region:southern africa

  • The United Nations backs seed sovereignty in landmark small-scale farmers’ rights declaration

    On Dec. 17, the United Nations General Assembly took a quiet but historic vote, approving the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas by a vote of 121-8 with 52 abstentions. The declaration, the product of some 17 years of diplomatic work led by the international peasant alliance La Via Campesina, formally extends human rights protections to farmers whose “seed sovereignty” is threatened by government and corporate practices.

    “As peasants we need the protection and respect for our values and for our role in society in achieving food sovereignty,” said #Via_Campesina coordinator Elizabeth Mpofu after the vote. Most developing countries voted in favor of the resolution, while many developed country representatives abstained. The only “no” votes came from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, Israel and Sweden.

    “To have an internationally recognized instrument at the highest level of governance that was written by and for peasants from every continent is a tremendous achievement,” said Jessie MacInnis of Canada’s National Farmers Union. The challenge, of course, is to mobilize small-scale farmers to claim those rights, which are threatened by efforts to impose rich-country crop breeding regulations onto less developed countries, where the vast majority of food is grown by peasant farmers using seeds they save and exchange.
    Seed sovereignty in Zambia

    The loss of seed diversity is a national problem in Zambia. “We found a lot of erosion of local seed varieties,” Juliet Nangamba, program director for the Community Technology Development Trust, told me in her Lusaka office. She is working with the regional Seed Knowledge Initiative (SKI) to identify farmer seed systems and prevent the disappearance of local varieties. “Even crops that were common just 10 years ago are gone.” Most have been displaced by maize, which is heavily subsidized by the government. She’s from Southern Province, and she said their survey found very little presence of finger millet, a nutritious, drought-tolerant grain far better adapted to the region’s growing conditions.

    Farmers are taking action. Mary Tembo welcomed us to her farm near Chongwe in rural Zambia. Trained several years ago by Kasisi Agricultural Training Center in organic agriculture, Tembo is part of the SKI network, which is growing out native crops so seed is available to local farmers. Tembo pulled some chairs into the shade of a mango tree to escape the near-100-degree Fahrenheit heat, an unseasonable reminder of Southern Africa’s changing climate. Rains were late, as they had been several of the last few years. Farmers had prepared their land for planting but were waiting for a rainy season they could believe in.

    Tembo didn’t seem worried. She still had some of her land in government-sponsored hybrid maize and chemical fertilizer, especially when she was lucky enough to get a government subsidy. But most of her land was in diverse native crops, chemical free for 10 years.

    “I see improvements from organic,” she explained, as Kasisi’s Austin Chalala translated for me from the local Nyanja language. “It takes more work, but we are now used to it.” The work involves more careful management of a diverse range of crops planted in ways that conserve and rebuild the soil: crop rotations; intercropping; conservation farming with minimal plowing; and the regular incorporation of crop residues and composted manure to build soil fertility. She has six pigs, seven goats, and 25 chickens, which she says gives her enough manure for the farm.

    She was most proud of her seeds. She disappeared into the darkness of her small home. I was surprised when she emerged with a large fertilizer bag. She untied the top of the bag and began to pull out her stores of homegrown organic seeds. She laughed when I explained my surprise. She laid them out before us, a dazzling array: finger millet; orange maize; Bambara nuts; cowpea; sorghum; soybeans; mung beans; three kinds of groundnuts; popcorn; common beans. All had been saved from her previous harvest. The contribution of chemical fertilizer to these crops was, clearly, just the bag.

    She explained that some would be sold for seed. There is a growing market for these common crops that have all but disappeared with the government’s obsessive promotion of maize. Some she would share with the 50 other farmer members of the local SKI network. And some she and her family happily would consume. Crop diversity is certainly good for the soil, she said, but it’s even better for the body.
    Peasant rights crucial to climate adaptation

    We visited three other Kasisi-trained farmers. All sang the praises of organic production and its diversity of native crops. All said their diets had improved dramatically, and they are much more food-secure than when they planted only maize. Diverse crops are the perfect hedge against a fickle climate. If the maize fails, as it has in recent years, other crops survive to feed farmers’ families, providing a broader range of nutrients. Many traditional crops are more drought-tolerant than maize.

    Another farmer we visited already had planted, optimistically, before the rains arrived. She showed us her fields, dry and with few shoots emerging. With her toe, she cleared some dirt from one furrow to reveal small green leaves, alive in the dry heat. “Millet,” she said proudly. With a range of crops, she said, “the farmer can never go wrong.”

    I found the same determination in Malawi, where the new Farm-Saved Seed Network (FASSNet) is building awareness and working with government on a “Farmers’ Rights” bill to complement a controversial Seed Bill, which deals only with commercial seeds. A parallel process is advancing legislation on the right to food and nutrition. Both efforts should get a shot in the arm with the U.N.’s Peasants’ Rights declaration.

    The declaration gives such farmers a potentially powerful international tool to defend themselves from the onslaught of policies and initiatives, led by multinational seed companies, to replace native seeds with commercial varieties, the kind farmers have to buy every year.

    Kasisi’s Chalala told me that narrative is fierce in Zambia, with government representatives telling farmers such as Tembo that because her seeds are not certified by the government, they should be referred to only as “grain.”

    Eroding protection from GMOs

    As if to illustrate the ongoing threats to farm-saved seed, that same week in Zambia controversy erupted over two actions by the government’s National Biosafety Board to weaken the country’s proud and clear stance against the use of genetically modified crops. The board quietly had granted approval for a supermarket chain to import and sell three products with GMOs, a move promptly criticized by the Zambian National Farmers Union.

    Then it was revealed that the board secretly was drawing up regulations for the future planting of GM crops in the country, again in defiance of the government’s approved policies. The Zambian Alliance for Agroecology and Biodiversity quickly denounced the initiative.

    The U.N. declaration makes such actions a violation of peasants’ rights. Now the task is to put that new tool in farmers’ hands. “As with other rights, the vision and potential of the Peasant Rights Declaration will only be realized if people organize to claim these rights and to implement them in national and local institutions,” argued University of Pittsburgh sociologists Jackie Smith and Caitlin Schroering in Common Dreams. “Human rights don’t ‘trickle down’ — they rise up!”

    https://www.greenbiz.com/article/united-nations-backs-seed-sovereignty-landmark-small-scale-farmers-rights-
    #ONU #semences #déclaration #souveraineté #souveraineté_semencière (?) #agriculture #paysannerie #Zambie #OGM #climat #changement_climatique
    ping @odilon

  • Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps

    If you were paying close attention last week, you might have spotted a pattern in the news. Peeking out from behind the breathless coverage of the Trump family’s tuxedoed trip to London was a spate of deaths of immigrants in U.S. custody: Johana Medina Léon, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker; an unnamed 33-year-old Salvadoran man; and a 40-year-old woman from Honduras.

