholders who help scale-up the market for off-grid energy.

Jaipal Hembrum stitches old clothes mattresses in the evening by the light of a solar-powered bulb. The 50 dollars a day he earns is kept aside for schooling and marriages of his three daughters. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

What can mini-grids can do? Plenty

A recent evaluation of the mini-grids’ impact on communities they serve in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh already show a broad range of economic, social and environmental benefits.

Entrepreneurship and new businesses have grown, with 70 percent existing micro-businesses reporting increased number of costumers after connecting to the mini-grids and 80 percent planned to expand.

Nine in 10 household users said their children’s daily study time has increased by two hours since they got the lights. Women said they had increased mobility after dark and theft cases had fallen. Use of kerosene and diesel has fallen dramatically — to virtually zero, according to Khanna.

Micro-businesses like cyber cafes, fuel stations, mobile and fan repair shops, banks, schools and hospitals are the fastest growing commercial customer section of mini-grids constructed under Smart Power India.

In Shivpura village of Uttar Pradesh, where TARA Urja, a small energy service company (ESCO), started providing reliable electricity from a 30-KW solar plant, Sandeep Jaiswal set up a water purification processor in 2015. In just over a month he was rushing 1,200 litres of water on his new mini-truck to 40 customers. TARA, also a social business incubator, has financially supported Jaiswal with 530 dollars, in return for a one-year contract to source electricity from TARA.

Smart Power India supports the development of rural micro-enterprises through loans, community engagement and partnerships with larger companies with rural value chains, for instance, city malls that source vegetables from rural farms.

India confronts a demographic youth ‘bulge’ with 64 percent in the working age group in 2020, requiring 10 million new jobs every year in the coming decade. Using green mini-grids to create rural livelihoods can also reduce urban migration.

Innovating a business model that propels construction of mini-grids

Mini-grids are a decentralized system providing a renewable energy-based electricity generator with a capacity of 10 kilowatts or more, with a target consumer group it supplies through a stand-alone distribution network.

The sustainability of private companies in the rural power supply sector depends on generating sufficient revenue long-term. To make it profitable for smaller-scale ESCOs to bring electricity to rural parts of the developing world, the Smart Power model ensures fast-growing sectors with significant energy needs such as telecom towers in rural areas, to provide steady revenue. In return, the ESCOs provide contractual guarantee of reliable power supply to the towers.

“There is an opportunity to catalyze the telecommunication and off-grid energy sectors. Currently cell phone towers in rural areas are often powered by expensive diesel generators and companies are looking for cheaper alternatives, thereby creating the possibility for a strong anchor,” says Ashvin Dayal, Managing Director, Asia, of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Telecom towers — by becoming the ‘anchor’ customers – help make ESCOs bankable. They then can expand supply into rural household lighting and local enterprises.

Government figures say 2 billion litres of diesel is annually consumed by the 350,000  existing telecom towers in India, including those in remote rural regions. The challenge India faces is how to meet its energy requirements without compromising environmental sustainability, while meeting its emission reduction commitment to the global climate deal.

Solar power cost per unit has fallen in India to 0.045 cents, which makes it increasingly feasible to shift to renewable powered mini-grids, saving substantial subsidies spent on fossil fuels. The government in 2016 decided to construct 10,000 mini-grids in the next five years of 500 megawatt (MW) capacity, but this is clearly not enough, say experts.

India has a potential for 748,990 MW of solar power. Fourteen states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, receive irradiance above the annual global average of 5 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day.

Around the world, approximately 1.3 billion people lack access to reliable and affordable means of electricity without which, growing their incomes, improving food security and health, educating children, accessing key information services becomes a major challenge. Energy access is critical to achieving several UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Curbing illicit financial flows will free finances for development projects like the provision of safe drinking water. A man collecting water at a government-funded borehole in Southern Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 26 2017 (IPS)

Thanks to growing investor interest, increasing respect for democratic reforms, and its vast food production potential, the Africa Rising narrative is only getting better.

But Africa’s development success story will only be complete when the continent plugs the hemorrhaging of its financial resources badly needed for its own development. Africa is losing an estimated 50 billion dollars annually through illicit financial flows (IFFs) — half of all global losses and the equivalent of Morocco’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP)."[Illicit Financial Flows] are only a tip of the iceberg. Within the paradigm of Africa's natural capital losses, part of which is in the form of IFFs, the losses are mind-boggling.” --UNEP's Richard Munang

According to the World Bank, IFFs refer to the deliberate loss of financial resources through under-invoicing, which researchers say is a blot on the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. Worst, IFFs are depriving Africans of needed resources to access better food, education and health care. Despite a decline in the prevalence of undernourishment in Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Food Programme says the region still has the highest percentage of population going hungry, with one in four persons undernourished.

As cancerous as corruption, illicit financial flows are costing Africa big time. This is despite a continental initiative to curb them at a time Africa is making some progress on good governance, according to the seminal Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance 2016.

Can the wings of capital flight be clipped?

