Category Archives: Global development

‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US

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Haitian deportees arriving from Texas say they were ‘rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals’

When Evens Delva waded across the Rio Grande with his wife and two daughters, he had dreams of starting a new life in Florida. But less than a week later, he and his family stepped on to the tarmac in Port-au-Prince, the sweltering and chaotic capital of Haiti, with nothing except traumatic memories and a feeling of bubbling anger.

Delva, along with nearly 2,000 other Haitians, was deported from southern Texas this week to Haiti, despite having lived in Chile for the past six years and having few remaining connections to his home country. His younger daughter, who is four, does not hold Haitian citizenship, having been born in Chile, and speaks more Spanish than Haitian Creole.

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Cop26: Women must be heard on climate, say rights groups

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Those worst hit by global heating are left out of talks, says feminist coalition calling for systemic change

Women must be enabled to play a greater role at the Cop26 summit, as the needs of women and girls are being overlooked amid the global climate crisis, a coalition of feminist groups has said.

The Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice has laid out a call for action at the UN general assembly, including demands that world leaders meeting at Cop26, in Glasgow this November, must end fossil fuel expansion and move to 100% renewable energy.

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Philippines’ youth call for systemic change at climate protest

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Protesters parading an effigy of Rodrigo Duterte in Manila call for policies that prioritise people and planet

A monstrous effigy of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was paraded through the country’s capital Manila on Friday as protesters joined a worldwide youth climate action.

About a hundred young people wearing masks gathered in one of several socially distanced demonstrations around the country in support of the global climate strike by the international Fridays for Future movement.

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‘A poem is a powerful tool’: Somali women raise their voices in the nation of poets

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A childhood encounter with a hyena inspired Hawa Jama Abdi’s first verse. Now she is part of an arts project designed to encourage women storytellers - and unite all Somalis

When Hawa Jama Abdi was eight years old, she got lost in a forest and found herself in the path of a hyena. In her place, many would have run, some would have frozen – but Jama Abdi, the blind daughter of Somali pastoralists, kept her cool, and composed her first poem. The verse ran:

I lived in fear of you, day and night
It is a miracle world if I am standing in front of you, tonight
Since I am blind and cannot see anything
Come to my rescue and let your voice be my company

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Salt-tolerant crops ‘revolutionise’ life for struggling Bangladeshi farmers

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As sea levels rise, growers are employing innovative methods to adapt to saline soils

Like millions of people across Bangladesh, Anita Bala, 45, relies on a small plot of land to feed her family.

But for years nothing would grow. Her husband farmed shrimp in the salty ponds on their land, but the surrounding ground was barren. Bala’s efforts to cultivate beans and pulses failed repeatedly. Eventually she gave up.

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16 million in Yemen ‘marching towards starvation’ as food rations run low – UN

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Aid worker describes ‘horrific’ scenes in one hospital where starving and malnourished children ‘look like skeletons’

At least 5 million people in Yemen are on the brink of famine and a further 16 million are “marching toward starvation”, as the country’s humanitarian crisis spirals out of control.

The situation in Yemen, which has been torn apart by civil war, has been described as “rapidly deteriorating” by experts.

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Small farmers have the answer to feeding the world. Why isn’t the UN listening? | Elizabeth Mpofu and Henk Hobbelink

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We’re among the thousands boycotting the UN food summit – it’s been hijacked by corporate interests while the voices of small-scale farmers go unheard

Thursday’s UN food summit proposes to help solve the world’s nutrition crisis, with 800 million people going hungry and 1.9 billion labelled obese, by better aligning food systems with development goals. But it won’t achieve any of this. The summit was hijacked early on by powerful corporate interests – but people are resisting.

Hundreds of social movements and civil society groups across the world representing small-scale and subsistence food producers, consumers and environmentalists are protesting about the summit for being undemocratic, non-transparent and focused only on strengthening only one food system: that backed by the big corporations. Civil society bodies active at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for instance, are running a massive grassroots boycott of the summit, and there is a website and several actions dedicated to it. Grain, a small nonprofit group campaigning for biodiversity-based food systems, shut down its website and social media in protest on Thursday and many other organisations are holding their own protests around the world. An online alternative forum in July, running in parallel with the pre-summit meeting in Rome, attracted about 9,000 participants. This week, even more are expected.