    Photos from a Border Patrol processing center in El Paso showed people herded so tightly into cells that they had to stand on toilets to breathe. Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

    Also last week, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

    Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

    There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

    The goal of concentration camps has always been to be ignored. The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote a few years afterward about the different levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

    Euphemisms play a big role in that forgetting. The term “concentration camp” is itself a euphemism. It was invented by a Spanish official to paper over his relocation of millions of rural families into squalid garrison towns where they would starve during Cuba’s 1895 independence war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans into prisons during World War II, he initially called them concentration camps. Americans ended up using more benign names, like “Manzanar Relocation Center.”

    Even the Nazis’ camps started out small, housing criminals, Communists and opponents of the regime. It took five years to begin the mass detention of Jews. It took eight, and the outbreak of a world war, for the first extermination camps to open. Even then, the Nazis had to keep lying to distract attention, claiming Jews were merely being resettled to remote work sites. That’s what the famous signs — Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Sets You Free” — were about.

    Subterfuge doesn’t always work. A year ago, Americans accidentally became aware that the Trump administration had adopted (and lied about) a policy of ripping families apart at the border. The flurry of attention was thanks to the viral conflation of two separate but related stories: the family-separation order and bureaucrats’ admission that they’d been unable to locate thousands of migrant children who’d been placed with sponsors after crossing the border alone.

    Trump shoved that easily down the memory hole. He dragged his heels a bit, then agreed to a new policy: throwing whole families into camps together. Political reporters posed irrelevant questions, like whether President Obama had been just as bad, and what it meant for the midterms. Then they moved on.

    It is important to note that Trump’s aides have built this system of racist terror on something that has existed for a long time. Several camps opened under Obama, and as president he deported millions of people.

    But Trump’s game is different. It certainly isn’t about negotiating immigration reform with Congress. Trump has made it clear that he wants to stifle all non-white immigration, period. His mass arrests, iceboxes and dog cages are part of an explicitly nationalist project to put the country under the control of the right kind of white people.

    As a Republican National Committee report noted in 2013: “The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become.” The Trump administration’s attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census was also just revealed to have been a plot to disadvantage political opponents and boost “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” all along.

    That’s why this isn’t just a crisis facing immigrants. When a leader puts people in camps to stay in power, history shows that he doesn’t usually stop with the first group he detains.

    There are now at least 48,000 people detained in ICE facilities, which a former official told BuzzFeed News “could swell indefinitely.” Customs and Border Protection officials apprehended more than 144,000 people on the Southwest border last month. (The New York Times dutifully reported this as evidence of a “dramatic surge in border crossings,” rather than what it was: The administration using its own surge of arrests to justify the rest of its policies.)

    If we call them what they are — a growing system of American concentration camps — we will be more likely to give them the attention they deserve. We need to know their names: Port Isabel, Dilley, Adelanto, Hutto and on and on. With constant, unrelenting attention, it is possible we might alleviate the plight of the people inside, and stop the crisis from getting worse. Maybe people won’t be able to disappear so easily into the iceboxes. Maybe it will be harder for authorities to lie about children’s deaths.

    Maybe Trump’s concentration camps will be the first thing we think of when we see him scowling on TV.

    The only other option is to leave it up to those in power to decide what’s next. That’s a calculated risk. As Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night,” one of the most comprehensive books on the history of concentration camps, recently noted: “Every country has said their camps are humane and will be different. Trump is instinctively an authoritarian. He’ll take them as far as he’s allowed to.”

    https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-katz-immigrant-concentration-camps-20190609-story.html
    #terminologie #vocabulaire #mots #camps #camps_de_concentration #centres_de_détention #détention_administrative #rétention #USA #Etats-Unis
    #cpa_camps

    • ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System

      On Monday, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” spurring a backlash in which critics accused her of demeaning the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. Debates raged over a label for what is happening along the southern border and grew louder as the week rolled on. But even this back-and-forth over naming the camps has been a recurrent feature in the mass detention of civilians ever since its inception, a history that long predates the Holocaust.

      At the heart of such policy is a question: What does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens? The twentieth century posed this question to the world just as the shadow of global conflict threatened for the second time in less than three decades. The dominant response was silence, and the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty meant that what a state did to people under its control, within its borders, was nobody else’s business. After the harrowing toll of the Holocaust with the murder of millions, the world revisited its answer, deciding that perhaps something was owed to those in mortal danger. From the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in 1949 to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international community established humanitarian obligations toward the most vulnerable that apply, at least in theory, to all nations.

      The twenty-first century is unraveling that response. Countries are rejecting existing obligations and meeting asylum seekers with walls and fences, from detainees fleeing persecution who were sent by Australia to third-party detention in the brutal offshore camps of Manus and Nauru to razor-wire barriers blocking Syrian refugees from entering Hungary. While some nations, such as Germany, wrestle with how to integrate refugees into their labor force—more and more have become resistant to letting them in at all. The latest location of this unwinding is along the southern border of the United States.

      So far, American citizens have gotten only glimpses of the conditions in the border camps that have been opened in their name. In the month of May, Customs and Border Protection reported a total of 132,887 migrants who were apprehended or turned themselves in between ports of entry along the southwest border, an increase of 34 percent from April alone. Upon apprehension, these migrants are temporarily detained by Border Patrol, and once their claims are processed, they are either released or handed over to ICE for longer-term detention. Yet Border Patrol itself is currently holding about 15,000 people, nearly four times what government officials consider to be this enforcement arm’s detention capacity.

      On June 12, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Fort Sill, an Army post that hosted a World War II internment camp for detainees of Japanese descent, will now be repurposed to detain migrant children. In total, HHS reports that it is currently holding some 12,000 minors. Current law limits detention of minors to twenty days, though Senator Lindsey Graham has proposed expanding the court-ordered limit to 100 days. Since the post is on federal land, it will be exempt from state child welfare inspections.

