Zimbabwe: This Is No Election, This Is a Brutal War.

Reporting for The Observer UK, Chris McGreal writes: “Zimbabweans have not seen anything like this since the Matabeleland massacres by Mugabe’s army more than two decades ago. That violence was limited to the south. This time, as Mugabe, 84, fights for his political life, it is nationwide. If this is the endgame for his regime, the brutality of the tactics employed reveal his determination to win at any cost.”

Sunday 22 June 2008, The Observer / Guardian UK

Two members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) who claim they were beaten by President Robert Mugabe’s supporters after disputed elections in May 2008. Continuing violence has stirred fears of civil war as Mugabe attempts to cling to power. (There is a Photo from AFP / Alexander Joe)
More than 100 have died and thousands have endured savage beatings in the lead up to Zimbabwe’s presidential run-off. As Robert Mugabe’s thugs terrorise opposition supporters, Chris McGreal in Harare reports on a poll in which voting against the president means placing your life on the line.

John Kadonhera, 77, decided that, if he was going to die, he was not going to give his murderers the satisfaction of co-operating with them. A former policeman who defected from Zanu-PF to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), he said the militiamen who pointed him out ordered him to lie on the ground.
‘I refused to lie down because I knew they would kill me, so they started beating my head with a wooden stick. They put me in a house they were using as their base. There were about 10 people in the room. When I tried to push my way out, that’s when they started beating me again,’ he said.
Blood is still caked around the back of his head and right ear. His right arm and hand are so swollen that they strain the seams of his shirt. But he says he wants to get home to look after his four grandchildren, whose parents have died. And to vote.
Zimbabweans have not seen anything like this since the Matabeleland massacres by Mugabe’s army more than two decades ago. That violence was limited to the south. This time, as Mugabe, 84, fights for his political life, it is nationwide. If this is the endgame for his regime, the brutality of the tactics employed reveal his determination to win at any cost.
There has been election violence before. Beatings, intimidation and sporadic killings were part of every ballot since the opposition emerged as a coherent force in 1999. But never before has it generated such widespread fear that even urban critics of the government have gone into hiding.
Mugabe’s opponents are counting on desperation and anger overcoming fear at the ballot box this week. But, despite the courage of men such as John Kadonhera, it looks an increasingly forlorn prospect as Zimbabweans vote for the second time in three months in a contest that their country’s leader of 28 years says is not so much an election as a war.
The run-off presidential ballot on Friday is altogether a different affair from the first round of voting three months ago. There was popular excitement back then, a feeling that the ballot might finally bring change. But the euphoria when it fleetingly looked as if Mugabe had been toppled has given way to a grim calculation by many Zimbabweans over which is the worst option.
Do they dare to vote against Mugabe despite the threats of bloody retaliation, in the hope they might somehow be able to lever him out? Or do they resign themselves to more years of Zanu-PF misrule and plunder under a government with no policies to reverse 1.6 million per cent inflation, prices now calculated in billions of Zimbabwe dollars, no jobs to speak of, and a currency that has lost half its value in the past week alone?
Mugabe believes he is in a life-and-death struggle. He made that clear again at a campaign rally on Friday, when he told his audience that only God could remove him from power. ‘We will never allow an event like an election to reverse our independence, our sovereignty,’ he said.
Were Zimbabweans able to make a free choice, Mugabe would almost certainly lose decisively to Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC candidate. The president has already lost once, taking only 43 per cent of the vote to 48 per cent for the MDC leader in the first round, despite the advantages of money and a massive propaganda campaign. The balance of the vote went to a third candidate whose support was strongly anti-Mugabe and can be expected to swing behind Tsvangirai.
A second defeat, it is increasingly clear, will not be allowed to happen. Zanu-PF has spent the past few weeks enforcing a military-led strategy that began with the beating of rural voters who deserted the ruling party and that evolved into a campaign of terror to purge swaths of the country of opposition activists, drive independent officials out of the election administration, replacing them with party lackeys and soldiers, and break Tsvangirai’s support in Harare and its townships.
More than 100 are dead, 200-plus abducted and missing, hundreds more jailed on spurious charges, thousands beaten and tens of thousands forced from their homes.
One group of doctors covertly helping the wounded says it has treated more than 2,500 victims and that is far short of the real number of those attacked. With roadblocks dotted on all the main roads and surrounding major towns, the army and police are stopping ambulances from carrying people to hospitals.
Human rights lawyers have been intimidated - sometimes killed - to keep them from defending opposition officials jailed on trumped-up charges. Independent groups, from doctors helping victims of the terror to poll watchers, have been driven underground.
The MDC has found it all but impossible to campaign, with its activists locked up or in hiding. Tsvangirai’s campaigning has been curtailed at almost every turn. He is obliged to file notice of his rallies with the police, who promptly inform Zanu-PF, which dispatches thugs to break up the meetings. Tsvangirai often does not get to them in any case because he is sitting at a police roadblock in his car - his campaign buses were confiscated - for hours.