A 2015 report by the High-level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa established by the African Union and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) puts the average financial losses at between 50 billion and 148 billion dollars a year through trade mispricing. South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Mozambique and Liberia are some of the countries that have suffered most due to trade mispricing.

“IFFs significantly hamper Africa’s development and progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) considering the astronomical investments the region needs to mobilize and the declining international sources,” climate change expert and the United Nations Environment Programme’s Regional Climate Change Programme Coordinator, Richard Munang, told IPS.

Cumulatively, IFFs range from natural resources plundering and environmental crimes like illegal logging, illegal trade in wildlife, and unaccounted for and unregulated fishing (IUU) to illegal mining practices, food imports, and degraded ecosystems. Munang estimates that Africa loses up to 195 billion dollars annually of its natural capital — an amount exceeding the total annual cost Africa needs to invest in infrastructure, healthcare, education and adapting to climate change under a 2°C warming scenario.

“Reversing IFFs and other natural capital losses is an urgent imperative if the region is going to develop and achieve the SDGs,” said Munang, adding that in terms of climate resilience, for instance, it is projected that to meet adaptation costs by the 2020s, funds disbursed annually to Africa need to grow at an average rate of 10-20 percent annually from 2011 levels.

“So far, this has not been achieved. And no clear pathway exists from international sources,” Munang said. “But IFFs are only a tip of the iceberg. Within the paradigm of Africa’s natural capital losses, part of which is in the form of IFFs, the losses are mind-boggling.”

A recent study called “Financing Africa’s Post-2015 Development Agenda” shows that from 1970 to 2008, Africa lost between 854 billion and 1.8 trillion dollars in illicit financial flows — good money in bad hands.

UNECA says illicit financial flows are unrecorded capital flows derived from the proceeds of theft, bribery and other forms of corruption by government officials and criminal activities, including drug trading, racketeering, counterfeiting, contraband and terrorist financing.

In addition, proceeds of tax evasion and laundered commercial transactions are counted under IFFs. Africa is also losing much-needed money to drug trafficking, tax dodging, wildlife poaching, human trafficking and theft of minerals and oil.

Tax Inspectors without Borders (TIWB), a project launched by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2015, has helped collect more than 260 million dollars in additional tax revenues in eight pilot countries, indicating the potential of tightening tax audits.

Head of the TIWB Secretariat James Karanja noted that capacity-building can help companies pay their taxes, stop tax dodging and help raise domestic resources to fund government services.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, GDP growth has averaged five percent in Africa in the last decade, consistently outperforming global economic trends. This growth has been boosted by among other factors, rapid urbanization, expanding regional markets, sound macroeconomic management and improved governance.

The Panel chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki also fingered large commercial corporations as culprits in IFFs, which have been fueled by corruption and weak governance. The solution, the panel said was to boost transparency in mining sector transactions and stop money laundering via banks, actions which rested on coordinated action between government, private sector and civil society.

“Illicit financial flows are a challenge to us as Africans, but clearly the solution is global. We couldn’t resolve this thing by just acting on our own as Africans,” Mbeki told the UN’s Africa Renewal magazine in a 2016 interview in New York.

For instance, Zimbabwe is currently in a financial crisis, having lost close to 2 billion dollars to illicit financial flows in 2015, according to the Reserve Bank. The figure is four times the money Zimbabwe attracted in Foreign Direct Investment in 2015 and more than half the 2016 national budget. The Global Financial Integrity Report estimates that over the last 30 years, Zimbabwe has lost a cumulative 12 billion dollars to IFFs.

“It is a grave concern. I looked at the statistics and found out that it’s a cancer that we are brewing,” Central Bank Governor John Mangudya conceded.

Is transparency the tool for slaying development’s demon?

The World Bank says curbing IFFs requires strong international cooperation and concerted action by developed and developing countries in partnership with the private sector and civil society.

IFFs pose a huge challenge to political and economic security around the world, particularly to developing countries. Corruption, organized crime, illegal exploitation of natural resources, fraud in international trade and tax evasion are as harmful as the diversion of money from public priorities, says the World Bank.

Advice on how to make tax policies more transparent — such as requiring all tax holidays to be publicly disclosed, along with names of officials involved in granting the holiday — would likely increase tax revenues collected by governments while reducing the risk of corruption and the potential for firms to abuse tax holiday provisions.

Global initiatives to limit tax evasion and stop proceeds of crime such as the the OECD/Global Forum on Taxation and the UN Conventions against Drugs, Trans-national Organized Crime and Corruption (UNODC) are yielding results. The World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) programme found that of nearly 1.4 billion dollars in frozen corrupt assets in OECD countries between 2010 and 2012, less than 150 million has been recovered.

Proceeds of illicit financial flows are difficult to recover despite some high-profile cases like that of Teodorin Nguema Obiang, the son of Africa’s longest serving leader, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. In 2014, a U.S. court ordered Teodorin to sell 30 million dollars’ worth of property believed to have been the proceeds of corruption. In 2013, 700 million in assets stolen and stashed in Switzerland by the Sani Abacha regime was returned to Nigeria.