      In addition to the total of detainees held by Border Patrol, an even higher number is detained at centers around the country by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: on a typical day at the beginning of this month, ICE was detaining more than 52,500 migrants. The family separation policy outraged the public in the 2018, but despite legal challenges, it never fully ended. Less publicized have been the deaths of twenty-four adults in ICE custody since the beginning of the Trump administration; in addition, six children between the ages of two and sixteen have died in federal custody over the last several months. It’s not clear whether there have been other deaths that have gone unreported.

      Conditions for detainees have not been improving. At the end of May, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general found nearly 900 migrants at a Texas shelter built for a capacity of 125 people. On June 11, a university professor spotted at least 100 men behind chain-link fences near the Paso del Norte Bridge in El Paso, Texas. Those detainees reported sitting outside for weeks in temperatures that soared above 100 degrees. Taylor Levy, an El Paso immigration lawyer, described going into one facility and finding “a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches… Another young child had to be restrained by his mother because he kept running full-speed into metal lockers. He was covered in bruises.”

      If deciding what to do about the growing numbers of adults and children seeking refuge in the US relies on complex humanitarian policies and international laws, in which most Americans don’t take a deep interest, a simpler question also presents itself: What exactly are these camps that the Trump administration has opened, and where is this program of mass detention headed?

      Even with incomplete information about what’s happening along the border today and what the government plans for these camps, history points to some conclusions about their future. Mass detention without trial earned a new name and a specific identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The labels then adopted for the practice were “reconcentración” and “concentration camps”—places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.

      Other kinds of group detention had appeared much earlier in North American history. The US government drove Native Americans from their homelands into prescribed exile, with death and detention in transit camps along the way. Some Spanish mission systems in the Americas had accomplished similar ends by seizing land and pressing indigenous people into forced labor. During the 245 years when slavery was legal in the US, detention was one of its essential features.

      Concentration camps, however, don’t typically result from the theft of land, as happened with Native Americans, or owning human beings in a system of forced labor, as in the slave trade. Exile, theft, and forced labor can come later, but in the beginning, detention itself is usually the point of concentration camps. By the end of the nineteenth century, the mass production of barbed wire and machines guns made this kind of detention possible and practical in ways it never had been before.

      Under Spanish rule in 1896, the governor-general of Cuba instituted camps in order to clear rebel-held regions during an uprising, despite his predecessor’s written refusal “as the representative of a civilized nation, to be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence” that such detention would represent. After women and children began dying in vast numbers behind barbed wire because there had been little planning for shelter and even less for food, US President William McKinley made his call to war before Congress. He spoke against the policy of reconcentración, calling it warfare by uncivilized means. “It was extermination,” McKinley said. “The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.” Without full records, the Cuban death toll can only be estimated, but a consensus puts it in the neighborhood of 150,000, more than 10 percent of the island’s prewar population.

      Today, we remember the sinking of the USS Maine as the spark that ignited the Spanish-American War. But war correspondent George Kennan (cousin of the more famous diplomat) believed that “it was the suffering of the reconcentrados, more, perhaps, than any other one thing that brought about the intervention of the United States.” On April 25, 1898, Congress declared war. Two weeks later, US Marines landed at Fisherman’s Point on the windward side of the entrance to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. After a grim, week-long fight, the Marines took the hill. It became a naval base, and the United States has never left that patch of land.

      As part of the larger victory, the US inherited the Philippines. The world’s newest imperial power also inherited a rebellion. Following a massacre of American troops at Balangiga in September 1901, during the third year of the conflict, the US established its own concentration camp system. Detainees, mostly women and children, were forced into squalid conditions that one American soldier described in a letter to a US senator as “some suburb of hell.” In the space of only four months, more than 11,000 Filipinos are believed to have died in these noxious camps.

      Meanwhile, in southern Africa in 1900, the British had opened their own camps during their battle with descendants of Dutch settlers in the second Boer War. British soldiers filled tent cities with Boer women and children, and the military authorities called them refugee camps. Future Prime Minister David Lloyd George took offense at that name, noting in Parliament: “There is no greater delusion in the mind of any man than to apply the term ‘refugee’ to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration.” Contemporary observers compared them to the Cuban camps, and criticized their deliberate cruelty. The Bishop of Hereford wrote to The Times of London in 1901, asking: “Are we reduced to such a depth of impotence that our Government can do nothing to stop such a holocaust of child-life?”

      Maggoty meat rations and polluted water supplies joined outbreaks of contagious diseases amid crowded and unhealthy conditions in the Boer camps. More than 27,000 detainees are thought to have died there, nearly 80 percent of them children. The British had opened camps for black Africans as well, in which at least 14,000 detainees died—the real number is probably much higher. Aside from protests made by some missionaries, the deaths of indigenous black Africans did not inspire much public outrage. Much of the history of the suffering in these camps has been lost.

      These early experiments with concentration camps took place on the periphery of imperial power, but accounts of them nevertheless made their way into newspapers and reports in many nations. As a result, the very idea of them came to be seen as barbaric. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first camp systems had all been closed, and concentration camps had nearly vanished as an institution. Within months of the outbreak of World War I, though, they would be resurrected—this time rising not at the margins but in the centers of power. Between 1914 and 1918, camps were constructed on an unprecedented scale across six continents. In their time, these camps were commonly called concentration camps, though today they are often referred to by the more anodyne term “internment.”

      Those World War I detainees were, for the most part, foreigners—or, in legalese, aliens—and recent anti-immigration legislation in several countries had deliberately limited their rights. The Daily Mail denounced aliens left at liberty once they had registered with their local police department, demanding, “Does signing his name take the malice out of a man?” The Scottish Field was more direct, asking, “Do Germans have souls?” That these civilian detainees were no threat to Britain did not keep them from being demonized, shouted at, and spat upon as they were paraded past hostile crowds in cities like London.

      Though a small number of people were shot in riots in these camps, and hunger became a serious issue as the conflict dragged on, World War I internment would present a new, non-lethal face for the camps, normalizing detention. Even after the war, new camps sprang up from Spain to Hungary and Cuba, providing an improvised “solution” for everything from vagrancy to anxieties over the presence of Jewish foreigners.

      Some of these camps were clearly not safe for those interned. Local camps appeared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, after a white mob burned down a black neighborhood and detained African-American survivors. In Bolshevik Russia, the first concentration camps preceded the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922 and planted seeds for the brutal Gulag system that became official near the end of the USSR’s first decade. While some kinds of camps were understood to be harsher, after World War I their proliferation did not initially disturb public opinion. They had yet to take on their worst incarnations.