The brutal strategy, inevitably, is paying off. ‘It’s a very big problem,’ said Lynette Karenyi, an opposition MP who was forced to flee her constituency in Chimanimani West because of Zanu-PF attacks. ‘In some areas, I think it is working. They are telling our polling agents that, if they go and monitor the count, they will kill them. They are saying that if you vote for Morgan Tsvangirai you are voting for war. We are saying to people that this is just political propaganda.’
But is it?
‘It’s not. The threat is real. I’m not going to lie to you. There is no way I can give people security. Where am I going to get security from? How are we to protect them? If they have to vote Zanu-PF to survive, then…’
Edmond, a teacher from a school in Muzokomba in Buhera South, has certainly got the message from Zanu-PF. He was an independent election official in the March vote, but after he was dragged out of his bed and beaten up he decided to pull out. Teachers are particularly distrusted by Zanu-PF because they are trusted by the communities they live in. ‘No one is willing to be a polling officer this time. It’s better for me just to cast my vote and go home. It’s less trouble,’ he said. ‘It’s fear. People are afraid of Zanu-PF. They want to be safe, so they pretend to be Zanu-PF.’
More than 20 of the 63 teachers at Edmond’s school were forced to flee last week after Zanu-PF called the villagers to a rally. Another of them is Elijah. ‘There is nothing people in Zimbabwe can do to stop Zanu-PF from doing what it wants. People are so afraid they may not turn out to vote, or will vote Zanu-PF. Almost every day, they have a rally from morning to sunset where they are threatened. People are threatened that, if they vote for Tsvangirai, there will be war. People are saying it’s better to have Mugabe so there will not be war,’ he said. ‘If Zanu-PF wins, we will not be able to stay in Zimbabwe. The only solution is to leave, because they are going to finish off the MDC.’
Zanu-PF’s violent militia has taken control of the townships around Harare and even moved into some of the capital’s upmarket suburbs, forcing the maids and gardeners to late-night meetings where they are threatened, sometimes beaten.
The MDC’s national election director, Ian Makone, said: ‘There’s the terror to stop people from voting, but I think they are also hoping to provoke a violent response from the MDC to justify a state of emergency or scrapping the election if they think they are still going to lose.’
There has been retaliation by some MDC supporters, who have killed war veterans, but it is not on the scale of Zanu-PF violence. Nevertheless, the state-run press has used it to try to portray the opposition as responsible for the killings and attacks at the behest of a British government trying to sow chaos.
The state media no longer even bothers to talk about Tsvangirai other than to deride him. Every few minutes during the news, an advertisement pops up that shows Tony Blair morphing into George Bush and then Gordon Brown and finally Tsvangirai. The commentary says they are all losers, but the underlying message is that the MDC leader is a puppet of Western imperialism.
The government is attempting to keep prying eyes away from its conduct of the poll. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a respected local poll monitoring organisation, dispatched 8,800 observers to check on the March vote. This time, the government has said it will permit the network only 500 monitors to oversee more than 9,000 polling stations.
‘It’s not hard to see why they want to do that,’ said Noel Kututwa, the network’s chairman. ‘The fact is, we won’t be everywhere like we were before and so they will hope they can get away with more. We’ll concentrate on the hotspots, if we can get in to them. They’ve intimidated our local observers, so we’ll have to bring them in from Harare. Access will be a problem. It’s not going to be a free and fair election. The will of the people won’t be respected. It’s a foregone conclusion what’s going to happen. Ordinary citizens have been terrorised to the extent that they won’t vote or they will be afraid to vote for the opposition.’
So why participate?
‘The point is Zimbabweans still have the right to choose their leaders, to determine the destiny of the country,’ he said. Makone admits he faces an enormous challenge in the face of Zanu-PF’s campaign. ‘We thought the March election was difficult to plan, but by comparison it was a piece of cake, because we had relative peace. We had 54,000 polling agents, six at each station. We could recruit locally,’ he said. ‘This time, possibly half the country has been terrified. We have to ship party agents from Harare into these areas.
‘We are going to be beaten, there are going to be deaths, but we have to try to minimise it. The first challenge is to find the people to go to the polling stations as election agents, and then to get them there. The risks involved are enormous,’ he said.
Transport is a problem. Supporters are reluctant to lend their vehicles to transport election agents when cars are being burned. With the violence escalating, Tsvangirai is under pressure from regional leaders, including South African president Thabo Mbeki, to agree to call off the election, but there are many in the MDC who believe that would just allow Mugabe to perpetuate his rule.
Makone says there should be an election, even in such difficult conditions, because it will mark a watershed. He says that, even if Mugabe is declared the winner, he will no longer be accepted as the country’s legitimate president, either by Zimbabweans or their neighbours.
He may be right. Although Mbeki has protected Mugabe until now, and regional election observers have shied away from condemning previous votes in Zimbabwe as flawed, there is growing revulsion at what is happening.
A group of South African generals sent to assess the violence has told Mbeki squarely that Mugabe and Zanu-PF are to blame. Marwick Khumalo, the head of an African parliamentarians’ observer mission in Zimbabwe, said he had received ‘horrendous stories’ of political violence and would not endorse the election if it continued. Some African governments, including Tanzania and Kenya, have said there is no hope of a fair election.
The MDC is bracing itself to lose the count when the results come in, but is hoping that Mugabe has overplayed his hand and that Friday’s election will finally sweep away any lingering illusions about the legitimacy of his rule. For John Kadonhera, those illusions disappeared long ago.

