Day: November 15, 2022

Without coordinated action, this year’s “crisis of affordability” threatens to become a dire global food shortage in 2023, the UN chief told the G20 Summit in Indonesia on Tuesday.

The world is on its way to “a raging food catastrophe”, Secretary-General António Guterres warned leaders gathered in Bali, alerting them that “people in five separate places are facing famine”.

“Simultaneously, we are witnessing a crunch in the global fertilizer market”, he continued, highlighting once again the Black Sea Grain Initiative to export vital food supplies from Ukraine, and fertilizers from Russia.

Food and energy session

Speaking at the special session on the food and energy crisis, Mr. Guterres credited the European Union, United States, United Kingdom and others, for cooperating successfully with the UN to remove many of the obstacles preventing the free flow of Russian food and fertilizers to global markets.

He informed the participants that the first shipment of Russian fertilizers – donated by Uralkem and managed by the World Food Programme (WFP) – will be loaded up in the Netherlands on Tuesday. 

“Food and fertilizers are not subject to sanctions, but suffer indirect impacts”, explained the UN chief. We are working nonstop to resolve all remaining issues, chiefly around payments, and to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative”.

“I count on all of your to support these efforts”.

Step up financing

Many governments in the Global South, battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, unequal resources for recovery, and the climate crisis, lack the fiscal space to help their people deal with rising food and fertilizer prices accelerated by the war, the top UN official said.

He reminded that his call for a Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Stimulus aimed to provide those countries with adequate liquidity by reallocating supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets called Special Drawing Rights; concessional financing to Middle Income Countries in distress; and effective mechanisms of debt relief and restructuring.

“Transformational investments in agriculture, particularly in Africa, are essential to prevent future crises”, he asserted. “But they need the resources, to be implemented”.

Environmental woes

The climate crisis is another factor pushing people into hunger, according to the UN chief.

“Changing weather patterns, droughts and storms are disrupting crop cycles and fisheries”, he told the G20, pointing out that “80 per cent of global emissions are sitting around this table”.

Mr. Guterres argued that a Climate Solidarity Pact between developed countries and large emerging economies is the only way to defeat climate change.

“Developed countries must take the lead in reducing emissions”, he instructed.

“They must also mobilize, together with international financial institutions and technology companies, to provide financial and technical support so that large emerging economies can accelerate their transition to renewables”.

Just energy transition partnerships are an important first step to this end.

Prevent ‘energy scramble’

As many developing countries cannot afford soaring energy prices, the top UN official warned against “an energy scramble” in which developing countries “come off worst” – as they did in the competition for COVID-19 vaccines.

Moreover, doubling down on fossil fuels is no solution. 

“If, in the last two decades, the world had massively invested in renewable energy, rather than its addiction to fossil fuels, we would not be facing the present crisis”, he said.

Working as one for the good of all

In closing, the Secretary-General advocated for “unity, solidarity and multilateral solutions” to address the food and energy crises, and to “eliminate the trust deficit” that is undermining global action across the board.  

“Multilateral solutions can only be built on fairness and justice”, he said.

“I urge G20 countries to consider these fundamentals in your decisions”.

