UN Agency Defers Action Cutting Ties to Tobacco Industry
Close-up of a woman hands hold and broke a cigarette. Credit: Bigstock
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2017 (IPS) – Back in November 2008, the 193-member General Assembly decided, by consensus, to ban smoking and tobacco sales at the UN headquarters in New York: a ruling observed by all affiliated agencies worldwide, including the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) which has severed links with the tobacco industry.
But there still remains one holdout: the 187-member International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva whose Governing Body, which meets three times a year, has postponed once again its decision on whether or not to cut ILO’s ties with the tobacco industry.
The executive body’s deliberations remained deadlocked at a meeting in early November resulting in a second postponement of a decision to sever ties with an industry, whose products are …
Keeping Jewelry Companies Accountable: Where Do Our Gold and Diamonds Come From?
Former “Blood Diamonds” now Provide Employment. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/ IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 2018 (IPS) – How many people know where their gold and diamond jewelry comes from?
How many people consider the human cost of its production?
Not many consumers ask these questions, and, shockingly, neither do many of the world’s leading jewelry brands.
It’s a trend that Human Rights Watch (HRW) is trying to change with a new social media campaign, #BehindTheBling.
“We want people to think about where their jewelry comes from,” Jo Becker, Advocacy Director of the Children’s Rights Division at HRW, told IPS.
“Importantly, we want people to tell the brands that. We want them to write, to tweet, to call the big companies to put pressure on them to guarantee that their gold and diamonds are not coming from places that are c…
Valuing the Food System
Danielle Nierenberg is Founder and President of . Emily Payne is a food and agriculture writer based in New York
Credit: Bigstock
NEW ORLEANS, United States, May 29 2018 (IPS) – Many factors contribute to the cost of a tomato. For example, what inputs were used (water, soil, fertilizer, pesticides, as well as machinery and/or labor) to grow it? What kind of energy and materials were used to process and package it? Or how much did transportation cost to get it to the shelf?
But that price doesn’t always reflect how the plant was grown—overuse and misuse of antibiotics, water pollution from pesticide runoff, or whether or not farm workers harvesting the tomatoes were paid a fair wage. It turns out cheap food often comes with an enormously expensive cost to human and planetary health.
Take Charge of Your Food: Your Health is Your Business
Sunita Narain is Director-General of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) & Editor of Down to Earth magazine in New Delhi
Credit: IPS
NEW DELHI, Aug 17 2018 (IPS) – The minimum we expect from the government is to differentiate between right and wrong. But when it comes to regulating our food, it’s like asking for too much. . The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)’s pollution monitoring laboratory tested 65 samples of processed food for presence of genetically modified (GM) ingredients.
The results are both bad and somewhat good. Of the food samples tested, some 32 per cent were positive for GM markers. That’s bad. What’s even worse is that we found GM in infant food, which is sold by US pharma firm, Abbott Laboratories, for toddlers with ailments; in one case it was for lactose intolerant infants and the other hypoallergenic�…
Why We Should Care about Vulnerable Coastal Communities
Nigel Brett is Director of the Asia and Pacific Division at the International Fund for Agricultural Development
Meity Masipuang is a member of an enterprise group in Papusungan village, Lembeh island, Indonesia. Their women’s group purchases fish to smoke and resell. They are participants of the IFAD-funded Coastal Community Development project in Indonesia. Credit: IFAD/Roger Arnold
ROME, Jan 16 2019 (IPS) – According to UN statistics, approximately 40 per cent of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast, and overall the world’s coastal population is increasing faster than the total global population. At the same time, global warming is causing sea levels to rise and increasing extreme weather incidents on coastlines.
