Complete Wellness

In June, New York state legislature will vote on a bill that will increase protection for sex trafficking victims. Credit: Bigstock

NEW YORK, Jun 13 2013 (IPS) – It started for Ruth when she was 12 years old and for Lowyal when she was 13. After being raped by her mother s boyfriend, Ruth ran away from home and was picked up by a pimp, who sold her into prostitution.

Lowyal, bullied at school and facing a deteriorating situation at home, dropped out of school and eventually began working on the streets. In a drawing Lowyal created to depict this traumatic time in her life, a wide eye reflects a city skyline as red flames curl at the bottom, with menacing faces on both sides.

This month, New York s legislature will vote on the New York Trafficking Victims and Protection and Justice Act (TVPJA), which would give more protection to girls like Ruth and Lowyal, and harsher punishments for those who trafficked them. It is part of the Women s Equality Act that supporters hope will be voted on before the legislative session ends Jun. 20.

, an international human rights organisation, is working with the and the to get the law passed.

The organisation is encouraging supporters to send letters to Governor Andrew Cuomo, Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, and State Senator Dean G. Skelos.

The TVPJA will direct resources to toughening laws to target and arrest pimps and buyers rather than victims. And under the new law, penalties for buying sex from a minor will be similar to those for statutory rape.

The law would also mean that all prostituted persons under the age of 18 are treated as trafficking victims instead of criminals in the state of New York. Currently, 16- and 17-year-olds arrested for prostitution are prosecuted as adults.

There are two provisions that we are having a hard time with and [are] getting opposition to, Lauren Hersh, New York director of Equality Now, told IPS. Hersh is perplexed as to why these provisions are problematic.”Sex trafficking is happening within New York City, and many of its victims are American-born.”
— Lauren Hersh

The first is making sex trafficking a violent felony in New York State, which would send a message to law enforcement that trafficking is a violent crime, Hersh explained.

Talk to any sex trafficking victim, and they ll tell you how violent it is, she added.

The second is aligning New York state law with U.S. federal law, which does not require prosecutors to prove that minors were coerced into sexual acts. Under the current law, with most cases in New York, victims have to testify in court, Hersh said.

The New York State assembly is historically against raising penalties, Emily Amick, staff attorney at and legislative director for the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition, told IPS.

The law needs to evolve, Amick said. Albany is letting politics get in the way of helping people, she added, with state lawmakers who oppose these provisions working against the livelihoods and futures of sex trafficking victims.

Despite some opposition, Hersh sees the bill as excellent and comprehensive .

The fact that women and girls are being trafficked not only inside U.S. borders, but also within city limits, may be a surprise to some people, Hersh said.

When people think of sex trafficking, they often only think of women and girls being smuggled across international borders. But sex trafficking is happening within New York City, and many of its victims are American-born, Hersh said in a statement.
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Legislative justice is one part of the solution. Sexually exploited girls like Ruth and Lowyal should also be given a voice in the process of advocacy and justice, Hersh said. Project IMPACT, a New York-based programme that allows trafficking victims to share their stories, if and how they choose to, is one way to do so.

I think telling my story matters because it could help other girls like me, Veronica, another formerly trafficked girl, said, after sharing her story at Project IMPACT. Storytelling is important because I lived this – I m the one who knows what it s really like.

Ruth, Lowyal and Veronica are part of Gateways, a residential treatment program for commercially sexually exploited youth that is run by the Jewish Child Care Association and allows them to rebuild their lives and self-esteem. Some Gateways residents visited Albany in May to lobby for the bill s passing.

Reliable statistics on sex trafficking are difficult to obtain due to the hidden and underground nature of the crime, according to Hersh, but a 2010 State Department report put the number of people trafficked to the United States each year at around 15,000.

Two million children are exploited each year in the international commercial sex trade, according to 2012 data from the International Labour Organisation, which also estimates that women and girls make up 98 percent of sex trafficking victims.

And in the United States, while little data is available for the number of victims, the FBI estimates that 293,000 American children and teenagers are at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

The only way we re going to have justice in New York is to pass this bill in its entirety, Hersh told IPS.

GMOs are steadily advancing in Brazil, where transgenic crop varieties produced by multinational corporations grow alongside others developed nationally.

Field of soy in Não-Me-Toque, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Credit: Nilson Konrad/IPS

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 30 2013 (IPS) – Ten years ago, Brazil yielded to agribusiness pressure and legalised the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) soy. Today it is the world’s second leading producer of GM crops, surpassed only by the United States.

Transgenic soy had been grown clandestinely in Brazil since the second half of the 1990s.

In 2003, the adoption of Decree 4680, which stipulated the labelling of foods with a genetically modified organism (GMO) content of at least one percent, was considered a landmark decision.

But the most definitive step in this direction was taken by the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) through its authorisation of GM soy through successive “provisional measures”, which temporarily allowed the legal sale of crops that were being illegally grown in the south of the country with GM seeds smuggled in from Argentina.

Finally, in 2005, the adoption of the Biosafety Law established the National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio), which is responsible for assessing and approving or rejecting applications for the cultivation and sale of GMOs.
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Two years later, another law created the National Biotechnology Commission to coordinate and implement a general policy on biotechnological development.

Plant diseases, pests and invasive species are the main causes of financial losses in agriculture, especially due to the difficulty of monitoring and controlling them, according to agricultural engineer João Sebastião Araújo, from the Department of Agronomy at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

“In this context, in 1996 a new technology was introduced, transgenesis, with a variety of maize that contained proteins derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt),” providing the maize with the bacterium’s insecticidal properties, Araújo told Tierramérica.

“It became one of the most commonly used technologies in agriculture in the United States, and quickly came to account for the majority of maize crops grown in that country,” he added.

The emergence of this technology was followed by a new escalation in the use of fertilisers, new crop varieties, agricultural machinery and the introduction of entomotoxic (insecticidal) molecules, “all aimed at achieving bigger crop yields,” said Araújo.

This new technological package was then promoted by transnational corporations in countries like Brazil, which is viewed as “an exceptional market” due to its vast areas of soy, maize and cotton plantations, he explained.

As a result, considerable pressure was exerted by these corporations to gain government authorisation for the use of transgenics, with the promise of greater efficiency and lower costs.