      In 1933, barely more than a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis’ first, impromptu camp opened in the town of Nohra in central Germany to hold political opponents. Detainees at Nohra were allowed to vote at a local precinct in the elections of March 5, 1933, resulting in a surge of Communist ballots in the tiny town. Locking up groups of civilians without trial had become accepted. Only the later realization of the horrors of the Nazi death camps would break the default assumption by governments and the public that concentration camps could and should be a simple way to manage populations seen as a threat.

      However, the staggering death toll of the Nazi extermination camp system—which was created mid-war and stood almost entirely separate from the concentration camps in existence since 1933—led to another result: a strange kind of erasure. In the decades that followed World War II, the term “concentration camp” came to stand only for Auschwitz and other extermination camps. It was no longer applied to the kind of extrajudicial detention it had denoted for generations. The many earlier camps that had made the rise of Auschwitz possible largely vanished from public memory.

      It is not necessary, however, to step back a full century in American history to find camps with links to what is happening on the US border today. Detention at Guantánamo began in the 1990s, when Haitian and Cuban immigrants whom the government wanted to keep out of the United States were housed there in waves over a four-year period—years before the “war on terror” and the US policy of rendition of suspected “enemy combatants” made Camps Delta, X-Ray, and Echo notorious. Tens of thousands of Haitians fleeing instability at home were picked up at sea and diverted to the Cuban base, to limit their legal right to apply for asylum. The court cases and battles over the suffering of those detainees ended up setting the stage for what Guantánamo would become after September 11, 2001.

      In one case, a federal court ruled that it did have jurisdiction over the base, but the government agreed to release the Haitians who were part of the lawsuit in exchange for keeping that ruling off the books. A ruling in a second case would assert that the courts did not have jurisdiction. Absent the prior case, the latter stood on its own as precedent. Leaving Guantánamo in this gray area made it an ideal site for extrajudicial detention and torture after the twin towers fell.

      This process of normalization, when a bad camp becomes much more dangerous, is not unusual. Today’s border camps are a crueler reflection of long-term policies—some challenged in court—that earlier presidents had enacted. Prior administrations own a share of the responsibility for today’s harsh practices, but the policies in place today are also accompanied by a shameless willingness to publicly target a vulnerable population in increasingly dangerous ways.

      I visited Guantánamo twice in 2015, sitting in the courtroom for pretrial hearings and touring the medical facility, the library, and all the old abandoned detention sites, as well as newly built ones, open to the media—from the kennel-style cages of Camp X-Ray rotting to ruin in the damp heat to the modern jailhouse facilities of Camp 6. Seeing all this in person made clear to me how vast the architecture of detention had become, how entrenched it was, and how hard it would be to close.

      Without a significant government effort to reverse direction, conditions in every camp system tend to deteriorate over time. Governments rarely make that kind of effort on behalf of people they are willing to lock up without trial in the first place. And history shows that legislatures do not close camps against the will of an executive.

      Just a few years ago there might have been more potential for change spurred by the judicial branch of our democracy, but this Supreme Court is inclined toward deference to executive power, even, it appears, if that power is abused. It seems unlikely this Court will intervene to end the new border camp system; indeed, the justices are far more likely to institutionalize it by half-measures, as happened with Guantánamo. The Korematsu case, in which the Supreme Court upheld Japanese-American internment (a ruling only rescinded last year), relied on the suppression of evidence by the solicitor general. Americans today can have little confidence that this administration would behave any more scrupulously when defending its detention policy.

      What kind of conditions can we expect to develop in these border camps? The longer a camp system stays open, the more likely it is that vital things will go wrong: detainees will contract contagious diseases and suffer from malnutrition and mental illness. We have already seen that current detention practices have resulted in children and adults succumbing to influenza, staph infections, and sepsis. The US is now poised to inflict harm on tens of thousands more, perhaps hundreds of thousands more.

      Along with such inevitable consequences, every significant camp system has introduced new horrors of its own, crises that were unforeseen when that system was opened. We have yet to discover what those will be for these American border camps. But they will happen. Every country thinks it can do detention better when it starts these projects. But no good way to conduct mass indefinite detention has yet been devised; the system always degrades.

      When, in 1940, Margarete Buber-Neumann was transferred from the Soviet Gulag at Karaganda to the camp for women at Ravensbrück (in an exchange enabled by the Nazi–Soviet Pact), she came from near-starvation conditions in the USSR and was amazed at the cleanliness and order of the Nazi camp. New arrivals were issued clothing, bedding, and silverware, and given fresh porridge, fruit, sausage, and jam to eat. Although the Nazi camps were already punitive, order-obsessed monstrosities, the wartime overcrowding that would soon overtake them had not yet made daily life a thing of constant suffering and squalor. The death camps were still two years away.

      The United States now has a vast and growing camp system. It is starting out with gruesome overcrowding and inadequate healthcare, and because of budget restrictions, has already taken steps to cut services to juvenile detainees. The US Office of Refugee Resettlement says that the mounting number of children arriving unaccompanied is forcing it to use military bases and other sites that it prefers to avoid, and that establishing these camps is a temporary measure. But without oversight from state child welfare inspectors, the possibilities for neglect and abuse are alarming. And without any knowledge of how many asylum-seekers are coming in the future, federal administrators are likely to find themselves boxed in to managing detention on military sites permanently.

      President Trump and senior White House adviser Stephen Miller appear to have purged the Department of Homeland Security of most internal opposition to their anti-immigrant policies. In doing so, that have removed even those sympathetic to the general approach taken by the White House, such as former Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in order to escalate the militarization of the border and expand irregular detention in more systematic and punitive ways. This kind of power struggle or purge in the early years of a camp system is typical.

      The disbanding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, in February 1922 and the transfer of its commander, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to head up an agency with control over only two prisons offered a hint of an alternate future in which extrajudicial detention would not play a central role in the fledgling Soviet republic. But Dzerzhinsky managed to keep control over the “special camps” in his new position, paving the way for the emergence of a camp-centered police state. In pre-war Germany in the mid-1930s, Himmler’s struggle to consolidate power from rivals eventually led him to make camps central to Nazi strategy. When the hardliners win, as they appear to have in the US, conditions tend to worsen significantly.

      Is it possible this growth in the camp system will be temporary and the improvised border camps will soon close? In theory, yes. But the longer they remain open, the less likely they are to vanish. When I visited the camps for Rohingya Muslims a year before the large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing began, many observers appeared to be confusing the possible and the probable. It was possible that the party of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would sweep into office in free elections and begin making changes. It was possible that full democracy would come to all the residents of Myanmar, even though the government had stripped the Rohingya of the last vestiges of their citizenship. These hopes proved to be misplaced. Once there are concentration camps, it is always probable that things will get worse.

