Four Years to Doomsday: Checking In on The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (REPORT)

(VIDEO: IlluminatiOrderNWO/YOUTUBE)

By Ross Andersen

For its fourth birthday, Svalbard will receive seeds from war-torn Syria and celebrate years of success preserving our inheritance from Neolithic times.

The world's agricultural hard drive, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, turns four years old today.

(PHOTO: The Svalbard Seed Vault/Richard Wagner) The vault was a media sensation when it first opened in 2008, but it hasn't been in the news much since. I figured it was time to check in and see how these first four years have gone. An awesome technology by any measure, the vault is a steely compound tunneled five hundred feet into an icy mountain in the Norwegian Arctic, just 600 miles from the North Pole.

It is designed to last a thousand years, and to withstand a wide range of global disasters, including climate change, nuclear war, and even an asteroid strike. Over the past four years the vault has amassed some 740,000 seed samples and eventually it may house every crop seed ever used by a human being. 

The vault stores duplicates of the holdings of local seed banks all over the world, insuring against seed loss in the event of a local or global catastrophe. It functions like a safety deposit box; samples can be accessed by their depositing seed banks, but if researchers or plant breeders wish to access the seeds, they must request samples directly from those banks. 

(PHOTO: interestinEngineering.com) Security at the facility is state of the art and fully automated---there is no full-time staff and no single person has all the codes necessary for entrance. Nor is there much traffic inside, for new seeds are only accepted a few days a year. Today's fourth anniversary will bring several new seed shipments to the vault, including an ancient grain called amaranth, a favorite of the Aztecs and Incas, and a malting barley from the Pacific Northwest called "Klages," which is used in many craft beers.

Cary Fowler is the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which maintains the vault in partnership with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resources Center.

I talked to Cary about the vault's anniversary, its importance, and the future of agriculture.

When I think about the seed vault, the first thing that stands out to me is that it's really a technology of deep time, a way of coping with the kinds of events that happen on very broad time scales.

Q:  Do you see any other technologies or institutions outside the world of agriculture as playing a similar role as yours?

Fowler:  I haven't given it a lot of thought, so I guess I would say no. We tried to design this facility to last as far as we could see into the future. We didn't actually plan this to be what some in the media have called it, which is a doomsday vault. We're not people who run around with signs saying "repent the end is near." In fact we realized that unfortunately the vault was probably going to be used sooner rather than later. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, there was a fire in the national gene bank in the Philippines and two years before that they experienced a flood, so you don't have to have some kind of global catastrophe for this thing to be useful. We're losing biodiversity right now, and it isn't necessarily because of some global catastrophe.

But of course I have to acknowledge that even though we weren't planning for doomsday, the facility is such that it would provide a lot of protection for many large catastrophes depending on where they occurred, but that wasn't the original impetus for the project.

(PHOTO: Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust/MEMPHISFLYER) Q:  You first opened for seeds in 2008, which means you've been at this for four years now. What's the most surprising thing you've learned in that time?

Fowler:  Things have moved a lot faster than I expected. I think most people thought that the day we opened we would have every seed that we wanted or needed, or that it would come shortly thereafter, but those of us in the field know that that's not the way it happens. The seed banks themselves are typically not sitting on such large quantities of seeds that they can just immediately divide them and send them up to the vault in Norway. Even though it's for safety purposes, they still have to multiply the seeds and clean them and package them up and send them, and that takes time, and so it's been a nice surprise to see how quickly things are moving.

The other surprise is that we've had no bad surprises. When you plan something this  complicated you figure something is going to go wrong. During these past four years we've had seeds come from all over the world and it's been a gigantic coordination process to try to get seed boxes from all of these locations, a lot of which are in developing countries---Africa, Asia and Latin America---and to try to get them up to Oslo and then up to Svalbard on roughly the same day, so you don't have them sitting out on some tarmac in the hot sun. It's also surprising that we haven't lost a single box of seeds in transit. It's a miracle.

Q:  Where does the seed vault rank on the list of agricultural innovations, from the first crude stone sickles to the more sophisticated technologies of industrial farming?

(PHOTO: Inside the Svalbard Seed Vault stacks/WIRED) Fowler:  It's hard to say. What we hope to do is to provide robust and secure conservation for what's left of agricultural diversity. This is the inheritance of the Neolithic times and our time and everything in between, and so I guess I see it as a library, a library of life, that gives the history and culture of agriculture and protects it, but it's also a resource for the future. And so I'm not sure where it ranks, but I do think it's extremely important given the challenges that agriculture is facing right now, but it's not in and of itself a solution to those problems and it's not the only thing we should be doing.

Q:  As you see it what are the biggest challenges agriculture is facing right now?

Fowler:  Climate change is obviously the big one, but there are others; water availability is a big problem, so is nutrient availability, particularly phosphorous. And all of this is in the context of growing demand, both from increased population and from development pressures. As people get wealthier they tend to gravitate towards more meat-based diets, and it requires a lot more agricultural crop production to produce that meat. So we have all of those things happening and at the same time we don't have huge increases in agricultural investments, and so in a way we're really behind the game in terms of producing new crop varieties that are going to be adapted to these conditions. We need our crops to produce more on less land, with less water and less nutrients, and in a changing climate. Any one of those problems could be extremely daunting, but we're facing all of them at the same time. 

Q:  Are there scenarios you can envision that would render the earth's environments entirely inhospitable to seeds?

(PHOTO: Journalists waiting outside the Svalbard Seed Vault/The Atlantic) Fowler:  No. If the projections are correct it's certainly going to get more inhospitable, but not entirely inhospitable. The issues that I mentioned before---nutrient and water availability and climate change---are going to cause some fairly radical readjustments in agriculture if you look down the road any distance. And that's one of the things that differentiates us, the people involved in the seed vault from others, we do tend to have a long view of what's going to happen and we're trying to plan for that.

We expect that agriculture would even survive something like an asteroid strike; after all, plants survived the last one. What we're really trying to do up in Svalbard is preserve options. We're not saying that we have a crystal ball and that we know what's going to happen and we know what's needed, but we do know that the diversity we have represents an immense number of untapped options, and what we're trying to do is keep all of those options. I think it was Paul Ehrlich who said "the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts," and that's what we're trying to do.