A 2016 report by the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution, “Foresight Africa: Top Priorities for the Continent 2017”, says good governance significantly impacts the mobilization of domestic resources such as tax revenues, as well as external financial flows such as FDI, ODA, remittances, and illicit financial flows.

The report said lowest levels of corruption and highest levels of political stability correlated with the highest tax-to-GDP ratio while “conversely, countries with low political stability scores have a relatively high ODA-to-GDP ratio. In addition, though the differences are subtle, the charts hint that more corrupt countries have higher FDI-to-GDP ratios.”

Delegates participate in one of the women’s forums during the Nov. 28-Dec. 1 HLM2 Nairobi meeting. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 12 2016 (IPS)

Reengineering the framework of support by bringing in women as new actors in effective development cooperation will play a pivotal role in achieving the 2030 Agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“We need to deliberately make sure that women are part of the development agenda,” Stephen Gichohi, country manager at Forum Syd’s office in Kenya, told a recent Nov. 28-Dec. 1 Second High Level Meeting (HLM2) on the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) in Nairobi.“If you look across countries, institutions working on gender equality and women’s rights issues are the least funded." -- Patricia Akakpo of the Network for Women Rights in Ghana

The HLM2Nairobi meeting brought together over 5,000 delegates from across the globe, and saw a 400 delegation Civil Society Organisations Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE) endorse the Nairobi Outcome Document.

“Through the government of Kenya’s hosting of this meeting and its leadership, stronger language on gender equality, women’s empowerment and youth’s role in development was made possible,” Theresa Nera-Lauron, co-chair and CSO Policy Advisor, Effective Development Cooperation told IPS.

The HLM2Nairobi built on the Rome Declaration on Harmonisation (2003), the set of principles adopted in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), the Accra Agenda for Action (2008), the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan (2011) where the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) was born, and the outcome of the First High-Level Meeting of the GPEDC in Mexico City (2014).

Patricia Akakpo, Programme Manager, Network for Women Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT), says despite progress on gender equality and women’s rights, much needs to be improved.

“The general CSO concern, for instance, on democratic ownership is not about shared ownership. The shrinking space of women’s rights and a backlash on gains made in gender and women rights clearly reveals that more needs to be done,” Akalepo told IPS.

She says gender-responsive budgeting has been sector-specific, coupled with failure of the governments to meet commitments on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

“If you look across countries, institutions working on gender equality and women’s rights issues are the least funded. Gender ministries are the least funded. Feminists organizations don’t have the funds to organize to advance women’s rights,” she says.

This comes in the wake of concerns regarding the failure of development support to marry country development policies.

“We need to look at quality for development cooperation and aid in general as countries have been getting much on development support, but little concern is given to whether the support marry with the country development policies, such as the Vision 2030 for Kenya, “said Gichohi.

Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta reiterated the need to include all sectors of the population in the development and implementation of the socio-economic agenda.

“We are happy that the topic of incorporating women, youth and persons with disabilities in the development cooperation has raised big interest in this meeting. We must chose to champion the economic empowerment of women and youth in recognition to the potential they can contribute to the Agenda 2030,” said Uhuru when he opened the HLM2Nairobi meeting.

“HLM2Nairobi focussed on women and youth, a population largely left out. Nothing about us without us. We must involve the voices of youth and women in the development agenda,” Memory Kachambwa, Programme Manager for the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), told IPS in an interview.

Reacting to President Uhuru’s sentiment, Kachambwa reiterated the need for policymakers to stop viewing women as victims, and rather as agents of change in their own right who should influence the aid agenda.

Africa, a continent endowed with rich natural resources – especially from the extractives sector – has borne the brunt of tied aid and illicit financial flows, but concern was also raised about the impact of it on the women.

“For every one dollar that comes through development aid, 10 dollars leaves African countries. African has natural resources, but cannot be accounted for, and has been the interest of donor countries which have Multi-National Companies. Governments need to work on certain jurisdictions that provide multinational companies loopholes for tax avoidance,” said Kachambwa.

In a report last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that companies and government officials are skimming as much as 60 billion dollars annually though illicit financial flows.

“The 60 billion dollars lost through illicit financial flows from African continent is much more than the aid being received. Women are disproportionately affected. This shows there is more in utilizing local resources to fund development in the developing world,” Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary General, told IPS in an interview.

With women facing the harsh reality of fragility in states witnessing violence, Kachambwa calls for linkages with instruments such as the UN Security Council Resolution 1825 and Beijing Declaration.

“Women’s leadership, active participation and influence on different levels in society is important for a sustainable development and a strong democracy,” says Lisbeth Petersen, head of the International Programme Department at Forum Syd.

Children pick through garbage in the FATA region of Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Rose Delaney
ROME, Dec 5 2016 (IPS)

As Human Rights Day approaches Dec. 10, it offers a moment to pause and look back at the roots of the global development process as a platform for stepping forward. On this day 30 years ago, the international community made a commitment to eliminate all obstacles to equality and inclusivity.