Source: United Nations

The world’s population is projected to hit an estimated 8 billion people on Tuesday, according to a United Nations projection, with much of the growth coming from developing nations in Africa.
Among them is Nigeria, where resources are already stretched to the limit. More than 15 million people in Lagos compete for everything from electricity to light their homes to spots on crowded buses, often for two-hour commutes each way in this sprawling megacity. Some Nigerian children set off for school as early as 5 a.m.
And over the next three decades, the West African nation’s population is expected to soar even more: from 216 million this year to 375 million, the U.N. says. That will make Nigeria the fourth-most populous country in the world after India, China and the United States.
“We are already overstretching what we have — the housing, roads, the hospitals, schools. Everything is overstretched,” said Gyang Dalyop, an urban planning and development consultant in Nigeria.
The U.N.’s Day of 8 Billion milestone Tuesday is more symbolic than precise, officials are careful to note in a wide-ranging report released over the summer that makes some staggering projections.
The upward trend threatens to leave even more people in developing countries further behind, as governments struggle to provide enough classrooms and jobs for a rapidly growing number of youth, and food insecurity becomes an even more urgent problem.
Nigeria is among eight countries the U.N says will account for more than half the world’s population growth between now and 2050 — along with fellow African nations Congo, Ethiopia and Tanzania.
“The population in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double between 2022 and 2050, putting additional pressure on already strained resources and challenging policies aimed to reduce poverty and inequalities,” the U.N. report said.
It projected the world’s population will reach around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100.
Other countries rounding out the list with the fastest growing populations are Egypt, Pakistan, the Philippines and India, which is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation next year.
In Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where more than 12 million people live, many families struggle to find affordable housing and pay school fees. While elementary pupils attend for free, older children’s chances depend on their parents’ incomes.
“My children took turns” going to school, said Luc Kyungu, a Kinshasa truck driver who has six children. “Two studied while others waited because of money. If I didn’t have so many children, they would have finished their studies on time.”
Rapid population growth also means more people vying for scarce water resources and leaves more families facing hunger as climate change increasingly impacts crop production in many parts of the world.
“There is also a greater pressure on the environment, increasing the challenges to food security that is also compounded by climate change,” said Dr. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Reducing inequality while focusing on adapting and mitigating climate change should be where our policy makers’ focus should be.”
Still, experts say the bigger threat to the environment is consumption, which is highest in developed countries not undergoing big population increases.
“Global evidence shows that a small portion of the world’s people use most of the Earth’s resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “Over the past 25 years, the richest 10% of the global population has been responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions.”
According to the U.N., the population in sub-Saharan Africa is growing at 2.5% per year — more than three times the global average. Some of that can be attributed to people living longer, but family size remains the driving factor. Women in sub-Saharan Africa on average have 4.6 births, twice the current global average of 2.3.
Families become larger when women start having children early, and 4 out of 10 girls in Africa marry before they turn 18, according to U.N. figures. The rate of teen pregnancy on the continent is the highest in the world — about half of the children born last year to mothers under 20 worldwide were in sub-Saharan Africa.
Still, any effort to reduce family size now would come too late to significantly slow the 2050 growth projections, the U.N. said. About two-thirds of it “will be driven by the momentum of past growth.”
“Such growth would occur even if childbearing in today’s high-fertility countries were to fall immediately to around two births per woman,” the report found.
There are also important cultural reasons for large families. In sub-Saharan Africa, children are seen as a blessing and as a source of support for their elders — the more sons and daughters, the greater comfort in retirement.
Still, some large families “may not have what it takes to actually feed them,” says Eunice Azimi, an insurance broker in Lagos and mother of three.
“In Nigeria, we believe that it is God that gives children,” she said. “They see it as the more children you have, the more benefits. And you are actually overtaking your peers who cannot have as many children. It looks like a competition in villages.”
Politics also have played a role in Tanzania, where former President John Magufuli, who ruled the East African country from 2015 until his death in 2021, discouraged birth control, saying that a large population was good for the economy.
He opposed family planning programs promoted by outside groups, and in a 2019 speech urged women not to “block ovaries.” He even described users of contraceptives as “lazy” in a country he said was awash with cheap food. Under Magufuli, pregnant schoolgirls were even banned from returning to classrooms.
But his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, appeared to reverse government policy in comments last month when she said birth control was necessary in order not to overwhelm the country’s public infrastructure.
Even as populations soar in some countries, the U.N. says rates are expected to drop by 1% or more in 61 nations.
The U.S. population is now around 333 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The population growth rate in 2021 was just 0.1%, the lowest since the country was founded.
“Going forward, we’re going to have slower growth — the question is, how slow?” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The real wild card for the U.S. and many other developed countries is immigration.”
Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, says environmental concerns surrounding the 8 billion mark should focus on consumption, particularly in developed countries.
“Population is not the problem, the way we consume is the problem — let’s change our consumption patterns,” he said.

Source: Voice of America

Two trucks carrying medical supplies arrived in Ethiopia’s Tigray region on Tuesday, the first shipment of international aid to reach the region since Ethiopia’s federal government and Tigrayan forces agreed to a cease-fire earlier this month.

The convoy by the International Committee of the Red Cross or ICRC delivered 40 tons of “essential items, emergency medicines and surgical equipment” to Mekelle, Tigray’s regional capital, according to an ICRC statement.

Until today, no international aid had entered Tigray by road since late August.

Restrictions on humanitarian access since the conflict erupted in November 2020 have resulted in a dire humanitarian crisis across the region, with millions in urgent need of food and medicine.

The terms of the cease-fire deal — struck in South Africa earlier this month — commit Ethiopia’s federal government to facilitating unhindered humanitarian access to Tigray and restoring its phone, internet and banking services.

Jude Fuhnwi, a spokesperson for the ICRC in Ethiopia, said more aid including food and basic household items would be delivered to Tigray by air and road “in the coming days.”

“The delivery today signified hope to the population of Tigray. It also signifies to some of them hope for survival because there are many patients in the region who could have died because of lack of medicine, because of lack of proper medical care, because most of the hospitals and health centers in the region had run out of medical supplies. We had some of the hospitals that were no longer functional and this health system in the region was entirely or has been entirely under serious pressure,” said Fuhnwi.

Last week, Ethiopia’s chief negotiator in the peace talks, Redwan Hussein, said services were “being restored” to Tigray, while on Tuesday Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said his government was committed to implementing the cease-fire deal.

A spokesperson from the U.N.’s World Food Program told VOA their organization had not yet resumed aid deliveries to Tigray, where nutritional supplies have mostly run out.

Roughly one-third of children and three quarters of lactating mothers screened for malnutrition in Tigray last month were malnourished.

Source: Voice of America