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Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN in his News Analysis has a very interesting story about the way the UN Security Council operates when it is bankrupt.

So, we had “A meeting In UN Basement, Zimbabwe and a Fig Leaf NGO, Consensus Belied by Empty Chairs.”

UNITED NATIONS, June 19 — The staged Zimbabwe meeting convened by Condi Rice occupied less than an hour in the UN basement Thursday. Around a horseshoe table were nameplates for the 15 Council members. South Africa’s and Libya’s seats stayed empty until 11:55.

Then again, Costa Rica’s seat was not filled, though doubtless Mugabe’s name is mud in San Jose.

A rape debate upstairs, in the UN Security Chamber, created conflict. In Conference Room 7, in the basement, African nations were given the extra seats, along with World Vision, an NGO, in the center.

Ms. Rice’s co-sponsor, the foreign minister of Burkina Faso, said afterwards that now is not the time for sanctions.

The UK’s Attorney General, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, congratulated African nations for standing unanimous up to Mugabe. {??}

Mbeki, not so much. But in the wings waits Jacob Zuma. { will he be any better? } The world is closing in upon Harare, but the location of the meeting, in the basement not the chamber, was telling.

Perhaps World Vision was there only as a fig leaf, the rationale for exile from the Chamber. When NGOs brief the Council, it happens in the basement. But if one or more nations opposed addressing Zimbabwe in the chamber, other than as a strictly humanitarian issue, a room in the basement and a sample NGO were matched to move things forward.

So, to explain to non-UN readers - The UN Security Council cannot have an NGO speak at their deliberations - but in this case it seems that in effect the bringing in of a single NGO - the “World Vision” folks - was just a fig-leave for the fact that the US hit very shallow ground when South Africa and Libya simply did not show up and its co-sponsor Burkina Faso, the third African Member of the Security Council, simply said that this is no time for sanctions. The UK then declared victory so she could return home. What a UN disaster - and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was there present to lend from his prestige to the UNSC excuses.

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Fom the EU Parliament website Monday June 23, 2008 - EU to consider punitive measures against Zimbabwe.
The EU is expected to consider a raft of punitive measures aimed at Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF leaders, their finances, and their children’s European educations, as the country’s political crisis moves to the UN security council today, reports the Guardian.

Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, pulled out of the run-off for the presidential election, saying the level of violence and intimidation against his supporters made a fair vote impossible.

The international community is currently contemplating fresh sanctions against Robert Mugabe’s government, with the UK, US, and France having agreed to adopt a joint approach which would emphasise the status of the MDC as the only legitimate power in Zimbabwe.

23 June 2008
Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom, H.E. Sir John Sawers, on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 3 minutes

Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the Permanent Representative of Zimbabwe, H.E. Mr. Boniface G. Chidyausiku, on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 6 minutes

Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the Permanent Representative of the South Africa, H.E. Mr. Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo, on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 3 minutes

Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the President of the Security Council and Permanent Representative of the United States, H.E. Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad, on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 6 minutes

Security Council: Peace and Security in Africa. Presidential statement on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 4 minutes

Security Council: Peace and Security in Africa. Briefing by Mr. B. Lynn Pascoe, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 16 minutes

Media Stakeout: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks to the press on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 9 minutes

Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the President of the Security Council and Permanent Representative of the United States, H.E. Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad, on the situation in Zimbabwe.
UN WEBCAST TV VIDEO - 5 minutes 

Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the Permanent Representative of the France, H.E. Mr. Jean-Maurice Ripert, on the situation in Zimbabwe.