Q:  Earlier you mentioned that these seeds represent an inheritance from Neolithic Age, and it got me thinking about a different sort of inheritance. At the seed vault do you also store the intellectual and cultural capital of agriculture?

Fowler:  In a sense we do. We don't have archives at the seed vault, but we do have a record of what is there, and even though in a sense the seed vault is a kind of safety backup for existing seed banks and their collections, you could also look at it the opposite way, which is to say that the seed banks that contribute to the seed vault are actually performing backup for the seed vault. There is redundancy in our system. Everything that's in Svalbard can be found somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the main manager of that particular portion of diversity, and those institutions maintain extensive databases that describe everything they know about the traits and characteristics of every single sample. We link back to those and in that sense we have a very good record.

(PHOTO: Tunnel leading into the Seed Vault/Seed Trust) Also, at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, we're working with some other partners to put together a large international database called Genesys which will essentially unite all of these seed banks around the world so that researchers or plant experts who, for instance, may want to take a look at the whole diversity of rice or wheat can go onto one website and see what's available and where it is and how to get samples of it and things like that. A lot of that information, characteristics and the history and so forth, is missing in some of the seed samples, but for the samples that do have it, it's quite valuable and we try to maintain it.

Q:  Why is it that Norway was chosen for this project? Is it just the geography or is there something particular about Scandinavian culture reflected in the seed vault?

Fowler:  I think it's both. There are a lot of reasons for that particular location. One of them was historical; the Nordic countries, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, were storing backup copies of some of their seeds in an abandoned mine shaft up there, so there was a precedent.

But apart from that, Norway is special. Historically there have been a number of controversies around these genetic resources, questions of ownership and access and so forth, and I think Norway was at the top of the list in terms of the countries that everyone in the room trusted. They didn't have a commercial seed industry so there was no sense of a conflict of interest or of a private interest being involved. Norway is just an unusually generous and collaborative country. When I headed the committee that undertook the feasibility study for the seed vault, and when we presented it to the government, their attitude was "if this is a valuable natural resource and Norway is the place to safeguard it, how can we say no?" And they jumped right in and built the facility at their cost.

(PHOTO: An artists rendering of the vault/interestinengineering.com) Q:  Some of your methods make it clear that terrorism is a special concern for the Seed Vault. I know that new seed shipments are screened with an airport x-ray scanner to make sure that none contain bombs. Is that because you see terrorism as just one of the many contingencies that could occur over the next thousand years, or do think the Vault might be a likely target for terrorism?

Fowler:  I don't think it's a likely target, but of course one can never know. No political or religious group is against what we're doing so I don't think it's a target in that sense. When the vault was being built we performed a security assessment in order to assess the likelihood of it being a target, or the likelihood of it being under any kind of threat, and the Norwegian government deemed the threat to be extremely low. But, at the same time we thought that if we're going to go to all the trouble to build this place in the middle of a mountain in the Arctic then we might as well go the whole distance, and we think that increases the trust and confidence in what we're doing, the fact that we have thought through all of these contingencies even though we don't think many of these things are ever going to happen.

I remember when we were constructing the facility and I was talking to the local Governor in Svalbard who's responsible for security on the island, and he said to me "Cary, if anyone so much as writes graffiti on this thing we'll know who it is." After all it's just a small village there, and really what's neat is that the villagers are remarkably proud and protective of the vault. They know it's there, and they're proud of it and that gives us an extra security blanket out there because the locals see everything that's going on---walking around up there I've had any number of people stop me and say "we're protecting that vault of yours."

Q:  I know that you have some interesting seed shipments coming in association with the anniversary. Are you particularly excited about any of them?

(MAP: Svalbard and Jan Mayen/MAPQUEST) Fowler:  Two of them, actually. There is a very important, very historic dwarfing wheat variety coming from the United States. The short stature of modern varieties of wheat is very important, because it allows the wheat to carry more grain on the top without falling over. That's a huge event in agricultural history that we'll be able to preserve.

The other one we haven't publicized too much, because we didn't want to draw too much attention to what is a very sensitive situation---we're getting a large shipment in from ICARDA, an international agricultural research center in Syria. It's not a Syrian government organization, it's an international center and it's completely independent from the government. Obviously, there are a lot of troubles in that country right now and that center, ICARDA, has been safety duplicating its material all along, as a good professional team will do, but the fact that this shipment is coming up right now in some ways points to the utility and value of the seed vault. One would not expect a seed bank, even in Syria, to be a target, but unfortunately  there is a recent precedent: seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed or severely damaged over the course of the wars there, not because they were blown up or anything but because in the context of chaos and the breakdown of law and order, people have come in and looted them. So we're pretty happy to have that collection at the vault.

Q:  There seems to be a real cultural fascination with the vault. Have you had many interesting visitors in the four years it's been up and running?

Fowler:  Oh yeah. The surprising thing about the visitors is how many artists we've had come up and try to take a look at it. I get the sense that the seed vault must be the subject of many different art projects. Now it's not a tourist attraction; we don't just open it up for people all the time. In fact there's no permanent staff there; we only go up to put the seeds in a couple of times a year. We do have a lot of monitoring there with people in the local community going up to check on it daily, but we monitor the facility remotely and they aren't authorized to take anyone in.

(PHOTO: Svalbard Seed Vaault view/SSV) But, given enough advance notice and enough time to see who a person is and if there's a real interest in them seeing it, we do have visitors there. We've had a number of political leaders, including Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations. I think the most interesting tour, and it's one I gave myself, was to former President Jimmy Carter and a group that he brought along, which included Madeleine Albright and a few others. I have a lot of admiration for him after having done that tour. Carter is famous for being a peanut farmer in Georgia, but not a lot of people know that his farm was devoted not just to producing peanuts but for producing peanuts for seed, so he knew the seed business very well. As I was giving the tour people in his group were asking all of these questions, and he was answering half of them.

