It’s Time to Step up for Street Vendors’ Rights

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Asia-Pacific, Civil Society, Headlines, Labour, Poverty & SDGs

Opinion

Street Vendors Act - Since the passing of the act around seven years ago, only a minor fraction of its extensive recommendations has been implemented. Picture courtesy: Adam Cohn.

Since the passing of the act around seven years ago, only a minor fraction of its extensive recommendations has been implemented. Picture courtesy: Adam Cohn.

MUMBAI, India, Mar 2 2022 (IPS) – In the second week of January 2022, Purushottam—locally known as Prashant—a street vendor in central Delhi’s Connaught Place area, died by suicide. It was later discovered that the reason for his death was his inability to pay certain debts.

Ground reports show that, since November 8, 2021, approximately 150 street vendors in Connaught Place, including Purushottam, have lost their livelihoods due to forced eviction by municipal authorities.

Over the past few years, the vast population of vendors has reported facing repeated harassment or eviction at the hands of the police, local authorities, and society. Therefore, street vendors remain marginalised and their situation grows increasingly precarious, despite the fact that they are protected by the law

It is a complex combination of pressures from market traders’ associations, insensitive court orders, bureaucracy, and non-existent planning standards that have disallowed street vending—one of the largest economies for self-employed workers—in Connaught Place.

This removal of street vendors has further been replicated in other well-established markets of Delhi such as Lajpat Nagar, Sarojini Nagar, and Chandni Chowk, and is now being extended to other cities across India.

What the Street Vendors Act 2014 guarantees

In 2014, the central government passed the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act based on Article 21 of the Constitution of India—the right to live with dignity. As the title suggests, the act is designed to ‘protect’ and ‘regulate’ street vending in urban areas.

Till 2014, street vending was an ungoverned territory where ‘regulation’ meant the removal of vendors, who were considered illegal and unfit to be in cities. The Street Vendors Act 2014 attempted to change this mindset in the following ways:

  • It acknowledged vendors as an integral part of Indian cities and granted legal recognition to them by protecting them from evictions till they were surveyed.
  • The act created a governance framework that is participatory and decentralised, and primarily led by the town vending committees (TVCs) located in urban local bodies. TVCs are in charge of enumerating, identifying, and allocating vending zones in a city. Each TVC requires at least 40 percent of its members to be street vendors, with the rest of the committee including representation from local authorities, planning authorities, police, residential welfare associations, nonprofits, and market associations.
  • It allowed street vendors to be included in the city planning process by letting up to 2.5 percent of the city population engage in street vending.
  • It specifically mandated prevention against eviction and harassment.
  • The act laid out various inclusionary measures for the legal support and promotion of street vending through vendors’ welfare, training, and capacity building.

Overall, the act is a nuanced, well-designed legislation that is a result of numerous years of contributions from social movements led by street vendors’ associations and incremental progressive court directives.

Why are forced evictions taking place in Delhi?

Poor implementation of the act

The evictions taking place in Delhi have set a dangerous precedent by undermining the Street Vendors Act 2014—the only progressive legislation enacted for the upliftment of working-class groups such as street vendors. Since the passing of the act around seven years ago, only a minor fraction of its extensive recommendations has been implemented.

With much reluctance, it is only now that street vendors are being surveyed and issued licenses and certificates of vending in Delhi. However, with no demarcation of the vending and non-vending zones in the city, the vendors find themselves without ‘space’ on the city streets.

Over the past few years, the vast population of vendors has reported facing repeated harassment or eviction at the hands of the police, local authorities, and society. Therefore, street vendors remain marginalised and their situation grows increasingly precarious, despite the fact that they are protected by the law.

Judicial apathy

In 2021, various market traders’ associations put forth petitions challenging the act. While listening to their grievances, the Delhi High Court passed unfavourable comments on the legal rights of street vendors in Delhi.

The bench further questioned the basis of the act and said that “the country will go to [the] dogs if this act is implemented in its entirety. What will happen if street vendors start sitting on your doorsteps?”

The court also raised concerns over the rising number of vendors in the city and questioned how Delhi could become like London if the planning aspect wasn’t focused on. These comments were made alongside the passing of a legal order to remove street vendors from their spaces of work.

The same bench also stated that the act is heavily biased towards the street vendors and that there are no experts in the TVCs.

It should be noted that street vendors in Delhi make up only 40 percent of the TVC by having 12 seats out of 30, whereas 10 seats are taken by local authorities, planning authorities, the police and traffic police, the revenue department, the medical officer, and the CPWD/PWD/works department of the local authority.

The committee also offers eight seats to nonprofits, resident welfare associations, community-based organisations, and market traders’ associations—independent bodies that are nominated by the state government itself. With such a comprehensive list, encompassing the economic, spatial, health, social, and administration perspectives, the TVC is full of experts and, therefore, is not tilted towards the vendors.