Dec. 4, 1986 marks the date the United Nations General Assembly officially adopted the Declaration on the Right to Development, a landmark text which describes development as an “inalienable human right”.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights encourages all stakeholders to “approach the 30^th anniversary of the Declaration with a sense of urgency.”

“The 30th anniversary of the Declaration on the Right to Development must remind us that marginalized people – including migrants, indigenous peoples, and other minorities, as well as persons with disabilities – have a right to development, and that the true purpose of any economic endeavor is to improve the well-being of people.”

The groundbreaking 1986 declaration called for the establishment of inclusive global societies wherein the elimination of all forms of discrimination would be implemented to ensure sustainability. Developing countries in the Global South perceived to be “lagging behind” would be restored through the “international cooperation” advocated by the text.

The declaration stressed the importance of active and meaningful participation in the development process, even by those traditionally silenced and stigmatized by society. The marginalized poor were encouraged to speak out in the name of their rights. The emphasis on inclusivity highlighted the importance of non-discrimination and equal opportunity in the development process.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes, in its consensus, the right to development. The main objectives of the 1986 declaration are also reflected in both SDG16 for the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies in addition to SDG17 which calls for the strengthening of global partnerships.

Undoubtedly, as we approach the 30^th anniversary of the 1986 declaration, there are several significant achievements to reflect on, most notably the reduction of more than half of the population of people living in extreme poverty and in conditions of undernourishment in developing regions. In addition, the adoption of the declaration also resulted in improved access to clean drinking water and a much-needed increase in official development assistance.

However, despite significant progress, poverty and inequality persist. According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, world wealth remains unevenly distributed. Over 700 million people still live on the equivalent of less than two dollars per day. The limited access to healthcare, higher education and employment suffered by vulnerable segments of society runs the risk of pushing 100 million more into poverty by 2030, according to the World Bank.

Increased inequality and injustice in the developing world indicate the shortcomings of the 1986 declaration. An ongoing debate circles around its ineffectiveness, with many arguing that there is a lack of clear, coherent guidelines and thus far, it cannot be recognized as a legally binding instrument.

Differing interpretations of the declaration have also resulted in the absence of clear-cut solutions to critical development problems. While the United Nations Development Programme claims that any action, in order to be developmental, must be human rights-based, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action in addition to the UN 2030 agenda state that the right to development calls not only for enforcing action at the domestic level, but also for enabling action at the international level.

Both states and individuals share an equal responsibility to contribute to the creation and maintenance of a peaceful and inclusive global society.

Although the 1986 declaration was at first celebrated and welcomed by the international community, in recent years it has received less support from developing countries.  Rising inequality, limited economic opportunity and lack of access to basic services have led to lost faith in its true effectiveness.

Recently, a promising step forward was made for the development agenda, especially to tackle the past “ineffectiveness” of the right to development, when the Human Rights Council Resolution 33/L.29 was adopted at the council’s 33^rd session this September.

The resolution stressed the need to need to operationalize the Right to Development as a priority and called for the elaboration of a legally binding international instrument on the Right to Development in addition to the formation of a Special Rapporteur mandate devoted to the issue.

The council’s resolution – although welcomed by countries in the Global South – was met with extreme reluctance by developed countries, whose delegates claimed the resolution unnecessarily duplicated the work of other mechanisms already put in place.

On Dec. 5, The Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue and the Permanent Mission of the Government of Azerbaijan hosted a panel discussion on the rising debates surrounding the right to development in 2016. The core objective was to of emphasize the importance of granting a voice to the voiceless and most importantly, and the necessity of global solidarity as a means of eradicating underdevelopment.

The approach undertaken by the Geneva Centre and the government of Azerbaijan places civil society at the heart of the development process, as defined 30 years ago, in the 1986 declaration. The power of interconnected global communities knows no bounds, especially to build bridges between the developed and developing world, and ultimately, eliminate persistent North-South divides.

In his opening address, H. E. Dr. Hanif Al Qassim recognized the advancements in terms of development achieved over the past thirty years, but regretted that the ongoing violence, conflict and displacement were in contradiction with the vision expressed by the Declaration in 1986. He recalled that violence was trampling on both human rights and development, and encouraged the audience to use the opportunity of the debate to revitalize their commitments in this sense.

Ambassador Idriss Jazairy, Executive Director and moderator of the panel discussion, emphasized the importance of global solidarity in age of ongoing violence, corruption, economic crises, and most notably, mass displacement, the world over.

In his opening remarks, Ambsaddor Jazairy discussed the revitalization of a peaceful international community and called for the inclusion of the 1986 Declaration  in the International Bill of Human Rights.

“Development is a human and a peoples’ right. The individual is entitled to have the means to thrive professionally, and peoples have the right to break the chains of subordination to an unjust global order,” he said.

