Direct benefits of Cape Town’s MyCiTi early phase Bus Rapid Transit system are skewed in favour of middle rather than lower income residents. Credit: Gail Jennings/IPS

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Oct 2 2012 (IPS) - In South Africa, Bus Rapid Transit systems, which were pioneered to great effect in Latin American countries such as Colombia and Brazil, are being promoted as potentially effective ways of delivering improved public transport services to the urban poor. But experts question whether systems such as these can alleviate poverty to any meaningful extent.

Bus Rapid Transit, sometimes referred to as “rail on road” systems, are high-quality, high-capacity bus systems with their own right-of-way, dedicated bus lanes.

Today the TransMilenio in Bogota, Colombia carries around 1.6 million passengers every day, over 84 kilometres of segregated busway. In Curitiba, Brazil, about 70 percent of commuters use the BRT, and around 30 percent of passengers are “converted” private car users.

It is upon purportedly transformative systems such as these that the cities of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Cape Town in South Africa, Lagos in Nigeria and Nairobi in Kenya have pinned their transport hopes and dreams.

Early phases of multi-million dollar capital projects are operating in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and are set to soon launch in at least four other cities in South Africa.

But while it is too early to draw long-term conclusions about the impact of these transport systems, a number of researchers are asking questions and coming up with some answers about their ability to contribute to national goals of alleviating poverty.

James Chakwizira, a senior researcher in the built infrastructure department at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), told IPS that although these high-quality services do have great potential for addressing public transport challenges within communities, the current initiatives such as Johannesburg’s three-year-old system, Rea Vaya, fall short of expectations.

He said because terminal infrastructure developments are located away from the marginal communities’ location, people from these areas need to use a minimum of two transport modes in order to access and use the routes.

Councilor Rehana Moosajee, who is on the Mayoral Committee Member for Transport for the City of Johannesburg, and is a Rea Vaya champion, told IPS that initially one of the key imperatives of the Rea Vaya system was to overcome apartheid’s spatial legacy and promote access and social cohesion.

“I think that now a lot more work will have to be done over a period of time in assessing impacts on poverty, as based on the city’s own multiple deprivation indices, the areas of highest multiple deprivation are further south of Soweto – a township to the south of Johannesburg – and therefore not yet reached by the service.

“Our own experience suggests that Rea Vaya commuters are certainly saving time, though, and we have also had some interesting accounts of property availability and take-up on certain parts of routes and the creation of economic activity,” she said.

At a December 2011 conference on Land Passenger Transport, Karen Lucas, an international researcher on transportation equity, supported the implementation of BRT to the extent that “these major infrastructure projects are needed to bring high quality, modern and efficient mainstream public transport services to inner cities.”

However, she noted “these services will serve only a minority of the travel needs of urban populations.”

Research released in July by the University of Pretoria’s Christo Venter and Eunice Vaz reached a similar conclusion. Using data from a small-sample household survey conducted in Soweto, they found that the time and cost benefits of the system “accrue largely to medium-income households rather than to the poorest commuters in the area.”

“To the extent that passengers can spend time and fare savings on other goods, Rea Vaya contributes to poverty reduction,” they found. The researchers also noted that Rea Vaya is priced higher than the cheapest available public transport alternative, commuter rail, which remains the mode of choice for the poorest commuters.

The average travel cost for Rea Vaya users comes to R10.20 (about 1.24 dollars) per one-way trip to work, as compared to R11.70 (about 1.42 dollars) for other modes of transport like mini-bus taxis, which most people used to take before Rea Vaya.

Overall, the direct benefits of Rea Vaya are skewed in favour of middle- rather than lower-income residents, the researchers concluded. They suggested that more specific targeting was needed for the BRT to deliver significant poverty reduction benefits.

The situation is similar with the City of Cape Town’s MyCiTi early phase BRT service.
African Centre of Excellence for Studies in Public and Non-motorised Transport (ACET) researchers Lorita Maunganidze and Romano Del Mistro used ACET Household Survey data to conclude that MyCiTi might not be of value to poor commuters.

“While poor commuters may benefit from more accessible, frequent and fast BRT services, ironically, these will be more expensive and in some cases unaffordable to them and therefore of no benefit,” the researchers said.

They recommend that the routing structure be revised and rationalised to make in-vehicle and trip distances shorter, particularly for the poor commuters who face the longest commuting distances and times; and that local BRT be tailored more specifically to work within the South African environment or under South African conditions.

Councilor Brett Herron, City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee Member for Transport, Roads and Stormwater, told IPS that it is not possible to look at the impact of a new BRT service on poverty, or on poor communities, in isolation from the entire public transport network.

“BRT is just one mode of transport and this mode alone cannot have expansive direct economic benefits to poor communities … BRT trunks alone are not going to bring about the level of change we require in order to universally benefit the urban poor.

“We will seriously address poverty only when we piece together all the complicated components of this puzzle; public transport is one piece – with changed land use, densification, transit-orientated development, all responding to new or improved public transport corridors, we will start to bring people to opportunities and take opportunities to people.”

Pauline Froschauer, project manager for Rustenburg Rapid Transport, which is currently in the construction phase, told IPS that instead of poverty alleviation, a transport project such as a BRT should be measured against what is usually its primary objective: the effect it has on levels of mobility and accessibility.

“At best one could say that by improving mobility and accessibility, there are positive ‘externalities’, such as city development, local economic development and poverty alleviation. But to try to measure this in one BRT corridor (such as the Soweto-CBD Rea Vaya) is, I think, misrepresentative. Until one has a reasonable network effect, improved mobility and accessibility will not be achieved.”

The European Union is calling for protectionist measures against strong emerging economies. Credit: Jim Killock/CC-BY-SA-2.0

BERLIN, Sep 28 2012 (IPS) - For many years, the European Union (EU) and its individual member states counted among the strongest advocates for free trade, arguing that it would boost economic growth and welfare both at home and abroad.