Stagnant functioning of TVCs

As per the Street Vendors Act 2014, Delhi’s Street Vendor (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Rule 2017, and the Street Vendor (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Scheme 2019, Delhi has 27 TVCs across the three municipal corporations of Delhi, North Delhi Municipal Corporation, and Delhi Cantonment.

In spite of many deliberations in the TVCs where vendor representatives have pushed for a comprehensive survey to identify and register street vendors, there has been a bureaucratic lethargy and rigidness in execution. For example, the TVC meetings are not held regularly and survey and certificate issuance processes are slow.

Often the chairpersons—who are usually IAS officers—don’t listen to the TVC members, thus systematically undermining the democratic nature of TVCs.

From the minutes of the TVC meetings1 it is apparent that members representing government authorities such as the health, police, and planning departments do not attend them, thus missing the opportunity to make these meetings enriching and participatory. Together, the poor functioning of the TVCs inhibits the proper implementation of the act and allows forced evictions to continue.

Exclusionary urban planning

The recent eviction orders are unlawful also because they are based on the Master Plan of Delhi (MPD) 2021 and older vending zones—both of which were made prior to the passing of the Street Vendors Act 2014.

Moreover, as mentioned previously, the act mandates the right of TVCs to decide on vending and non-vending zones. Unfortunately, this right has been curtailed under the present MPD 2001–21 since the plan has not been amended in line with the Street Vendors Act 2014.

Now the latest draft of the MPD 2041 has also carried forward the same legacy by excluding the 2.5 percent norm on the number of street vendors in a city, TVCs, and participatory process on the vending zone demarcation. It is not a matter of coincidence that the North Delhi Municipal Corporation’s smart city plans—like the smart city plans of many other cities—have demarcated the central park and surrounding areas as ‘hawker-free zones’.

Outside the bureaucratic and city planning hurdle, societal apathy and disdain towards the vendors comes from a colonial mindset where they are viewed as smugglers and encroachers occupying public spaces, posing a threat to pedestrians’ right of way.

How do we move forward and course-correct?

The Street Vendors Act 2014 is the only legal framework that protects street vendors, as it focuses on enhancing their livelihoods and safeguarding them from evictions and harassments.

It uplifts the values of democracy by setting up the TVCs as decision-making authorities that conduct surveys, issue certificates of vending, and provide vendors with spatial right to the city.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last couple of years have been extremely difficult for street vendors and the informal economy.

Our research has shown that their incomes have reduced by more than 40 percent in the case of Delhi, and many vendors have reported falling into debt traps. The proactive measures taken by the government through the PM SVANidhi scheme and the Delhi government reaching out with PDS and non-PDS relief were only of temporary help.

The bigger problem for street vendors is that they were not legally permitted to work in the city even prior to the pandemic. Addressing this problem requires concrete efforts from the government at the central, state, and local levels.

The first step is to explicitly integrate urban development schemes such as the MPD, Smart Cities Mission, and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan with the objectives and mandates of the Street Vendors Act 2014. Since these schemes are integral to a city’s strategic planning and welfare, they must recognise the needs and aspirations of street vendors.

There is also a need to focus on training and capacity building of urban local bodies, TVCs, and vendors so that they can play a decisive role in executing the act, for example, to identify and demarcate vending zones.

Further, the Delhi Development Authority needs to acknowledge the absence of street vending and other informal livelihoods from the MPD. Lastly, there is a need to include natural markets, weekly markets, women’s markets, and other heritage markets in the MPD 2041.

Unless we reform urban planning both in theory and in practice, our cities will continue to see exclusionary development. The implementation of the Street Vendors Act 2014 could be seen as an opportunity to prioritise the welfare of the urban poor and enhance their livelihoods.

Aravind Unni is an urban rights activist and researcher associated with the National Hawker Federation.

Shalaka Chauhan is a social designer by training. Her work focuses on urban planning vis-à-vis urban poverty and inequality. 

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

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Building a Disability-Friendly Workplace: Why Includability Matters

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Asia-Pacific, Civil Society, Headlines, Health, Labour

Opinion

An includable leader knows that not everyone comes from the same space with the same privileges. They are aware of systemic barriers that dictate interactions between people of different genders, classes, or abilities, according to the author. Credit: United Nations - Awareness of differences is not the barrier to includability. It is the inability to create a common ground for dialogue, which requires strategic planning and building competency

An includable leader knows that not everyone comes from the same space with the same privileges. They are aware of systemic barriers that dictate interactions between people of different genders, classes, or abilities, according to the author. Credit: United Nations

BENGALURU, India, Dec 2 2021 (IPS) – In her famous speech ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us against a singular narrative of a person—a stereotype. This, Adichie asserts, is not because stereotypes are untrue, but because they are incomplete—“They make one story become the only story.” This is true in all walks of life, including in our interactions with people with disabilities at workplaces.