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More than 100 countries face spending cuts as Covid worsens debt crisis, report warns

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As pandemic widens inequalities, many developing countries spend more on debt than health, study says

More than 100 countries face cuts to public spending on health, education and social protection as the Covid-19 pandemic compounds already high levels of debt, a new report says.

The International Monetary Fund believes that 35 to 40 countries are “debt distressed” – defined as when a country is experiencing difficulties in servicing its debt, such as when there are arrears or debt restructuring.

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UN food summit will be ‘elitist’ and ‘pro-corporate’, says special rapporteur

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Michael Fakhri says Thursday’s meeting will not be promised ‘people’s summit’ on tackling world’s nutrition crisis

The UN global food summit is “elitist and regressive” and has failed in its goal of being a “people’s summit”, according to the special rapporteur on food rights.

As world leaders prepare to attend the virtual event on Thursday, which aims to examine ways to transform global food systems to be more sustainable, Michael Fakhri said it risked leaving behind the very people critical for its success. In an interview with the Guardian, Fakhri said neither the worsening impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the right to food, nor fundamental questions of inequality, accountability and governance were being properly addressed by the meeting.

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Big pharma fuelling human rights crisis over Covid vaccine inequity – Amnesty

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Six companies warned not to put profit before lives as report shows less than 1% of almost 6bn doses have gone to low-income countries

Amnesty International has accused six pharmaceutical companies that have developed Covid-19 vaccines of fuelling a global human rights crisis, citing their refusal to sufficiently waive intellectual property rights, share vaccine technology and boost global vaccine supply.

After assessing the performance of six Covid-19 vaccine developers – Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Novavax – Amnesty International claims that all are failing to uphold their own human rights commitments and warns they should not be putting profit before the lives of people in the world’s poorest countries.

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Zahra Joya: the Afghan reporter who fled the Taliban – and kept telling the truth about women

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As a child in Afghanistan, she pretended to be a boy in order to get an education, before starting her own women’s news agency. Now living in Britain, her fight continues

Just over a month ago, Zahra Joya left her house in Kabul to walk to her office, as she had been doing every day. From this small office, Joya, a journalist, ran Rukhshana Media, the news agency she founded last year to report on the stories of women and girls across Afghanistan. By the time she returned home in the afternoon, however, men with guns were on street corners and her sisters were shut inside their house, shaking with fear. In just a few hours, normal life had been obliterated.

“Right to the end, on that afternoon of 15 August, I couldn’t believe what was happening,” she says. “It was like a bad dream. Even on that day, it just seemed impossible that the Taliban could come to power so quickly, wipe away 20 years and drag us all back to the past.”

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‘Ecofeminism is about respect’: the activist working to revolutionise west African farming

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Mariama Sonko is an unstoppable force who continued her work even when she was ostracised by her community in Senegal

Outside Mariama Sonko’s home in the Casamance region of southern Senegal pink shells hang on improvised nets that will be placed in mangroves to provide a breeding spot for oysters.

Normally, women collecting oysters chop at the branches – a method that can harm the mangroves. But these nets allow them to harvest sustainably, says Sonko, who is trying to revolutionise agriculture in west Africa.

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Most infants in 91 countries are malnourished, warns Unicef

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Climate crisis, conflict and Covid stunting progress on nutrition, UN says on eve of food security summit

Only a third of children under two in many developing countries are fed what they need for healthy growth and no progress has been made on improving their nutrition over the past decade.

Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, said in a report published on Wednesday that a combination of crises from Covid-19 to conflict and the climate breakdown had stunted progress on children’s nutrition in 91 countries.

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Argentina to lift almost all Covid restrictions as cases and deaths fall

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Masks will no longer be required outdoors as government says country could be at ‘end of pandemic’

Masks will no longer be required outdoors in Argentina as the country’s government announced the lifting of almost all Covid restrictions following a dramatic fall in Covid cases and deaths in recent months.