But since the global financial crisis in 2007 triggered a severe sovereign debt crisis and a general economic downturn across most European countries, EU institutions, individual governments and representatives of some industrial sectors are calling for protectionist measures, especially against competitors from strong emerging countries such as Brazil, India, the People’s Republic of China, and South Korea.

The European turnabout on international trade became evident this summer, when struggling German solar panel manufacturers and the new, Leftist French government of François Hollande urged the EU to launch protectionist measures against Chinese competitors and to suspend a recent free trade agreement (FTA) with South Korea.

French minister for industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, denounced in early August “the unacceptable dumping (by) Korean auto manufacturers such as Hyundai and Kia, which are disloyal competitors to the French auto industry”.

“Europe may open its markets, but it should not give herself up” to disloyal economic competitors, Montebourg argued.

An assessment of current industrial trends suggests that Europe is indeed lagging.

The legendary French automaker Peugeot accumulated losses of 1.2 billion euros between July 2011 and June 2012, and has announced layoffs of more than 8,000 workers in France, and industrial relocations to Eastern European countries.

Meanwhile, Korean automakers have substantially increased their exports to Europe. According to European Commission figures released on Aug. 29, exports to France by Korean automobile maker Hyundai grew by 48 percent during the first half of 2012.

At the same time, European automobile exports to Korea fell by 13 percent in the same period.

However, these figures alone do not make a strong enough case for Europe’s calls for protectionism. According to the South Korean car maker Hyundai, well over half of the 400,000 automobiles it sold in Europe between January and July this year were actually fabricated in EU countries such as the Czech Republic.

Additionally, the FTA led only to a marginal fall of customs duties for small South Korean autos, from 10 percent before the agreement to 8.3 starting July 2011, and to 6.6 percent since July 2012.

Still, since other French industrial players – from manufacturers of ships and high-speed trains to constructors of nuclear power stations – have recently suffered severe contract losses against South Korean competitors, the latter has become the embodiment of a strong, allegedly disloyal competitor.

Additionally, according to the World Economic Forum’s newest global competitiveness report, South Korea’s economic performance in 2011 surpassed that of France.

But South Korea is not the only formidable threat.

Twenty-five European producers, led by German solar panel manufacturers facing bankruptcy due a strong Sino presence in the market, asked the EU to launch an anti-dumping measure against Chinese competitors, arguing that the government in Beijing gives local manufacturers illegal subsidies and allows them to sell their products below actual costs of production.

Such practices, according to the group EU ProSun – which represents the majority of solar industrial production in the region – constitute “unfair distortions” of international trade.

The World Trade Organisation itself allows governments to act against dumping where there is genuine injury to the competing domestic industry.

In 2011, the Chinese solar panel industry sold 60 percent of its global exports in Europe. On Sept. 6, the EU announced it would respond to ProSun’s demand by launching an official investigation into Chinese subsidies and trade practices.

Protectionism on the rise

The EU has also developed a new international trade concept, which, according to economic experts and analysts, clearly includes new protectionist measures likely to hurt emerging developing countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) as well as China, South Korea, and Vietnam.

In an analysis released last July, ‘The next decade of EU trade policy: Confronting global challenges?’, the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI warned, “There is a major concern that the EU is moving towards protectionism.”

The ODI paper analyses the proposals on international trade approved by the European Commission last May. This new agenda, expected to come into force in January 2014, foresees a reform of the EU’s generalised system of preferences (GSP), which has ruled European trade policies towards developing countries since 1971.

According to the new rules, several strong developing countries would be excluded from the GSP. Additionally, the new GSP would establish new standards on environment, labour, and social rules to be respected by developing countries trading with the EU.

In its analysis of this new GSP, the ODI report warns that the number of countries eligible for preferential trade with the EU will fall from 175 at present to about 80 in the near future.

Dirk Willem te Velde, head of the ODI’s International Economic Development Group and coordinator of the ODI report, is concerned that “the EU will retreat into protectionism, especially vis-à-vis the so called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) with a range of trade-related economic policies.”

“Clearly, the GSP reform is likely to impose more trade barriers on a range of products and countries when they are not benefiting from a reciprocal Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU,” te Velde added.

“This does not offer the best value for EU consumers or developing country exporters,” he said.

Christopher Stevens, co-author of the study, said the new GSP regime would exclude all so-called Upper Middle Income Countries (UMICs) from the GSP, even for products where these countries are not competitive.

“The justification for the change is that the UMICs are sufficiently well integrated into the world economy (that they) do not need the GSP; and it will ease pressure on less competitive developing countries and hence focus the GSP preferences on the countries most in need,” Stevens added.

But neither claim stands up well to examination, Stevens argued. “UMICs are not a very close proxy for ‘the most competitive developing countries’,” he wrote in the report, concluding with some very telling examples of the coming discriminations: “Under the new regime, China will remain in the GSP but Cuba will be excluded; Indonesia and Thailand will remain in, but Gabon and Namibia will be out.”

(END)

Cristina Fernández and Wen Jiabao in a videoconference with Dilma Rousseff and José Mujica. Credit: Office of the president of Argentina.

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 8 2012 (IPS) - There is little likelihood that South America’s Mercosur trade bloc will take up China’s proposal to establish a free trade agreement, at least in the short term. Experts and industrialists fear an invasion of cheap Chinese goods, and unequal competition.

Although the sources consulted by IPS agreed that trade and investment between Mercosur (Southern Common Market) and China will continue to expand, they said a free trade deal was unrealistic under the present circumstances.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao expressed interest in such an agreement on his Jun. 25 visit to Buenos Aires, in a videoconference with Presidents Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and José Mujica of Uruguay.

The four leaders welcomed the idea of forging closer trade ties between Mercosur and China.

Paraguay, Mercosur’s fourth founding member, has been suspended from the bloc since that country’s legislature removed President Fernando Lugo in a lightning-quick impeachment trial on Jun. 22.

At any rate, Paraguay is facing the dilemma of maintaining diplomatic relations with Taiwan or agreeing to cut off ties in order to negotiate with Beijing.