      The Philippines, Japanese-American internment, Guantánamo… we can consider the fine points of how the current border camps evoke past US systems, and we can see how the arc of camp history reveals the likelihood that the suffering we’re currently inflicting will be multiplied exponentially. But we can also simply look at what we’re doing right now, shoving bodies into “dog pound”-style detention pens, “iceboxes,” and standing room-only spaces. We can look at young children in custody who have become suicidal. How much more historical awareness do we really need?

      https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/06/21/some-suburb-of-hell-americas-new-concentration-camp-system

    • #Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez engage le bras de fer avec la politique migratoire de Donald Trump

      L’élue de New York a qualifié les camps de rétention pour migrants érigés à la frontière sud des Etats-Unis de « camps de concentration ».

      https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/06/19/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-engage-le-bras-de-fer-avec-la-politique-migratoire-

    • Media coverage of rhino poaching in Southern Africa not only fails to address white control over conservation, but also reinforces it.

      (...)

      The white knight mentality in global North reporting on conservation across Africa is clearly evident (the documentary includes footage of Player on horseback and bakkie-riding down a rhino with a dart gun) and a topic which this site has previously addressed (“Open letter to 60 Minutes” from March 25 2015). This disparity in reporting is not confined to conservation. See coverage of recent “tricky” debates over the restitution of museum collections or efforts to combat Ebola in the DRC.

  • Why people care about ancient buildings - The human spark
    https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/04/20/why-people-care-about-ancient-buildings

    Plus intéressant, dans sa version papier, le sous-titre est : "It is not wrong to care more about a building than about people"
    Voilà, voilà.
    Ça et le fait « qu’on a tous un selfie devant la cathédrale » : voilà un « tous » particulièrement circonscrit !

    It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of Notre Dame going up in flames (see article) has attracted so much more attention than floods in southern Africa which killed over 1,000 arouses understandable feelings of guilt. Yet the widespread, intense grief at the sight of the cathedral’s collapsing steeple is in fact profoundly human—and in a particularly 21st-century way.

  • Colonial and Postcolonial Logistics | FOOTPRINT

    https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/article/view/2044

    This article addresses the logistical aspects of colonial and postcolonial governmental practices and the way in which such practices structured the African territory. In particular, it focuses on Zambia (Northern Rhodesia at time of British domination), a landlocked country located in the centre of Southern Africa, whose historical evolution, since it was conquered at the beginning of the twentieth century, is deeply intertwined with the discovery, extraction and export of copper and with the import of fossil fuel.

    In the first part, I introduce the concept of ‘colonial logistics’ intended as the modification and rationalisation of territories for military and political domination, and extraction and export of resources. In the second part of the article I show how, after independence, Zambia dealt with its complex geopolitical entanglement, partially inherited from colonial planning and partially generated by the end of direct forms of imperialism, which required the rerouting of its resources and the rebalancing of uneven territorial structures. The analysis of infrastructure development in postcolonial Zambia illustrates the competing strategies through which imperialist powers attempted to secure a new form of control on Africa and elucidates the role of logistics as a decisive tool to shape the African territory.

    #colonialisme #néo-colonialisme

  • Unpacking the Myths around Human Smuggling in and from East Africa

    This paper finds that migrant smuggling within and from the Horn of Africa continues to occur, with new smuggling routes opening in response to irregular migration related risks and law enforcement responses to migrant smuggling on traditionally popular routes. Smuggling as part of the mixed migration flows are more and more common, particularly as travel across borders becomes more dangerous. 4Mi data shows that at least 73% of migrants are using smugglers for at least part of their journey. The key findings from the research explore the dynamics and trends of this elicit trade:

    Migrant smuggling within and from the Horn of Africa remains a vibrant business, and new smuggling routes continue to open - largely in response to political and economic factors, migration risks, and law enforcement efforts to curtail certain routes.
    Many smugglers are young men who enter the smuggling trade because they have limited employment opportunities in their home countries, and smuggling activities are more lucrative than other job opportunities in their home countries.
    Across all three major routes leading out of the region, smuggling networks are organised. Some networks resembling loose, horizontal networks in which smugglers work collaboratively across national borders. In these networks, smugglers tend to hand over the migrants at borders to new smugglers operating the subsequent leg/s of the journey. Other networks, particularly Libya-based smuggling networks along the North-western route to Europe are increasingly hierarchical, with smuggling kingpins dominating the smuggling business from Libya, and Horn of Africa smugglers playing important, but usually subordinate, positions to the Libyan kingpins.
    For most smugglers operating in the region, migrant smuggling is the primary criminal enterprise. Predominantly on the Eastern, and North-western routes, smugglers may also be involved in other criminal activities, such as trafficking in persons, 1 kidnapping, and extortion.
    Government officials are reported to be involved, directly and indirectly, in migrant smuggling operations. Without this collaboration smugglers would likely encounter significant obstacles to conducting successful migrant smuggling ventures.
    With a reported pre-departure average expenditure for smuggling services of USD 1,036 per migrant, 2 the smuggling business remains lucrative for those involved. With a reported average expenditure of USD 2,371 3 per migrant on bribes and extortion, it is clear that many other individuals, including border guards, militia, kidnappers, and traffickers, are also profiting from the flows of smuggled migrants within and from the Horn of Africa.
    The migration flows within and from the Horn of Africa are mixed, 4 with asylum seekers and refugees being smuggled alongside economic migrants.
    Various political and socio-economic factors motivate irregular migration from the Horn of Africa region. The level of migration is highly reactive to political and other pressures, as well as national migration policy. Movement from the region is both in response to short-term crises, as well as rooted in long-term factors.
    Most smuggled migrants from the Horn of Africa are young, single men; however, the number of female migrants is reportedly increasing. Also reportedly increasing is the number of unaccompanied Horn of Africa minors travelling irregularly to Europe, the Gulf States and Middle East, and Southern Africa.
    Some migrants initiate the first leg of travel, and navigate one or more subsequent segments of travel without the aid of smugglers. These migrants tend to pay smugglers, where they are used, for each individual part of the journey, using cash or informal money transfer systems, such as hawala systems (informal financial transfers outside of the traditional banking system). 5 Other migrants use the services of smugglers to take them from their home country all the way to the destination country - some of these migrants pay for the entire journey in advance.
    The paper finds that paying for the entire smuggling journey in advance does not reduce the vulnerability of migrants to exploitation and abuse during the journey.
    In terms of volume, the most popular smuggling route is the Eastern route to the Gulf States and the Middle East. Horn of Africa migrants are also still being smuggled in large numbers to Europe, and to Southern Africa, particularly South Africa.