But as far as visitors go generally, when people go to the vault they seem to get very emotional; people feel something in there, and maybe it's because they're standing in the room with the greatest amount of biodiversity in the world, and the rich human history associated with that, people can feel that something important is happening. It has a big impact on people when they see it. 

----This piece originally appeared on The Atlantic 2.28.12

Vladivostok - The Final Frontier of Russian Politics (PERSPECTIVE)

You'd need many weeks of travel to get the true feel of a country the size of Russia. Even then, you wouldn't be anywhere close to understanding it.

It is harder still to pierce the veil of people's real political allegiances and beliefs.

I have just ten days, and much of that time will be spent navigating the often numbingly frustrating modes of Russian public transport from planes and airports, to trains and unintelligible timetables.

Here in the far east, where my journey begins in the city of Vladivostok, it feels like frontier exploring, rough and exotic, unusual in this abundantly connected, same-same world of 2012.

I'm a foreigner in a strange land, not always welcomed with my garbled Russian and western high expectations of life. Precise timings? - why. Accurate directions? - what for. Hot coffee? - nyet!

The police are quick to yell at me for infringements of the most meaningless bureaucratic protocols: no photos even outside the train station, no going in through the door marked out. But you get the sense they'd be nowhere about if you were in real trouble.

My Russian colleague sums it up well.

"Always keep your expectations very low," Anton says. I try.

It is that spirit which has kept much of the Russian electorate spellbound by Vladimir Putin for 12 years. The political compact is a simple one: provide me with my basic needs, make my life a little better than it was and I will give you my vote, ask no questions.

While I wholeheartedly endorse my friend's advice as a mantra for travel across this vast country, the spirit of low expectation is steadily being rejected politically by large numbers of Russians.

Vladivostok is a crumbling port on Russia's far east Pacific coast, seven time zones away from the Kremlin. It is strikingly decrepit for a city that is the proud home of the navy's Pacific Fleet and the country's gateway for trade with Japan and Korea, with China on its doorstep.

Only a few years ago, I'm told, there was no working sewerage system in this city of 600,000.

It is achingly cold.

Despite sudden massive infrastructural investment ahead of this September's APEC summit, which Vladivostok will host, the political compact here is falling apart.

Salaries are stagnant and low, prices are shooting up. The streets are decidedly third world. A teacher on $400 a month spends half that on rent and taxes. Massive oil deposits in the region have made the Kremlin rich, and local officials in expensive SUVs sport Swiss watches worth as much as their cars, a trademark of Russian wealth and position.

Vladivostok has benefitted little.

It's a city closer to Pyongyang than to Moscow, and not just geographically.

There have been opposition protests in Vladivostok, as in many Russia cities, since last December's parliamentary election revealed falling national support for the ruling United Russia party, and massive electoral fraud. The numbers have not been huge here, but then nor is general turnout at the polls.

In Vladivostok, a once prized and well-funded Soviet city, United Russia was beaten into second place by the Communist Party in December.

The Communists were out on the streets during my visit.

I don't believe there's any danger of a Communist takeover, a Russian Revolution mk-II. Across the country, opposition forces of all persuasions, including a hefty chunk of Russia's middle class, are in this together. They won't stop Vladimir Putin winning the election. But they hope to force change on the way he governs in future.

More and more people want accountable politics, control of their own destinies. In my report, neurologist and local activist Alexander Krinitsky says people no longer want to be sheep "in the flock of some shepherd - now we sheer their coats, now we slaughter them."

It does feel like change is upon Russia, a change of heart, a change of thinking. A change to that simple old compact between power and the voter.

If only Mr Putin et al are wise enough to listen.

I'm finishing this in the historic and beautifully preserved city of Irkutsk in the heart of Siberia. Vladivostok is a three hours flight away to the east and I'm preparing to board a train on the trans-Siberian railway heading west for the oil town of Tyumen. As we clatter along over the next two days, I'll ask my fellow travellers, perchance over a vodka or two, what they think of pre-election Russia.

More as it happens...

For regular updates from Russia, follow Jonah Hull on Twitter: @JonahHull

Originally published by AlJazeera under Creative Commons License 

Colombia's FARC rebel group says `kidnapping days are over' (NEWS)

(VIDEO: Life Inside FARC/AlJazeera, May 2011)

This weekend, Colombia's main armed opposition group announced that it is abandoning the practice of kidnapping and will soon free its last remaining "prisoners of war" - 10 security force members held for as long as 14 years.

The left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) announced on its website that it would no longer kidnap civilians "for financial ends," unequivocally renouncing for the first time a tool it long used against Colombia's elite as well as foreigners.

"We wish to announce that in addition to our plans to free six prisoners of war, we will free the four others who remain under our power," the Farc said.

It did not provide a date for the release of the 10 security force members, two fewer than the government has said the guerillas hold.

Kidnapping civilians for ransom had helped sustain the armed struggle against the Colombian state, it said, but "from this day on we are halting the practice in our revolutionary activity."

It was not clear whether an order had been given to release ransom-kidnap victims currently held by the guerillas.

The organisation is known to currently hold four foreigners, all Chinese oil workers abducted last June. Sunday's announcement could advance prospects for a peace dialogue sought by the Farc.  

The government has insisted that it end all kidnappings as a first step.  But the rebels did not say that they were abandoning hostilities.

They have recently stepped up hit-and-run attacks and the military blames them for a bombing and mortar attack on two police posts in the past month that killed 15 people and wounded nearly 100, most of them civilians.

The Farc has been releasing captives piecemeal since early 2008 and some have been rescued by the military in operations such as the July 2008 ruse that freed a group including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors.

The guerillas and the government have not provided any figures on how many civilians are currently held.

Colombian police said the Farc kidnapped 72 people during the first 11 months of 2011.

-- Originally published by The Morning Star

Fighting the drugs menace in Saudi Arabia (PERSPECTIVE)

(PHOTO: Saudi Arabia Police train to find undercover drugs/ARABNEWS)From the Arab News

The latest figures relating to drug abuse in the Saudi Arabia Kingdom make appalling reading. In the last three years, 119,000 people of different nationalities have been arrested for drugs offenses. What is worse, it is reported that some 400 police and anti-narcotics officials have been killed fighting the traffickers.