The fifth full member of Mercosur, Venezuela, had not yet been admitted to the bloc at the time of the videoconference. It officially joined on Jul. 31 in Brasilia.

At the last Mercosur summit, held in the Argentine province of Mendoza four days after Wen’s visit, the governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay agreed to strengthen cooperation with China.

They also approved a proposal to send a joint trade mission this year to China ‘s commercial hub, Shanghai.

But they did not elaborate on the Asian giant’s suggestion of freeing up trade, which analysts agree will be a long, complex process.

Mauricio Mesquita Moreira, an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) expert on international trade, said the conditions are not in place for reaching a free trade deal in the near future.

“On one hand, Argentina and Brazil have industries that are highly vulnerable to competition from Asia. And on the other, the state still has too much of an influence in the promotion of industry in the Chinese economy for Mercosur to accept a liberalisation of trade,” the Brazilian economist told IPS.

“The smaller partners, Uruguay and Paraguay, lack industrial structure, and could benefit from an agreement with China. But being in Mercosur also gives them benefits such as privileged access to the bloc’s larger markets,” he said.

Mesquita Moreira was in Buenos Aires this month to present a study carried out by the IDB together with experts from the Asian Development Bank Institute, which analyses the future of ties between Asia and Latin America.

The study recommends an increase in trade and investment between the two regions.

Argentine economist Guillermo Rozenwurcel, director of the Centre for Research on Economic Development in South America (IDEAS), said “the Chinese proposal is not viable in the least, over the next 10 to 15 years.

“The presidents gave a diplomatic response to the Chinese interlocutors, to show that they had listened to the proposal. But until the playing field is level, there are few prospects for real discussions on free trade,” he told IPS.

Rozenwurcel also said there was little “political margin” for considering the question.

On the other hand, “there is a challenging and complex, but possible, outlook” for boosting trade, investment and scientific and technological cooperation between this region and Asia, he added.

According to the study by the IDB and the Asian Development Bank Institute, trade between Latin America and Asia has grown by an average of 20.5 percent a year since 2000, to 442 billion dollars today.

With that sharp increase over the last 12 years, China, Asia’s biggest supplier of imports to Latin America, is now the region’s second largest trading partner, after the United States.

But the pattern of trade between the two regions is based mainly on exports of raw materials from Latin America and sales of manufactured goods from Asia, experts point out.

Abeceb, a private consultancy in Argentina, reported that trade between Mercosur and China climbed from 10.3 billion dollars a year in 2003 to 77.9 billion dollars in 2011, and could reach 200 billion dollars by 2016.

But Abeceb also noted that in the same period, Argentina’s purchases of manufactured goods from Brazil such as textiles, capital goods, plastics or pharmaceutical products fell as a result of competition from lower-cost imports from China.

In the case of textiles, for example, 56 percent of Argentina’s imports came from Brazil in 2003, but today that proportion is less than 23 percent. Meanwhile, purchases of textiles from China grew from two to 34 percent of the total.

And while footwear imports from Brazil fell from 79.2 percent to 37.5 percent between 2003 and 2011, purchases from China rose from 12.6 to 36 percent in the same period.

The president of Argentina’s toy industry chamber, Miguel Faraoni, said a free trade accord between Mercosur and China “would be very counterproductive.”

“Competition is impossible due to the differences between the policies of each one. China produces between 75 and 80 percent of the toys sold around the world, which means it would be an unequal fight,” he said.

Faraoni said the share of locally produced toys sold on the domestic market has gone up from 10 percent in 2002 to 50 percent today. He also noted that the number of foreign companies producing toys in Argentina has increased.

“Production, employment and investment in machinery and new technologies have grown, and we are exporting eight percent of what is produced to the region and to the Latino market in the United States,” he said.

Faraoni stated that Argentine industry could compete in terms of price and quality with Brazil, “which has the same rules of the game,” but that “opening up the market to China would reverse the gains made in the last few years.”

Knowledge-sharing has become a cornerstone of successful cooperation among developing countries, in areas ranging from agriculture to health and renewable energies.

Helen Clark and John Ashe are joined by representatives from Japan, South Africa, India, Brazil and South Korea at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the South-South Cooperation exhibition. Credit: Shari Nijman/IPS

“There is a feeling that there are some solutions which can be generated by the South for the benefit of the South, and that ought to be shared between Southern countries,” John Ashe, president of the United Nations High-level Committee on South-South Cooperation, told IPS.

“South-South Cooperation (SSC) is intended to be that vehicle, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for the traditional North-South cooperation,” Ashe added.

To date, Japan is the largest contributor to SSC under the Japan Human Resources Development Fund (JHRDF) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) partnership fund.

Between 1996 and 2011, Japan contributed more than 33 million dollars to South-South initiatives.

Masato Watanabe, the vice-president of Japan’s International Cooperation Agency, told IPS, “We’ve devised a couple of modalities and approaches. One is to have triangular training programmes. The second one is to have bilateral partnership programmes with potential providers of development cooperation. The third one is to explore the possibility of utilising so called centres of excellence in the South.”

NERICA (New Rice for Africa), an initiative funded by the Japanese government, the African Development Bank and the UNDP, has been in operation for 15 years. Today, over 700,000 hectares of NERICA varieties of rice are cultivated in 31 countries, leading to a five-percent reduction in poverty in Uganda and a 13-percent reduction in Benin.

“What we are trying to do is to share these modalities or potential modalities and approaches with other partners so that they can learn our experience and through mutual learning processes we may create better models or approaches,” said Watanabe.[related_articles]

Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, permanent representative of India to the United Nations, spoke to IPS on behalf of IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa). “South-South Cooperation is doing what it can and that’s what needs to be accepted in its own framework, in the way it is, based on the national priorities of the countries which are the partner countries,” said Puri.

The IBSA Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation Fund has aided initiatives of the U.N. SSC unit since it was created in 2004.

It has helped to combat HIV and AIDS in Burundi by building and equipping a prevention, testing and treatment centre. This centre will enable around 39,000 consultations per year for various health-care services including HIV and AIDS, reproductive health, sexually transmitted diseases, prenatal care and family planning.

