Prafulla Samantara: indigenous land rights' champion

Samantara with the Dongria Kondh/ Credit: Goldman Environmental Prize

 

 

Prafulla Samantara has been threatened, kidnapped and jailed trying to stop a huge mining project on sacred tribal land in Odisha, India.  But he is not afraid and, at 65, not ready to retire. ‘I will keep on fighting until my last breath. I cannot betray the people, the cause,’ he told me when I met him in London in late Spring.

The Indian social justice activist won the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize  for Asia for his 12-year campaign to block the mine and for securing indigenous communities’ voting rights on such projects.

From a young age, he witnessed the impact of mining and industrial development on small farming communities and the growing inequalities between rich and poor. ‘I’ve seen working people and those at the bottom of society being exploited and suffering. Equality and justice became my guiding principles.’

Yet he recognizes that development is necessary, but not at all costs. ‘In India, 60 million people have been displaced over the last 60 years because of big projects such as mining and dams. Indigenous people are not consulted. They are marginalized, even though they are the owners and guardians of natural resources.’

Odisha, the eastern Indian state on the Bay of Bengal where he grew up, is known for its pristine forests, high mountain peaks and numerous rivers; but also for its vast reserve of minerals – almost a third of the state is under mining concessions.

The Odisha Mining Company had agreed a deal with London-based Vedanta Resources to gouge a $2 billion open-pit bauxite mine on the Dongria Kondh’s land without consulting them. 

‘The Dongria Kondh don’t believe in religion, but in nature. The Niyamgiri Hills are their gods. They get everything from them: their entire livelihood and their social and cultural identity. They believe it’s their duty to protect them at all cost.’ The mine would not only have destroyed their homeland, but also polluted water for millions downstream as far as the Bay of Bengal, and destroyed large areas of protected forests which are home to rare wildlife including elephants and the Bengal tiger. In anticipation of receiving the mining licences, Vedanta illegally annexed 148 acres of forest and bulldozed 12 villages.

You can read my article on Samantara for New Internationalist here.

Trouble in Paradise: Solomon Islands’ traditions foster inequality

Solomon Islands/ credit: olli0815 /bigstock.com

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Solomon Islands, the string of paradise-looking green islands tucked away in the South Pacific, is a place of exotic beauty where life flows at a gentle pace.  But it also a country with one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world.  And the violence is widely accepted as "the way things are".

A new report by the Equal Rights Trust shows that strong traditions, such as Kastom (Pijin for custom) and Wantok ('one talk') reinforce clan ties, but also emphasise differences and foster discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, disability and sexual orientation.

In particular, the report highlights widespread discrimination against women, which is directly connected to Kastom - in this case, the patriarchal attitudes and gender stereotypes typified by the Bigman culture, whereby communities look to a strong male figure to provide leadership and consider women as inferior to men.

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Members of Solomon Islands YWCA march during International Women’s Day in Honiara by DFAT/Credit:Jeremy Miller

“We found that women are effectively second-class citizens in Solomon Islands; they are invisible in all areas of politics and government and do not participate equally with men in any area of life. Violence against women is alarmingly widespread and widely accepted by both men and women,” said Executive Director of the Equal Rights Trust, Dr Dimitrina Petrova.

Statistics highlighted in the report are startling: more than half of all women experienced sexual violence by an intimate partner and 64% of women between 15 and 49 suffered violence at home.

During a focus group discussion for the report, one woman summarised male attitudes towards women in these terms: “You women are here on earth to give birth and work for us men, and we are your bosses; so do as we say.”

In travel guides, the former British protectorate south-east of Papua New Guinea is presented as a friendly melting pot of cultures and traditions, but the report found serious discrimination between those of different Wantok, community groups based on shared linguistic and cultural heritage.  “Our research found compelling evidence of concern amongst Solomon Islanders that those in positions of power abuse their authority and make corrupt decisions in favour of their Wantok group,” says Petrova.

In addition, the report found that people with disabilities are perceived as “cursed” and denied equality of participation in education, employment and healthcare. And lesbian, gay and bisexual persons are subject to severe social stigma.

The report argues that if Solomon Islands is to move on from the civil unrest, which brought the country to the brink of collapse between 1998 and 2003, its people must stand up and fight traditions which exacerbate difference on the basis of ethnicity, gender, disability and sexual orientation. 