According to Céleres, a consulting firm that specialises in the agribusiness sector, GM crops occupied 37.1 million hectares of land in Brazil during the 2012-2013 agricultural year, which reflects an increase of 14 percent (4.6 million hectares) over the previous year.

The leading GM crop is soy, with 24.4 million hectares planted in 2012, accounting for 88.8 percent of total soy production.

GM varieties accounted for 87.9 percent (6.9 million hectares) of the harvest. As for the summer maize crop, transgenic varieties cover 5.3 million hectares, or 64.8 percent of the total area planted.

Meanwhile, GM cotton makes up just over 50 percent (547,000 hectares) of the crops planned for the 2012-2013 agricultural year, according to Céleres.

Araújo noted that Brazil is highly competent in agricultural research and that its scientists have achieved “exceptional results” and contributed to crop yields that were unimaginable in the past.

However, despite the technological advances made, there are still insufficient answers for a number of concerns about GM crops, he said.

“Caution is needed so as not to use this technology without the necessary discretion. Today, Europe is convinced that its impacts go much further. We are talking about a very recent technique. In Brazil it dates back only 10 years, in Europe, 13 years, and in the United States, 17 years,” he added.

Maurício Lopes, president of the government agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, emphasised another aspect.

The tropics are the world’s most challenging region for agriculture, due to the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by this human activity, he said.

“We need to make use of the entire technological arsenal available to us. We believe that modern biotechnology, nanotechnology, new sciences and new paradigms are important. Brazil cannot say no to these techniques, because the current challenges are enormous,” Lopes told Tierramérica.

Lopes believes that the results of these past 10 years have been positive overall, but that it is important to make intelligent, planned and careful use of these new tools.

“We are in favour of transgenesis. We understand that there is a framework of methods and procedures for using it safely,” he noted. At the same time, however, he is critical of the fact that biotechnology remains under the control of a handful of global actors, such as agrifood corporations.

EMBRAPA is currently working on the development of new varieties of beans, tomatoes and papayas.

“We are testing a that is resistant to a terrible disease, known as bean golden mosaic virus, which is transmitted by an insect. This product has already been developed by EMBRAPA and we are now testing it,” said Lopes.

The next frontier will be vegetables. Brazilian scientists have already obtained a modified lettuce that contains large concentrations of folic acid.

“Folic acid is a key component in the diet of pregnant women, because of its importance for the nervous system development of the foetus. We are testing it and it will have to pass a long battery of tests. But it is a product which might be on our tables in the future,” he said.

While the proponents of GMOs claim that they can be a tool to combat hunger and reduce the use of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and micro-fertilisers, environmentalists warn of the risks they pose for agricultural biodiversity.

The environmental organisation Greenpeace says the release of GMOs into the environment can lead to the loss of plants and seeds that constitute the world’s genetic heritage.

“We defend a model of agriculture that is based on agricultural biodiversity and does not use toxic products, because we understand that this is the only way we will have agriculture forever,” says a Greenpeace statement.

Moreover, the group stresses, there is no consensus in the scientific community regarding the safety of GMOs for human health and the environment.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

This article is the second of a two-part series exploring disability’s place in international development guidelines. In part one, IPS looked at the repercussions of ignoring disability on an international level. Part two asks: was the lack of attention simply an oversight or due in part to the complex nature of disability?

The media and public perception play a role in how different conditions are treated and how the disabled view themselves. Credit: Bigstock

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2013 (IPS) – When U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened a recent high-level meeting on disability and development that promised a place for the issue in the post-2015 agenda, he cited three examples of incapacity.

All three were stories of children or adolescents, even though the World Health Organisation estimates nearly 200 million adults have a functional difficulty.When aid is “solutionist”, it only looks for problems where data lies, like the drunk who searches for his keys under a streetlamp and not where he dropped them.

Ban s comments illustrate what many see as a key difficulty in representing disability, both in language and in the democratic decision-making process.

Activists say the lack of attention at the international level is not simply an oversight but a product of a confused conception of disability and the unique experiences of different groups of disabled people.

The reality, they argue, is that certain classes of disabled people coincide more easily with the orientation of international guidelines for healthcare intervention and with public understanding of health.

A dominant assumption in interventions is that “we save people because when we save them they are going to have a full life and produce a lot, so society benefits,” said Bruce Jennings, director of bioethics at the Centre for Humans and Nature and a lecturer at Yale University.

Saving lives means a country will have a more reliable workforce, a guarantee of vital importance in places like Sub-Saharan Africa where populations have been ravaged by HIV/AIDS.

But a focus on mortality puts those with severe and cognitive disabilities in a precarious limbo.

“What is the rationale for spending a great deal of resources for supporting the quality of life of people with severe cognitive problems when the usual answer our society gives for spending resources in healthcare is future productivity?” Jennings told IPS.

In developing countries, where 80 percent of the world’s disabled live, social integration and sustained healthcare for them can be financially unpalatable to governments when set alongside well-subsidised international measures that focus on vaccines for polio or cutting edge treatments for AIDS.
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Programmes that focus on pharmaceutical solutions are seen as easier to account for in cost-benefit terms.

But for the disabled, there is often no pill to end their distress or help overcome social barriers. For severe cases, years of rehabilitation and attention from public sector healthcare are required.

“It’s a difficult subject to bring up,” said Antony Duttine, rehabilitation advisor at Handicap International.

“It’s perceived as quite costly to provide care and support but equally it’s a moral and legal issue that you have to look into.”

Whose voice?

As is true for many activists, those with first-hand experience of disability are often the clearest voices for progress.

“We need to include people with disabilities not just as the beneficiaries but the participants,” said MP Reen Kachere, minister of disability and elderly affairs in Malawi.

Participation is especially important in developing countries, said Kachere, where international projects have to navigate the historical question of paternalism.

“The disability advocacy community has very much been oriented towards inclusiveness and participation of individuals with impairments in the decision-making processes,” Jennings said.

A common refrain among advocates is “nothing decided for us without us.”

But participation raises the question of representation, he said.

“I’m not sure someone who has experience living in a wheelchair is a good representative for someone with cognitive impairments,” noted Jennings.

Because of how varied conditions are, differences arise in how integrated the disabled feel in society.