The consequence of the single story, according to Adichie, is that it robs people of dignity. “It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

Take the example of my brother, Hari. He topped the MBA programme in Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies. He has a visual disability, and he managed his education with the help of audio cassettes, screen reader software, and the internet. But when it came to his placement, none of the employers wanted to hire him because of his ‘blindness’. He went through 70 interviews.

To go beyond the differences, leaders must focus on the commonalities between them and the person they are interacting with. To be an includable leader, one must do away with the us-versus-them narrative

The problem was not that the interviewers saw him as a person with vision impairment, but that they could see only one ‘story’ of him—his disability. It created fear and discomfort, and took precedence over any other stories that would have helped the interviewers see his personality, conduct the interview, and gauge his competence.

They focused so much on how he was different from them that they did not even try to look for similarities. Hari likes cricket, a sport with billions of admirers across the country, and this could have been a conversation starter for some of them. Or someone could have simply said, “Hey, I have never met a blind person. How do I interview you?”

EnAble India’s idea of includability—the ability to include—emerged from this and many other experiences I had with leaders, managers, and employees across organisations. I realised that awareness of differences is not the barrier to includability. It is the inability to create a common ground for dialogue, which requires strategic planning and building competency.

What is includability quotient?

Becoming an includable leader requires cultivating what we call an includability quotient (IncQ)—a competency framework for leaders on how to include diverse people in their organisation. A leader with a high IncQ is able to get the most out of their team, and is guided by three broad principles:

1. Internalising the landscape

An includable leader knows that not everyone comes from the same space with the same privileges. They are aware of systemic barriers that dictate interactions between people of different genders, classes, or abilities. They are also aware of how these barriers intersect, and actively plan strategies to overcome them.

For example, disability, lack of access to education, and poverty are often interlinked. To overcome this, we urged the leaders in a multinational corporation (MNC) we had worked with to hire persons with disabilities who had earned diplomas—for a position for which a degree was otherwise necessary.

The leader took the right decision to hire and provided a level playing field to overcome the inequities which come with the landscape. Their next step was to offer the employees a scholarship to pursue their degree later. Similarly, there are information technology (IT) companies that provide a loan for modified two-wheelers to people with disabilities for easy access to the workplace. In each example, the leader used their competency to distinguish a level playing field from an ‘excuse’.

2. Normalising the differences

To go beyond the differences, a leader must focus on the commonalities between them and the person they are interacting with. An includable leader does not function with an us-versus-them narrative. They actively try to facilitate conversations by using appropriate language and triggers.

However, like all conversations, this normalisation of differences is a two-way process. Employees with disabilities must be equipped with self-advocacy tools that help them to identify as more than their disability. The tools can include hobbies, adjectives, and aspirations that might spark an exchange.

For example, when a leader met Ajay*, a person with intellectual disability who is 38 years old and speaks in monosyllables, the leader didn’t know what to say. However, when Ajay presented them with a card where he described himself as a cricket lover and as Mr Dependable, the leader asked him about cricket. With this topic, Ajay gradually opened up and spoke a couple of sentences. The leader could see his personality, which may not have been possible if only the term ‘intellectual disability’ was ringing in his head.

In another instance, a manager had to familiarise his interns with domain-related video content in an American accent. To make it easier for the interns who might have found a non-Indian accent a barrier to understanding, the manager first introduced similar content in an Indian accent to them. This was a learner-centric approach that worked for people from different backgrounds.

3. Changing expectations    

Every person is capable of growth. Our inadequacy as leaders and managers is that at times we fail to remember this. An includable leader uses appreciative inquiry (AI)—an evaluation mechanism that focuses on the strengths rather than the weaknesses of an employee. This is applicable to employees coming from all kinds of spaces—be it a person with or without disability. And it is done with the belief that what you focus on will grow.

Whenever a new employee joins the team, the leader figures out their strengths and gains an understanding of the systemic barriers they face. From here both of them can go on to co-create solutions. Once this is done, the boundaries need to be pushed by focusing on the employee’s strengths.

Take, for instance, the case of an MNC that hired a person with intellectual disability for an internship. In the initial days, the intern mostly interacted with their manager and a colleague who was assigned to them as a buddy. With time the intern was made to attend presentations, which interested them enough to want to present on their own.

The MNC’s strategy was to make the intern speak on any topic of their choice for five minutes to a small team. As a second step, the management provided the intern with the topic to speak on. And, finally, the intern was asked to make a formal presentation to a larger team.

The MNC’s process of gradually moving the metre helped the intern gain confidence to speak in front of people and accumulate technical knowledge from the interactions. This kind of intervention helps employees not only in their current job but also going forward in their career. Additionally, a leader skilled enough to design and implement such a process gathers the confidence to work with team members from various facets of society.