Food Crisis Accelerates Africa’s Rural-Urban Drift, UN Says.
By Eric Ombok

June 19 (Bloomberg) — Stagnating agricultural production in Africa is fueling a population drift from rural areas to the cities that may lead to civil unrest, the head of the United Nations Human Settlements Program, Anna Tibaijuka, said.

“If we do not secure the African farming system, all these people will be heading to urban areas,” Tibaijuka told a regional meeting of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization today in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. “Where are the hungry? Where are the rioters? You will find most of them in urban areas.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the Food Security Summit this month in Rome that the world needed to spend as much as $20 billion a year on agriculture to tackle a 60 percent rise in food prices over the past 18 months that has sparked riots in more than 30 countries.

The percentage of Africans living in urban areas will rise to 60 percent in the next two decades, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki told the meeting. That compares with about 37 percent as of 2004, according to the UN settlements program, known as UN- Habitat.

He called for greater investment in developing irrigation and water-supply systems, which he said could triple crop production on the continent.

Water Resources

“Unless we invest in and finance agriculture, we are unlikely to change the tide” of food insecurity, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Eric Ombok in Nairobi via Johannesburg at  pmrichardson at bloomberg.net.

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We must repeat - go to Malawi and learn how it is done. Start with a government that wants to do it.    In case of crisis, remember, sending out food rather then teaching how to grow the local food - is just a temporary crutch that makes the recepient even more dependent on crutches. 

Malawi cultivates cash gains for its farmers.
By Alan Beattie, The Financial Times, June 10 2008

Try walking 25 kilometres carrying a 50-kilogramme bag of fertiliser on your head, as farmers in Malawi do, and you might get a sharper appreciation of the difficulties in building agricultural supply chains in Africa.

It is hard to find a country that more embodies the struggles to improve African farming. Landlocked, crowded, one of the poorest countries on earth, Malawi’s 10m semi-subsistence smallholders coax harvests of corn from poor soils in family plots averaging just half a hectare. { BUT THEY DO IT - A success story! }

Yet a nationwide experiment, and a more intensive local pilot operating as part of an international trial, have shown the gains possible from giving farmers access to inputs that their counterparts elsewhere in the world would regard as routine.

A widely-watched government subsidy scheme, which gives smallholders vouchers to buy seed and fertiliser, helped to double the harvest between 2004-05 and 2005-06, and has just helped produce another rich corn crop.

Meanwhile, in the south of the country near the high Zomba plateau, a cluster of settlements that is home to about 35,000 people has become part of the international “millennium villages project” inspired by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and backed by the United Nations.

The millennium villagers receive intensive help across a wide range of areas such as education, healthcare and setting up small businesses. On the agricultural front they get seeds and fertiliser on a more generous basis than the nationwide government scheme, and advice to help them diversify into cash crops such as groundnuts, cabbages, tomatoes and fish farming.

Glenn Denning, who helps run the project as director of the Millennium Development Goals Centre in Kenya, says that the villages should reach sustainably higher output in five to 10 years, though the Malawi one is likely to take longer. Currently, the corn cribs in the villages are overflowing with the second successive year of bumper harvests, two or three times the national average yield, which is helping to support the project’s other aims. A school-feeding programme giving corn porridge to pupils has increased attendance at the local primary school from 380 children to 500, the headmaster says.

Esnart Kaphesi, a farmer in the millennium village, used to harvest about eight 50kg bags of corn from planting traditional varieties of seed. Having been given higher-yielding hybrid seed and 100kg of fertiliser, her crop is now 21 bags and counting.

“This year is the best yet,” she says. Her first priority is an iron roof for her house to replace the thatch. If she continues to generate surpluses she wants to open a sideline trading rice.

Connecting farmers to the cash economy requires overcoming considerable challenges in itself.

Although the Zomba villages are closer to the nearest town than many in Malawi, some farmers still have to walk or cycle 25km to buy inputs or sell produce. Some club together to hire pick-up trucks to take their crops to the market. Cecilia Natchengwa, another villager, says that the rising cost of fuel is cutting into the money to be made from selling cabbages, although they remain her most profitable cash crop.

Whether the schemes of subsidised inputs are sustainable, or indeed applicable, elsewhere in Africa, remains in question. The national voucher scheme will be repeated for next year’s harvest. But global fertiliser prices, which largely reflect the cost of energy used to make it, will increase by 70 per cent. Ms Kaphesi estimates that, after keeping enough for her family to eat, she will be able to sell 10 bags of corn this year to raise 15,000 kwacha ($110, €70, £57).