Delegates meeting at the Fifteenth Session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC 15) of UNCCD held in Nairobi Oct. 18-20, 2016. Credit: Justus Wanzala/IPS

By Justus Wanzala
NAIROBI, Oct 26 2016 (IPS)

Land degradation already affects millions of people, bringing biodiversity loss, reduced availability of clean water, food insecurity and greater vulnerability to the harsh impacts of climate change.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), two billion hectares of productive land are currently degraded worldwide. An additional 12 million hectares are degraded every year.

Delegates meeting at the Fifteenth Session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC 15) held in Nairobi Oct. 18-20 all agreed that urgent action is needed to address the problem.

But for efforts to combat land degradation to succeed, huge financial resources must be mobilised.

UNCCD has proposed creation of the Impact Investment Fund for Land Degradation Neutrality (Land Degradation Neutrality Fund). Although not yet operationalsed, the fund is intended to bring together institutions committed to addressing the global challenge of land degradation.

It will support large-scale rehabilitation of degraded land, for sustainable and productive use, with long-term private sector financing. The fund also aims to contribute to the achievement of global and local food and water security, and to mitigate climate change by sequestering up to 20 percent of CO2 emissions by 2050.

The fund hopes to mobilise 50 billion dollars to rehabilitate 300 million hectares of land worldwide in the next 20 years, reducing carbon emissions by an estimated 20 billion tonnes.

The Global Mechanism is spearheading the establishment of the Fund. The Fund plans to provide a structured framework in which private and public actors will be able to engage with the aim of achieving Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN). The private-public partnership will include provision of funds and technical assistance.

The LDN concept was introduced at the Rio+20 Conference in 2012. According to UNCCD, attaining LDN means ensuring that the amount of land resources that every household, region or country depends on for ecosystems services such as water, remains healthy, productive and stable.

The resolve resonates with target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in September 2015 in New York. The target is to achieve LDN by 2030.

The Global Mechanism, UNCCD’s operational arm, was identified as the body to administer the fund to support initiatives that aim to reach LDN.

The vision of the LDN Fund is to combat land degradation and finance rehabilitation of 12 million hectares of degraded land a year. When in place, it will also complement and leverage existing initiatives by creating a link between the bottom up approach (projects developed on the ground) and the top down initiatives (government targets, institutional initiatives).

Markus Repnik, managing director of the Global Mechanism, said that 450 billion dollars is required annually to combat land degradation and desertification. He noted that climate funding is growing but more resources are needed. Repnik added that states have spent 200 billion dollars but total financing is less than 400 billion dollars.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), a financial mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is aiming to provide half of its funds for climate change adaptation measures. He noted that the African Development Bank (ADB) wants to triple climate financing by 2020.

Repnik said that there is abundance of funding initiatives and systems but there is no single measure to show how finances are being mobilised.

“In-depth data on global financing is required. It should be known how much has been spent, where it came and who provided it in addition to ensuring data compatibility and reliability,” said Markus.

He called upon parties to consider how they will mobilise resources to implement the convention. The EU delegation to the UNCCD’s CRIC 15 urged parties to explore more funding mechanisms instead of relying on multilateral partnerships. They said innovative measures to source funds from the private sector should be explored.

During the conference it was revealed that developing countries and their partners have contributed five billion dollars towards efforts to curb desertification and land degradation. However, delegates insisted that more money is urgently needed and the developed countries should provide more funds.

Representatives of community-based organisations (CSOs) noted that the cost per unit (hectare) in combating land degradation also varies from country to country.

“More precise and comprehensive information is required,” they noted in a statement.

They emphasized that financing of programmes to combat land degradation should incorporate human resources development. They also noted that the financing mechanism should involve the 500 million smallholder farmers across the world whose rights require protection.

“Vulnerable groups such as indigenous people and pastoralists should be targeted for support,” read the CSOs statement.

At the same time, parties recognised the need to mobilise additional financial resources for voluntary LDN target setting and implementation from multiple sources such the GEF, Green Climate Fund, LDN Fund (once operational), national budget allocations and the private sector.

They called upon the Global Environment Facility (GEF), an independent financial entity that works with countries and international institutions, CSOs and the private sector to address global environmental issues, and the Global Mechanism to provide the required support.

Richard Mwendandu, director of Multilateral Environment Agreements at Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, said that although money can be mobilised to finance efforts towards meeting SDG 15.3, there is no specific global fund in place to support efforts to fight land degradation.

“Just a paltry 30,000 dollars has been issued by the Global Mechanism to assist countries on a pilot basis in the area of target setting as envisaged in the LDN concept,” he told IPS.

Mwendandu added that individual countries are trying to mobilise resources to combat land degradation. Citing the case of Kenya, he noted the government is mobilising funds in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to fund projects aimed at fighting land degradation.

CRIC 15 was aimed enabling parties to UNCCD to agree to a post-2018 strategy.

A man stands in the middle of parched paddy land in the northern Kilinochchi District, Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI/BONN, Oct 18 2016 (IPS)

One of the critical challenges facing the world today is that emerging migration patterns are increasingly rooted in the depletion of natural resources.