    http://www.regionalmms.org/index.php/research-publications/feature-articles/item/70-unpacking-the-myths-around-human-smuggling-in-and-from

    #smuggling #passeurs #Corne_de_l'Afrique #migrations #asile #réfugiés #frontières #business

    Lien vers le rapport :
    http://regionalmms.org/images/briefing/RMMS%20BriefingPaper6%20-%20Unpacking%20the%20Myths.pdf

    –-> intéressant pour analyser le discours, probablement aussi pour les chiffres (pas lu en détail le rapport), mais attention, car financé par la coopération au développement suisse et allemande... du coup, voilà... c’est probablement un papier qui légitime encore plus la fermeture des frontières...

    Voici des tableaux qui, je pense, suggèrent que j’ai raison à être un peu dubitative face à ce rapport :

    Où veulent aller les personnes en fuite ? En Europe pour la majorité, évidemment...

    Qui sont les facilitateurs ? Les passeurs, obviously...

    Pourquoi fuient-ils ? Pour des raisons économiques avant tout, évidemment...


    #flèches

    Un tableau intéressant sur le nombre des #décès :


    #mourir_aux_frontières #morts #chiffres #statistiques
    C’est la première fois que je vois les chiffres de personnes mortes aux frontières de la Corne de l’Afrique

    Et sur les #viols / #violences_sexuelles :

    cc @reka

  • Radical Agendas #1: South Africa - ROAPE
    http://roape.net

    The set of essays initially entitled “South Africa: What Next?” that is accessible here over a number of weeks consists of five essays that, together with my introduction posted below, focus on various areas of political creativity currently being acted upon by various peoples, groups and fledgling movements in South Africa. It is complementary to an earlier set of essays on the wider southern Africa region entitled “Southern Africa – the liberation struggle continues” the title of which is self-explanatory and that included case-studies, by various writers, of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa itself. This was a series first edited for the AfricaFiles “At Issue Ezine”, and then had been reproduced in ROAPE in March, 2011 as vol. 38, #127.

    –—

    Radical Agendas #2: Community Resistance from Below - ROAPE
    http://roape.net

    Amongst the most studied and celebrated aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1980s in South Africa was the breadth and impact of community resistance (Ballard et al 2006; Buhlungu 2010).

    The origins of that resistance came during the late 1970s and early 1980s when the working class, broadly conceived, was hit with a double blow. Emerging clusters of neoliberal capitalism privileged the opening up of global markets, increasing capital mobility and reorganising states to guarantee and catalyze ‘free market principles’ (Harvey 2005), while pushing for a flexible, insecure and informal labour regime (Chun 2009).

    –—

    Radical Agendas #3: The Numsa Moment - ROAPE
    http://roape.net

    The Marikana massacre of 16 August 2012 triggered a wave of strikes across South Africa, culminating in an unprecedented uprising in the rural areas of the Western Cape. It also began a process of political realignment. The dramatic entry of the Economic Freedom Front (EEF) into parliament was to become the most spectacular. But could the historic decision of Numsa in December 2013 to withdraw its logistical support for the ANC and its mandate to the union’s leadership to form a United Front and Movement for Socialism, be of more long term significance? It certainly was the popular view on the left at the time (Satgar, 2014). The “Numsa moment”, one support group boldly proclaimed, “constitutes the beginning of the end for the ANC and its ambivalence towards neo-liberalism” (Democracy from Below, December 2013).

    –—

    Radical Agendas #4: Gender in South African Politics - ROAPE
    http://roape.net

    Recently, the University of Cape Town (UCT) student organization #RhodesMustFall, displayed a banner proclaiming: “Dear History: This revolution has women, gays, queers, and trans. Remember that.” It was a profound declaration that the old politics of the left can no longer hold, and that the masculinist, male-dominated forms of oppositional politics that centred the male subject as the defining agent of transformation must be confronted.

    To understand where this statement – which went viral on social media – comes from, we need to consider both the failures of the state-led democratic project and the modes of analysis and organisation on the left. An honest examination is especially timely as progressive politics is re-grouping around new formations ranging from political parties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters, to student movements, to broad front civil society arrangements such as the United Front. The women’s movement itself, to the extent that it ever existed in coherent form, has also seen several changes in the past two decades with the collapse of the Women’s National Coalition, the ever-increasing distance between the ANC Women’s League and feminists, and the emergence of a much wider range of organisations dealing with issues of violence and sexuality. Importantly, through initiatives such as the Feminist Table, connections are being forged between women’s organisations working at the brutal edge of the economic crisis in families, households and communities, and feminist thinkers.

    –—

    Radical Agendas #5: An Eco-Socialist Order in South Africa - ROAPE
    http://roape.net

    n ecological transformation is required as part of a ‘new liberation struggle’ in South Africa. This involves a ‘just transition’ from the present fossil fuel regime that is moving us towards ecological collapse and catastrophe. The article suggests that the impetus to this ecological transformation is coming strongly from two aspects of the ecological crisis: accelerating climate change and the spread of toxic pollution of water, air, land and food that is experienced as ‘environmental racism’. The implication is that what Von Holdt and Webster (2005) conceptualised as a triple transition from democracy (economic liberalisation, political democracy and post-colonial transformation), requires a fourth dimension: an ecological transition to a society marked by a very different relation with nature, a relation combining social justice with ecological sustainability.

    “new coalitions and forms of co-operation between both labour and environmental activists contains the promise of a new kind of socialism that is ethical, ecological and democratic.”

    –—

    Radical Agendas #6: Where to for South Africa’s Left? - ROAPE
    http://roape.net

    n October 2015, South Africa was rocked by over two weeks (commencing 14th October) of student protests. These protests shut down most universities, led to violent confrontations between police and students (most notably at parliament and with a march of thousands of students on the Union Buildings), and vocalized demands that President ZUMA address the call for free higher education, “insourcing” and a moratorium on fee increases for 2016. Twenty-one years into post-apartheid democracy a new generation of university student activists openly rebelled against the ANC government’s neoliberal fiscal cutbacks of public universities and reclaimed the importance of “public goods.” The use of mass mobilisation and social media, such as #FeesMustFall, led some commentators to suggest the “Arab Spring Moment” had arrived in South Africa. Students themselves in their assemblies and messaging also discoursed in the language of revolution. This manifestation of resistance is far from over and cannot be isolated. It has to be located in the crisis of national liberation politics and renewal of a new South African left.

