CWS Update December 2008
Days to note
- 1 World AIDS Day
- 2 International Day for the Abolition of Slavery
- 3 International Day of Disabled Persons
- 5 International Volunteer Day
- 10 Human Rights Day
- 18 International Migrants Day
>>Congo crisis: CWS partners delivering aid read more
>>Deepening food crisis: American writer and journalist,
Sharon Smith, explains that the source of worsening global hunger is a
system that puts greed first read more
>> Wall Street crash: Poor are bailing out the rich read more
>>Uganda peace process: hopes are high for the signing of
a peace agreement ending the conflict with the Lords Resistance Army
that has terrorised North Uganda since 1986 read more
>>Climate Change Refugees: Climate refugees from the Carterets Islanders are being resettled as rising sea levels inundate their atoll homeland read more
Congo: ACT Members Deliver Initial Assistance
Despite the lack of humanitarian access, several CWS partners through
ACT International (Action by Churches Together have been able to
deliver some initial assistance to communities displaced by the
conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). However
the security situation has made it extremely difficult to keep up
consistent supplies and to reach all the internally-displaced people.
The ACT members started by distributing 14-day food rations and a stock
of medicines to a health centre in the Minova area. A therapeutic
feeding centre has continued to assist 90 children throughout the
fighting. ACT International is now implementing a plan to provide
water and sanitation facilities and trauma counselling has started.
Another part of the plan is to provide agricultural inputs, such as
seed, to people in the areas which have taken in displaced people so
those communities will not run short of food supplies.
Internally displaced people have been spending their nights on bare
ground and under the open sky without food, shelter, medical or
material assistance. It is the height of the rainy season with the risk
of disease increasing, combined with a hunger crisis. In addition,
vulnerable families are at even greater risk as many local health
centres have been looted. As fighting pauses and flares again there are
reports of looting, killing and raping of civilians as uncontrolled
elements of armed groups flee the battlefront.
The Geneva office of the UN World Food Programme reports that between
1.4 million and 2 million people are displaced in North Kivu, including
those uprooted from earlier waves of fighting since 2007. It is
estimated 250,000 of them have left their homes since the fighting
intensified in August and thousands have reportedly fled to other
countries including Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.
The security situation in the eastern DRC remains precarious, but ACT
International members continue to work together to respond in these
very difficult conditions. CWS is accepting donations to be channelled
through ACT International to assist people whose outlook at present is
grim. Please respond today! CWS, PO Box 22652, Christchurch 8142 -
Ph: 0800 74 73 72 or donate online
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The Deepening Food Crisis: Can They Eat Ethanol?
American writer and journalist, Sharon Smith, explains that the source
of worsening global hunger is a system that puts greed first.
“Wall Street millionaires have spent months mourning their losses from
once ridiculously overvalued investments. Yet these same free-market
cheerleaders remain blissfully unaware of the magnitude of the crisis
facing the real victims of the unfolding global meltdown they so
enthusiastically enabled.
“For the 3 billion people who survive on less than $2 a day, the upward
spiral in global food prices has meant a struggle for the most basic of
human rights—the right to eat. Rice, bread and tortillas are the staple
foods for this half of the world’s population. A global rice shortage
has seen prices of one of the world’s most important staple foods
increase by 50 percent, triggering an international crisis.”
Smith cites events such as food riots around the world, then goes on:
“The problem is usually described as a food ‘shortage’ in the
mainstream press, but World Food Programme Executive Director Josette
Sheeran has said about sub-Saharan Africa, ‘We are seeing more urban
hunger than ever before. Often, we are seeing food on the shelves, but
people being unable to afford it.’
“This crisis shows it can no longer be claimed that all of those
residing in the global North gain prosperity at the expense of the
global South - for the unregulated greed, unleashed over 30 years of
neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world’s poorest countries, is
now exposing the class divide in the world’s richest. Hunger is also
rising in the US to a level not seen in decades, with food staples such
as milk rising 17 percent over the last year; rice, pasta and bread
over 12 percent; and eggs increasing by 25 percent. As job losses mount
in the current recession, an unprecedented 28 million Americans are
receiving food stamps to survive…
“The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable
industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed, the
automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in
the world, has become one of the world’s largest beef processors,
demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the
agribusiness sector. Just as it wiped out small US farmers in the
1980s, it has repeated this pattern around the world ever since.
“Now the market for biofuels has reduced the production of corn for
food by 25 percent in the US, triggering a rise in corn prices that has
encouraged speculators to hoard crops on the expectation that prices
will rise further.”
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Wall Street Crisis: Poor to Bail Out Rich Again
If
the US public feels blackmailed and swindled, they are not alone.
Noted writer Walden Bello, in Manila, says there is growing trepidation
in the Third World, where the crisis looks like “a replay, though on a
much larger scale, of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which brought
down the red-hot ‘tiger economies’ of the East”.