“It is relatively easier for a person who is blind or a person with physical disability to access services, but there is much more stigma attached to cognitive disabilities,” said Gopal Mitra, a programme specialist for children with disabilities at UNICEF.

“Disability is not a homogeneous group,” he told IPS.

The media and public perception play a role in how different conditions are treated and how the disabled view themselves.

In the United States, victims who lost limbs when bombs went off at the Apr. 15 Boston marathon . At the same time, more than 50,000 U.S. diabetes patients undergo lower extremity amputations each year. Worldwide, someone loses a leg to diabetes every 30 seconds. All of them will require lifetime care.

Images of children or victims of a tragedy are easier to digest for the public than those whose descent into incapacity is slow or genetic. Physical disabilities are easier to understand than mental ones, and as a result societies are more likely to allocate money to that which they can comprehend, said Jennings.

“There is an image of the disabled as being physically limited and cognitively sound,” he said. “By having the public have a person in a wheelchair be the paradigm of disability in their mind and thinking that we deal with disability if we have wide doors and lifts on public buses is an unfortunate mistake.

Even as organisations catch up with contemporary theory on the fluidity of gender and sexual orientation or the vastness of the disability spectrum, their efforts can still be constrained.

The problem, as disability activists see it, comes in large part from the total lack of language concerning the disabled in U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The result can be a self-perpetuating cycle.

“Countries are not tracking and reporting progress on children and adults with disabilities as far as MDG achievements are concerned,” said Mitra. “Countries are not connecting data. Unless you have numbers, it is difficult to plan or allocate resources.

“However, the point is 15 percent of the world’s population is people with disability. If you don’t include this 15 percent no development goals can be achieved.

At its worst, say critics, when international aid is “solutionist , it only looks for problems where data lies, like the drunk who searches for his keys under a streetlamp and not where he dropped them. And disability is notoriously hard to define and track.

Though an understanding of the different forms of disability may allow society to better help, the ultimate solution may be the idea of a common shared experience.

“I think the rational is solidarity, empathy, dignity, mutuality, equality and respect,” says Jennings. “It’s very hard to put a metric on those.”

In Swaziland, which has been hard-hit by the AIDS pandemic, an HIV-positive mother sits next to her 18-month-old baby girl. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

WASHINGTON, Dec 3 2013 (IPS) – The gap in health standards between the world’s poorest countries and the more advanced middle-income nations could close by the year 2035, according to a major new report published Tuesday by Britain’s The Lancet medical journal.

Written by a group of 25 of the world’s top global-health experts and international economists, makes the case for the international community, governments and key donors, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to increase investments in health to meet the target.

“Now, for the first time in human history, we are on the verge of being able to achieve a milestone for humanity: eliminating major health inequalities, particularly inequalities in maternal and child health, so that every person on earth has an equal chance at a healthy and productive life,” according to Harvard University professor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers.

“The powerful drugs and vaccines now available make reaching this milestone affordable. It is our generation’s unique opportunity to invest in making this vision real,” said Summers, who 20 years oversaw the preparation of the only ‘World Development Report’ (WDR) devoted to global health when he served as the World Bank’s chief economist.
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The 58-page report, which calls for government policymakers to adopt a new approach to measuring the importance of health to their national economies, is being published as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – a unique multilateral agency that has approved 29 billion dollars in grants since its founding in 2002 – is meeting here this week to gain new donor commitments for its fourth three-year replenishment.

The three diseases are among the biggest health challenges faced by the world’s poorest countries and poorest people in middle-income nations.

The Fund’s leadership got a big lift here Monday when, at a World AIDS Day ceremony, President Barack Obama pledged continued U.S. support for the Fund, promising to provide one dollar for every two dollars committed by other donors over the next three years, up to a total of five billion dollars.

Bill Gates also announced that his foundation – the single biggest private funder of global health initiatives will provide up to 500 million dollars through 2016, including 300 million dollars that was previously committed and up to 200 million dollars in new matching grants.

“Don’t leave our money on the table,” Obama said, speaking to many of the delegates who have gathered here for the pledging conference. “Now is the time to replenish the Global Fund.”

The Fund’s new executive director, Mark Dybul, said he was confident that this week’s pledging would significantly exceed the 9.2 billion dollars that was committed at the last replenishment in 2010.

The Lancet report offers what it calls a “roadmap to achieving dramatic gains in global health through a grand convergence around infectious, child and maternal mortality; major reductions in the incidence and consequences of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and injuries; and the promise of ‘pro-poor’ universal health coverage.”

If followed, the roadmap could result in averting some 10 million deaths across the target countries in 2035 alone, according to the report.

It points to the experience of the “4C countries” – Chile, China, Costa Rica, and Cuba as models for poor and lower-middle-income countries. All four started off at similar levels of income and mortality as today’s poor countries but, by 2011, had become among the best-performing middle-income nations.

Among the specific goals, according to the report, are reducing under-five mortality to 16 per 1,000 livebirths, and reducing annual AIDS-caused and TB-caused deaths to eight and four per 100,000, respectively.

To achieve these and other aims, the report calls for “aggressively scaling up” efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria as well as improve maternal- and child-health conditions which were a major focus of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); strengthening health systems to focus on the most problematic sectors, including poor rural sub-populations of middle-income countries that are disproportionately affected by infectious diseases; and devoting more and earlier investment to family planning.

In addition, government should be encouraged to pursue fiscal policies – notably by heavily taxing tobacco and other harmful substances, such as alcohol, that can sharply reduce NCDs and injuries, as well as leverage significant new revenue for low- and middle-income countries that can, in turn be used to reduce subsidies on items, such as fossil fuels that produce air pollution which in turn cause NCDs.

Such savings will provide most countries with enough funds to finance many of the steps urged in the report. It thus urges that, while donor countries, which hopefully will include emerging economies, should increase their investment into research and development to produce new drugs, vaccines, and other health technologies.

The report calls for at least a doubling in health R D from current annual spending of around three billion dollars to six billion dollars by 2020, with half of the increment coming from middle-income countries.

The report argues that the economic returns from investments in health are “much greater” than policy-makers have previously assumed.

The 1993 WDR found considerable evidence that improvements in health increased gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by enhancing childhood educational advances and adult worker productivity, as well as increasing access to natural resources and foreign investment that are encouraged by controlling diseases like malaria.