Lessons for nonprofits

These are not easy lessons to learn for even the most eager leaders and managers—not because they do not want to engage, but often because they do not have a language to communicate their guilt, worries, and discomfort when they encounter a person they see as different from themselves.

Finding that common language requires a leader and a colleague to first learn to self-include. This involves feeling comfortable about themselves by gaining awareness of their own space, which comes with its own difficulties. It includes being able to speak openly about their problems and concerns—be it personal or professional. It is only then that a workplace can become truly inclusive.

As facilitators working with organisations, our job is to make space for these conversations at various levels. This requires us to build a nuanced understanding of the various elements that form an organisation—only then can we come up with tools, methods, and strategies. Here are some of the lessons I have learnt over the years:

1. An includable workplace is more than the leader

While speaking with and educating leaders is an essential part of creating an inclusive workplace, the idea needs to travel across the organisation. The leadership has to play the role of an implementer in bringing changes at various levels. This includes individuals being comfortable with and understanding the needs of a colleague with disability, as well as people with disabilities being able to assert an identity that is more than their disability.

2. ‘Peacetime’ interactions go a long way

We have seen that people with disabilities and those without have more fruitful interactions when these are facilitated during ‘peacetime’—an informal, non-work setting. For instance, when a person without disability studies with a person with disability at school or when they work together as volunteers, there’s a chance that they might be able to build a sustainable bond that’s beyond notions of ability and disability. Peacetime creates an exposure opportunity where the knowing and acceptance happens in a non-threatening way.

3. Facilitators need to keep introspecting

Conversations around disabilities demand a space of vulnerability. This is true for participants across the intersections of people with disabilities, non-profit facilitators working with people with disabilities, and leaders. It is easy to form attachments, look out for each other, and become protective of each other. However, as facilitators, we must be wary of our actions that stem from these emotions.

Our well-intentioned protectiveness can stand in the way of a person being able to push their limits and prepare for the competitive world of employment. This is a clear deviation from our own idea of building together a more equitable world. Thus, we need to constantly evaluate our actions. Because that equitable world—in Adichie’s words, “a kind of a paradise”—will emerge not from our guilt or pity, but from our rejection of the singular narratives of individuals.

*Name changed to maintain confidentiality.

With contributions from Gayatri Gulvady.

Shanti Raghavan, the author of this article, is a social entrepreneur and the co-founder of EnAble India, which works towards providing economic independence to persons with disability

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

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Delivering On the Promise of Health For All Must Include Gender Equality and SRHR

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Civil Society, COVID-19, Development & Aid, Gender, Global, Headlines, Health, Human Rights, Humanitarian Emergencies, Inequity, Labour, Poverty & SDGs, TerraViva United Nations, Women’s Health

Opinion

Health workers are at the frontlines in the fight against the new Corona Virus. Credit: John Njoroge

NEW YORK, Sep 29 2021 (IPS) – Gender-responsive universal health coverage (UHC) has the proven potential to transform the health and lives of billions of people, particularly girls and women, in all their intersecting identities. At tomorrow’s kick-off to the 2023 UN High-Level Meeting (HLM) on UHC, Member States and stakeholders will review progress made on the 2019 HLM’s commitments and set a roadmap to achieve UHC by 2030. We, as the co-convening organizations of the Alliance for Gender Equality and UHC, call on Member States to safeguard gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) as part of UHC implementation, especially in light of the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To move forward, it is crucial to remember our cumulative past promises. In 2019, Member States adopted a Political Declaration that contained strong commitments to ensure universal access to SRHR, including family planning; mainstreaming a gender perspective across health systems; and increasing the meaningful representation, engagement, and empowerment of all women in the health workforce. Further, 58 countries put forward a joint statement that argued that investing in SRHR is affordable, cost-saving, and integral for UHC. These commitments were the result of the advocacy and hard work of civil society organizations, including members of the Alliance for Gender Equality and UHC, and set out a clear path on the steps needed to make gender-responsive UHC a reality.

However, following the 2019 HLM, the deadly and devastating COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed how individuals around the globe could access essential health services. Fundamental human rights, including hard-won gains made for UHC, SRHR, and gender equality, are now at risk as health and social services are strained and political attention is diverted. The protracted pandemic underscores how gender-responsive UHC is more important than ever.

We call on Member States to renew the commitments made in 2019 and affirm that delivering on the promise of health for all is only possible by way of gender-responsive UHC.

To truly deliver gender-responsive UHC, we offer the following five recommendations:

1. Design policies and programs with an intersectional lens that places SRHR and girls and women — in all their diversity — at the center of UHC design and implementation. To be effective, UHC must recognize and respond to the needs of women in all their intersecting identities, including by explicitly addressing the ways in which race, ethnicity, age, ability, migrant status, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, and caste multiply risk and impact health outcomes. What’s more, COVID-19 has deepened inequalities for marginalized populations, and special attention is needed, now more than ever, to deliver UHC for those pushed furthest behind.