Last year, that would have been enough to buy the seed and fertiliser she was given, suggesting the scheme could be self-supporting. This year, fertiliser prices have doubled to K9,000 for 50kg, meaning she would not break even without the free inputs.

Experts say that it is tricky to design large-scale government interventions that correct market failures rather than add to them.

A recent review of the national subsidy programme led by Andrew Dorward, a UK academic, was generally positive – especially since the scheme now encourages private markets to develop by allowing farmers to buy their fertiliser from agro-dealers rather than the government procuring it centrally.

But Prof Dorward says great care is needed when translating lessons from Malawi to other areas in Africa such as, say, western Kenya, which have better access to ports and more scope for agribusinesses to penetrate rural areas on their own.

“Input subsidies may also be appropriate here, but would need to be implemented very carefully to build on and strengthen the existing demand and supply systems,” he says.

Mr Denning is enthusiastic about the Malawian voucher scheme, but refers to the experience as “an inspiration rather than a model”.

The UK’s Department for International Development is one of Malawi’s biggest donors, and after much internal debate has continued to support the programme.

However, it is cautious about replicating it. Douglas Alexander, international development secretary, says: “I would not at this stage say the lesson is to increase agricultural subsidies across Africa.”

{ ??? - are the donors to stop short from getting Africa on its feet ? Is this because of OECD economies actually liking it if others are not able to become potential competitors? The halt-back attitude by those depicted in this article make us feel sick.  www.SustainabiliTank.info comment)}

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Hunger spreads to Ethiopia’s adults as food crisis worsens: Chronic drought, global food prices deal double blow.

Tariken Lakamu, 6, has been living on one meal a day. “I’m weak,” the child said. “I feel sick. I don’t get any food.”
 http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/…

SHASHAMANE, Ethiopia - Like so many other victims of Ethiopia’s hunger crisis, Usheto Beriso weighs just half of what he should. He is always cold and swaddled in a blanket. His limbs are stick-thin.

But Usheto is not the typical face of Ethiopia’s chronic food problems, the scrawny baby or the ailing toddler. At age 55, he is among a growing number of adults and older children - traditionally less-vulnerable groups - who have been stricken by severe hunger due to poor rains and recent crop failure in southern Ethiopia, health workers say.

“To see adults in this condition, it’s a very serious situation,” Mieke Steenssens, a volunteer nurse with Doctors Without Borders, said as she registered the 5-foot-4 Usheto’s weight at just 73 pounds.

Aid groups say the older victims suggest there is an escalation in the crisis in Ethiopia, a country that drew international attention in 1984 when a famine compounded by communist policies killed 1 million people.

This year’s crisis, brought on by a countrywide drought and skyrocketing global food prices, is far less severe. But while figures for how many adults and older children are affected are not available, at least four aid groups said they noticed a troubling increase.

“We’re overwhelmed,” said Margaret Aguirre, a spokeswoman for the International Medical Corps, an aid agency based in Santa Monica, Calif. “There’s not enough food and everyone’s starving, and that’s all there is to it.

“Older children are starting to show the signs of malnutrition when normally they might be able to withstand shocks to the system,” she added. “What’s particularly concerning is that the moderately malnourished are soaring. It’s increasing so much that it means those children are going to slide into severe malnutrition.”

Ethiopia is not alone in suffering through the worldwide food crisis, which is threatening to push the number of hungry people in the world toward 1 billion. Last week, a UN summit of 181 countries pledged to reduce trade barriers and boost agricultural production to combat rising food prices.

But in Ethiopia, food production is hampered by drought, meaning the country has been hit with a double blow. Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of people live off the land. Agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic production and 85 percent of exports.

Sending more food is one solution, but there already is a global crunch as rising fuel prices drive up the cost of fertilizers, farm vehicle use, and transport of food to market. Biofuels, which are made from crops such as sugar cane and corn, are another contentious issue, with critics saying they compete with food crops.

The problem is echoed across Africa, from Kenya and Somalia and farther west. Exacerbating the global rise in food prices, which has sparked protests and riots in several West African nations, is an annual decline in food reserves across the high desert-like region called the Sahel, just below the Sahara Desert.

The so-called lean season that begins around June is marked by near-empty grain stores, with the next harvest not due until around September. Locust invasions and poor rains in recent years have only worsened the condition, which leads to deadly malnutrition among young children.