The full extent of this great evil can be gauged by the astonishing fact that the total value of the drugs seized exceeded SR18 billion. The Department for Combating Drugs this week listed their haul as including 181 million Captagon tablets, 222 kilos of heroin, 61 tons of hashish and 2,206 tons of qat. 

Working on the basis that, as with anti-drug enforcement campaigns worldwide, narcotics seizures represent only a relatively small proportion of the actual amount of illegal substances in circulation, these figures are truly frightening.

What are our young people — and drug abusers are all too often the young — what are they thinking about? It is of course the nature of youth to rebel. Every new generation throughout history has sought to find its feet by establishing its own identity. Only with increasing age comes wisdom and an acceptance of established values. Yet the use of narcotics by the young, to somehow differentiate themselves from their elders is dangerous, foolish and deeply wrong.

Drugs do not just endanger the people who use them. They threaten the very fabric of society.

As the police have pointed out this week, fully 60 percent of the crimes in the Kingdom were drugs-related. Put simply, once users have become addicted to a narcotic, their competence in the workplace, their ability even to maintain natural relationships with friends and family, are steadily destroyed. Without income and support, only theft will enable them to sustain their body’s increasing demand for more narcotics. The result is squalor, loneliness and self-destruction.

Yet while society is the victim of drug users, so too are the users themselves victims of the cynical peddlers of death who grow, refine and otherwise manufacture narcotics and as a result, worldwide, rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits every year.

Young people can be educated about the dangers and evils of narcotics, as the Kingdom has been seeking to do in an ongoing campaign in schools and colleges. But this is clearly not enough. Moreover, it could be argued that this program should be harder hitting, with graphic and alarming displays of the horrors, degradation and ugly deaths to which addiction eventually leads. Maybe also, young people should be shown the bodies and surviving family members of some of the 400 brave security officers who gave their lives here in the Kingdom, so that these same young people could live safe, decent and productive lives.

Yet the harsh reality is that such campaigns will never be enough. The only way to stop the wicked destructiveness of narcotics use is to attack it at its source, to assault the merchants of death and smash the mafia-networks that run the international trade in illegal drugs.

This requires real coordination between anti-narcotics forces worldwide. Next week the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which is mandated by the United Nations to oversee the implementation of the UN’s drug control conventions, will release its latest annual report.

It is unlikely to make comfortable reading. The drugs barons arguably have larger financial resources at their disposal than the forces of law and order that are seeking to destroy them.

Nor do these mafias have to work within any legal framework. Yet they must be crushed, for the sake of young people around the world, not just here in the Kingdom, who take the foolish and fatal first step of experimenting with narcotics.

In a prosperous country like Saudi Arabia, where  the younger generation has so much to live for, the joy and security of work, family and eventually children of their own have to conquer the false lure of drug-induced well-being.

---- You can read more here from the Arab News

The Slide Towards War (PERSPECTIVE)

By Conn Hallinan

Wars are fought because some people decide it is in their interests to fight them. World War I was not started over the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, nor was it triggered by the alliance system. An “incident” may set the stage for war, but no one keeps shooting unless they think it’s a good idea. The Great War started because the countries involved decided they would profit by it, delusional as that conclusion was.

It is useful to keep this idea in mind when trying to figure out whether the United States or Israel will go to war with Iran. In short, what are the interests of the protagonists, and are they important enough for those nations to take the fateful step into the chaos of battle?

Israel’s Political Problem

According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran is building nuclear weapons that pose an “existential” threat to Israel. But virtually no one believes this, including the bulk of Tel Aviv’s military and intelligence communities. As former Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said recently, Iran “is not an existential” threat to Israel. There is no evidence that Iran is building a bomb, and all its facilities are currently under a 24-hour United Nations inspection regime.

So from a strictly security perspective, Israel has little reason to go to war with Iran. But Israel does have an interest in keeping the Middle East a fragmented place, driven by sectarian divisions and dominated by authoritarian governments and feudal monarchies. If there is one lesson Israel has learned from its former British overlords, it is “divide and conquer.” Among its closest allies were the former dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia. It now finds itself on the same page as the reactionary monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman.

Iran is not a military threat to Israel, but it is a political problem: Tel Aviv sees Tehran’s fierce nationalism and independence from the West as a wildcard. Iran is also allied to Israel’s major regional enemy, Syria—with which Israel is still officially at war—as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Shiite-dominated government in Iraq.

In the Netanyahu government’s analysis, beating up on Iran would weaken Israel’s local enemies at little cost. Tel Aviv’s scenario features a shock-and-awe attack followed by a UN-mandated ceasefire, with a maximum of 500 Israeli casualties. The Iranians have little capacity to strike back, and if they did attack Israeli civilian centers or tried to close the Strait of Hormuz, it would bring in the Americans.

Of course, that rose-colored scenario is little more than wishful thinking. Iran is not likely to agree to a rapid ceasefire; it fought for eight long years against Iraq, and war has a habit of derailing the best-laid plans. A war between Israel and Iran would be long and bloody and might well spread to the entire region.

Iran’s leaders dispense a lot of bombast about punishing Israel if it attacks, but in the short run there is not a lot they could do, particularly given the red lines Washington has drawn. The Iranian air force is obsolete, and the Israelis have the technology to blank out most of Tehran’s radar and anti-aircraft sites. Iran could do little to stop Tel Aviv’s mixture of air attacks, submarine-fired cruise missiles, and Jericho ballistic missiles.

The United States and Its Allies

For all its talk about how “all options are on the table,” the Obama administration appears to be trying to avoid a war. But with the 2012 elections looming, could Washington remain on the sidelines? Polls indicate that Americans would not look with favor on a new Middle East war, but a united front of Republicans, neoconservatives, and the American Israeli Political Action Committee is pressing for a confrontation with Iran.

Israeli sources suggest that Netanyahu may calculate that an election-season Israeli attack might force the Obama administration to back a war and/or damage Obama’s re-election chances. It is no secret that there is no love lost between the two leaders.