    #afrique_du_sud

  • Quelques références trouvées dans le livre Violent Borders de Reece Jones (excellent, par ailleurs), sur les #statistiques des décès de migrants (certains, voire beaucoup déjà signalés sur seenthis):

    Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border

    This report is the result of a cooperative agreement entered into by Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties to explore and use binational strategies to protect the human rights of immigrants in the border region. The report describes the unacceptable human tragedy that takes place daily in this region. The study was conducted and written by immigration and border policy advocate Maria Jimenez who resides in Houston, Texas.

    https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/humanitarian-crisis-migrant-deaths-us-mexico-border

    Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost during Migration

    In October 2013, over 400 people lost their lives in two shipwrecks close to the Italian island of Lampedusa. While these two events were highly publicized, sadly they are not isolated incidents; the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that in 2013 and 2014 nearly 6,500 migrants lost their lives in border regions around the world. Because many deaths occur in remote areas and are never reported, counts of deaths fail to capture the full number of lives lost.

    Despite recognition that actions must be taken to stop more unnecessary deaths, as yet there remains very little information on the scale of the problem. The vast majority of governments do not publish numbers of deaths, and counting lives lost is largely left to civil society and the media. Drawing upon data from a wide range of sources from different regions of the world, Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost during Migration investigates how border-related deaths are documented, who is documenting them, and what can be done to improve the evidence base to encourage informed accountability, policy and practice.

    Regionally focused chapters present most recent statistics and address a number of key questions regarding how migrant border-related deaths are enumerated. Chapters address: migration routes through Central America to the United States, with a focus on the United States–Mexico border region; the southern European Union bordering the Mediterranean; routes from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa; routes taken by migrants emigrating from the Horn of Africa towards the Gulf or Southern Africa; and the waters surrounding Australia.

    Numbers have the power to capture attention, and while counts of border-related deaths will always be estimates, they serve to make concrete something which has been left vague and ill-defined. In a way, through counting, deaths too often invisible are given existence. More complete data can not only serve to highlight the extent of what is taking place, but is also crucial in guiding effective policy response.

    https://publications.iom.int/fr/books/fatal-journeys-tracking-lives-lost-during-migration
    #fatal_journeys

    Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis

    The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people―more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. Beyond Walls and Cages offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future.Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression.As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. Beyond Walls and Cages develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world―whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia―requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization.


    https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Walls-Cages-Geographies-Transformation/dp/0820344125

    The Human Costs of Border Control (2007)

    This article outlines the relationship between irregular immigration, increased border control, and the number of casualties at Europe’s maritime borders. The conclusion is that the number of fatalities is increasing as a result of increased border control. The author argues that States have a positive obligation under international law to address this issue, and formulates concrete proposals to monitor the number of border deaths.

    http://thomasspijkerboer.eu/migrant-deaths-academic/the-human-costs-of-border-control-2007

    #migrations #asile #réfugiés #chiffres #décès #morts #rapport #USA #Etats-Unis #frontières #Mexique

  • Why do we still use the term ’sub Saharan Africa’? - Quartz
    http://qz.com/770350/why-do-we-still-say-subsaharan-africa

    “It divides Africa according to white ideas of race, making North Africans white enough to be considered for their glories, but not really white enough,” Tatenda Chinondidyachii Mashanda, a politics and international affairs scholar at Wake Forest University, wrote earlier this year for The African Exponent. “[It] is a way of saying ‘Black Africa’ and talking about black Africans without sounding overtly racist.”
    One US diaspora group found the phrase so “disparaging and contemptuous” it launched a 2010 petition to abolish it—but found scant success.

    (...) What’s wrong with more accurate geographic markers, like East, West, Central and Southern Africa? Or even just calling Nigeria, the world’s seventh biggest country, by its own name?

    #afrique #noms #racisme

  • Learning from El Niño as La Niña Odds Rise
    http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2016/04/28/learning-from-el-nino-as-la-nina-odds-rise

    Although #El_Niño is weakening, its ramifications continue to be felt around the world. Drought and resulting food insecurity is one of the major implications for southeast Asia, eastern and southern Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Sixty million are in need of emergency relief today, according to the United Nations.

    One of the most hard-hit areas has been Ethiopia, where at least ten million people need emergency food assistance, according to the World Food Programme (see figure). In addition to malnutrition and other ill effects of food insecurity, El Niño also has a myriad of other health impacts that will last through at least the end of 2016, including disease outbreaks and disruption of health services.

    #climat #agriculture #alimentation #El_Niño #El_Niña #cartographie

  • Across Africa, the worst famine since 1985 looms for 50 million | Global development | The Guardian
    http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/may/22/africa-worst-famine-since-1985-looms-for-50-million?CMP=twt_gu

    Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Madagascar, Angola and Swaziland have already declared national emergencies or disasters, as have seven of South Africa’s nine provinces. Other countries, including Botswana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have also been badly hit. President Robert Mugabe has appealed for $1.5bn to buy food for Zimbabwe and Malawi is expected to declare that more than 8 million people, or half the country, will need food aid by November.

    More than 31 million people in the region are said by the UN to need food now, but this number is expected to rise to at least 49 million across almost all of southern Africa by Christmas. With 12 million more hungry people in Ethiopia, 7 million in Yemen, 6 million in Southern Sudan and more in the Central African Republic and Chad, a continent-scale food crisis is unfolding.

    #climat #famine #Afrique #El_Nino #sécheresse

  • http://www.lcps-lebanon.org/agendaArticle.php?id=62

    What are international best practices for governments addressing a refugee crises?

    I think we learn more from failures. Speaking about best practices is important but it is also necessary to reflect in terms of what went wrong. To be honest there have been some huge mistakes made across the world. In my experience, the most frequent error is replicating models without the ability to adapt the experience to local needs and contexts. In Southern Africa or Latin America, this was very common.
    [;;;]
    Based on my knowledge concerning refugee crises, the Lebanon experience is rather unique due to its complexities. There are similar aspects to other cases regarding targeting, within a sustainable development perspective. Also, it would be useful to look at Lebanon before the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, with its many challenges in terms of poverty, inequality, management of natural resources and public services, and transparency, among others.

