IDN-InDepthNews

Europe2013-12-232023-07-10

Swiss Aid Helps UN Agencies Ban Hunger

By Richard Johnson | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

GENEVA (IDN) – The Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation has come up with a Christmas and New Year gift that has the potential of feeding some 2 billion people around the world. The international cooperation agency, based in Berne, is placing $2.7 million at the disposal of three United Nations agencies – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) – to launch a joint project to tackle the global problem of food losses, beginning with pilot programmes in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda.

Asia-Pacific2013-12-212023-07-10

Imparting Dignity To Bangladesh Garment Workers

By Tithe Farhana* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

DHAKA (IDN) – Salma Khatun (25), a victim of early marriage divorced by her husband, came to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in 2009 along with her two daughters, accompanied by her sister Shikka, a worker in a local Ready-Made Garments (RMG) factory in the city’s Mirpur area.

“I was very vulnerable due to getting divorce from my husband and also thinking about my daughters’ future. Subsequently, my sister insisted that I come with her.” With her help, she got a job in the factory, which gave her economic freedom and appeared to ensure the future of her daughters.

ECONOMY2013-12-202023-07-10

Developing Economies’ Myths and Realities

By World Economy Desk | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

BERLIN (IDN) – The South Centre, an intergovernmental organization of developing countries, has good news about developing economies. Contrary to the view promoted by ‘establishment institutions like the IMF’ (International Monetary Fund), recent events show that major developing countries have not “decoupled” their economies from those of advanced ones, avers Yılmaz Akyüz, chief economist of the Geneva-based organization.

GLOBAL ISSUES2013-12-192023-07-10

Revisiting Nine-Eleven Twelve Years On

By Eric Walberg* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

Congressmen Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch introduced a resolution early December 2013 urging President Barack Obama to declassify the legendary “28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry of 9/11” issued in late 2002, which point to official Saudi involvement in a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. After much lobbying, and under an oath of secrecy, Jones was allowed to read the censored document: “I was absolutely shocked by what I read. What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me.”

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT2013-12-182023-07-10

Local Knowledge Vital For Global Experts

By Pranab Bardhan* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

BERKELEY (IDN |Yale Global) – For quite some time the economic development profession has gone global in a rather grandiose way. Those quick with pronouncements on global development issues get the maximum attention, rise to the top of the profession, and may even get to hobnob with international celebrities and philanthro-capitalists.

The premium has been on finding global patterns in fighting poverty – in promoting comprehensive development strategies meant for a broad range of countries, with the Washington Consensus or alternatively the so-called Beijing Consensus – and pronouncing overarching policy judgments on the hot issues of the day on a global scale, including austerity or stimulus, free trade, capital flows, global inequality, migration, intellectual property rights, the development NGO movement and the like.

ARMAMENTS2013-12-162023-07-10

No-Nuke Australia Thwarts Nuclear Free World

By Neena Bhandari* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

SYDNEY (IDN) – Australia has been expressing support for a nuclear weapons-free world, but documents obtained by disarmament advocacy group, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), reveal that the Australian Government sees the increasing international focus on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons as “rubbing up against” its reliance on the United States nuclear weapons.

ICAN has obtained declassified diplomatic cables, ministerial briefings and emails under freedom-of-information laws, which show that the Australian Government plans to oppose efforts to ban nuclear weapons.

Middle East2013-12-152023-07-10

Syrian Refugees Biggest Sufferers Of The Conflict

By Manish Rai* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

NEW DELHI (IDN) – Nearly three years of bloody civil war in Syria have created what the United Nations, governments and international humanitarian organizations describe as the most challenging refugee crisis in a generation bigger than the one unleashed by the Rwandan genocide and laden with the sectarianism of the Balkan wars.

With no end in sight in the conflict and with large parts of Syria already destroyed, governments and humanitarian as well as other organizations are quietly preparing for the refugee crisis to last years. This is the crisis that has been called the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of this century and condemned by the UN as a “disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history”.

Europe2013-12-132023-07-10

Nicaragua and Europe Strive To Deepen Ties

By Peter Tase* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (IDN) – Over the past three years, Nicaragua has been trying to deepen ties with major European Union countries, paying special attention to the establishment of various sustainable development initiatives.

Nowhere is the strategy more apparent than in Foreign Minister Samuel Santos’ visit to Brussels and Strasbourg in December of 2010, where he secured financing from the European Commission for the Nicaragua Education Project (PROSEN) and funding for anti-dengue and rural public health campaigns from Luxembourg.

ARMAMENTS2013-12-122023-07-10

Daughter Takes Kennedy’s Peace Torch To Japan

By Katsuhro Asagiri | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

TOKYO (IDN) – Caroline Kennedy was just 20 years old when she accompanied her uncle, the late Senator Edward Kennedy, to Hiroshima, site of the first U.S. bomb attack that killed 140,000 people on August 6, 1945. In a Senate hearing in September, confirming her appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, she said she was deeply moved by her visit in 1978 that included a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

In her video message to the people of Japan posted before assuming office on November 12, 2013, she remarked that her trip to Hiroshima had left her “with a profound desire to work for a better, more peaceful world”.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT2013-12-102023-07-10

‘We Can, And Must, End Poverty’

By Erik Solheim* | IDN-InDepth NewsDocument

While the international community has learned much about what works in terms of reducing poverty, and the world is on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the proportion of people whose income is less than USD 1.25 a day, it is far from achieving the overarching MDG goal of eradicating extreme poverty. Subsequently, “getting to zero” remains a challenge in the face of the intractable difficulties of reaching those mired in extreme poverty, says the OECD Development Co-operation Report (DCR) 2013, which explores what needs to be done to achieve rapid and sustainable progress in the global fight to reduce poverty. But Erik Solheim, a former Norwegian Minister of International Development, and current Chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, insists in an Editorial to the Report that ‘We Can, And Must, End Poverty’.