But the United States also has a dog in this fight. American hostility to Iran dates back to Tehran’s seizure of its oil assets from Britain in 1951. The CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and install the dictatorial Shah. The United States also backed Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran, has had a longstanding antagonistic relationship with Syria, and will not talk with Hezbollah or Hamas. Tel Aviv’s local enemies are Washington’s local enemies.

When the Gulf monarchs formed the GCC in 1981, its primary purpose was to oppose Iranian influence in the Middle East. Using religious division as a wedge, the GCC has encouraged Sunni fundamentalists to fight Shiites in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, and largely blocked the spread of the “Arab Spring” to its own turf. When Shiites in Bahrain began protesting over a lack of democracy and low wages, the GCC invaded and crushed the demonstrations. The GCC does not see eye-to-eye with the United States and Israel on the Palestinians—although it is careful not to annoy Washington and Tel Aviv—but the GCC is on the same page as both capitals concerning Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.

The European Union (EU) has joined the sanctions, although France andGermany have explicitly rejected the use of force. Motivations in the EU range from France’s desire to reclaim its former influence in Lebanon to Europe’s need to keep its finger on the world’s energy jugular.

Setting the Stage for Tragedy

In brief, it isn’t all about oil and gas, but a whole lot of it is — and, as CounterPunch’s Alexander Cockburn points out, oil companies would like to see production cut and prices rise. Another war in the Persian Gulf would accomplish both.

Iran will be the victim here, but elements within the regime will take advantage of any war to consolidate their power. An attack would unify the country around what is now a rather unpopular government. It would allow the Revolutionary Guard to crush its opposition and give cover to the Ahmadinejad government’s drive to cut subsidies for transportation, housing, and food. A war would cement the power of the most reactionary elements of the current regime.

There are other actors in this drama—China, Russia, India, Turkey, and Pakistan for starters, none of whom supports a war—but whether they can influence events is an open question. In the end, Israel may just decide that its interests are best served by starting a war and that the United States will go along.

Or maybe this is all sound and fury signifying nothing?

Israel, the West, and the Gulf Cooperation Council share many of the same interests. Unfortunately, they also share the belief that force is an effective way to achieve one’s goals.

On such illusions are tragedies built.

Conn Hallinan is a columnist with Foreign Policy In Focus. His work can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries@wordpress.com

Originally published  by Institute for Policy Studies licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

IAEA Visit to Iran Ends in Deadlock

By Teymoor Nabili in the Middle East 

photo AFP

Almost inevitably, the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) comments regarding the visit to Iran are being framed as yet more evidence of Tehran’s defiance and duplicity.

The IISS is amongst the first to jump to conclusions with the headline "What is Iran hiding at Parchin?"

Mark Fitzpatrick writes that inspectors wanted to visit Parchin because "US officials suspected [it] might be used for high-explosive tests related to nuclear weapons development".

Thus, Tehran’s refusal to allow access must be because there is something to hide, right?

Well, there may be another explanation. As the Tehran Bureau points out,

"According to the Safeguards Agreement, the IAEA can visit only those locations declared to be nuclear sites - which does not include Parchin - and has no legal right to demand entry to other sites."

So Iran may have simply been sticking to the letter of the law and asserting some measure of sovereignty.

But still, if they had nothing to hide, why hide it?

Well, it seems Fitzpatrick has provided one possible answer himself -

"The IAEA had been led to believe they would have access to the Parchin, [...] But hardliners in Tehran prevailed over those who wanted to demonstrate some flexibility"

In other words, one political opinion prevailed over another.

That the nuclear debate is as robust inside Iran as outside is no secret. Nor is it news that a large number of very vocal politicians consider this nuclear row to be nothing more than a pretext for interference in its affairs.

That some politicians would insist on strict adherence to existing agreements would therefore seem pretty much within bounds.

- Originally published by AlJazeera under Creative Commons License 

G20 foreign ministers meet in Mexico; say `World is failing' (NEWS)

(PHOTO: Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa Cantellano speaks during the opening of the G20 Foreign Ministers Informal Meeting in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur state, Mexico, 2.19/Xinhua, Shi Sisi)LOS CABOS, Mexico -- Foreign ministers of the Group of 20 (G20) on Sunday convened in Los Cabos, a resort town in northwestern Mexico, to discuss important issues including global governance, food safety, climate change and green growth.

Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa, host of the meeting, said that frank and open dialogue would be held among G20 foreign ministers and officials from other invited countries at the two-day meeting from Sunday to Monday.

Mexico, which holds the G20 presidency this year, planned the meeting to "stimulate ideas" to promote the changes the world needs, said Espinosa.  "There are many important issues that affect the lives of billions of people across the world, on which the international community is failing to make any discernible progress," she said.

She called for progress to be made on issues such as eradicating famine and illiteracy, promoting green growth and sustainable development, and enhancing the rule of law.

The Mexican official, however, said the meeting, given its informal color, would not lead to any official documents.

"At this stage any results arising from these sessions will be mere recommendations for policy coherence among our countries and we do not intend to develop guidelines or formal documents to negotiate at the G20 Summit," she said.

According to the minister, the meeting have four major topics, namely the multilateral trade system, current global challenges, green growth and human development.

The meeting brought together 10 foreign ministers of G20 member economies, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd. The Chinese delegation is led by Assistant Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu. Mexico also invited representatives from non-G20 economies and international organizations to participate in the meeting.

Los Cabos, the coastal resort where the G20 Summit will take place in June, has adopted strict measures to beef up security. More police and soldiers have been deployed at the airports and along the major roads to maintain order and check the vehicles.

--- this article first appeared on Cam11

Related:

Mexican Presidency of the G20

Mexico will chair the G20 in 2012 and host the Leaders’ Summit in June of the same year. By assuming the annual Presidency of the G20, as the second emerging country to do so at the Leaders’ level, and the first in Latin America, Mexico confirms its role as a responsible and constructive actor, both regionally and globally.

Mexico is firmly committed to achieving a successful Summit in regards to the agreements reached and their positive impact on the world economy. The Mexican Presidency will seek to follow up the agreements reached previously and will also work to make important contributions to these and other issues of the agenda of the G20. Moreover, Mexico will promote an active and engaged participation of non-members, international organizations, think tanks and the private sector in order to make the G20 dialogue as inclusive, open and transparent as possible.