Aid agencies in Ethiopia are issuing desperate appeals for donor funding, saying emergency intervention is not enough. Ethiopia receives more food aid than nearly every other country in the world, most of it from the United States, which has provided $300 million in emergency assistance to relief agencies in the past year.

But despite the international help, the country is again facing hunger on a mass scale. Part of the reason, according to John Holmes, the top UN humanitarian official, is the country’s climate, chronic drought, and the large population of 78 million people.

The UN children’s agency has characterized this year’s food shortage - in which an estimated 4.5 million people are in need of emergency food aid - as the worst since 2003, when droughts led 13.2 million people to seek such aid. In 2000, more than 10 million needed emergency food.

Studies by the International Medical Corps in southern Ethiopia - the epicenter of the crisis - indicate that up to one in four young mothers is showing signs of moderate malnutrition.

Ethiopia’s top disaster response official, Simon Mechale, insists that the food situation is “under control” and will be resolved within four months. But in the countryside, there are signs that drought has taken a more serious toll.

At a recent food distribution in a village some 155 miles southwest of the capital, more than 4,000 people showed up for free wheat and cooking oil, but only 1,300 rations were available.

Harried health workers picked through the impatient crowd, sorting out the sickest children. Frantic mothers proffered their withered infants, hoping the children’s poor state would earn some food for the family.

Ayelech Daka said her 6-year-old son, Tariken Lakamu, has been living on one meal a day for the past three months.

“He was very fat three months ago,” said his mother, Ayelech said. “He was normal.”

Now, he’s skin and bones; he vomits just seconds after taking a bite of a ration offered by an aid worker. “I’m weak,” the child said. “I feel sick. I don’t get any food.”

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Amid food crisis, a growing focus on local farmers: Poor countries were discouraged by development experts for decades from pouring too much resources into agriculture, instead being told they would be wise to focus more on manufacturing, tourism and other industries and then buy a lot of imported food from rich countries. But the ongoing food crisis is changing this mindset, with poor nations now increasingly being urged to invest more in local farming to become more self-sufficient. This is a self criticism in today’s The Wall Street Journal - June 10, 2008. THAT IS THE TRUTH !!!

UN: Open AIDS Meeting to All - General Assembly Should Reverse Ban on Human Rights and Sexual Health Groups.

Writes Human Rights Watch from the UN.

(New York, June 5, 2008) – The United Nations General Assembly should reverse its decision to exclude three human rights and sexual health nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from its June 10 high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS, a coalition of human rights groups and international AIDS organizations said today.

Assembly members Egypt, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica blocked the participation of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), and the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG).

According to a resolution passed last year, the president of the General Assembly was responsible for compiling a list of relevant civil society organizations, which member states reviewed and approved. The three organizations were initially included on the General Assembly president’s list but denied accreditation after the General Assembly accepted their respective governments’ objection to their participation.

“This meeting is about expanding access to HIV prevention and treatment,” said Joe Amon, HIV/AIDS program director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s hypocritical and counterproductive for UN member states to block organizations from attending who are working to ensure that HIV information and services are truly available to all.”

The UN meeting is intended to review global progress made in the fight against AIDS. General Assembly meetings in 2001 and 2006 resulted in commitments by all member states to halt and reverse the HIV epidemic by 2010 and to achieve “universal access” to HIV prevention, care, and treatment. Greater involvement of civil society has been identified by the UN as a critical strategy to combat AIDS. In a resolution tabled late in 2007, civil society was specifically encouraged to be involved in this year’s meeting.

“J-FLAG is extremely disappointed by this move,” said Jason McFarlane, programme manager of J-FLAG.  “The Jamaican government itself has acknowledged that homophobia is fuelling our HIV epidemic. Silencing J-FLAG – Jamaica’s only LGBT organization – undermines Jamaica’s efforts to combat HIV/AIDS.”

This is not the first time that key human rights groups have been excluded from the UN high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS. The South African government caused an uproar in 2006 by excluding the internationally acclaimed group Treatment Action Campaign, which has challenged South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for past statements questioning the efficacy of anti-retroviral medicines.

“If the United Nations is to allow member states to exclude organizations, they should insist that the process be transparent,” said Hossam Bahgat, director of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “We applied for accreditation to attend the meeting along with dozens of other NGOs that we work with daily. All of these groups were approved while we were – without explanation – excluded.”

Human rights groups and international AIDS organizations – including Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO), and the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) – joined the three excluded NGOs in appealing to the UN General Assembly to ensure that the rhetoric of “universal access” is matched with participation and inclusion, and to each individual government to withdraw their objections and allow representatives to attend the meeting.