But the GDP analysis, the Lancet report asserts, measures only the impact of health improvements on economic productivity. It fails to capture the intrinsic value people place on their own improved health, including their greater life expectancy.

A full-income approach combines growth in national income with the value of additional life years (VLY). The report estimates that, on average, across low- and middle-income countries, one VLY – a one-year increase in life-expectancy – is about 2.3 times greater than per capita income.

Using that approach, the report found that, between 2000 and 2011, 24 percent of the growth in full income in those countries resulted from health improvements; that is, in VLYs gained. By the same token, setbacks to life expectancy, such as in countries hit hard by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, resulted in a far greater adverse impact than the impact on GDP per capita would suggest.

“We believe that if nations worldwide adopt a full-income approach to economic planning, the human returns to investing in health can be brought into resource allocation decisions,” said Dean Jamison, a University of Washington professor who co-chaired the Commission with Summers.

“People value a longer and healthier life, and the notion of full income simply places that value in monetary terms. While it does not put a monetary value on an individual’s life, it does place a value on changing mortality risk, which traditional notions of GDP neglect,” he added.

People go about their daily lives in Roseau, Dominica. The country’s chief medical officer says climate change is taking a toll on the health of people. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

ROSEAU, Dominica, Jan 20 2014 (IPS) – Caribbean countries, struggling to emerge from a slump in exports and falling tourist arrivals brought on by the worldwide economic crisis that began five years ago, have one more thing to worry about in 2014.

Dominica’s chief medical officer, Dr. David John, said climate change and its effects are taking a toll on the health of people in his homeland and elsewhere in the region.“A lot of diseases will essentially create havoc among people who are already poor.” — Dr. Lystra Fletcher-Paul

You have seen what is happening [with] the effects of climate change in terms of our infrastructure, but there are also significant effects with regards to climate change on health,” John said, adding that “these effects relate to the spread of disease including dengue fever and certain respiratory illnesses.”

John said the Dominica government would be seeking assistance from international agencies, including the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), to mitigate “the effects of climate change on health as it relates to dengue, leptospirosis and viral disease.”

In late 2012, the Ministry of Health in Barbados alerted members of the public about a spike in leptospirosis cases. Senior Medical Officer of Health-North Dr. Karen Springer said then that five people had contracted the severe bacterial infection, bringing the number of cases for the year to 18.

Springer explained that the disease, which includes flu-like symptoms such as fever, headache, chills, nausea and vomiting, eye inflammation and muscle aches, could be contracted through contact with water, damp soil or vegetation contaminated with the urine of infected animals. Bacteria can also enter the body through broken skin and if the person swallows contaminated food or water.

In recent years, dengue has also been on the rise throughout the Caribbean with outbreaks in Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico and the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, among other places.

Professor of environmental health at the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies Dr. Dave Chadee told IPS there is ample “evidence that climate-sensitive diseases are being tweaked and are having a more significant impact on the region .
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He said he co-authored a book with Anthony Chen and Sam Rawlins in 2006 which showed “very clearly” the association between the changes in the seasonal patterns of the weather and the onset and distribution of dengue fever.

“There is enough evidence, not only from the Caribbean region but worldwide, that these extreme events are going to have and going to play a significant role in the introduction and distribution of these sorts of diseases in the region,” Chadee, who previously served as an entomologist at the Insect Vector Control Division of the Ministry of Health in Trinidad and Tobago, told IPS.

“If you look at the various factors that are associated with climate change, the first is heat waves. There has also been a reduction in air quality. You also see an increase in fires and the effects on people’s ability to breathe as well as the association between the Sahara dust and asthma which was demonstrated in Barbados and Trinidad recently.

“The Sahara dust which comes in from Africa brings in not only the sand but also other pathogenic agents within the sand, together with some insecticides which have been identified by people working at the University of the West Indies,” Chadee told IPS.

Dr. Lystra Fletcher-Paul, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) representative for Guyana, said she has no doubt that climate change has contributed significantly to some of the issues related to diseases in the region.

“If you look at some of the impacts of climate change, for example drought, with drought you are going to increase the amount of irrigation that you are going to be applying to the crops. And irrigation water is a source of pesticides or even chemicals, depending on where that source of water is and that could lead to problems in health,” she told IPS.

“Similarly with the extreme events, if you are talking about floods, there can be contamination of the fresh-water supply.”

The FAO representative is adamant that there is too much “talk” in the Caribbean and too little “implementation .

“We have had the conversation, so what we need to do now is put the systems in place to mitigate and adapt to climate change, she said. Using land-use planning as an example, Fletcher-Paul told IPS, “A lot of what we see happening in St. Vincent and St. Lucia may not necessarily have taken place if we had proper land-use planning.”

A slow-moving, low-level trough on Dec. 24 dumped hundreds of millimetres of rain on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia and Dominica, killing at least 13 people. The islands are still trying to recover.

“So we need to take some hard decisions in terms of where we would allow development to take place or not,” Fletcher-Paul said.

Chadee said the poor would always be at a disadvantage in  climate change scenarios and they will suffer the most from sea level rise when you have salt water intrusion into fertile agricultural land, rendering them unsuitable for food production.

“A lot of diseases will essentially create havoc to people who are already poor. The adaptability of the poor versus the rich within the Caribbean region will be tested because if the poor are no longer able to produce some of their food, this would then lead to health problems.

He explained that if the poor are no longer able to have a particular diet this would make them susceptible to a number of diseases.

“With the Caribbean region having developing states, and especially Small Island Developing States, we do have a unique situation where the resources have to be put in place, especially for adaptation,” Chadee told IPS.

“It’s almost like the wall of the reservoir has been breached and you know that the water is coming. You don’t know how high the water level is going to be but you know it’s coming, so what do you do? And that essentially is the scenario in which we have found ourselves in the Caribbean,” Chadee added.

VIENNA, Mar 17 2014 (IPS) – A top level United Nations conference on drugs has highlighted growing divisions between member states on how to move forward in dealing with global drug problems as calls grow for major reforms in approaches to international drug policy.