The IBSA fund also supports Guinea-Bissau’s agriculture, education and clean energy development by training over 4,500 farmers in enhanced agriculture techniques for rice cultivation, and implementing a solar-energy strategy for rural areas. This has led to a 12-percent increase in crop yields and enabled 3,000 individuals to access electricity, according to IBSA.

The programme will soon be expanded to include 20 additional villages.

Puri also noted the importance of both South-South Cooperation and traditional North-South Cooperation.

“South-South Cooperation can neither be seen as substitute, or in any way as a displacer for North-South cooperation, which must remain strong,” Puri said.

China’s investment in solar energy systems in Kenya has benefitted 250. The project researched and developed solar technologies that were adapted to the geographical conditions of the region.

GNERI (The Gansu Natural Energy Research Institute) was the partner responsible for researching and developing these solar products, and produced 50 solar photocaic demonstration systems, 100 solar water heating systems and 100 solar cooker systems, all designed for use by villages and households in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Korean National Commission for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), and KEMCO (Korea Energy Management Corporation) are piloting projects for the RICE (Regional Initiative for Climate change Education) which provides climate change education in developing countries throughout Asia.

To date, pilot projects are underway in Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. In 2012, seven projects will be added in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Burma.

The UNDP has been credited for facilitating South-South and Triangular development as an important means for advancing development and achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

In an exhibition that opened last Friday at the United Nations, SSC and its successful partnerships are now displayed for the public to see.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, Helen Clark, UNDP administrator and chair of the United Nations Development Group, said, “We believe that through the universal presence we have in developing countries we have the capacity to link people, countries, communities, ideas, experience and best practice.”

(END/2012)

SKDRDP acts as Business correspondent for achieving financial inclusion. Credit: Courtesy SKDRDP website.

In a country with a disastrous record for microfinancing, a religious organisation has done well enough to claim this year’s Ashden award for initiatives in providing loans to poor farmers.

The Ashden award – which carries 40,000 British pounds (62,238 dollars) in prize money – is given for sustainable energy initiatives in Britain and the developing world by the Ashden Trust that is run by the Sainsbury family, founders of a supermarket chain and other businesses.

The success of the awardee, the Shri Kshethra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP), is linked to the fact that it also administers the ancient and well-endowed Manjunatha Temple in Dharmasthala town, set in the high Western Ghats of southern Karnataka state.

The temple’s hereditary head priest, Veerendra Heggade, who also heads SKDRDP, is revered by devotees as well as borrowers. “It is this reverence that spurs loanees to pay back their loans,” explains L.H. Manjunath, the project’s executive director.

“We are secular with many Muslims and Christians in our fold, and Manjunatha is a symbol of the poor, not just of Hindus,” Manjunath hastens to add.

SKDRDP’s microfinance operations, begun in 2000, now have a turnover of   800 million dollars. Some 1.8 million families from 5,000 villages in Karnataka are covered through a decentralised system that is run by a staff of about 7,000.

Manjunath, who earlier headed a commercial national bank, said SKDRDP noticed that handing out charity did not bring improvement in people’s lives.  “So we changed our policy in 1990 and began giving out small loans for specific livelihood and development purposes.”

SKDRDP started by forming small, ‘joint liability groups’ of five farmers each.  A rotary system was devised where each member performed a day’s free labour on another member’s lands.

“This galvanised development,” says Manjunath. Farmers were also persuaded to save 20 cents weekly that went into a common fund.

By 1995, the organisation had begun involving women’s self-help groups and today two-thirds of its clientele consists of women.

A 4,500-strong band of rural youth forms part of SKDRDP’s network  spread over 16 districts in Karnataka, that grades loan eligibility, guides  repayment and maintains grassroots contacts with clients.

Heggade stands guarantor for loans taken from national banks, which SKDRDP disburses to clients, keeping a four percent profit margin and his high status comes in handy for negotiating the best interest rates.

Factors such as such as a lending bank’s unmet targets are taken into account and in one case, says Manjunath, a leading national bank lent money at 6.9 percent when the going rate was approximately 12 percent.

SKDRDP lends at between nine and 18 percent interest, but keeps both interest rate and payback timings flexible.

Approximately 20,000 loans have gone towards renewable systems of lighting and fuel needs, benefitting some 82,500 people.

A bank account with a deposit of two months’ repayment amount as taken from clients a buffer against repayment default and this is mandatory before the first cheque is disbursed.

“Building the payback capacity of the borrower is our strong point,” says Manjunath.

SKDRDP’s success contrasts with the record in India of borrowers, mostly marginal farmers in the rural areas, getting caught in debt traps and being driven to suicide in droves.

In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the state government was forced to legislate in the state assembly in October 2010, banning the collection of repayments by goons hired by MFIs, leading to the virtual collapse of the system.

“To my mind, microcredit cannot really alleviate poverty,” says Aloysius Fernandez a pioneer of microfinance in India and former head of MYRADA, a reputed non-government organisation (NGO).

Fernandez, now chief of the financial services of the government’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, says distributing credit to the poor and extracting capital from the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ is the wrong way to go.

“I have seen this work where there are support services, but not otherwise,” Fernandez says emphatically. “The national banking system with its standard measures for loans cannot be applied to poor communities who need customisation.

“If you ask me whether agriculture has improved for people through microcredit, I will say ‘yes’, but I have not seen poverty alleviation as such.”

India is predominantly agricultural and more than 70 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people are dependent on farming for a living.

“The question is whether an NGO should function as a banking institution, or be doing rural upliftment work,” says Somnath Naik of Nagarika Seva Trust that has record of good work in the region.

Manjunath responds to that by saying SKDRDP’s microcredit works successfully because of the ‘hand-holding’ and capacity-building measures that it undertakes.

India’s apex reserve bank has outlined the rural sector’s near exclusion from banking services, and has, as a matter of policy, been encouraging rural agents to come forward to fill this gap in rural development. “We are in tune with this policy,” Manjunath said.