With this goal in mind, Mexico has established the following priorities:

1. Economic stabilization and structural reforms as foundations for growth and employment.

2. Strengthening the financial system and fostering financial inclusion to promote economic growth.

3. Improving the international financial architecture in an interconnected world.

4. Enhancing food security and addressing commodity price volatility..

5. Promoting sustainable development, green growth and the fight against climate change.

¡Viva México! The G20’s New Political and Security Agenda (COMMENTARY)

by Stewart M. Patrick

Meeting last weekend in Los Cabos, Mexico, for their first, “informal” gathering, G20 foreign ministers made a pivotal decision: to expand the G20 agenda to encompass pressing political and security matters. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister, emphasized that on crucial issues that “affect the lives of billions…the international community is failing,” and announced that the group would reconvene at the G20 leaders’ summit from June 19 to 20 in Los Cabos to consider a raft of global issues ranging from transnational crime to green growth and food security.

For the G20, this represents a huge advance. Since its inception as a leaders’ level forum at the November 2008 Washington summit, the G20 has been dominated by finance ministers and central bank governors, who have fought to restrict its mandate to macroeconomic issues. Espinosa’s proposal - endorsed by Secretary of State Clinton - will help the G20 transition from an emergency economic committee to a more general-purpose steering group chaired by the most important developed and developing countries.

This shift is both inevitable and welcome. From the beginning, many have anticipated that the G20 would be drawn into a broader global agenda, either by design or by the intrusion of outside events. Indeed, the communiqué of that initial Washington summit hinted as much, committing the assembled countries “to addressing other critical challenges such as energy security and climate change, food security, the rule of law, the fight against terrorism, poverty and disease.” Certainly, the history of the G7 and G8 suggests that world leaders are reluctant to confine their remit to economic and financial issues. Indeed, they find annual summits irresistible opportunities to address a broader global agenda, particularly issues dominating the headlines.

Over the past two decades, first the G7 and then the G8 expanded their agenda to include issues ranging from money laundering to nuclear nonproliferation,  and then democracy promotion in the wake of the “Arab spring.” At the end of the day, leaders will speak about whatever they desire, regardless of the script.

For the past three years, finance ministries - including the U.S. Treasury—have fought a rearguard action to restrict the G20 summit agenda. At one level this made sense. The G20 was born in the depths of the global credit crisis, when the world economy was on the verge of collapse. The zenith of its success came at the London Summit of April 2009, when British prime minister Gordon Brown, U.S. president Obama, and their counterparts cobbled together an unprecedented global stimulus package to save the world from a second Great Depression.

Since then, the G20 has had a much bumpier ride, as it seeks to grapple with longer-term challenges of “rebalancing” the global economy, coordinating exchange rates and financial regulations across twenty sovereign jurisdictions, and ameliorating the eurozone crisis. With so much left to be done economically, finance ministers have understandably fought against “mission creep.” The surest way to kill the G20, U.S. Treasury officials maintain, would be to saddle it with a sprawling array of global tasks.

To be sure, modest agenda expansion has already occurred. At the Pittsburgh summit of September 2009, where Obama declared the G20 the “premier forum for global economic coordination,” the assembled leaders gingerly entered the climate change fray, pledging to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. A year later in Seoul, the G20 embraced a role in advancing global development - heretofore the purview of the G8. Still, these changes have occurred at the margins. And last November in Cannes, the United States gave a cool reception to the Cameron Report on the future of G20 governance, in which the UK prime minister suggested that the G20 might lead reform in other bodies, including the UN Security Council.

Beyond underscoring the dominance of the U.S. Treasury in U.S. policymaking, the U.S. attitude reflected a lingering attachment to the G8, which the Obama administration believed retained a comparative advantage in addressing sensitive political and security issues, given its largely likeminded membership. The G8’s solid performance in Deauville, where it coordinated international support to the Arab spring, appeared to give that venerable body a new lease on life.

As a long-term approach, however, restricting the G20 to economic issues is short-sighted and neglects the unprecedented opportunity the forum provides to forge new patterns of international cooperation. As Bruce Jones of New York University has cogently argued, the demand for new forms of cooperation between established and emerging powers is hardly restricted to the economic realm. It applies equally to other global issues, from climate change to nuclear proliferation and humanitarian intervention. The G20 is the only forum where the world’s established and rising powers meet exclusively, on an equal footing, to candidly air their differences and (hopefully) hammer out new principles, norms and rules of international behavior. It also provides an invaluable setting to calm inevitable frictions between the world’s two most important players—the United States and China.

The Obama administration, which has made the integration of rising powers a geopolitical priority, should embrace the new opportunities afforded by an expanded G20 agenda. The forum provides a chance for the United States to erode the bloc mentalities that often thwart cooperation within the UN, forge new diplomatic alignments spanning developing and developed countries, and negotiate breakthroughs on longstanding global bottlenecks—solutions that can be taken up and implemented by more formal organizations, from the UN to the World Trade Organization to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of course, the G20 will not provide a magic bullet to solve the most complex challenges, like growing tensions with Iran, for example. Still, the G20 offers a more fluid environment for the United States to seek political buy-in from a more diverse swath of the world’s most important players. Clinton and Espinoza were right to seize this opportunity.

---- this Commentary first appeared CFR.org

10 million Africans face starvation (REPORT)

 By Mel Frykberg

(GRAPHIC: FEWS Net)The UN warned on Saturday that 10 million people in Africa’s Sahel region faced starvation and called for a greater humanitarian response to the crisis, which is threatening eight countries, particularly Niger, where at least half of those at risk are situated. The Sahel countries include parts of Senegal, southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Algeria, Niger, northern Nigeria, Chad, Sudan and South Sudan, northern Cameroon and Eritrea.

Helen Clark, the UN development programme’s administrator, and the under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and UN emergency relief coordinator, Valerie Amos, made the appeal during a visit to Niger’s Tillabery region.