Child Marriages Blight Bangladesh

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Nargis who was forced to marry at 12

Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with 20% of girls becoming wives before their 15th birthday, even though 18 is the minimum age allowed by law for a girl to marry and 21 for a boy.

Many young girls are made to give up their education to marry and raise families when they reach puberty because they are seen as a financial burden with less potential to contribute to the household income than a son. Arranging for a daughter to marry an older man can seem like a good way to secure her future and a younger bride can mean lower dowry payments for her parents.

Child brides drop out of school and are rarely allowed to work.  Often they become victims of domestic violence.  They lose their childhood completely. And with their bodies too young for child bearing, pregnancy results in serous health risks for both mother and child.

“I was 12 when child marriage shattered all my dreams,” says Nargis who is now 19.  “On the day itself I was frightened: again and again I felt fear, fear, fear. Once my grandmother and sister had gone, I had to go and live with my husband. I didn’t know him. That night I felt strange, and very scared.

“I feel very bad, because instead of going to school I live at my father-in-law's house and do all the household work. When I was at home I could share my feelings and emotions. Now that I’m married I don’t have any say and I have to abide by what my husband and my father and mother-in-law decide.

“Two years after my marriage, when I was 14, I gave birth to a baby boy, but there were complications after the birth. He survived for 16 days but then he died," Nargis says.

"It is the new kind of slavery," says Mirna Ming Ming Evora, country director for the NGO Plan International, a global children’s charity, focusing among other issues on early and forced marriages. "Here girls are a burden, they don't earn income in this culture,”  she says.

“Behind our parents’ decisions to marry girls young is poverty – extreme poverty. If our parents get a good offer, sometimes it is very difficult to change their minds,” explains Oli.

Oli is an amazing 12-year old boy, who is a member of a Plan’s children’s group in northern Dhaka, raising awareness of the impact of early and forced marriages on girls and society in general. 

They perform street dramas and step in directly when they hear a marriage is planned. “We go to see the parents and try to get them to stop the marriage,” Oli says. “We have tried this on many occasions - sometimes with success and sometimes we are not able to stop the marriage.” Plan staff in Bangladesh know of four child marriages that Oli’s club has directly prevented in his small district of the Bashentak slum alone.

In this short video of Oli explaining how boys can make a difference.
 

There are 25 children in Oli’s organisation and Plan has 60 similar clubs across the country. Plan has reached an estimated one million people with its anti-child marriage work while Oli himself has reached about 50,000.

Oli is one of  three children affected by child marriage - Oli, Poppy and Jemi - whose experiences is featured on Angus Crawford's Crossing Continents on Radio 4 today, Thursday 26 April, at 11:00 BST and again on Monday 30 April at 20:30 BST. You can listen online, download the podcast and browse the archive.

A TV documentary on child marriage will also be featured on BBC World News GMT: Fri 27th April 13:30 and Sat 28th April 11:30 and 23:30; and on BBC News Channel BST:  Sat 28th April 05:30, 14:30, 21:30 and Sun 29th April 03:30, 10:30, 22:30.

BBC team filming with Plan's children's group in Bashantek slum, Dhaka

 Sign Plan's petition to stop child marriage here.

Vietnam coffee - A better future is percolating for Vietnam's coffee

Ripe coffee cherries ready for picking on a Rainforest Alliance certified farm in Vietnam/Veronique Mistiaen

I recently went to the central highlands region of Vietnam to look at the terrible environmental cost the country is paying for its spectacular coffee growth over the past two decades. Now the country is trying to undo the damages and put itself on a more sustainable path.

Here is my story, published in the Guardian yesterday.

  

 A better future is percolating for Vietnam's coffee

 The spectacular growth of coffee in Vietnam came at a terrible environmental cost. Now conservation groups are working with food multinationals to ensure quality and sustainable production

A coffee picker from the ethnic minority Edê. Photograph: Veronique Mistiaen

The velvety coffee slowly dripping from the filter into my glass is bitter and dark. But once mixed with the sweet, silky condensed milk at the bottom, it turns into a rich chocolaty brew. It is a fitting metaphor for the story of coffee in Vietnam.

French colonists introduced coffee here in 1857. The central highlands region – known as Buon Ma Thuot – proved a perfect area for growing robusta beans. But a century later, the Vietnam war devastated the country and coffee production was severely disrupted.

After the long war, the government, supported by development agencies, launched a vast coffee-growing programme in the region to help put the country on the road to recovery. Its success has been astonishing.