“We are all in this fight together,” said Samuel Matsikure, programmes manager for GALZ. “To succeed in the fight against AIDS we must come together. We can not allow governments to divide and exclude certain NGOs.”

For more information, please contact:
In New York, Joe Amon, Human Rights Watch (English): +1-917-519-8930 (mobile)
In New York, Rebecca Schleifer, Human Rights Watch (English, Spanish): +1-646-331-0324 (mobile)
In Cairo, Soha Abdelaty, EIPR (Arabic, English): +20-2-2794-3606; or +20-2-2796-2682; or +20-12-310-7147 (mobile)
In Toronto, Mary Ann Torres, ICASO (English): +1-416-921-0018 ext. 16; or +1-416-419-6338 (mobile)
In Uganda, Ian McKnight, Caribbean Vulnerable Communities (English): +1-876-564-1241 (mobile)

 UN food summit hammers out plan for world’s hungry.

From Times Online, June 4, 2008 - Richard Owen in Rome.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil defended the use of biofuels, of which his country is a major producer.

Delegates to the UN summit on the world food crisis today began hammering out an emergency plan to reduce hunger and help Third World farmers despite often testy disagreement behind the scenes over the future of biofuels.

The three-day summit, convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which is based in Rome, ends tomorrow, when the final communique will be issued outlining both short-term and long-term solutions.

A draft declaration vows to eliminate hunger and secure “food for all, today and tomorrow”. The leaders undertake to “stimulate food production and increase investment in agriculture” while “addressing obstacles to food access and using the planet’s resources sustainably for present and future generations”.

The draft document calls for a reduction in trade barriers and food export restrictions, emergency food aid, increased crop yields and guidelines on the use of biofuels.

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FAO officials said 850 million people already faced famine or malnutrition, and rising food and fuel prices would push that figure over the one billion mark, with the risk of further riots and instability in affected nations. Prices of staples such as rice, corn and wheat have soared.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said it was rolling out an additional US$1.2 billion in food assistance to help tens of millions of people in more than 60 nations hardest hit by the food crisis.

She said that WFP was “helping the world to weather the storm” by tripling the number of people who receive food in Haiti, doubling those who will receive food in Afghanistan, and delivering assistance to people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. “We have mobilised our 10,000 employees and every dollar and Euro given to us to reach as many hungry people as we can at this critical time,” she said.

The first day of the summit was dominated by controversy over the presence of the President Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Today, however, delegates got down to the nitty-gritty of the food crisis, with the United States and Brazil - the world’s largest producer of sugar-cane ethanol - defending the diversion of crops for energy in the face of growing criticism.

The US plans to use 25 per cent of its corn crop for ethanol production by 2022, and the European Union aims to obtain 10% of its car fuel from bio-energy by 2020. The US Agriculture Secretary, Ed Schafer, insisted that “the use of sustainable biofuels can increase energy security, foster economic development especially in rural areas and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without weighing heavily on food prices.”

He said the US was “deeply concerned by the current crisis…..We are now projecting to spend nearly five billion dollars in 2008 and 2009 to fight global hunger”.

But Jacques Diouf, director general of the FAO, said: “Nobody understands how $11-12 billion-a-year subsidies in 2006 and protective tariff polices have had the effect of diverting 100m tonnes of cereals from human consumption, mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuel for vehicles.”

Mr Schafer responded that biofuels had contributed under 3 per cent to food price increases. However FAO officials said biofuels accounted for 59 per cent of the increase in global use of coarse grains and wheat between 2005-2007, and 56 per cent of the increase in vegetable oils. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that biofuels are responsible for up to 30 per cent of the price rises overall.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, accused critics of biofuels of hypocrisy. “It offends me to see fingers pointed at biofuels, which produce clean energy, when those fingers are soiled with oil and coal,” he said. “It is frightening to see attempts to draw a cause and effect relationship between biofuels and the rise of food prices”.

But he took a swipe at the US version of biofuel, saying that corn-based ethanol was less efficient than fuel produced with sugar cane, and could only compete “when it is shored up with subsidies and shielded behind tariffs”. Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, added: “In some cases, biofuel production is in competition with food supply…..We need to ensure that biofuel production is sustainable.”

The Rome summit will be followed by the G8 summit in Japan next month and the final stages of the stalled World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha round of talks on global trade. Pascal Lamy, the head of WTO, said a Doha deal “would reduce the trade-distorting subsidies that have stymied the developing world’s production capacity”.