Their visit entailed an inspection of an agricultural project supported by the UN, which grows vegetables in a sustainable way, while simultaneously improving the nutrition of the villagers and providing them with a source of income.

“This project shows how a tiny initial investment can make a major difference,” Amos said.

“Just a few kilometres from here, there is a village which has not had this investment, where people are leaving their homes and have taken their children out of school so that they can look for food,” she said.

(PHOTO: Aliyin Would Eleiat, the chief of a village in the Gorgol region of Mauritania shows 1 of few wells that still has water. It serves as the lifeline for 75 families/Irina Fuhrmann, OXFAM)Clark stated that the wider crisis in the Sahel, where poor harvests following repeated droughts had caused severe shortages, threatened 10 million people in desperate need of assistance.

Furthermore, international non-governmental organisations warned that the Sahel could be crippled by this year.

Oxfam has announced that harvests plummeted 25% in the region compared to 2010 because of lack of rains. This will leave more than one million children threatened with severe malnutrition.

---This piece originally appeared in South Africa's New Age

RELATED:

(PHOTO: Baaba Maal with Oxfam in Mauritania/OXFAM)Senegal's Baaba Maal visits Mauritania with Oxfam: "The scale of this crisis is so great that I have to speak out so that the world reacts"

During a 48 hour visit to the Gorgol region of Mauritania, the musician Baaba Maal discovered the harsh reality for communities affected by a food crisis that now touches one in four people across the country. Today 700,000 people are food insecure in Mauritania.

"What is happening in this part of Africa is so close to my heart. People are suffering, especially children. I cannot watch and do nothing,” declared Senegalese singer Baaba Maal after visiting Mauritanian communities at the center of the current food crisis in the Sahel. Low rainfall, poor harvests, a lack of pasture and rising food prices are among the key factors driving this crisis.

Baaba Maal, who met populations in the south of the country, not far from his home village in Senegal, noted: “Some families have almost nothing to eat, and I worry about how they will feed themselves until the next harvest.”

(PHOTO: The Senegal River, which forms the natural border between Mauritania & Senegal, is too low for the crop season/Irina Fuhrmann, OXFAM)The Senegalese singer, internationally renowned and recognized for his commitment to development in Africa, launched an appeal to the international community for urgent action: “We cannot watch and do nothing while our brothers and sisters in Mauritania are victims of such a crisis. I have been able to see the solutions that are being put in place. We have to support and strengthen them."

"I met Hamila, a mother of five children, who had just bought a bag of rice thanks to money provided by Oxfam. This money will allow her to feed her family over the coming weeks. Hamila is among the most vulnerable people in her community but there are many other people who need our help,” explained Baaba Maal.

Last December, Oxfam and its partners launched a humanitarian response in the south of Mauritania in order to provide assistance to 30,000 people, and are planning to scale up operations to avoid a major crisis. In coordination with the emergency plan developed by the Government, the organisation has put in place cash transfers to allow populations to protect their livelihoods. Other actions to improve access to clean drinking water are also underway in order to prevent water-borne diseases that lead to malnutrition, especially in children.

"When I was young, this region was totally green but every year I see it becoming more and more dry. Yet water is there, in the river and in the ground. We have to work together and join forces to solve the problem, so that we never see this situation repeated again,” added Baaba Maal.

Oxfam is calling for urgent interventions to avoid the worst over the coming months, as well as long-term investments to strengthen the resilience of populations, allow communities to cope with bad years, and prevent crises of the future. As well as Mauritania, Oxfam is actively supporting communities affected by this crisis in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger and Senegal.

--- This piece originally appeared on OXFAM

Signs of Progress Amid the Chaos of Mogadishu

By Nazanine Moshiri in Africa 

Somali families fled from al-Shabaab held towns after the group was reported to have joined ranks with al Qaeda (AlJazeera)

We are on the maiden flight of Jetlink Express - from Nairobi to Mogadishu. Along for the ride, a few hardened journalists, and mainly diaspora Somalis, returning home, some for the first time in almost 10 years.

Somalia's Transitional Federal Government has a message for the World, Mogadishu is safe and, crucially, open for business.

It is as important point to get across. Somalis living abroad send around a billion dollars home every year.

If they actually start heading home, and staying, well, then that investment could double.

Driving around the capital Mogadishu, there is plenty of activity.

Freshly painted luxury villas are popping up everywhere; one close to airport has a price tag of half a million dollars.

But most are lying empty, landlords have invested in the hope that the Turks with their good intentions, or eventually the United Nations will take their building over.

But there is one entity that stands in the way of all this planned order and peace. The Islamist group al-Shabab is promising to step up its bombing campaign in the run up to the London Somalia conference on February 23rd.

They have warned  "all Muslims of Somalia to stay away from the enemy bases in order to avoid being unintentional victims of this new campaign".

On Friday February 17, Shabab managed to sneak a car laden with explosives into Mogadishu's Central Intelligence building.

According to authorities, two of the group's members stole mobile phones as a ruse to get themselves arrested, and get their vehicle inside. The explosives were then detonated by remote control injuring several soldiers.

Attacks thwarted

Since I arrived here last week, several car bombs have been discovered, just in time, before they could wreak any major damage.

Deputy Commander Colonel Omar Mohamed, is worried. He believes "al Shabab are hiding themselves among people returning" from the Afgoye corridor just outside Mogadishu.

It isn't difficult for them to do, thousands of people have been fleeing the region, concerned about an imminent attack by the African Union.

The security situation has overshadowed any political progress that may have been made in Garowe, the capital of Puntland - a region of north-east Somalia, which declared itself an autonomous state in August 1998.

For three days Somali leaders gathered there to discuss what will replace the current transitional government, whose mandate comes to an end in August.

It concluded Somalia would become a federal state, with Mogadishu as the federal capital. The meeting comes days before a London conference, where heads of states and Somali representatives will gather to discuss the future of the country.

The British Foreign Minister calls the London conference, a "moment of opportunity", but for Somalis who have lived through twenty years of civil war, there is a sense of deja vu.

There have been so many conferences, and so many agreements that have come to nothing.