(END/2012)

A year after the Indian government began paying pregnant women to deliver their babies in state-run facilities, the pressure is showing on the country’s understaffed and poorly equipped  hospitals.

Between February and May, 397 newborns died at the G.B. Pant hospital in this city, summer capital of northern Jammu and Kashmir state, underlining deficiencies typical of government-run health facilities across the country.

“My baby turned pale soon after a nurse administered an injection and he died moments after that,” Haleema Akhtar, a grieving mother, told IPS.

“I saw over a dozen infants dying before my eyes in a matter of hours. The conditions at the hospital can only be described as inhuman. We could not afford to go to a private hospital,” a tearful Akhtar told IPS.

An official inquiry into the deaths, conducted by Dr. Showkat Zargar, eminent physician and ex-officio secretary to the state government, blamed inadequate staff and equipment.

“There is total apathy and mismanagement by the hospital administration,” Zargar said in his report.

“Just one junior post-graduate student and a qualified nurse were looking after critically sick babies. I counted 27 (newborns) in a nursery, with no senior resident doctor posted in the neonatal intensive care unit,” Zargar reported.

Citing the hospital’s records, the report said the facility had witnessed 981 infant deaths in 2010 and 985 in 2011, averaging a high 20 percent mortality – twice the accepted rate for state-run hospitals in India.

Another committee comprising legislators from the Jammu and Kashmir   assembly corroborated Zargar’s findings. Mustafa Kamal, a member of the state legislators’ committee, told IPS “the deaths occurred due to a lack of equipment, shortage of manpower and a pathetic sanitation system in the hospital.”

The spate of infant deaths at the G.B. Pant hospital mirrored a similar episode at the district hospital in Malda, in West Bengal state, in November 2011. No fewer than 26 babies had died in a space of two weeks because of infection.

On Mar. 20, India’s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, called to account in Parliament, admitted that India’s infant (under one year of age) mortality rate (IMR) of 47 per 1,000 live births was worse than in the neighbouring countries of Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

“In India, the IMR is 47 per 1,000 live births, which translates into 1.25 million infant deaths per year,” Azad said. Only Pakistan had a worse IMR rate in South Asia, he said.

A report released Jun. 13 by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as part of the ‘Countdown to 2015’ initiative placed India’s IMR rate slightly higher at 48 per 1,000 live births.  The initiative tracks country-level progress in reducing maternal, newborn and child mortality and involves various partners.

According to the UNICEF report, Pakistan has an IMR of 70  per 1,000 live births, followed by India with 47, Nepal with 41, Bangladesh with 38 and Sri Lanka with 26.

[related_articles]The UNICEF report said most of these deaths are preventable through access to health services before, during and immediately after childbirth.

In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, according to official data accessed by IPS, there are only 24 pediatricians available to take care of over a million children below the age of six years.

The Doctors’ Association of Kashmir (DAK) says that many of the hospitals not only lack child specialists but also basic life-saving equipment such as ventilators. “No doctor can work without the support of basic health infrastructure,” DAK president Nissar-ul-Hassan told IPS.

In a bid to lower the IMR, the government launched in June 2011 the Janani–Shishu Suraksha Karyakram (JSSK), a programme to protect mothers and newborns, by providing a range of services free to pregnant women in government hospitals across the country.

Cashless and free services under the JSSK include normal and caesarian section deliveries, care and proper diet for up to 30 days after delivery plus free transport from home to hospital and back.

A sample registration system (SRS) survey carried out in 2010 by the Registrar General of India showed that initiatives to get pregnant women to avail of professional services were working with three-fourths of deliveries  already happening in institutional settings.

But there are vast differences in how programmes aimed at lowering the IMR were being implemented across this country of 1.2 billion people living in 27 states in a wide variety of settings.

While states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh recorded less than one percent of births conducted by untrained midwives, Jharkhand state in central India still has 46.5 percent of births attended to by  untrained traditional birth attendants.

Prominent health activists welcome programmes like the JSSK but say the government needs to spend much more if it is to meet the millennium development goal (MDG) of reducing child mortality rate by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015.

Dr. Mira Shiva, coordinator of the non-government Initiative for Health, Equity and Society, points to the fact that where India’s public outlay on health was six percent of GDP in 1991, it had been whittled down to a little over one percent of GDP by 2011.

“Naturally, such a drastic reduction in GDP spending has taken a toll on the public health delivery system – so it is not enough to get pregnant women to the hospitals and hand out doles,” said Shiva who is on several health committees.

In February, the government had announced that by the end of India’s 12^th five-year plan, due to be rolled out this year, spending on health would be increased to 2.5 percent of GDP – nominally placed at 1.67 trillion dollars in 2011.

But Shiva said that would still work out to less than half of what many countries in situations comparable to that of India, such as Brazil, are spending on the health sector.

According to a World Bank report published in 2010, public health expenditure in Brazil was 3.72 percent of GDP in 2008 but moved up to 4.13 percent of GDP in 2009.

(END)

(END/2012)

The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) face a key choice: to opt for “good” development aid, based on sustainable development, or for the “bad” old traditional model, which they criticised when they were its recipients.

This was the conclusion of a debate on the sustainability challenges facing the leading emerging economies in BRICS, at the People’s Summit being held in parallel to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20.

While countries like Brazil have not ceased to receive international aid, the size of their economies has turned them into global aid donors, said Adriano Campolina, country director for ActionAid Brazil.

While the government promotes family farming to combat poverty and inequality and improve food security, at the same time agribusiness is expanding in Brazil, with the growth of monoculture and the concentration of land tenure in a few hands, creating unemployment and harming the environment, Campolina told TerraViva.

“These contradictions wind up being reproduced in the development aid strategy,” he said.[related_articles]

On the one hand, the government promotes “good” cooperation with African countries, emphasising family agriculture and food self-sufficiency, for instance.

But on the other hand, it also practises “bad” aid policies, selling its own technology for producing ethanol from sugarcane and acquiring vast tracts of land in other countries for monoculture plantations of soybeans or sugarcane, replicating its national agribusiness model, he said.