The High-Level Review at the latest annual session of the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) – the chief policymaking body for international drug control in Vienna assessed last week how the organisation is meeting goals for dealing with the global drug problem ahead of the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in 2016.”We have been taking a certain approach for 50 years and it hasn’t worked. It’s time to experiment with alternatives.”– Ann Fordham, executive director of NGO, International Drug Policy Consortium

But it ended with a joint ministerial statement that was only agreed at the very last minute after months of fractious debate, with states failing to agree on a common approach to key points, and proposed paragraphs on issues such as the death penalty absent from the final text.

This, say civil society groups promoting global drug policy debate, underlines a growing split in attitudes towards drugs in U.N. member states between those pushing for liberal reforms and those continuing to follow conservative and repressive approaches which evidence is increasingly showing is failing.

Ann Fordham, executive director of the NGO, told IPS at the conference: “The joint ministerial statement always comes out, even if individual member states disagree over some fundamental things. But this year things were much harder, it was much more difficult for countries to agree, and for a while it looked like the unthinkable might happen and they wouldn’t agree and there would be no statement.

“But while there was one in the end, and although it was full of watered-down language, it shows there are growing fractures between states on how to approach drug problems and just how big those differences are.”

A number of U.N. member states have recently either undertaken or are planning fundamental reforms to their drugs policies.

In December last year Uruguay became the first country to legalise commercial sales of marijuana and regulate its production. Commercial sales of marijuana began in the U.S. state Colorado in January while sales of marijuana will begin in Washington state in June.

These developments came just months after Latin American leaders used U.N. platforms to deride the body’s approach to drugs. The president of Guatemala told the U.N. General Assembly that the regulated supply of illicit drugs should be considered while his Colombian counterpart told the same body that the U.N. s conventions “gave birth to the war on drugs …. that war has not been won.”

These reforms have been praised by many third sector organisations working with drug users and pushing for debate on drug policy. They say reform is desperately needed and a traditional punitive criminal approach to dealing with global drug problems has been shown to have failed.

But the U.N. has slammed drug legalisation. (UNODC) executive director Yury Fedotov told journalists just days before the start of the Vienna Conference that Uruguay’s decision to legalise cannabis sales was “not a solution to dealing with world drug problems.”

The U.N.’s International Narcotics Control Board has labelled the country’s government “pirates” for going against the U.N.’s conventions on drugs.

The apparent distance between U.N. drugs policy bodies’ thinking on drugs and that of individual member states was further evidenced at the conference itself.

Individual country representatives – particularly those from Latin America which has seen decades of horrific violence connected with the drugs trade spoke vociferously of the need to move away from criminalisation of drug use to a health-based approach to drugs problems.

Colombian minister of justice Gomez Mendez told delegates: “…people have been sacrificed in our actions to tackle the drug problem….we call for more effective ways to achieve the objectives stated in international agreements.

Meanwhile, representatives of the Ecuadorian government spoke of “the failure of present drug policies” and said “many voices are calling for a change in paradigm in the understanding and approach to the drug phenomenon.”

This was backed up by civil society representatives who spoke in special sessions and meetings during the conference.

Senior U.N. officials too emphasised the importance of preventive measures, rather than punitive criminal justice legislation, in helping deal with problems caused by drugs.

Michel Kazatchkine, U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said at the conference that “ciminalisation of drug use, restrictive drug policies and aggressive law enforcement practices are key drivers” of serious public health threats such as of HIV and hepatitis C epidemics among people who inject drugs.”

However, despite these warnings, the joint ministerial statement was released without the use of the term ‘harm reduction’ as such language is still deemed unacceptable by countries like Russia which stringently enforce severely punitive anti-drug policies.
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This, argued civil society groups at the conference, shows that the U.N.’s drug policy bodies have abrogated their responsibility as leaders in dealing with the global drug problem, focusing on punitive measures rather than a health-based approach.

Joanne Ceste, deputy director of the told IPS: “For a long time, UNODC has abdicated its responsibility as the global leader for HIV prevention, treatment and care among drug users because it has had such a hard time getting serious about real advocacy on decriminalisation of minor offences.”

However, there is hope that the current divisions between member states’ views on drug policy could end up providing the impetus for important debate ahead of the U.N. General Assembly special session on drugs in 2016.

Fordham told IPS: “What was interesting about watching negotiations on the joint ministerial statement is that usually when they can’t agree, member states just say, ‘OK, let’s just reaffirm what we said last time’, which was in 2009.

“But this time, even though the eventual statement is much weaker than we would have liked, there were many states that said, ‘no we can’t go back to that. Things have changed, we need to come to new agreements on drugs policy’.”

She added: “There are some governments now, ahead of 2016, that are really pushing for global drugs policy to be debated. We have been taking a certain approach for 50 years and it hasn’t worked. It’s time to experiment with alternatives.”

Ibrahim Sobeh and his son Mahmud with the device they built for domestic fuel production. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS.

GAZA CITY , May 7 2014 (IPS) – On the roof of a modest house amidst the alleys of Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, Ibrahim Sobeh and his sons spent more than 200 days working on a primitive device that converts waste plastic into fuel.

“The idea came when I watched smoke emissions from a fireplace I made in my house,” Sobeh tells IPS. “I thought how to exploit these fumes and vapours. That prompted me to search online to find there were already attempts in America to exploit fumes emitted by burning hay to produce fuel, and this was the start.”In harsh conditions where survival is a struggle, not many are thinking of the environment, or even of long-term damage to their health.

Fifty-six-year-old Sobeh, who got a diploma in electricity from the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) Institute in Gaza 30 years ago, tells IPS how he faced considerable difficulties because of lack of raw materials. And, he had to borrow money from a friend.

Fuel in Gaza is extremely expensive and it is not available on a regular basis as a result of the blockade imposed on Gaza,” says Sobeh. “This is precisely what prompted me to look for a way to produce fuel domestically, which finally succeeded. But the project requires substantial financial support for its development.”

The device exposes plastic waste composed of oil molecules to high temperature in an Oxygen-free airtight box leading to degradation of the constituent particles of plastic into vapours. These are then passed through metal channels where the fumes are cooled. This results in liquid fuel somewhere between gasoline, diesel and kerosene.

We produce one litre of fuel from 1.5 kg of plastic waste,” son Mahmud Sobeh tells IPS. “Diesel-run electrical and mechanical machines were successfully run on this fuel output. We have sent samples to the laboratories of the Islamic University of Gaza for scientific examination.”