The impacts are well publicized and alarming. But what we may not realize is that the people who ar…
Revealed — A Roadmap to Defeat Tobacco Tax & Keep Indonesians Addicted
Dr. Ulysses Dorotheo is Executive Director of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA)*
BANGKOK, Thailand, Apr 11 2019 (IPS) – The image of a smoking toddler from Indonesia horrified the world but did little to motivate local policy makers to enact measures to protect children and youth from the harms of tobacco use. Indonesia has one of the world’s highest smoking rates where two out of three men and about 40 percent of adolescent boys smoke.
Cigarette prices in Indonesia are among the cheapest in the region, where a pack of Marlboros is sold for as little as US$ 1.70, while local brands or loose sticks are dirt cheap ($ 0.05 per stick), easily affordable to the nation’s 65 million smokers.
Indonesia has a complex tobacco taxation structure of 12-tiers, dividing between machine-made white cigarettes, machine-made Kretek cigarettes, hand-rolled ci…
Nothing For Us, Without Us – Hansen’s Disease-Affected Tell International Gathering
Jennifer Quimno of the Coalition of Leprosy Advocates of the Philippines (CLAP) (centre) is joined by Sri Lanka’s Shagana Thiygalingam (L) and Amarasinghe Manjula (R) after Quimno delivered the recommendations presented by the Global Forum of People’s Organisations on Hansen’s Disease to the International Leprosy Congress in Manila on September 11. Credit: Ben Kritz/IPS
MANILA, Sep 11 2019 (IPS) – Stronger government action to fight stigma and discrimination, more government funding for health and non-health support programmes, and a larger role for people’s organisations in developing policy towards Hansen s disease treatment and eradication are still needed for eliminating the disease.
This was some of the recommendations made by participants of the first ever Global Forum of People’s Organisations on Hansen’s Disease today, Sept. 11 during a presenta…
Women with Disabilities Speak out Against Exclusion at ICPD25
Jeffrey Jordan/ President of the Population Reference Bureau with ICPD25 participants. Credit: Joyce Chimbi / IPS
NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 13 2019 (IPS) – One in five women globally lives with a disability even as they have same needs and interests as women without disabilities, their access to sexual and reproductive health services and rights remains severely limited.
Delegates representing people living with disabilities at the ICPD25 Conference painted a grim picture of barriers and challenges they face.
“We are perceived to be asexual and therefore offering us reproductive health information is considered wasteful,” says Josephta Mukobe, principal secretary of the Kenya’s Ministry of Culture and Sports.
Motherhood remains taboo for differently abled women
Mukobe says motherhood for them is taboo, and that a pregnant w…
Women Activists Escalate Demand for “Bodily Autonomy” as 19 Nations Dissent
Credit: UN Women
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2020 (IPS) – The United States and 18 other UN member states have come under fire for denying a woman’s legitimate right to “bodily autonomy”—the right to self-governance over one’s own body without coercion or external pressure.
The Executive Director of Women’s March Global, Uma Mishra-Newbery, told IPS the United Nations has worked towards progress in fighting for women s rights.
But many countries on the Human Rights Council continue to negotiate women s human rights off the table, she pointed out.
In Sept 2019, she said, the world watched as the US, in partnership with 18 other member states, put forth a statement saying there is no international right to abortion.
She said UN member states have also witnessed “the continued and grave human rights violations in Saudi Arabia”, inclu…
Use Stimulus Packages for Longer Term Progress
SYDNEY, Mar 18 2020 (IPS) – The coronavirus pandemic seems to have finally forced governments around the world to ditch their obsession (at least for the moment) with delivering budget surplus. As stock markets tumble, stimulus measures, worth billions of dollars, are announced to boost investor confidence and consumer spending to keep economies running.
Anis Chowdhury
The shift in fiscal strategy is welcome; hopefully the measures will provide some relief to the struggling individuals, families and businesses. But they are short-sighted in so far as most proposed measures do not address the underlying economic malaise even before Covid-19 pandemic.
Fraught with risk
Even though some individuals and businesses may face cash-flow problem, this is not a liquidity crisis. It is primarily a supply shock to the global production or ‘value’ chains due …