Olga Ponizova of the Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (Eco-Accord), a Russian NGO, described a similar strategy in her country, which subsidises the construction of nuclear power plants abroad by Russian companies.

“The challenge, as we grow richer, is for our aid not to repeat the imperialist strategy of development aid of the past,” said Vera Masagão of the Brazilian Association of NGOs (ABONG).

It is possible to implement “good” cooperation, based on solidarity, by exporting successful experiences that have arisen from years of social progress, she said.

The most serious problem, according to Sergio Schlesinger, is a different kind of development aid that does not appear in the official accounts, but is greater in terms of invested resources.

This is the participation of Brazil’s private sector in international cooperation, through subsidies granted by state institutions like the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), said Schlesinger, of the Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE).

The subsidised assistance for projects in aid-receiving countries ultimately benefits Brazilian oil, mining, infrastructure and agribusiness corporations, he said.

Schlesinger described the Brazilian strategy of “multiplying the number of countries producing ethanol” in Africa, Asia and the rest of Latin America, rather than monopolising the global market.

“Brazil realised that its aim of being a major world supplier of biofuels would not be met if it remained the only producer, so it began to encourage other countries, mainly in Africa, to invest in ethanol production,” he told TerraViva.

This kind of assistance is muddied by self-interest, he said.

ABONG’s Masagão fears that “the banned practices for which countries of the global North were criticised, like making aid conditional on purchasing products or technology from the donor country,” may be replicated.

Adhemar Mineiro, who studies the BRICS economies, pointed to the social and environmental consequences of this scheme.

“As Brazil’s companies have become globalised, the country has turned into a major supplier of minerals, energy and commodity foods,” said the economist. In Brazil, such exploitation is criticised as “unsustainable,” but this country itself practices it abroad, he said.

Marcia Andrews, a South African activist with People’s Dialogue, an organisation building political and intercultural dialogue between Southern Africa and Latin America, said there should be more monitoring to examine and avoid “bad” cooperation mechanisms, as have been described for Brazil and China.

None of the BRICS has a clean sustainable development record, she said.

Andrews expressed concern over the inclusion of her country in BRICS, a move that she attributed to pressure from China, which views South Africa as a “gateway” to the African continent for Chinese trade and investment.

But making these contradictions manifest is not a simple matter in countries like South Africa or Brazil, that are governed by left-wing parties that which waged long struggles for freedom and democracy.

How can you build a viable opposition against governments that call themselves progressive? asked Andrews, expressing a concern shared by many at the People’s Summit.

(END/2012)

JEREMOABO, Brazil, Jun 16 2012 (IPS) – Many grow lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, beets and other vegetables. But cilantro is ever-present in the gardens that are helping rural families weather the lengthy drought that is once again wracking Brazil’s impoverished Northeast.

Cilantro is the favourite “because of the flavour it adds to beans, meat, pasta – everything,” said Silvia Santana Santos, a beneficiary of the Projeto Gente de Valor (PGV), a project that has helped families create “productive backyards” in 34 municipalities in the state of Bahia, where poverty is aggravated by water scarcity.

The taste for cilantro has drawn families to get involved in initiatives that are enabling people to deal better with the semi-arid climate in the state and improving living conditions in the 282 poorest rural communities in Bahia, as identified by the Regional Action and Development Agency (CAR), the government body that is carrying out the project.

The PGV’s three main goals are to install small-scale water tanks for harvesting and storage of rainwater, boost production, and provide training. The total investment is 60 million dollars, half of which is financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the other half by the Bahia state government.

“No one buys beans, but they do buy cilantro,” said Julio Santos, who lives with Silvia Santana and their seven children in the community of Sitio Taperinha of just over 100 families, in Jeremoabo, one of the municipalities included in the project, which IPS visited.

The drought destroyed the maize and bean crops, but “we sell our vegetables every 15 days” without interruption, said Santos, who agreed to abandon his traditional grain crop, which is vulnerable to the risks posed by the semi-arid climate of the Northeast, a region that is home to 22 million of the country’s 198 million people.

Vegetable gardens could become the main activity of families in the future, he said. A profit margin is ensured by irrigation using water from two 5,000-litre half-buried rainwater tanks built with support from the project, which capture water that runs along the ground.

During drought conditions, the water harvested by the tanks is used up in two months. But the Santos family also has a pump to draw water from a nearby spring, which has allowed them to continue growing fresh produce. In addition, with assistance from the project, they have begun to produce honey.

As of February, the project had created 5,644 gardens, which have “changed people’s eating habits,” said Gilberto de Alcántara from Curralinho, a community in the municipality of Itapicurú, 175 km south of Jeremoabo, a town of 35,000 people that is the seat of the municipality.

The project has also “helped people understand what a valuable role women play,” because it is women who care for the terraces where the vegetables are grown around their houses, said Cleonice Castro, a young community activist from Jeremoabo who works with the Pastoral da Criança, a Catholic organisation working on behalf of children that has helped reduce child mortality in Brazil.

And everyone is eating better, she added: “without poisons, because we don’t use toxic agricultural chemicals.”

“The excellent focus on the poorest communities” and the active participation of women and young people are aspects that make the PGV “one of the best of the experiences we have carried out in a number of countries,” said Ivan Cossio, IFAD country programme manager for Brazil.

The beneficiaries of the programme have also received training to administer the funds and assistance they have received “in an efficient, transparent manner,” he added.

The project has helped increase incomes by expanding traditional local activities like sheep and goat farming, beekeeping, production and gathering of cashews and native fruits, the production of yucca-based products, and craft-making.

Techniques have also been introduced to increase productivity in the vegetable gardens. For example, plastic sheeting has been placed underneath the traditional terraces to keep water from seeping into the ground, and shade screens are stretched over the crops to protect them from sun damage and curb evaporation, said Carlos Henrique Ramos, an agronomist with the CAR and assistant coordinator of the PGV.

Increasing food security and incomes are the production-related targets, Cossio said.