2. Ensure UHC includes comprehensive SRH services, and provide access to SRH services for all individuals throughout the life course. These services must be free of stigma, discrimination, coercion, and violence, and they must be integrated, high quality, affordable, accessible, and acceptable. The World Health Organization (WHO) provides guidance in the UHC Compendium of interventions and supporting documents for what this can look like. The pandemic has given way to multiple interruptions to SRHR care. For example, an estimated 12 million women may have been unable to access family planning services due to the pandemic. COVID-19 response and recovery and UHC implementation must address these issues.

3. Prioritize, collect, and utilize disaggregated data, especially gender-disaggregated data. UHC policy and planning can only be gender-responsive when informed by data that are disaggregated by gender and other social characteristics. In the current pandemic, not all countries are reporting disaggregated data on infections and mortality from COVID-19 to the WHO, and most countries have not implemented a gendered policy response. In June 2021, only 50% of 199 countries reported data disaggregated by sex on COVID-19 infections and/or deaths in the previous month.1 The number of countries reporting sex-disaggregated statistics has also decreased over the course of the pandemic. Without this information, decision-makers are unable to base policies on evidence affirming how to address the health needs of all genders — a critical lesson for UHC.

4. Foster gender equality in the health and care workforce and catalyze women’s leadership. The approach to the health and care workforce in the pandemic has frequently not applied a gender lens, ignoring the fact that women are 70% of the global health workforce and powerful drivers of health services. Gender inequities in the health workforce were present long before the pandemic, with the majority of female health workers in lower-status, low-paid roles and sectors, often in insecure conditions and facing harassment on a regular basis. Moreover, although women have played a critical role in the pandemic response — from vaccine design to health service delivery — they have been marginalized in leadership on pandemic decision-making from parliamentary to community levels. In fact, 85% of national COVID-19 task forces have majority male membership. Urgent investment in safe, decent, and equal work for women health workers, as well as equal footing for women in leadership and decision-making roles, must be central to the delivery of UHC.

5. Back commitments to advancing SRHR, gender equality, and civil society engagement in UHC design and implementation with necessary funding and accountability. Now is the time to invest in health and the care economy, particularly in UHC. Governments everywhere are facing fiscal constraints from the pandemic. UHC is a critical part of investing in and building back resilient health and social systems to avoid catastrophic spending on future pandemics and global health emergencies. UHC must be designed intentionally, with appropriate accountability mechanisms, to reduce inequalities between and within countries — and especially gender inequality, which undermines social and economic rights and resilience.

We, along with our civil society partners in the Alliance for Gender Equality and UHC, stand ready to work hand-in-hand with governments, the UN, and all stakeholders to act on these recommendations on the road to the 2023 HLM on UHC. At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no time to waste in making the promise of health for all a reality, and this can only be achieved through gender-responsive UHC that centers gender equality and SRHR.

The authors are Ann Keeling of Women in Global Health, Divya Mathew of Women Deliver, Deepa Venkatachalam of Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, and Chantal Umuhoza of Spectra Rwanda. These four organizations are the co-conveners of the Alliance for Gender Equality and Universal Health Coverage.

1 Global Health 50/50 (globalhealth5050.org)

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The UN Food Systems Summit and Some Issues of Concern

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Climate Change, Combating Desertification and Drought, Conferences, Economy & Trade, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition, Food Sustainability, Global, Headlines, Health, Humanitarian Emergencies, Labour, TerraViva United Nations

Opinion

Oxen have been used to plough in agriculture for at least 3,000 years. They are still used today. Painting from the burial chamber of Sennudjem c, 1200 BC, Egypt. Credit: Trevor Page

LETHBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 21 2021 (IPS) – Why is the UN holding a Food Systems Summit? Two issues that need discussion at the international leadership level are: Long before the Covid crisis was upon us, the number of hungry people in the world was increasing. Why ? What is the cause of this disturbing trend? And, can a country really claim to be food secure, unless it produces or can buy enough food to feed its population and its people can access sufficient quantities to keep themselves fit and healthy? Disquietening questions as extreme weather begins to show the destructive power that climate change will have on the planet and its people.

A whole range of food system issues will be discussed at the summit, among them: production, processing, supply chain, consumption, nutrition, malnutrition, food aid and waste.

Food Production

Food, or the nutrients it contains, is fuel for the body. Agriculture and the production of food in an organized way is one of the earliest human endeavors. It started in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, some 10,000 BCE. While mechanization dominates the way food is produced today in the major food producing countries, animal traction is still important in many parts of the world.