Entire populations are being disempowered and uprooted as the land that they rely on for their survival and for their future no longer provides sustenance.

Many people will move within their own region or to nearby cities, driving unplanned urbanisation. Up to 135 million people are at risk of distressed migration as a result of land degradation in the next 30 years, says a United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) vision document.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) along with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change both envision land rehabilitation and restoration as significant actions in development and addressing climate change.

Governments from all over the world are currently meeting in Nairobi in order to agree on the strategic direction of the Desertification Convention. IPS correspondent Manipadma Jena interviewed Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, ahead of the ongoing fifteenth session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC15) in Nairobi. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Monique Barbut. Photo courtesy of UNCCD.

Q: With as many as 170 countries affected by drought or desertification, how could these factors drive conflicts and forced migrations?

A. Two Somali proverbs, nabadiyocaano meaning ‘peace and milk’ and col iyoabaar which means ‘conflict and drought’, illustrate the strong connection between stability and access to pasture and water. The world’s drought-prone and water scarce regions are often the main sources of refugees.

But neither desertification nor drought on its own causes conflict or forced migration. But they can increase the risk of conflict and intensify ongoing conflicts. Converging factors like political tension, weak institutions, economic marginalisation, lack of social safety nets or group rivalries create the conditions that make people unable to cope. The continuous drought and water scarcity from 2006 to 2010 in Syria is a recent well-known example.

Droughts are natural phenomena, they are not fated to lead to forced migration and conflict. Severe droughts also occur in countries like Australia and the United States, but government intervention has made these experiences bearable.

For poor countries where safety nets do not exist, the intervention of the international community is vital.

In Mali, for example, unpredictable and decreasing rainfall seasons have led to a decline in harvests. More and more herders and farmers’ are moving into cities searching for employment. In Bamako, Mali’s capital, population in just over 20 years has grown from 600,000 to roughly   2 million with living conditions becoming more precarious and insecure. As Lagos fills up with those fleeing desertification in rural northern Nigeria, its population now 10 million. Disillusioned, unemployed youth are easy prey for smugglers, organised drug and crime cartels, even for Boko Haram.

Pastoralists face similar challenges when they are compelled to move beyond their accepted boundaries in search of water and pasture and risk clashing with other populations unwilling to share resources. Clashes between pastoralists and farmer are a serious challenge for governments in Somalia, Chad and Niger.

Q: Which other countries are showing signs of vulnerability to extreme droughts in the near future?

A: Drought occurs in almost every climatic region. With climate change, droughts are expected to spread to new areas and to become more frequent and more intense. The vulnerable regions are Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle-East and North Africa, South-Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Australia, Brazil, India, U.S. and China. In the coming decades, most of the United States, the Mediterranean region, Southwest Asia, Western and Southern Africa and much of Latin America, especially Mexico and Brazil, will face extreme droughts.

The more important question, however, is “who is going to be affected and what can be done about it?” The livelihoods of the poor in developing countries will be the most impacted because they rely heavily on natural resources.  So, more investment is needed to incentivise them to adopt sustainable land management (SLM).

But frankly, the investments we have for land rehabilitation are insufficient. We must also improve land tenure security because farmers with secure ownership are more likely to adopt good practices. Improving access to markets and rural services will create alternative non-farm employment, reducing pressure on land and the impacts of droughts in turn.

Q: A lot now hinges on achieving Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) which requires a paradigm shift from ‘degrade-abandon-migrate’ to ‘protect-sustain-restore’. UNCCD aims to achieve LDN by 2030.  Given the tremendous and diverse pressures on land for economic growth, also from large populations in regions like Africa and Asia, where do you see their achievements in 14 years?

A. We want to move from business as usual to a future where the amount of productive land passing from one generation to the next remains stable.

In the current scenario, large numbers of people and a large share of national economies are tied to the land sector, particularly in the developing countries. So any degradation of the land reduces a country’s productivity. Unsustainable land use practices costs Mali about 8 percent of its gross domestic product, for example.

By 2030, along with a higher world population, a large middle class will emerge, accelerating the demand to draw more from these land-based sectors. For Africa and Asia to bridge these gaps, the farmers need to keep every inch of their land productive. This switch to sustainable land management however needs strong government support – to move farmers to scale up these good practices, to recover degraded lands and to prevent losing the most productive lands to urbanisation.

Reforms would move credit, market access and rural infrastructural development to ignite sustainable growth in agriculture. This is what it will take, to achieve land degradation neutrality by 2030.

The Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative that seeks to restore degraded lands and create green jobs in the land-based sectors is a good example of this vision. The Desertification Convention is working with partners around the world to develop initiatives that are linked to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of achieving land degradation neutrality by 2030.

Q: Which countries are faring better in turning around land degradation and what is the key factor driving this achievement?

A. A 2008 global assessment showed that most of the land restoration since 1983 was in the Sahel zone. But we have seen a rise in global attention to land degradation through diverse initiatives. that include the Conventions on Biological Diversity and Climate Change,the Bonn Challenge on Forest and Landscape Restoration and the New York Declaration on Forests. There are also regional initiatives such as Initiative 20×20 in the Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa’s Great Green Wall and initiative AF100, also in Africa.