In just two decades, Vietnam went from the scorched earth of Agent Orange to become the second coffee exporter in the world after Brazil, and the number one for robusta – one of the two main coffee species, often used in instant coffee. (Arabica, the other main variety, is grown at a higher altitude and comprises about 75% of world production).

This spectacular comeback has been a huge boon to the economy – coffee is Vietnam's key export, generating an income of more than $1.5bn. In total, the coffee sector represents 3% of national GDP, providing a livelihood for around 2.6 million people – 600,000 of them farmers and many from minority ethnic groups. Only 5% to 7% of the total production is used for domestic consumption; the rest is exported, mostly to the US and Europe.

But the coffee miracle has come at a terrible cost. In the 1990s, when coffee price was high, entire forests were razed to make space for more coffee, grown as a monoculture with heavy use of agrochemicals and over-irrigation. While the acreage under coffee expanded rapidly, the development of training and processing infrastructure could not keep up.

The proliferation of poorly managed coffee farms (coffee in Vietnam is mostly grown on small family-run farms of two to five acres), where beans were cultivated with little regard for the environment, resulted in a glut of low quality beans that drove export prices down, contributing to the global collapse of coffee prices in the 2000s. It has also caused widespread pollution, soil and water degradation, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity in one of the most biologically diverse countries in south-east Asia.

Coffee pickers with their harvest after a long day of work/Veronique Mistiaen

 Aside from the catastrophic impact on the environment and the quality of its beans, coffee in Vietnam is now facing new challenges, such as adaptation to climate change, a younger generation not wanting to be farmers and a global market changing from oversupply with record low prices to supply shortage with high prices (and as China and India are developing a taste for coffee, the demand is likely to skyrocket).

These issues are so critical that, for the first time, the government, farmers, traders and global food giants see the need to develop sustainable practices. They are working with social and conservation groups such as the Rainforest Alliance, the 4C Association and the Fairtrade Foundation to find ways to make coffee farming more productive, while reducing the cost on the environment.

Measuring women's empowerment

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Rina Begum, who participated in one of the SHOUHARDO women's empowerment programs in Bangladesh. Once prohibited from leaving her home without a male escort, Rina blossomed into a member of three school committees and the leader of an EKATA group that, among other things, stopped four child marriages.  EKATA groups are women's self-help groups formed as part of the SHOUHARDO project/ Credit: Akram Ali/CARE)

 I’ve read many inspiring stories about mothers’ achievements around Mother’s Day (celebrated last Sunday in the UK), but one particularly caught my attention. It is a story about the measurable impact of empowering women.

Many NGOs have shown the transformative ripple effects of women’s empowerment, but a recent report by the Institute of Development Studies actually measured it. 

In the poorest villages of Bangladesh, economists and nutrition experts were shocked at the results of a program designed to fight malnutrition and poverty among more than 2 million of the country’s poorest people.

Funded by USAID and implemented by CARE, the $126 million SHOUHARDO ("friendship" in Bangla) project included a wide array of interventions, from child feeding and sustainable agriculture to sanitation and climate change adaptation. But researchers discovered that another force had actually produced the greatest independent impact. The game-changer? Women’s empowerment.

Efforts to combat deeply entrenched disparities between women and men had reduced stunting (a measure of child malnutrition) even more than giving women and their children regular rations of wheat, vegetable oil and yellow split peas. 

These gender-equality efforts included promoting female entrepreneurship and supporting self-help groups where women could address taboo topics like early marriage, dowry and violence against women. Once reluctant to leave their homes, the women of SHOUHARDO started travelling to markets to buy and sell goods. Detailed surveys revealed that their influence over household decisions — from the use of savings to what foods to buy — increased too. At the same time, their children were growing healthier — and taller. This was empowerment you could measure with a yard stick.

This is a poster hanging in the room where Rina's EKATA group meets. It describes key elements of an empowered woman. The phrases, translated roughly from Bangla, include "able to speak anywhere with courage" and "participates in the general election process."/Credit: Akram Ali/CARE

“Women who participated in the empowerment interventions were getting better antenatal care, eating more nutritious food and getting more rest during pregnancy. They and their children also had better diets,” says Lisa Smith, a senior economist at TANGO International, the firm hired to evaluate the project.