Million dollar combines handle reaping, threshing, gathering and winnowing in a single operation on North American and European cereal fields today. GPS programmed, they are set to become driverless within a decade. Fruit and vegetables grown in vertical farms in cities using aquaponics are already springing up around the world. Aquaculture too can be moved to vertical farms, making fish much cheaper for urban dwellers. Vertical farms will greatly reduce labour costs and transportation requirements. Mechanization hugely reduces the number of people engaged in farming and consequently, the cost. Robotics and digital agriculture are already with us in some parts of the world. But where most people live in the world, traditional manual methods and animal traction are set to continue until the high investment needed for cutting-edge technology becomes doable.

Combines harvesting barley for the 2021 annual Canadian Food Grains Bank (CFGB) food drive, Alberta, Canada. The grain is auctioned and the proceeds matched 4:1 by the Canadian government and used by CFGB to promote agriculture in developing countries. Credit: Trevor Page

Wrestling with nature

Despite the advances in technology, drought can badly affect a crop. Cereal crops in western Canada and the United States have been seriously affected by drought this year. Climate change presents the greatest challenge yet to agriculture, and to the human species, generally.

Agriculture is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses contributing to climate change. According to FAO, the rearing of livestock accounts for the highest proportion because of the methane produced from enteric fermentation as well as manure left on pastures. Also according to FAO, 44% of GHGs are emitted from Asia, 25% from the Americas, 15% from Africa, 12% from Europe and 4% from Oceania.

Is organic agriculture the answer to healthier food and also the way to go because it’s kinder to the planet? Studies have found that there are higher antioxidant levels in organically grown plant-based foods. There is also evidence that organic food has lower toxic, heavy metal levels and less pesticide residue, for instance organic eggs, meat and dairy products. Organic farms use less energy and have lower GHG emissions. They also reduce the pollution caused by the widespread use of nitrogen fertilizer on industrial farms, with the runoff causing the eutrophication of water bodies. Organic agriculture is based on nourishing the soil with composts, manure and regular rotations, keeping it covered with different crops throughout the year. That sequesters carbon, building healthier soil.

The problem is that organically grown food is more expensive that industrially produced food. On average, it retails around 25% more than food sold in supermarkets. Also, most organic farmers need to supplement their income from an additional occupation in order to make ends meet. So, despite the benefits to human health and to the planet, does organic farming have a future? The answer is a resounding “yes!”, both from producers and consumers. Although globally, only 1.5% of farmland is organic, in 16 countries 10% or more of all agricultural land is organic, and the proportions are growing. The countries with the largest organic share of their total farmland are Liechtenstein at 38.5 %, Samoa at 34.5% and Austria 24.7%, according to IFOAM Organics International. Today, organic food is more of a lifestyle choice, both by the producer and the consumer. But if its growth is an indicator of concern for our health and for that of the planet, and more and more people are willing and able to pay the extra cost involved, then organics can be seen as an indicator of wellbeing and a reduction of inequality, which is a major cause of conflict in the world today.

Healthy root formation on Mozart red potatoes on The Perry Farm in Taber, Canada. Regenerative agriculture is practiced on this farm. Credit: Trevor Page

Although humankind has grown up largely on a diet of just three cereals: wheat, corn and rice, potatoes are actually more nutritious. Furthermore, potatoes can be grown on marginal land and they require only one-third of the water needed to grow the world’s three main cereals. Five years ago, China moved to double its potato production and to add them to the diet of its growing population. Should Africa be following suit?

Conclusion

The Food Systems Summit kicks off in New York on September 23 during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week. World leaders will come together to find common ground and form alliances that accelerate our way to realizing the SDGs in this remaining decade of action before 2030 is upon us. Will we succeed in making Zero hunger a reality? If we are serious about this goal, the answer includes rethinking and redesigning our food systems to make them more sustainable.

Trevor Page, resident in Lethbridge, Canada, is a former Emergencies Director of the World Food Programme. He also served with the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, FAO, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR and what is now the UN Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs.

 

From Climate Change to Covid, Are We Ready to Deal with Disasters?

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Opinion

Credit: Bibbi Abruzzini

PARIS, Jun 10 2021 (IPS) – In the last 20 years, disasters affected over 4 billion people. At global level we witness on average one sweeping disaster a day, the majority of which are floods and storms. From the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, calamities are taking new shapes and sizes, infiltrating every dimension of society. From the emotional to the political, how do we deal with disasters? How can we create a whole-of-society approach to disaster risk reduction?

Right through this vortex of intersecting crises, a new toolkit and interactive website by Forus, the Global Network of Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR), Save the Children Switzerland and Inventing Futures, with the support of Fondation de France, looks at how civil society organisations coordinate disaster risk reduction and post-emergency interventions. Meant for civil society networks, activists, government officials and community-based organizations, the toolkit provides best-practices from around the globe.

“Today, we are all actors and victims of crises. How can we better understand and learn to cope with them? These practical tools allow us to discover the stakes, the exemplary actions and their effects, through simple definitions and concrete testimonies experienced by civil society,” says Karine Meaux, Emergency manager at Fondation de France.