Once the SDGs were adopted last year, our ambition for 2016 was to have at least 60 countries committing to set voluntary national targets to achieve land degradation neutrality by 2030. We have surpassed that target. Today, we have more than 100 country commitments.

This achievement is due, in part, to the success of a pilot project that enabled 14 countries to assess and politically communicate the potential returns each would get by reversing land degradation in target areas. Armenia, Belarus and Ethiopia could quantify how they could meet their national obligations under the climate change agreement by pursuing land degradation neutrality.

Some common patterns among the countries that tend to fare better in fighting land degradation and drought (DLDD) is strong government leadership that values the socio-economic benefits accruing to their people and political commitment to make effective policies. They also have active champions of good land use practices which can be NGOs, development and private sector partners as well as small and large farmers.

Q: UNCCD is open to private business funding for projects under LDN. Which type of projects would businesses -for- profit show investment interest?

A. There is a growing appetite in the private sector for sustainable land use projects that can contribute to land degradation neutrality. More industry players have committed to LDN-related initiatives and other environmental targets. Companies committing to reduce the ecological impacts of their commodity supply chains rose from 50 in 2009 to nearly 300 by 2014, Supply Change reported in 2016. Many businesses dealing in agricultural and/or forestry commodities get raw materials from the land, and may be interested in investing in projects that make their supply chains more sustainable.

But there is no dedicated public funding pool investing globally in projects to combat land degradation, and public financing alone is not sufficient to protect our planet’s ecosystems. The private sector needs to step up. This is what created the need and opportunity for a new dedicated funding source –the LDN Fund. It combines public and private capital in support of the SDG target of land degradation neutrality.

The sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry (including agroforestry), land rehabilitation and conservation, and the ecotourism sectors can support profitable investments. Forestry has attracted 77 percent of all capital raised for LDN investments to date. Agriculture is expected to see the strongest increase in investments and to grow by nearly 350 percent by 2021. It is clear that projects that incorporate at least some component of food and/or timber production are more likely to generate a stable cash flow are more appealing to private investors in LDN.

In the developed countries, many of the conservation activities receiving private investment are backed by government legislation. A strong regulatory framework provides certainty to the market and helps to create end buyers. As a result, the investments attract steady flows of private capital.

Q: Do governments need to put in place smallholder-safeguard mechanisms for private investments in land?

A. Safeguard mechanisms that recognise the land rights of smallholders are vital, even when the farmers have no formal tenure. Smallholdings support billions of livelihoods, which makes these households extremely sensitive to land use change.

In developing countries, government policies designed to attract investment are often biased towards large-scale farming, and hardly offer the protection to smallholders require. Private investors should have their own safeguards but governments have a responsibility to implement and enforce mechanisms to protect smallholders. The LDN Fund is designed to align with progressive global environmental and social standards.

Excerpt:

Malala Yousafzai (centre) addresses the General Assembly during the launch of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015.

By Roger-Mark De Souza and Sono Aibe
Washington, DC, Sep 28 2016 (IPS)

By recognising how closely connected the different aspects of sustainable development are, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) create an important opportunity – and challenge – for a more coordinated approach to implementing development policies.

The multi-faceted, interlinked nature of the 17 categories represented by the SDGs reflects our complicated world. We will need to work together to meet these goals while facing an increasingly complex set of challenges to human rights, equity, and security. The battle against terrorism and its horrors, for example, requires people working together across each and every one of the 17 categories.

However, traditional policy responses to these challenges have been divided into distinct policy sectors. If we are to achieve these goals, build peace, and increase world security, we must recognise that past efforts that were confined to individual sectors have failed. We must use new but proven tools that move the integrated SDG framework from concept to action. If the implementation phase of the SDGs defaults to the same old methods, the new goals will be meaningless.

One successful tool – what a World Bank expert called a “do-able miracle” in a speech at the Wilson Center — is the integrated Population, Health and Environment (PHE) approach, where many of the SDGs are addressed simultaneously in a coordinated, strategic manner.

PHE projects work concurrently to improve access to health services (especially family planning and reproductive health), protect and manage natural resources, generate income from alternative livelihoods, and provide women and men with the skills and tools to plan for a sustainable future. Key to its success is the strong buy-in from and engagement with local communities and their leaders, which is credited with its unusually rapid, widespread success in East Africa, Madagascar and the Philippines.

For example, Pathfinder International’s “HoPE-LVB” (Health of People and Environment in Lake Victoria Basin) project, based in Kenya and Uganda, is an integrated, community engagement initiative providing primary health care (including sexual and reproductive health, and maternal and child health services), along with the supply of clean water, training on sanitation and hygiene practices, natural resource management, and sustainable income generation opportunities.

