Inter Press Service | News and Views from the Global South

Inter Press Service | News and Views from the Global South

Triple Emergencies of COVID-19, Flooding & Locusts Makes Somalia Susceptible to Human Trafficking Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar While simultaneously suffering from the coronavirus pandemic, flooding and a locust crisis, Somalia, could well see a rise in the number of people who are susceptible to human trafficking. According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the rainy season in ... MORE > >

Memo from a Multi-Millionaire: Covid-19 Proves Business Case for Taxing the Rich Djaffar Shalchi For the past few decades, many big corporations and very wealthy individuals have operated according to the myth that they are “self-made”, that their success owed nothing to anyone else. From that narrative has come the notion that they are entitled and able to cut themselves off from others, ... MORE > >

How a Post-COVID-19 Revival Could Kickstart Africa's Free Trade Area The African Continental Free Trade Area was launched two years ago at an African Union (AU) summit in Kigali. It was scheduled to be implemented from 1 July 2020. But this has been pushed out until 2021 because of the impact of COVID-19 and the need for leaders to focus on saving lives. Studies ... MORE > >

Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe's Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly Tonderayi Mukeredzi Shurugwi communal farmer, Elizabeth Siyapi (57) can no longer be scammed by unscrupulous middlemen to sell her crops cheaply. Nowadays, before she takes her produce to market she scours her mobile phone, which has become an essential digital agriculture data bank, for the best prices on the ... MORE > >

SDG Setback 'Tremendous' as COVID-19 Accelerates Slide Gareth Willmer and Fiona Broom Crucial global goals to reduce hunger and poverty and curb climate change have gone backwards or stalled, the United Nations Secretary-General warns in a new report, as the COVID-19 outbreak moves from being a health crisis to becoming the “worst human and economic crisis of our lifetimes”. The ... MORE > >

Ensuring Biodiversity Now will Prevent Pandemics Later Samira Sadeque A future repetition of the current COVID-19 pandemic is preventable with massive cooperation on international and local levels and by ensuring biological diversity preservation around the world, experts recently said. How to prevent the current crisis in the future According to the World ... MORE > >

Innovation Is an Imperative - for Sustainable Food Systems Zoltán Kálmán Hunger and food insecurity continue to rise. The official 2019 statistics refer to 821 million people suffering from hunger all over the world. According the recently launched Global Report on Food Crises, there are further 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. WFP estimates ... MORE > >

Politics, Profits Undermine Public Interest in Covid-19 Vaccine Race Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram With well over five million Covid-19 infections worldwide, and deaths exceeding 340,000, the race for an effective vaccine has accelerated since the SARS-Cov-2 virus was first identified as the culprit. Expecting to score politically from being ‘first’ to have a vaccine, US President Trump’s ... MORE > >

Kenya's Adolescent Women Left Behind As More Married Women Access Contraception Miriam Gathigah It was only when 17-year-old Eva Muigai was in her final trimester that her family discovered she was pregnant. Muigai, a form three student who lives with her family in Gachie, Central Kenya, had spent her pregnancy wearing tight bodysuits and loose-fitting clothes that hid her growing baby ... MORE > >

Education Post-COVID-19: Customised Blended Learning is Urgently Needed Many well meaning education benefactors and commentators in South Africa have expressed that in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic online self-guided learning could solve some of the current teaching problems and address the educational backlog. What learners need, the reasoning goes, is to get ... MORE > >

Are the SDGs in Reverse Gear? Saida Ali When I was a little girl, my mother told us the story of a woman who escaped from a monster by cooking stones: when the monster fell asleep waiting for his dinner, the woman ran for her life. I thought of this tale when I read last month about Peninah Bahati Kitsao, a Kenyan widow who boiled ... MORE > >

Crisis Hits Oil Industry and Energy Transition Alike Emilio Godoy While it attempts to cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Latin American and Caribbean region also faces concerns about the future of the energy transition and state-owned oil companies. These questions were discussed at the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised by the ... MORE > >

Unite Behind Environmental Science: Transforming Values and Behaviour is as Important as Restoring Global Ecosystems Ana María Hernández Salgar Restoring damaged ecosystems is vital to avoid the collapse of nature’s most valuable contributions to people, but International Day for Biological Diversity 2020 should also be a wake-up call about the importance of addressing our social, economic and systemic values, because it is these that are ... MORE > >

Biological Diversity is Fundamental to Human Health Samira Sadeque This year’s International Day of Biological Diversity falls amid the coronavirus pandemic and the slow easing, in some nations, of a global lockdown. While the lockdown has forced most people to stay at home, there have been reports of more wildlife being spotted - even in once-busy city ... MORE > >

COVID-19: Global Supply Chain Resilience Relies on Soap & Water for Workers Ruth Romer As COVID-19 lockdown restrictions across the globe start to be relaxed, the collective conversation has shifted towards plans for a ‘new normal.’ With the IMF predicting a three percent dive to global GDP in 2020, the biggest economic downturn in almost a century, global corporations are ... MORE > >

Cyclone Amphan - ‘We Didn’t Expect Devastation of Such a Scale’ Stella Paul Amid the social distancing measures posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, coastal communities in Bangladesh and India face a double threat as the record-breaking Cyclone Amphan made landfall yesterday (May 20). With sustained wind speeds of 270km/h, intensified by record water temperatures in May, the ... MORE > >

Food Markets in the Caribbean Take Stock of Vulnerability during COVID-19 Jewel Fraser The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the spectre of food insecurity as countries and citizens fear a return to the conditions that roiled the international food markets during the 2008 economic crisis. Though food markets have withstood the shock caused by COVID-19, the Caribbean is being forced to ... MORE > >