The report’s results underscore why CARE and other NGOs believe that “greater gender equality is the key to fighting poverty, hunger and injustice around the world,” says Dr. Helene Gayle, CARE president and CEO.

Child trafficking in India - Rubina's return

Rubina's emotional reunion with her beloved grandmother/Fjona Hill

India is the fourth most dangerous country in the world for women, right after Afghanistan, DRC and Pakistan, according to a newly released global survey by the Thompson Reuters Foundation (I wrote a blogpost about the report a couple of weeks ago).  This unexpected distinction for the world’s largest democracy is due largely to the high numbers of women and girls trafficked in the country every year.  

It is estimated that 100 million people, mostly women and girls, were involved in trafficking in India in 2009 alone, according to the report.  Across the world, some of 1.2 million children are trafficked every year into prostitution, forced labour, child marriage, begging and other slavery-like conditions.

Rubina is one of them.  She was just ten when her father took her away from their small rural village in India’s Andhra Pradesh and sold her as a domestic slave in nearby Bangalore.

Photographer Fjona Hill followed her return home, after the little girl ran away and was taken to a Government’s Girls Home. There, Oasis, an NGO working with trafficked children, gave her counselling, traced her parents and brought her home. 

Although Rubina was luckier than most trafficked children, her story is fairly typical.

She lived with her parents, two young sisters and an elder bother in Chinampalle, a small Muslim village of 500 mud huts, where people eke out a meagre living off farming and stone mining.

Her father, a stone miner, could only find work two or three days a week, while her mother worked as a coolie (carrier) and toiled in the fields.  The family often went without food, and was in debt.  Rubina frequently bunked school and her father was convinced she was mentally unstable.  

Rubina arrives at her village and looks for her family/ Fjona Hill

  

Like most trafficked victims, Rubina had no idea what awaited her in Bangalore. Her father had told her he was taking her to an Islamic school, but sold her to a lady as a domestic servant instead.

In her case, the “dalal”, as recruiters are known in India, was her father – and that is not uncommon. Many children from poor families are sold by parents and relatives, who might not grasp the full implication of their actions.   Dalals can also be friends, neighbours, people who have been trafficked themselves, as well as corrupt police officers, passport officials and taxi/rickshaw drivers.  They haunt bus stops, railway stations and streets of deprived areas looking for potential victims, and use drugs, abduction, kidnapping, persuasion and deception to catch them.

Rubina kneels at her mother's feet as she explains where she had been taken by her father. A woman from the village looks on/Fjona Hill

 Rubina managed to escape, something few achieve, and was welcomed back into her village. The village elders disciplined the father. If she had been trafficked as a sex worker instead of a domestic servant, she might have been rejected by her family or her family would have been forced to leave their village because of the stigma and shame brought onto the household.

Oasis workers have been visiting Rubina recently. “She is now doing well and going to school, and the whole village are keeping an eye on her,” says Anita Kanaiya, Oasis executive director. 

For more information on Oasis, click here and to donate to the charity, click here.

Pakistani women need support

Last week, I wrote an entry about the world’s most dangerous places for women. Pakistan came third on the basis of cultural, tribal and religious practices harmful to women, according to a global report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

 
A few days later, I was approached by the head of a non-profit organization working for women’s rights and peace in Pakistan. She was asking for help.

Dr. Shabnam Nazli contacted me through the online women’s network PeaceXPeace, a grassroots community of women who share cross-cultural solutions to achieve peace in their families, communities and in the world.

Dr. Nazli is the chair of Hope Development Organization, founded in 1997 by a group of feminists to address and combat the “daily abuses and crimes against women in Pakistan, such as child marriage, honour killing, domestic violence, acid throwing, bride burning, dowry death, murder of pregnant women, human trafficking, sexual violence and female genital mutilation,” she says.

Despite some government’s actions, violence and discrimination against women remain rampant, as the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s TurstLaw global report testifies. “It is difficult to work for peace and equality in an environment of deep-seated traditionalism, terrorism, political instability and bad economy,” says Dr Nazli.   90% of Pakistani women experience domestic violence in their lifetimes. Women in the country earn 82% less than men and 1000 women and girls are victims of honour killings ever year, according to the global report.

HDO is doing much needed work to educate and empower women, and provide health services and skills training.  But they lack the resources needed to keep going.  “We need your encouragement and your help to continue working,” Dr Nazli pleads.

Please, visit HDO website and send messages of support,  and if you can donations.