“Building resilient communities in the face of natural and man-made hazards has never been more important. While disasters don’t discriminate, policies do. Together we can act and put pressure on decision-makers to promote a holistic approach to disaster prevention and reduction and truly people-centred policies,” says Sarah Strack, Director of Forus.

Civil society at the forefront of disaster management

From resilient communities in Nepal, to conflicts in Mali and peace processes in Colombia, the toolkit presents six approaches to disaster risk reduction gleaned from case studies compiled across the civil society ecosystem. The toolkit looks at various topics from capacity building, to local knowledge, resource mobilisation, partnerships with governments and long-term sustainable development and livelihood resilience, ensuring that communities ‘bounce forward’ after a disaster.

Credit: Bibbi Abruzzini

Specifically, the toolkit aims to clarify the crucial role frontline civil society organisations play in reducing the impacts of disasters in the midst of an expanding and intensifying global risk landscape. Bridging governments, communities and experts is the only way we can tackle the multiple ways disasters affect local and social processes such as education, migration, food security and peace. If civil society is not free to operate – or even exist – our collective capacity to deal with disasters and create long-term resilience is hampered.

“You have countries [in the region] in which civil society is not even allowed to exist. This reality changed a lot after the Arab Spring, with countries living in a terrible crisis, with military conflicts, where the role of civil society now is not only to struggle for their existence, but also to provide the population with basic needs and humanitarian interventions,” says Ziad Abdel Samad, Director of the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND).

Everyday disasters and inequalities

Robert Ninyesiga, from UNNGOF, the national civil society organisation platform in Uganda, argues that in most cases, “more effort has been put towards disaster response while neglecting the disaster prevention aspect”.

This therefore calls for continuous intentional awareness and capacity building as regards to disaster prevention and this can only be effectively achieved if sustainable partnerships between central governments, local governments, civil society organisations, media and citizens are strengthened.

Shock events, high-impact disasters, such as conflicts, earthquakes or tsunamis are just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath this layer there are an increasingly high number of “everyday disasters” affecting people around the globe. Localised, small scale, and slow onset disasters are often “invisible” – far from the spotlight. Those at low incomes are the most vulnerable and find themselves at the periphery of infrastructures, response systems and media attention.

For instance, in addition to being often exposed to intensive disasters such as floods and storms, residents in urban slums across Bangladesh are suffering much more than other communities since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Credit: Bibbi Abruzzini

“Most slum dwellers are daily wage earners, but they are not able to earn money. They are not able to maintain social distance, because in one room 4-5 members are living. Many people are using a shared bathroom. It’s very difficult to maintain hygiene. There is not enough space to sit or sleep at home while maintaining sufficient distance. Due to lack of money, many slum dwellers have only one or two meals a day. Violence and sexual harassment are increasing in the community due to cramped conditions. Children are not attending school,” explains the Participatory Development Action Programme (PDAP) which works in the slums of Dhaka .

These pressures add to regular “everyday” challenges of air pollution and garbage management, flooding, water-logged land, and poor quality water.

Local knowledge and Resilient Future

Civil society organisations often fill a tremendous gap and find themselves at the forefront of prevention and emergency efforts. The localisation of responses and partnerships are absolutely crucial to understand the needs of communities in pre and post-disaster scenarios.

In Honduras, civil society has created community-led interventions, to prioritise local plans of action across the country.

“Honduras, and Central America more in general, have been hit in the last 10 years by an intensification of disasters, most of them linked to climate change. Our role in helping communities to adapt to climate change and to deal with disasters, is in terms of capacity building, humanitarian assistance and advocacy by creating links between local, national, regional and global levels,” says Jose Ramon Avila from ASONOG, the national platform of civil society organisations in Honduras.

The intense and cascading nature of risks, such as seen in the cases of Covid-19 and climate change, represent a serious threat to the achievement of a sustainable and resilient future. Growing experience over the last three decades has revealed that disasters and development are closely linked. Ignoring the impact of disasters makes it more difficult to pursue sustainable development.

“Sustainable development can only be achieved when local risk is fully understood. Critical to understanding and assessing the complex threats and risks, challenges and opportunities faced by communities most at risk, is the need to partner with those people. This practical toolkit provides valuable insights and examples from GNDR members and others on how this can be achieved,” says Bijay Kumar, Executive Director, Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR)

It has also been found that much of the negative impact on sustainable livelihoods comes not from large, ‘intensive’ disasters, but from many smaller, ‘everyday’ disasters. It has become crucial to address intensive and everyday disasters and to integrate our responses with overall work to pursue sustainable development.

We need to ask ourselves this question: can we build new bridges of solidarity between civil society, communities and governments? Can we prevent and anticipate disasters? Our future is not disaster-free; to build resilient communities it is crucial to nurture strong roots for our society to flourish.

The author Bibbi Abruzzini is Communications officer at Forus.
Find the toolkit and microsite on Disaster Risk Reduction here. Available in English, French and Spanish.