Pathfinder and its partner organizations work to make the farms and fisheries that the communities depend on more sustainable, support environmentally friendly alternative livelihoods, and increase gender equality. Throughout the project, partners emphasize the inter-relatedness of people, their health, and their environment. The project is helping other organizations to replicate HoPE’s model and supporting local governments to plan integrated activities that meet the needs of their communities in a holistic way

The rapid acceptance of the PHE approach from concept to scalability in just five years has now created strong regional momentum for its expansion in East Africa. In fact, at a recent meeting, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission included a recommendation to its members to “mainstream PHE programming into national and institutional plans and set aside funds for PHE Integration and the implementation of the EAC PHE strategic plan.”

The results from these projects offer strong evidence that the PHE approach is working, growing, and primed for scale-up across other regions. PHE programs provide compelling, real-world, grounded evidence that UNGA policymakers would do well to consider as they seek to achieve the SDGs.

PHE can also be a powerful pathway to fight extremism and improve stability. By increasing communities’ resilience in a rapidly changing economic, environmental, and political landscape, integrated development can provide the foundation for increased security. For example, PHE programs focus on engaging youth in building their own sustainable futures, and thus building their resilience to recruitment by extremists. In this way PHE can also be considered a peacebuilding strategy in fragile and developing states. Research by Wilson Center experts has found that the PHE approach addresses challenges often missing from other resilience-building efforts, such as social dynamics, power structures, gender and reproductive health.

As world leaders meet to decide how to shift from goals to action, they should look at what is already working. PHE increases environmental sustainability, economic opportunity, reproductive health, women’s empowerment, climate resilience, and regional stability—at the same time, for less investment, and with more success. A proven tool for implementing this ambitious agenda, PHE is a win-win-win for the sustainable development team.

Excerpt:

World leaders attending the UN General Assembly in NYC in September encountered a Rainbow Crosswalk to remind them of LGBT rights. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2016 (IPS)

One year after UN member states adopted the ambitious 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda their repeated vow to “leave no one behind” seems almost as idealistic and impractical as ever.

2016 has so far proved a difficult year for the UN’s objective of including the world’s most vulnerable and marginalised in development efforts.

Last week’s UN Refugee and Migration summit fell short for child refugees; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) advocates were left out of an important HIV and AIDS meeting in June and no women were voted onto an important disability committee by UN member states also in June.

Danny Sriskandarajah Secretary General of CIVICUS told IPS that the objective of leaving no one behind will require governments to consider serious changes in both policy and social norms.

“If we’re serious about finding and helping those who are furthest behind that’s not a technical exercise that’s a deeply political exercise,” said Sriskandarajah.

The first step, says Sriskandarajah is making sure that we identify and include those at risk of being left out.

“If our leaders say 42 times in their agreement that they are not going to leave anyone behind we now very quickly need to find out who is being left behind,” he said.

However the marginalised and excluded are not always easy to reach, Vladimir Cuk, Executive Director of the International Disability Alliance (IDA) told IPS.

“Truly for everyone means that you have implement for those that are hardest to reach, hardest to count, hardest to include in the programs, hardest to know anything about, and those are typically persons with disabilities,” he said.

Cuk noted that some efforts have been made to include persons with disabilities in the 2030 sustainable development agenda so far, a welcome change from the previous millennium development goals which did not refer to disability.

However reaching persons with disabilities will also be difficult since they are also over-represented among the extreme poor, he added.

This points to another reason why it will be difficult for UN member states to ensure no one gets left behind – different types of disadvantage and exclusion often overlap.

This is true of Indigenous peoples who are often the “minorities within the minorities,” Marama Pala Executive Director of INA (Māori, Indigenous & South Pacific) HIV/AIDS Foundation told IPS.

“Until countries address the inequalities and injustices for Indigenous Peoples reaching the Sustainable Development Goals will be impossible,” said Pala, who is also a civil society representative at UN meetings.

Yet Indigenous peoples are also at risk of being left behind because they can be adversely affected by so-called development encroaching on their land, from land grabbing for palm oil plantations to the construction of mega dams funded by multilateral development banks.

“Massive demand for food, fuel and other commodities continues to drive industry into new territories,” Alice Harrison, Senior Communications Advisor with Global Witness told IPS.

“Increasingly those communities are finding themselves in the firing line for taking a stand against the theft or destruction of their land and natural resources.”

Some forms of inequalities were considered too politically divisive to be included in the final 2030 agenda, which had to be agreed to by all 193 UN member states.

The final version of the text refers to rights “without distinction of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, disability or other status.”

References to sexual orientation and migration status were removed from earlier drafts in order to reach consensus.

In order to address the inequalities which leave marginalised groups behind, political, social and economic change is needed at the national level as well as the multinational level.

“Once you start to commit to something like leaving no one behind you unearth a whole bunch of economic and social exclusion that’s happening in society that’s driven by corporate greed, political corruption, social exclusion which will need serious changes in both policy and social norms if we’re to track it,” Sriskandarajah said.

The Sustainable Development Goals themselves also address inequality between countries. Efforts to address these inequalities such as through a global tax cooperation body have also been stymied to-date.