“Trillions of dollars of Asian public and private money are invested in
US firms and property, with the five biggest Asian holders accounting
for over half of all foreign investment in US government debt
instruments. Funds from Asia have become a key prop of US government
spending and the middle-class consumption that has become the driver of
the American economy. With so much of Asia’s wealth relying on the
stability of the US economy, there is not likely to be any precipitate
move to abandon Wall Street securities and US Treasury bills...
“There is, moreover, resignation throughout Asia about the
inevitability of a deep US recession and its likely massive impact on
the East: the United States is China’s top export destination, while
China imports raw materials and intermediate goods from Japan, Korea
and Southeast Asia to shape into the products it sends to the US.
Despite some talk a few months ago about the possibility that the
economic fate of Asia could be ‘decoupled’ from that of the US, most
observers now see these economies as members of a chain gang shackled
to one another, at least in the short and medium term.”
Others are suggesting that trillions could be spent on real needs. The
hundreds of billions being wasted on the string of corporate bailouts
already overtakes the at least $750 billion the US has spent on the
ongoing wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. And soon it could
match the three trillion US dollars spent globally on arms. Instead,
says Jose Ramon Machado, Cuba’s vice president, “While a trillion of
dollars is spent on weapons in the world, more than 850 million human
beings are starving; 1.1 billion people don’t have access to drinking
water, 2.6 billion lack sewage services and more than 800 million are
illiterate. More than 640 million children lack adequate housing, 115
million do not attend primary school and 10 million die before the age
of five, in most cases as the result of diseases that can be cured.”
All of these problems could easily be eliminated with a fraction of the
bail-out money, and Machado added, “The formula is not difficult nor
does it require great sacrifices. All we need is the necessary
political will, less egotism and the objective understanding that if we
do not act today, the consequences could be apocalyptic and would
affect rich and poor alike.”
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Uganda: Peace Soon for another Troubled Land?
Roman
Catholic Archbishop John Baptist Odama from northern Uganda has said he
is optimistic about a final peace agreement between the country’s
government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, in spite of alleged
attacks by the insurgents near their base in the neighbouring
Democratic Republic of Congo. Odama is chairperson of the Acholi
Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative that has been trying to broker a
peace agreement between the Ugandan government and the rebel forces.
Fredrick Nzwili, reporting for Ecumenical News International, says,
With its streets full of bicycle riders transporting luggage or
passengers alongside mini buses, Gulu in northern Uganda looks as
peaceful as any small African town. However, its inhabitants, who say
they want nothing but peace, have to come to terms with the terrible
crimes that have been committed here during 22 years of civil war.
“Since 1986 the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels have waged a war
with the alleged goal of replacing President Yoweri Museveni’s
government with one based on the biblical ten commandments. It has
abducted children and forcefully recruited them into its ranks, adults
have been killed, mutilated or kidnapped, women have been raped. As a
consequence, nearly 2 million people fled into camps. However church
leaders now say the movement of people is ‘very free’, compared to the
situation before the peace negotiations.
“The peace talks between the LRA and the government led to a truce in
2006 and a permanent ceasefire in 2008. The comprehensive peace
agreement is awaiting the signature of rebel leader Joseph Kony and
President Museveni.
“The churches are keen to see people re-build their lives again.
Priorities on their agenda are poverty eradication, ensuring that
children go back to school, and support for those who are traumatised.”
The challenge of reconciliation: According to Justice Peter Onega, the
chairman of the Uganda Amnesty Commission, nearly 23,000 former rebel
fighters have returned to civilian lives in northern Uganda since the
parliament passed an amnesty act in 2000. Although the communities are
traumatised by the brutality they have faced during the war, many say
they are ready to forgive the LRA. Many refugees hope they can
re-build their houses and live in them next year, instead of returning
to the camps every evening after the daily work on their farms. But
since the final peace agreement has not been signed, many are still
apprehensive.
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Climate Change: Carteret Islanders to be resettled
The
first 40 families of Carterets Island, north of Ontong Java of Malaita
Province are to be resettled to Bougainville by March next year.
Bougainville Administrator Raymond Masono says they are still
negotiating with owners for land on which they could resettle the
islanders as their permanent home, under the major climate change
resettlement exercise. This exercise will cost the Autonomous
Bougainville and Papua New Guinea Governments millions of dollars,
starting next year and through to 2014.
The one-thousand five hundred residents of Carterets Island, an atoll
of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, are fast becoming the world's
first climate change refugees, according to a recent United Nations
Report. Sea levels around the atoll have risen 10 centimetres in the
past 20 years, inundating plantations.
A third of the population has refused to leave their island because,
they claim, they have spent all their lives there and will not move -
they say they will sink and vanish with the island.
The situation is deteriorating, other islanders have told officials.
They say they urgently need assistance to be relocated to higher
ground. The ABG administration has already set up a committee to work
on the resettlement programme to mainland Bougainville.
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