The “productive backyards”, with the double rainwater harvesting tanks and larger underground tanks used to provide drinking water, training in water use and management, and agricultural technical assistance are the mainstays of the project, which has benefited 36,500 people directly and 55,000 indirectly.

Eight local NGOs under guidance from the PGV have been involved in implementation of the project, with the goal of reaching “the poorest of the poor,” said Cesar Maynart, the coordinator of the project.

These social organisations form part of a broad movement involved in the development and expansion of low-cost technologies aimed at helping people “coexist” better with the semi-arid environment. One of the main actions of this movement was the installation throughout the Northeast of 400,000 16,000-litre tanks used to harvest rainwater from the roofs of houses.

Another of the PGV’s activities is harvesting and storing drought-resistant local plant species of the semi-arid “caatinga” region for forage, to guarantee animal feed during the most severe, lengthy dry seasons.

“I learned a lot, I didn’t know the moringa could be used as forage,” said Gilberto Alcántara, from the community of Curralinho.

The moringa tree (Moringa oleifera), also known as the drumstick or horseradish tree, is originally from India, grows in dry terrain, and adapted well to the climate conditions in the Northeast.

“I didn’t know the guandú (a perennial woody shrub), which I have been familiar with since I was a boy, also serves as forage,” added 26-year-old João dos Santos, a “subterritorial development agent” or ADS from Curralinho.

The ADS’s are promoters of the PGV who are generally young people chosen in the subterritorial divisions, as the groups of participating communities are known.

Forage from local species of plants is essential, especially in the municipality of Macururé, in the north of Bahia, where goats are raised because of their greater resistance to dry climate conditions. The local ADS, Adriano Souza, is heading an “agroecological experiment” there, growing 17 species as forage.

Miguel José dos Santos, 67, said he was getting ready “to sell everything I have left” for fear that the drought will linger. He said he has nine cows, “which are worth a lot” – around 450 dollars each. He explained that it had become too expensive to feed them “because the price of maize has doubled,” and added that he would now dedicate himself to raising goats.

Small farmers in the area continue to raise cattle because they see cows as “savings, or a reserve” for times of trouble, Ramos said. But they lose them to the drought, or are forced to sell them off for a song.

VILAPPILSALA, India, Jun 6 (IPS) – "We tell friends planning to visit us to follow the stench of rotting garbage," says Jeevaratnam (one name), a homemaker in this village 16 km from Kerala state’s capital of Thiruvananthapuram.

But Jeevaratnam’s humorous quips give way to anger as she talks about a plan by the Thiruvananthapuram city corporation to convert a part of this once idyllic, palm-fringed village of limpid backwaters into a garbage dump.

"Let the people of Thiruvananthapuram city deal with their own garbage. Why are they dumping it on us?" she demands to know.

Six months ago, Jeevaratnam joined other villagers and environmental activists in physically stopping trucks unloading garbage from the city on a 54-acre site acquired by the corporation in Vilappilsala for an aerobic waste composting plant.

Although the corporation is now armed with an order from the Kerala High Court to reopen the plant, it does not have the courage to face the irate villagers.

An enquiry commission appointed by the court has substantiated allegations by the villagers that the waste from the composting site was leaching into streams, wells and water sources in the village.

"Many of the villagers have been suffering from stomach and respiratory problems ever since they started dumping the garbage here," said Shobhana Kumari, president of the panchayat (village local body). "We are not going to allow city garbage to be dumped in our village," she said.

What is happening at Vilappilsala is indicative of a malaise that is gripping the whole of India – an inability to deal with the mountains of garbage generated by rapid urbanisation.

India framed a solid waste policy in 2000 on the orders of the Supreme Court, which required all cities to implement comprehensive waste-management programmes that would include household collection of segregated waste, recycling and composting.

However, no city has been able to set up any programme like that envisaged in the policy, with the result that heaps of rotting waste are now a regular feature of urban life.

Indian cities generate more than 50 million tonnes of solid waste a year, and on average, each person in the urbanised areas produces half a kilogram of waste daily.

The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi estimates that by 2047 waste generation in the cities will touch 260 million tonnes per year, with local governments unable to handle the problem.

Commenting on the mass dumping of urban waste in rural areas, as is being attempted in Vilappilsala, C. R. Neelakantan, one of Kerala’s best-known environmental activists, told IPS that this is "unconscionable and violates the ‘polluter pays’ principle."

"Trash and garbage are now a serious source of pollution in towns and cities and it is a failure of governance that the problem remains unaddressed," Neelakantan, chairman of ‘Samara Samiti,’ a non-government organisation (NGO), said.

One solution, increasingly finding favour with local governments, is contracting out waste handling to private waste incinerator operators – though environmentalists say this is a remedy worse than the disease.

Almitra Patel, a Bangalore-based environmentalist who has been involved in shaping Indian solid waste policy for over 16 years, told IPS that incinerators and waste-to-energy schemes are rotten with corrupt practices.

"The simple fact is that corrupt municipal authorities do not have the capacity to operate or monitor these plants under the strict conditions required to ensure that there is no environmental pollution from toxic emissions," she said.

"Incinerators also cost 12 – 43 times more than simple, easily-managed, low-cost composting, which is the ideal solution for a country like India," said Patel, a member of the Supreme Court committee on solid waste management.

"Unlike in developed countries where waste is segregated and has high calorie packaging that works well with incinerators, Indian waste is high in organics and moisture and has very low calorific content," Patel said.

"Thermodynamically there is no surplus energy available after deducting processing energy needs and that rules out waste-to-energy incinerators," she said.

Indian waste also has a high proportion of inert materials such as street dust and drain silt that damage waste-conveying equipment and the incineration chambers. "An incinerator set up in New Delhi’s Timarpur area packed up within a week and has been lying inoperative for years," Patel said.

Yet, Delhi went on to allow a private contractor to build a larger ‘waste-to-energy’ incinerator with a capacity to handle 2,000 tonnes of solid waste daily, ignoring protests by residents of the Okhla area who fear that the thick smoke billowing out of its smokestacks will harm their health.