These are desperate measures, and energy expensive in breaking down the plastic. But then Gazans are in a desperate situation.

The fuel crisis in Gaza has been ongoing for eight years now as Israel controls the amount of fuel entering Gaza through the Abu Salim crossing between Gaza and Israel. Gaza s only power plant also runs on scarce diesel. Blackouts that last hours are a daily feature.

A litre of Israeli gasoline costs seven shekels (two dollars). A litre of fuel smuggled from Egypt cost half as much before the Egyptian army demolished the tunnels between North Sinai and the southern town Rafah after the dismissal of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi. This exacerbated the electricity and fuel crisis in Gaza.

Dr. Sameer Afifi, director of the centre for environmental studies and scientific laboratories at the Islamic University of Gaza tells IPS that the Sobehs’ project was conducted under primitive conditions and the quality may therefore be not quite good. But still it is promising.”

What is certain is that production of fuel in such manner would be environmentally damaging, and could be harmful to health. Former environment minister Yusef Abu Safieh tells IPS that production of such fuel must be subject to an in-depth scientific studies.
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The incomplete combustion of plastic may result in release of other hydrocarbons that are hazardous, some of them carcinogenic.  Any material that is not fully combusted results in production of fumes and dangerous substances,” Abu Safieh tells IPS.

But citizens in Gaza still look at such attempts with hope. “Ordinary fuel is not readily available due to high prices, and this makes us look for locally produced fuel that helps us to overcome the energy crisis and relieve us of an economic burden, Shadi Abu Samra, 35, from Al-Shati refugee camp tells IPS.

The Sobeh experiment is now driving others to look at such measures to produce fuel. In harsh conditions where survival is a struggle, not many are thinking of the environment, or even of long-term damage to their health.

An elderly displaced man carries a sack of rations on his shoulder. The Pakistan Army has distributed 30,000 ration packs of 110 kg each. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 1 2014 (IPS) – Three days ago, Rameela Bibi was the mother of a month-old baby boy. He died in her arms on Jun. 28, of a chest infection that he contracted when the family fled their home in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, where a full-scale military offensive against the Taliban has forced nearly half a million people to flee.

Weeping uncontrollable, Bibi struggles to recount her story.

“My son was born on Jul. 2 in our own home,” the 39-year-old woman tells IPS. “He was healthy and beautiful. If we hadn’t been displaced, he would still be alive today.”

“My wife is expected to deliver a baby within a fortnight, But the doctors say the child will be premature due to the stressful journey we undertook to get here.” — Jalal Akbar, a former resident of the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan Agency
But Bibi does not have the luxury of grieving long for her little boy.

Soon she will have to dry her eyes and begin the grim task of providing for herself and her two young daughters, who now comprise some of the 468,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) seeking refuge from the Pakistan army’s airstrikes on the militant-infested mountainous regions that border Afghanistan.

Launched on Jun. 15, the army’s campaign was partly motivated by terrorist attacks on the Karachi International Airport that killed 18 people in early June.

Having failed since 2005 to flush out the militants from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the army is now focusing all its firepower on the 11,585-square-kilometre North Waziristan Agency, where insurgent groups have enjoyed a veritable free reign since escaping the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan over a decade ago.

Some political pundits are cheering what they call the government’s “hard line” on the terrorists. But what it means for a civilian population already weary from years of war is homeless, hunger and sickness.

Most of the displaced have collapsed, fatigued from hours of travel on dirt roads in 45-degree heat, in massive camps in Bannu, an ancient city in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KP) province.

Already groaning under the weight of nearly a million refugees who have arrived in successive waves over the last nine years, KP is completely unprepared to deal with this latest influx of desperate families.

With tents serving as makeshift shelters, and the blistering summer heat threatening to worsen over the coming weeks, medical professionals here are warning of a full-blown health crisis, as doctors struggle to cope with a long line of patients.

Many traveled for hours on dirt roads, in 45-degree heat, to reach safe ground, with no food or water along the way. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Muslim Shah, a former resident of North Waziristan, has just arrived in Bannu after a 45-km journey on an unpaved road with his wife and children.

He is being treated at a rudimentary ‘clinic’ in the camp for severe dehydration, and recovering from a stomach flu caused by consumption of contaminated water along the way.

The frail-looking man tells IPS he is concerned for his family’s health in an unsanitary environment, gesturing to a nearby filthy canal where his children are bathing amongst a herd of buffalos.

“We have examined about 28,000 displaced people,” Dr. Sabz Ali, deputy medical superintendent at the district headquarters hospital (DHQ) of Bannu, told IPS.

About 25,000 of these, he said, are suffering from preventable diseases caused by sun exposure, lack of nutrition, and consumption of unclean water.

On Jun. 29, the government relaxed its curfew, giving families a tiny window of escape before resuming its operation Monday.

Families who left in the allotted timeframe are expected to descend on Bannu soon, prompting an urgent need for preemptive and coordinated efforts to avert an outbreak of diseases, Ali asserted.

“Given the soaring temperatures, we fear outbreaks of communicable water and vector-borne diseases, like gastroenteritis and diarrhoea, as well as vaccine-preventable childhood diseases such as polio and measles,” he said.

Seeking some relief from the 41-degree heat, displaced children in Bannu join a herd of buffalos for a bath in a filthy canal. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Ahmed Noor Mahsud (59) and his family of four epitomise the unfolding crisis.

Mahsud himself is bed-ridden as a result of a heat stroke caused by walking 40 km in sweltering heat, while his sons – aged 14, 15 and 20 – have been suffering with diarhhoea, fever and headaches since they arrived in the camp on Jun. 22.

The family has had very little access to clean water for nearly a week, which is exacerbating their illness.

According to public health specialists like Ajmal Shah, who was dispatched by the KP health department, exhaustion among IDPs has even led to some cases of cardiac arrest.

Out in the desert, families are also at risk of snake and scorpion bites, and could suffer long-term psychological stress as a result of the trauma, Shah told IPS.

About 90 percent of the displaced are extremely poor, having lived well below the poverty line for over a decade due to the eroding impacts of terrorism on the local economy. Few can afford private care and must wait patiently for thinly-spread doctors to make their rounds.