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Time to End Generational Injustice with a ‘Global Blue New Deal’ to Protect Oceans

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Active Citizens, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Economy & Trade, Education, Environment, Global, Green Economy, Headlines, Labour, Poverty & SDGs, TerraViva United Nations, Water & Sanitation

Opinion

Credit: Australian Institute of Marine Science

PARIS, Jun 8 2021 (IPS) – Increasingly, youth are rising up to declare that they’ve had enough of the cyclical exploitation of the environment that jeopardizes their own future.

Youth activism through the Global Climate Strikes and Fridays For Future protests have helped spur revolutionary policy frameworks, like the Green New Deal championed by U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

International organizations and sovereign governments have now interpreted the Green New Deal into frameworks and policies of their own; it’s clear that environmental policy led by youth has energized the discussion on global decarbonization and the social impacts of climate change.

However, the Green New Deal only mentioned the ocean once. We need to insert more Blue into the green transition.

Earth’s vast oceans are humanity’s single most important climate regulation tool. As governments coalesce around plans to quite literally save our species, we must recognize that there is no future without understanding the role the ocean has to play.

Beyond human life support, the ocean economy contributes to ecosystem services, jobs, and cultural services valued at USD 3-6 trillion, with fisheries and aquaculture alone contributing USD 100 billion per year and 250+ million jobs.

Our ocean, however, is overfished, polluted with plastic, and exploited for non-renewable resources like minerals and fossil fuels. This perpetuates a cycle of generational injustice and leaves youth to inherit an increasingly degraded environment with less and less time to restore it. Not only is this detrimental to progress at large, but our most vulnerable global communities, who contribute the least to global emissions, will feel the effects of our degraded environment the most severely.

Youth not only need to be proactive advocates for the SDGs, we need to hold the global community accountable to commitments they have made between nations and to youth as the greatest stakeholders in the future health of our environment.

Creating the “Global Blue New Deal”

In 2019, the Sustainable Ocean Alliance distributed surveys across its network to identify the key youth policy priorities for a healthy ocean and just future. We received 100+ responses from 38 countries in 5 languages.

Over the past year, SOA’s Youth Policy Advisory Council synthesized these into a youth-led, crowdsourced ocean policy framework: the Global Blue New Deal.

The first public draft of our Global Blue New Deal is being launched now, at the dawn of the UN’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which aims to gather global ocean stakeholders behind a common framework to deliver “the ocean we need for the future we want.”

Youth want to contribute to the success of the Ocean Decade and call on the international community to recognize our policy suggestions as part of the solutions our planet needs.

The vision of the Global Blue New Deal is to “outline an ocean policy framework that integrates crowdsourced youth priorities that will be proposed to governments on international, national, and local scales for implementation.”

It is organized under four pillars, each containing specific ocean policy solutions.

In brief:

Pillar 1
Carbon Neutrality: Transition to a Zero Carbon Future

    1. End offshore drilling and invest in renewable ocean energy
    2. Decarbonize the shipping industry
    3. Reduce land-based marine pollution
    4. Transition to a circular economy
    5. Strengthen legislation and enforcement against ocean contamination

Pillar 2
Preserve Biodiversity: Apply Nature-based Solutions to Promote Healthy Ecosystems and Climate Resilience

    1. Support the global movement to protect 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030
    2. Enforce against non-compliance in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)
    3. Establish a global moratorium against deep-sea mining
    4. Transition from “gray” manmade infrastructure like culverts and seawalls to nature-based blue carbon infrastructure including the restoration of wetlands, mangroves and marshes

Pillar 3:
Sustainable Seafood: Match Increasing Global Demand Sustainably

    1. Encourage sustainable governance of capture fisheries
    2. Enforce against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing
    3. Eliminate capacity-enhancing fisheries subsidies
    4. Provide a sustainable path for aquaculture
    5. Fund research and development of plant-based and cell-cultured seafood

Pillar 4:
Stakeholder Engagement: Include Local Communities in Natural Ocean Resource Management

    1. Ensure the sustainability of coastal ecotourism
    2. Promote ocean research and innovation, with a goal of mapping 100% of the global seafloor by 2030.
    3. Emphasize ocean literacy and capacity building
    4. Build stakeholder participation in ocean governance

We invite like-minded youths, scientists, policymakers, and other ocean stakeholders to visit https://www.soalliance.org/soablog/youth-led-blue-new-deal and help as we finalize the Global Blue New Deal ocean policy framework during our public comment period throughout July.

Each generation has inherited an increasingly degraded ocean environment with the poorest, most vulnerable communities feeling the impacts the most severely. This is our opportunity to rewrite the long history of compromising our ocean.

Mark Haver and Marina Porto are Chair and Co-Chair respectively of the Youth Policy Advisory Council of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, the world’s largest youth-led network of ocean allies.

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