“If the numbers of coronavirus infections continue like this, we could say we are experiencing the end of the pandemic,” said presidential cabinet chief Juan Manzur amid a flurry of measures including the return of football matches with stadiums at 50% capacity starting next month – just in time for the 3 October classic super-match between Argentina’s two longtime rivals Boca and River Plate teams.

“Today for us the Covid pandemic ends to a large extent,” government Covid adviser Luis Camera said in a radio interview. “The pandemic ends but the virus continues,” he said.

The announcements were met with cautious optimism by doctors on the frontline. “We’re at a very good place: at the hospital where I work we have not admitted a single Covid patient to intensive care for three weeks now – but I would not dare say the pandemic is over,” said intensive care doctor Arnaldo Dubin, a researcher and professor at La Plata University.

Related: ‘People die in less than a week’: Covid wave catches Argentina off-guard

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‘The challenge for us now is drought, not war’: livelihoods of millions of Afghans at risk

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After years caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and security forces, farmers in Kandahar face a new threat, as water sources dry up

The war in Afghanistan might be over but farmers in Kandahar’s Arghandab valley face a new enemy: drought.

It has hardly rained for two years, a drought so severe that some farmers are questioning how much longer they can live off the land.

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Religious rehab centres fill gap as Nigeria grapples with soaring drug use

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With poverty deepening, state services are failing to cope with rising rates of addiction

Kola* was in secondary school in Nigeria when he started smoking cigarettes. He soon graduated to cannabis, heroin and eventually to crack cocaine. Access to drugs was easy and he felt the pressure of friends to participate.

In 2002, when he was 39, he was introduced to a private drug rehabilitation centre in Ibadan, in the south-west of the country, where he spent 90 days weaning himself off his addiction.

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Top Thai union leader ‘targeted’ with jail for rail safety campaign

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Case is ‘major blow’ in country with weak workers’ rights and puts trade deals in question, says Human Rights Watch

One of Thailand’s most prominent union leaders is facing three years in prison for his role in organising a railway safety campaign, in a case described as the biggest attack on organised labour in the country in decades.

Rights advocates say the case involving Sawit Kaewvarn, president of the State Railway Union of Thailand, will have a chilling effect on unions and threatens to further weaken workers’ rights in the country.

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Ten women and girls killed every day in Mexico, Amnesty report says

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Families often left to do their investigations into killings amid widespread indifference by authorities, report claims

At least 10 women and girls are murdered every day in Mexico, according to a new report that says victims’ families are often left to carry out their own homicide investigations.

The scathing report, released on Monday by Amnesty International, documents both the scale of the violence and the disturbing lack of interest on the part of Mexican authorities to prevent or solve the murders.

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‘The Taliban will have no mercy’: LGBTQ+ Afghans go into hiding

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Gay and trans people in Afghanistan already faced stigma, but now even a call from an unknown number sparks fear

Laila, a transgender woman in Afghanistan, rubs her eyes to wipe tears away. “I am terrified. It’s like a nightmare. I don’t feel safe even in my room. I’m scared of the Taliban. When I see them I feel they will know who I am and they will come to beat me, kick me or send me to prison.”

After the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Laila is far from an isolated case. Rehmat, a gay man, said: “Our lives are in danger. We are afraid of having mobile phones. I get afraid when I receive calls from unknown numbers, worried that it might be the Taliban.”

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‘It’s heartbreaking’: Steve McCurry on Afghan Girl, a portrait of past and present

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The US photographer’s image of Sharbat Gula captured the story of a country, its people and refugees across the world. Thirty six years on, another picture tells a similar tale – but also one of hope

On 1 September, a young Afghan girl stood in line with her family at a US base in Sicily waiting to board a flight to Philadelphia. She is about nine years old and is one of more than 100,000 people evacuated from Kabul by allied forces after the Taliban took control of the country in August.

Her photo, taken for the Guardian by Italian photojournalist Alessio Mamo and featured on the front page of the UK print edition, resembles the Afghan Girl by American photographer Steve McCurry. McCurry’s portrait, of a Pashtun child, Sharbat Gula, which appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic, became the symbol, not only of Afghanistan, but of displaced refugees across the world.

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