"We fail to understand how the government can allocate 15 acres of prime land in a densely populated part of the city for a privately-operated incinerator of this size, utterly disregarding public health," said Vimal Monga, president of a residents’ welfare association.

"Government must enforce controls, starting with segregation of waste and monitoring of emissions for toxic byproducts such as dioxins, furans and respirable particulate matter before allowing incinerators to come up in residential areas," Ravi Agarwal, chief of Toxic Links, a major environment NGO, told IPS.

Lack of waste segregation is a serious issue in India, said Agarwal, with everything from electronic waste to hazardous biomedical refuse from hospitals ending up in the same stream.

A study carried out in 2010 by the Indian Institute of Management in Lucknow for the Central Pollution Control Board found that 50 percent of biomedical waste generated in India’s hospitals gets dumped along with municipal garbage.

Jose Joseph, executive director of the ‘Clean City’ movement in Kerala’s port city of Kochi, told IPS that better understanding between manufacturers and consumers about the use and recycling of products will go a long way in solving the growing problem of waste disposal.

Green economists have suggested that what India needs is a comprehensive waste management and recycling strategy on the lines of Brazil’s national solid waste policy.

K. Lathanathan, a green activist, told IPS that recycling and energy recovery from waste are profitable even if there are issues of decent work involved. "It is worth considering that recycling in all its forms employs 12 million people in Brazil, China and the United States."

(END/2012)

BOGOTÁ/CARACAS, May 25 (IPS) – When 12 Colombian soldiers were killed by FARC insurgents a stone's throw away from the northern border with Venezuela, the consequences included military cooperation that reinforces the political, diplomatic and trade-related links that have developed over the past two years between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Santos said that after the attack on Monday he spoke to Chávez, who immediately "ordered the deployment of two brigades to the border zone, with instructions to try to locate" the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) column that attacked a Colombian army unit.

"If they manage to find them, they will capture them. If they resist, they will open fire. They will shoot them down," Santos said.

He said Chávez told him over the phone, "Our position is the same as it has been since you and I restored dialogue (in August 2010, when Santos took office as president) and we began our cooperation: we will not tolerate incursions by any illegal armed force, whatever its nature, into Venezuelan territory."

The left-wing Venezuelan president said on television that his government would not allow "irregular groups, whatever side they are on, to use Venezuela as a camping site, a training ground, or a base to attack forces of other countries, in this case Colombia.

"We cannot allow ourselves to be mixed up in a conflict that is not our own," Chávez said.

The attack took place at dawn on Monday May 21, in Colombian territory but very close to Guana, a Venezuelan village of 300 people located 200 metres from the border in the northern peninsula of La Guajira.

A Venezuelan army contingent was in position there by sunset.

The people of Guana, still frightened by the intense gunfire and explosions, spent several nights away from their homes, staying in nearby villages, the local press reported.

"Santos has persuaded Chávez to start pursuing the guerrillas. Now Chávez will ask Santos to pursue the criminal gangs (based in Colombia) smuggling gasoline, trafficking drugs and engaging in extortion rackets" in Venezuela, said Ariel Ávila, head of the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Bogotá think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris (CNAI).

In Ávila's view, Chávez's decision is "a setback" for the FARC, because "the guerrillas need a rearguard territory to retreat to." He said "cooperation between the armed forces of the two countries will mean the FARC will be hit hard," as well as the other Colombian left-wing insurgent group, the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

Colombian Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón said the FARC unit responsible for the attack "has probably been based in Venezuela for a considerable time."

General Sergio Mantilla, the Colombian army chief, said the FARC rebels "presumably came from Venezuela and fled back there" after the attack.

Mantilla said he had personally verified that the body of one of the dead soldiers was in Colombian territory, barely 150 metres from the boundary between the Colombian department (province) of La Guajira and the Venezuelan state of Zulia.

These statements have not been denied by the Venezuelan authorities.

Venezuelan opposition leaders like presidential candidate Henrique Capriles and Zulia state Governor Pablo Pérez have said it has long been known that Colombian irregulars operate all along the border.

"Why is the Venezuelan army not fulfilling its primary function of guarding the border?" asked Pérez, while Capriles maintained that "the places where the FARC operates in our border states are known, and the government is complicit in this situation."

In the past few years, IPS correspondents visiting Venezuelan border areas to report on problems facing indigenous communities, shopkeepers or Colombian refugees have gathered testimonies about the presence of guerrillas or far-right paramilitaries from Colombia.

Rocío San Miguel, head of Citizen's Control for Security, Defence and the Armed Forces, a Venezuelan NGO, told IPS that earlier cooperation mechanisms "have not worked because they did not give rise to clear and effective instructions that could be followed by middle-ranking officers of military units.

"This is apparent from the (Venezuelan) response arising from a telephone conversation between the presidents," San Miguel said.

However, "the Venezuelan military deployment on the border is not credible," she argued.

"The Venezuelan defence minister, General Henry Rangel, has talked of mobilising up to 140,000 troops, when the strength of the country's entire armed forces is 124,000," she said.

"The only way to address the problem in a consistent fashion is through effective cooperation between units led by middle-ranking officers, with permanent patrolling, and cooperation on intelligence and communications with the Colombian side, instead of sporadic actions," said San Miguel.

The military cooperation against the guerrillas comes on top of agreements between Chávez and Santos on trade, which have paved the way for Venezuela's pending debt to Colombian exporters to be paid, as well as reciprocal arrangements for handing over people wanted for drug trafficking and insurgency.

Colombia and Venezuela have also entered into a diplomatic understanding, in particular to buttress the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which brings together the 12 countries of the region.

Their amicable relationship apparently continues to flourish, in spite of the ideological differences between the two presidents which led to confrontation in the past.

When the conservative Santos was defence minister in the government of former right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), Chávez described the Colombian guerrilla groups as "political forces with a Bolivarian ideology" and said they deserved the status of legitimate belligerents because they "control territory" in Colombia.

(END/2012)