    If we are discussing this more comprehensive approach, I think the experience that has been tested is Southeastern Europe, which has a number of similarities to Lebanon, including some aspects which can be models for change. These are middle-income countries where active citizenship is growing, a debate on decentralization has started, and the dynamic of sustainable local development is at the center of the political agenda.

    #Liban #réfugiés #municipalité #ONG

  • Fidel #Castro says Obama’s ‘syrupy words’ were enough to cause a heart attack
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fidel-castro-says-obamas-syrupy-words-were-enough-to-cause-a-heart-attack/2016/03/28/35bda23c-f4f2-11e5-8b23-538270a1ca31_story.html

    Castro, after a long and somewhat rambling recounting of the failed U.S.-sponsored exile invasion of Cuba in 1961, and a critique of U.S. policy toward racism in southern Africa, wrote that he doubted Obama was unaware of the history between #Cuba and the United States.

    He offered a “modest suggestion” that the American president reflect on that history “and not offer elaborate theories about Cuban politics.”

    “Each of us probably had a heart attack” while listening to Obama, Castro wrote. “After nearly 60 years of ruthless blockade. And how many have died from mercenary attacks on boats, in Cuban ports, on an airplane full of passengers that exploded in full flight, in mercenary invasions and multiple acts of violence and force?

    #Etats-Unis #Histoire #histoires

  • Drought and rising temperatures ’leaves 36m people across Africa facing hunger’ | Environment | The Guardian
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/16/drought-high-temperatures-el-nino-36m-people-africa-hunger

    More than 36 million people face hunger across southern and eastern Africa, the United Nations has warned, as swaths of the continent grapple with the worst drought in decades at a time of record high temperatures.

    The immediate cause of the drought which has crippled countries from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe is one of the strongest #El_Niño events ever recorded. It has turned normal weather patterns upside down around the globe, climate scientists say.

    But with the world still reeling from record-high temperatures in February, there are fears that the long-term impacts of climate change are also undermining the region’s ability to endure extremes in weather, leaving huge numbers of people vulnerable to hunger and disease.

    The worst hit country in the current crisis is Ethiopia, where rains vital to four-fifths of the country’s crops have failed. Unicef has said it is making plans to treat more than 2 million children for malnutrition, and says more than 10 million people will need food aid.

    Pendant ce temps-là l’Éthiopie produit, entre autres, des agrocarburants pour l’Europe (et Israël)

    #sécheresse #climat #malnutrition #famine #Afrique

  • Millions Face Food Shortages as El Niño Fuels Africa’s Worst Drought in Decades | VICE News
    https://news.vice.com/article/millions-face-food-shortages-as-el-nio-fuels-africas-worst-drought-in-dec

    Southern and eastern Africa are in the grips of a historic drought blamed on #El_Niño that has put millions at risk of starvation, devastated croplands, and dried up rivers across the region.

    The World Food Program estimates that up to 14 million people are facing hunger due to failed crops, skyrocketing commodity and food prices, and the lowest levels of precipitation in 35 years. Among the worst affected areas are #Malawi, #Madagascar, and #Zimbabwe.

    #sécheresse #Afrique #indifférence

  • The Cost of the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity | UNPEI

    Joint launch of the UN Women, UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative, and World Bank report

    http://www.unpei.org/latest-news/joint-launch-of-the-un-women-undp-unep-poverty-environment-initiative-and-wor

    Women form a large proportion of agricultural labor force in sub-Saharan Africa and thus play a vital role in ensuring family nutrition and food security. In eastern and southern Africa, agriculture continues to be a key engine for local and regional economies and is a critical source of incomes besides being the basis for food security and nutrition. However gender-based inequalities in access to and control of productive and financial resources inhibit agricultural productivity and reduce food security. At the same time, a changing climate means that there is a shrinking window of opportunity to close the gender gap in agriculture and seize the prospects for promoting women’s empowerment, economic development and societal resilience to shocks, including climate change.

    #inégalités #discrimination

  • Continuing El Niño drives increased food insecurity across many regions
    Global - Alert: Thu, 2015-10-08 | Famine Early Warning Systems Network
    http://www.fews.net/global/alert/october-8-2015

    The strong #El_Niño of 2015 has contributed to suppressed rainfall over northern East Africa and Central America and the Caribbean (Figure 1), significantly limiting agricultural and pastoral potential, and straining local livelihoods. These impacts are contributing to Crisis (IPC Phase 3) acute food insecurity for approximately four million people in these regions. With El Niño forecast to continue into the first quarter of 2016, suppressed rainfall is likely over many regions during the coming rainy seasons, including in Southern Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean (Figure 2). Over the Horn of Africa and Central Asia, as well as parts of North and South America, the forecast strong El Niño is expected to result in above-average precipitation (Figure 2). Close monitoring of seasonal rainfall performance is needed in areas where El Niño is known to drive regional climate variability. Humanitarian agencies should prepare for high levels of assistance needs across many regions due to El Niño-related impacts on agricultural and pastoral production.

    #agriculture #climat merci @reka

  • Large scale land deals in Southern Africa: voices of the people
    http://www.future-agricultures.org/publications/research-and-analysis/books/1972-large-scale-land-deals-in-southern-africa-voices-of-the-pe

    This book presents case studies of large-scale land deals in Southern Africa. It aims to provide an accessible and vivid window into the lived realities and responses of rural people who are affected by such deals. For this reason, we have paid particular attention to what local people say, and have quoted their experiences and responses to the land deals.

    largescale500The book emerges from an action research project implemented by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, in partnership with non-governmental organisations in five Southern African countries: LandNet in Malawi, Kuwuka Juventude Desenvolvimento e Advocacia Ambiental in Mozambique, Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia, Zambia Land Alliance in Zambia and Ruzivo Trust in Zimbabwe.

    http://www.plaas.org.za/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/Large%20scale%20land%20deals.pdf

    #terres #accaparements #Afrique

  • Invisible Angola
    http://agro.biodiver.se/2015/07/invisible-angola

    Kew botanist David Goyder had a thought-provoking blog post a couple of days back describing the relative lack of floristic data from Angola. Here’s his map of plant collection data for southern Africa, from GBIF:

    But the thought that the map provoked in me was, of course, whether the situation was similar for crops. So here’s what Genesys knows about crop germaplasm collections in southern Africa:

    Angola genesys

    It seems the answer is a pretty resounding yes. Again, you can clearly trace the borders of Angola by where the genebank accessions end.

    #angola #afrique #cartographie