But for people like 30-year-old Jalal Akbar, a former resident of the town of Mir Ali in Waziristan, patience is almost impossible.

“My wife is expected to deliver a baby within a fortnight,” he told IPS anxiously. “But the doctors say the child will be premature due to the stressful journey we undertook to get here. She requires bed rest, but we have been unable to find a proper home.”

The exhausted man fears their eviction will deprive him of his first child.

Another major crisis looming on the horizon is a food shortage, which will only add to the woes of the displaced.

According to a by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “The Pakistan Army has distributed 30,000 ration packs each of 110 kg. The WFP has provided food rations to over 8,000 families while a number of NGOs and charity organisations are also carrying out relief activities.”

Still, those like Ikram Mahsud, a displaced tribal elder, fear that the worst is yet to come.

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“We lack good food, and the non-availability of sanitation facilities like latrines, detergent and soap [means] our people are destined to suffer in the coming days,” he told IPS, adding that requests for clean water and sanitation facilities have fallen on deaf ears.

Women and children currently comprise 74 percent of the IDPs, prompting the World Health Organisation (WHO) to point out, in a Jun. 30 report, the urgent need for “mass awareness campaigns among women to promote use of safe drinking water, hygienic food preparation and storage.

“Information regarding benefits of hand-washing before eating and preparation of food, use of impregnated bed nets to avoid mosquitoes’ bites and prevent occurrence of malaria should also be encouraged,” the agency noted.

WHO says it had sent medicines for 90,000 people to Bannu, but experts here feel this will fall short in the face of a spiraling crisis.

(END)

Women and children are badly affected by the rise in alcohol consumption in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

DHARMAPURAM, Aug 3 2014 (IPS) – Back in the day when the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ran a de-facto state in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, alcohol consumption was closely monitored, and sternly frowned upon.

But after government forces destroyed the militant group in 2009, ushering a new era into a region that had lived through three decades of civil conflict, strict rules governing the brewing and sale of spirits have lost their muscle.

Plagued by poverty, trauma and a lack of employment opportunities, civilians in the former war zone are increasingly turning to the bottle to drink their troubles away.

“There is worryingly high casual and habitual use of alcohol in the region. Drinking hard liquor by the end of the day is becoming a [norm],” Vedanayagam Thabendran, district officer for social services for the Kilinochchi district in the Northern Province, about 240 km from the capital Colombo, told IPS.

Available data on alcohol consumption trends back his assessment.

“There is a visible shift in consumption patterns in the war-affected areas from the days of the LTTE. They did not allow the northern citizens to drink moonshine [freely].” — G D Dayaratna, manger of the health and economic policy unit at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS)
According to a December 2013 survey by the Alcohol and Drug Information Centre (ADIC), a national non-governmental organisation, the northern district of Mullaitivu had the second highest alcohol consumption rate in the island, with 34.4 percent of the population identifying as ‘habitual users of alcohol’.

The covered 10 of the 25 districts in the country, including two in the Northern Province.

“Frequency of alcohol consumption was highest in Mullaitivu district, among the ten districts surveyed. In both the Jaffna and Mullaitivu districts, beer consumption was higher than arrack (hard liquor) consumption,” said Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, who heads the Jaffna-based Point Pedro Institute of Development.

The researcher told IPS that “anecdotal evidence and alcohol sales figures” indicate a link between the end of the civil war and the rise in alcohol consumption.

District official Thabendran said that alcohol abuse was more pronounced in interior villages that had once fallen under the purview of the LTTE. He identified one such village as Dharmapuram, located about 17 km northeast of Kilinochchi Town.

“We keep getting regular reports of domestic disputes because of alcohol consumption and we know that there are a lot of places (in that village) where illegal alcohol is available,” he stated.

Humanitarian workers in the region said that Dharmapuram has acquired the nickname ‘booze centre’ because of the free availability of illicit liquor.

“One of the disturbing trends is the prevalence of female headed households that have begun to sell illicit liquor as an easy income-generation method,” said a humanitarian worker who wished to remain anonymous because he was working with the families in question.

Homemade brews – typically derived from coconut, palmyra flowers or sugarcane – are cheap to make and easy to procure. Women in the north say they earn about 100 rupees (0.7 dollars) per litre of local moonshine.

A man sits in his makeshift kitchen in the village of Dharmapuram after returning home drunk. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Drinkers say that illegal alcohol can be obtained for less than one-fifth the price of the lowest-grade legal liquor.

“I haven’t seen this much alcohol here for almost 50 years,” Arumygam Sadagopan, a 60-year-old resident of Dharmapuram, admitted.

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A retired education officer, Sadagopan told IPS that habitual drinking, especially among men, is exacerbating poverty and fueling domestic violence. He added that his neighbour’s family was now at “breaking” point due to the husband’s daily bouts of drinking.

“He has two school-going children who now mostly see their father drunk, reeking of alcohol and arguing or fighting with their mother,” he stated.

The end of the war in May 2009 not only removed restrictions on easy access to liquor outlets, it also removed social barriers that had kept consumption in check.

“There is a visible shift in consumption patterns in the war-affected areas from the days of the LTTE. They did not allow the northern citizens to drink moonshine (freely),” said G D Dayaratna, manger of the health and economic policy unit at the think-tank (IPS).

He also said that the LTTE kept a close tab on alcohol production in areas they controlled. All such safeguards crumbled along with the demise of the armed group.

Still, the situation is not specific to the former war zone. Islandwide alcohol production and consumption have seen sharp increases since the end of the conflict.

In  2013 the Excise Department earned over 66 million rupees (over 500,000 dollars) in duties from the sale of alcohol, an increase of 10 percent from 2012.

In 2009 Sri Lanka produced 41 million liters of hard liquor and 55 million liters of beer, but by 2013 hard liquor production had touched 44 million liters, while beer production was an astonishing 120 million liters.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the among people aged 15 years and older between 2008 and 2010 was 20.1 litres.

There are no official figures available for the quantity of illegal, homemade alcohol but a 2002 found that 77 percent of all liquor consumed in Sri Lanka was illicitly brewed. In 2013, fines for illegal liquor touched 127 million rupees (975,000 dollars).

Social workers like Thabendran said that the worst cases of alcohol abuse were visible in poor households in the northern province, where men were either unemployed or engaged in backbreaking daily paid manual labour.