Douglas Alexander, Britain’s International Development Secretary, said that Western farm subsidies were also responsible for food price rises. “It is unacceptable that rich countries still subsidise farming by $1 billion a day, costing poor farmers in developing countries an estimated $100 billion a year in lost income,” he said

nbsp;washingtonpost.com  > World  > Africa - looking at a new mess in the making.

U.S. Africa Command Trims Its Aspirations - Nations Loath to Host Force - Aid Groups Resisted Military Plan to Take On Relief Work.

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 1, 2008; Page A18

The U.S. Africa Command, designed to boost America’s image and prevent terrorist inroads on the continent, has scaled back its ambitions after African governments refused to host it and aid groups protested plans to expand the military’s role in economic development in the region.

Africom, due to begin operations Oct. 1, will now be based for the foreseeable future in Stuttgart, Germany, with five smaller regional offices planned for the continent on hold while the military searches for places to put them.

Nonmilitary jobs, created within Africom to highlight new cooperation between the Pentagon and the State Department, have been hard to fill and will initially total fewer than 50 of 1,300 headquarters personnel. Plans to broaden the military’s more traditional overseas training and liaison responsibilities to include development and relief tasks were curbed after U.S.-funded aid groups sharply objected to working alongside troops.

“I think in some respects we probably didn’t do as good a job as we should have when we rolled out Africom,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said recently, adding that “I wasn’t there” when the command was conceived by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and approved by President Bush.

“I don’t think we should push African governments to a place they don’t really want to go in terms of relationships,” Gates said.

Planning for Africom began in early 2006, when the Bush administration designated Africa an area of “strategic concern” and policymakers cited a number of “pre-conflict” situations there. Based on lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. military is deeply involved in civil affairs and economic development efforts, Africom was fashioned as a template for a new interagency structure that would coordinate “hard” and “soft” U.S. power.

U.S. Agency for International Development personnel were assigned to Africom, and a senior State Department diplomat was named one of two command deputies under Army Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward. Not only would Africom help make Africa secure, Bush said when he unveiled it in February 2007, it would help promote “development, health, education, democracy and economic growth.”

Africa has always been an orphan in the U.S. defense establishment, divvied up among the Pentagon’s four regional “Unified Combatant Commands” — European, Central, Southern and Pacific — that manage U.S. military relationships and operations overseas.

Of the four, only Eucom, established in post-World War II Germany, is based overseas.

Pacom handles Asia from its headquarters in Hawaii;

Southcom, responsible for Latin America, and Centcom, in charge of operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, are both in Florida.

There was no Africom - period - probably Nigerian oil was left to be handled by the local ccoperative rulers. That was good until the Chinese showed up. Now the Indians, the Japanese, the Brazilians, are not far behind. www.SustainabiliTank.info comments.}

Under Africom, one command will consolidate military responsibility for all of Africa, excluding Egypt.

Although it encompasses the volatile Horn of Africa and the U.S. Navy’s forward operating base in Djibouti and will take over training tasks on the continent, it has no other dedicated troop components. “There are very few scenarios which would create a U.S. military intervention” in Africa, said one Africom officer who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Arguably, there are no scenarios.”

With its headquarters on the continent, liaison groups of 20 to 30 military personnel established in key countries and U.S. units brought in to help with development and relief tasks, the command was envisioned as an example to Africans of how their own armed forces and civilians could work together for the good of their nations. { ??? }

The trouble was, no one consulted the Africans. “Very little was really known by the majority of people or countries in Africa who were supposed to know before such a move was made,” said retired Kenyan army Lt. Gen. Daniel Opande. Worry swept the continent that the United States planned major new military installations in Africa. { ?!?!}

“If you know the politics of Africa,” said Opande, who has headed U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, “you know there are certain very powerful countries who said, no, we are not interested in having a headquarters here.” South Africa and Nigeria were among them, and their resistance helped persuade others.

Over the past seven years, the administration has more than tripled U.S. assistance to Africa, to about $9 billion annually, nearly half of which is spent on prevention and treatment for HIV-AIDS. U.S. military training for African forces has steadily expanded, and U.S. troops have undertaken humanitarian missions in several countries — digging wells, building schools and providing medical care. Africom’s budget request for 2009 is about $400 million.

But despite the promise of new development and security partnerships, many Africans concluded that Africom was primarily an extension of U.S. counterterrorism policy, intended to keep an eye on Africa’s large Muslim population. {!!!}

“I think everyone thought it would be widely greeted as something positive,” the Africom officer said. “But you suddenly have wide publics that have no idea what we’re talking about. . . . It was seen as a massive infusion of military might onto a continent that was quite proud of having removed foreign powers from its soil.” {it seems that the expectation was similar to Iraq -they will embrace the US army as l