Men who engage in hard, manual labour are the primary consumers of alcohol in Sri Lanka s Northern Province. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

There are no official figures for full unemployment rates in the north. However, in the two districts where figures are available – 9.3 percent in Kilinochchi and 8.1 percent in Mannar they were over twice the national rate of four percent.

Sarvananthan estimates that unemployment could be above 20 percent here in Dharmapuram, while employment in the informal sector, which includes agriculture, forestry, fisheries and day labour, hovers at just about 30 percent.

Poverty levels are also high in the province, with four of its five districts recording rates higher than the national average of 6.7 percent.

The three districts where the war was most intense, Kilinochchi, Mannar and Mullaittivu, record poverty rates of 12.7 percent, 20.1 percent and 28.8 percent respectively, according to the latest released in April.

“When you look at alcohol consumption patterns, you see they have a direct correlation with the type of employment. Manual labourers and daily wage earners are more likely to consume alcohol at the end of the day,” Dayaratna pointed out.

Sadagopan has a simple solution to the alcohol menace, at least in the short term. “The laws against illicit brewing and selling should be strictly enforced,” he said. “The problem is, since our villages are in the interior, enforcement is lax.”

Edited by

Millions of women in Pakistan do not have access to family planning services. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 19 2014 (IPS) – The U.N. s post-2015 development agenda has been described as the most far-reaching and comprehensive development-related endeavour ever undertaken by the world body.

But where does population, family planning and sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) fit into the proposed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an integral part of that development agenda?”We must continue to fight until every individual, everywhere on this planet, is given the opportunity to live a healthy and sexual reproductive life.” — Purnima Mane, head of Pathfinder International

Of the 17, Goal 3 is aimed at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages, while Goal 5 calls for gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.

But when the General Assembly adopts the final list of SDGs in September 2015, how many of the proposed goals will survive and how many will fall by the wayside?

Meanwhile, SRHR will also be a key item on the agenda of a special session of the General Assembly next week commemorating the 20-year-old Programme of Action (PoA) adopted at the landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994.

In an interview with IPS, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) said, Twenty years ago, we were able to secure commitments from governments on various aspects of poverty reduction, but more importantly the empowerment of women and girs and young people, including their reproductive rights.

But the battle is not over, he said.

Today, we are on the cusp of a new development agenda, and we, as custodians of this agenda, need to locate it within the conversation of sustainable development a people-centred agenda based on human rights is the only feasible way of achieving sustainable development, he declared.

Purnima Mane, president and chief executive officer of Pathfinder International, told IPS, We are delighted the final set of [proposed] SDGs contains four critical targets on SRHR: three under the health goal and one under the gender goal.

The inclusion of a commitment to universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services, including family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes, is necessary and long overdue, she said.

But we have not reached the finish line yet, cautioned Mane, who oversees an annual budget of over 100 million dollars for sexual and reproductive health programmes in more than 20 developing countries.
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The SDGs still need to be adopted by the General Assembly, and we must all continue to raise our voices to ensure these SRHR targets are intact when the final version is approved, she added.

Mane said civil society is disappointed these targets are not as ambitious or rights-based as they should be.

And translating the written commitment into actionable steps remains a major challenge and is frequently met with resistance. We must retain our focus on these issues, she said.

Sivananthi Thanenthiran, executive director of the Malaysia-based Asian-Pacific Resource Research Centre for Women (ARROW) working across 17 countries in the region, told IPS it is ideal to have SRHR captured both under the gender goal as well as the health goal.

The advantages of being part of the gender goal is that the rights aspects can be more strategically addressed because this is the area where universal commitment has been lagging the issues of early marriage, gender-based violence, harmful practices all of which have an impact on the sexual and reproductive health of women, she pointed out.

The advantages of being part of the health goal is that interventions to reduce maternal mortality, increase access to contraception, reduce sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, are part and parcel of sound national health policies,  Thanenthiran said.

It would be useful for governments to learn from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) process and ensure that the new goals are not implemented in silos, she added. Public health concerns should be addressed with a clear gender and rights framework.

Maria Jose Alcala, director of the secretariat of the High-Level Task Force for ICPD, told IPS what so many governments and stakeholders around the world called for throughout the negotiations was simply to affirm all human rights for all individuals and that includes SRHR.

The international community has an historic opportunity and obligation to move the global agenda forward, and go beyond just reaffirming agreements of 20 years ago as if the world hasn t changed,and as if knowledge and society hasn t evolved, she noted.

We know, based on ample research and evidence, based on the experiences of countries around the world, as well as just plain common sense, that we will never achieve poverty eradication, equality, social justice, and sustainable development if these fundamental human rights and freedoms are sidelined or traded-off in U.N. negotiations, Jose Alcala said.

Sexual and reproductive health and rights are a must and prerequisite for the post-2015 agenda if we are to really leave nobody behind this time around, she declared.

Mane told IPS, As the head of Pathfinder, I will actively, passionately, and strongly advocate for SRHR and family planning to be recognised and aggressively pursued in the post-2015 development agenda.

She said access to SRHR is a fundamental human right. We must continue to fight until every individual, everywhere on this planet, is given the opportunity to live a healthy and sexual reproductive life.

Asked about the successes and failures of ICPD, Thanenthiran told IPS there is a need to recognise the progress so far: maternal mortality ratios and infant mortality rates have decreased, access to contraception has improved and life expectancy increased.

However, much remains to be accomplished, she added. It is apparent from all recent reports and data that SRHR issues worldwide are issues of socio-economic inequality.

In every country in the world, she noted, women who are poorer, less educated, or belong to marginalised groups (indigenous, disabled, ethnic minorities) suffer from undesirable sexual and reproductive health outcomes.

Compared to their better educated and wealthier sister citizens, these women and girls are more likely to have less access to contraception, have pregnancies at younger ages, have more frequent pregnancies, have more unintended pregnancies, be less able to protect themselves from HIV and other sexual transmitted diseases, suffer from poor maternal health, die in childbirth and suffer from fistula and uterine prolapse.

Hence the sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda is also the equality agenda of this century, she added.

Governments must commit to reducing these inequalities and carry these learnings from ICPD at 20 into the post-2015 development agenda,  Thanenthiran said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at [email protected]