Every time I come back to Somalia - what never ceases to surprise me is that amid all this uncertainty and violence - life goes on.

"Welcome to Mogadishu", someone shouts out, as I walk around the city. I can't tell who, as the sun is so bright it almost blinds me.

- Originally published by AlJazeera under Creative Commons License 

Shifting Winds in the South China Sea (COMMENTARY)

By Derek Bolton 

Floating oil barrier in the South China Sea (AFP)The South China Sea, although far from tranquil, has yet to revert to the volatility and violence witnessed in the late 1980s. However, current efforts to maintain stability and implement confidence-building measures could soon be overtaken by environmental changes in the region.

As global warming takes its toll on the South China Sea (SCS), it has begun to redefine the very nature and physical characteristics of the region. These transformations have the potential to further escalate the already heightened competition among states, increasing the likelihood of conflict. As noted by Will Rogers in a report by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), climate change could indeed “act as an accelerant to destabilization.”

A Bevy of Disputes

The waters, islands, and resources of the SCS have been hotly contested among the littoral states of Southeast Asia in recent decades. Overlapping claims to maritime jurisdictions, Economic Exclusive Zones (EEZs), and various islands have been further complicated by rising nationalism in the region. Recent and ongoing discoveries of significant natural resources — including fish stocks, minerals, natural gas, and oil reserves — have only reinforced territorial claims and buttressed hard-line positions.  China, Vietnam, and Taiwan all lay claim to the entirety of the SCS, while the Philippines claims a significant portion as well. In addition to contradicting one another, these claims also tend to overlap with the EEZs of other countries in the region.

Other quarrels abound. Vietnam and China have yet to resolve an ongoing bilateral dispute over their competing territorial claims to the Paracel Islands, though China has maintained effective control of the islands since 1974. Meanwhile the Spratly Islands are engulfed in a multilateral dispute among China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Malaysia, all of whom maintain overlapping claims to various features of the islands.

Some progress has been made establishing mechanisms to at least manage the potential outbreak of conflict, such as the 2002 Declaration of Conduct. Other confidence-building measures have met with reasonable success, though these have also been unable to address the underlying causes of the disputes.

Environmental vicissitudes could potentially negate what progress has been achieved thus far. In his CNAS report, Rogers strives to evaluate how concerns over global warming — and especially its effects on resource development — affect the foreign policies of SCS states. This specifically applies to fish stocks, the growing demand for alternative forms of energy, and the recent influx of droughts in the region.  

Shifting Seas, Rising Tides

As CNAS scholar M. Taylor Fravel notes, SCS countries have in part sought to assert their territorial claims through commercial fishing — or, in the case of China, by challenging the commercial activities of other states. This has already led to a number of confrontations between countries, a worrisome development given the rising naval capabilities in the region. For example, in 2010, diplomatic relations between China and Japan were temporarily suspended after a Chinese fishing vessel rammed a Japanese patrol boat.

The effects of global warming may further complicate this situation. As sea temperatures in the SCS continue to rise, large quantities of fish will migrate north into even more heavily disputed waters. As fishermen are forced to follow suit, the probability of future confrontations will increase, raising the likelihood of a more serious conflict.

Moreover, the level of fishing required to maintain present per capita consumption would need to increase 25 percent by 2030. This will lead to higher levels of fishing in an increasingly smaller and more volatile segment of the SCS. The fact that present-day fishing, which is more dispersed and less abundant, has already led to near outbreaks of conflict does not bode well for the future.

Droughts and water contamination have also become a growing problem in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam, concerted development efforts have led to increased pollution and a constrained freshwater supply. These concerns are exacerbated by rising sea levels and the corresponding increase in sodium deposits on the mainland, which is detrimental to agriculture. With Vietnam’s development efforts centered partially on increased agricultural exports, the country cannot afford such setbacks.

Meanwhile, China’s hydroelectric power output was set to decline by 30-40 percent by the end of 2011 due to increased droughts. Accordingly, China is now seeking to double the number of its hydroelectric dams on the Mekong River, aiming to construct four new dams by 2020. China is pressing on in spite of protests from countries downstream that rely heavily on water from the Mekong for agriculture, especially Vietnam and Thailand. With Vietnam already struggling to maintain adequate levels of clean water, future cutbacks could be devastating. China’s disregard for the needs of other countries with respect to the Mekong River does not bode well for its behavior in the SCS.

Alternative Forms of Energy

As evidenced by China’s intensified development of hydroelectric power, concerns over climate change have led to increased investment in alternative forms of energy in the region. Although greener for the environment, this poses distinct geopolitical challenges.

Not least is the threat of nuclear proliferation in the region as countries seek to limit their dependence on oil. Vietnam plans to harness nearly 1,000 Megawatts (MWs) of nuclear power by 2020, 4,000 MWs by 2025, and 10,000 MWs by 2030. Indonesia and Thailand are set to achieve similar goals by 2020. This will inevitably foster fears over the possible military applications of nuclear programs, especially given the already hostile environment and intense competition in the region. Although the IAEA and a regional non-proliferation regime might help reduce tensions, nuclear reactors may further complicate an already complicated environment.

The countries of the region have considerable reason to reduce their dependence on oil. Oil exploitation in the SCS is both expensive and politically risky (if not impossible), and oil imported from the increasingly unstable Middle East must pass through the narrow and vulnerable straits of Malacca. However, all nations in the region will continue to actively pursue oil reserves in the sea, both for export and domestic consumption, even if demand is reduced. Vietnam, for example, could see oil exports as a way to offset its faltering agricultural sector. Moreover, as economies in the region continue to grow, so too will the demand for energy.

New investments in alternative energy will also lead to increased demand for the minerals associated with such technology, which can be found in abundance in the SCS. States developing these technologies will be driven to compete for these resources. Consequently, energy competition will be driven not merely by oil and natural gas, but also by rising demand for alternative energy.

Accommodating a New Actor

Still, all is not lost for the SCS. If states in the region approach the problem cooperatively, tensions may yet be defused by joint ventures in resource development.

However, with the emergence of global warming as a predominant non-state actor, the world is beginning to witness the very real intersection of climate change and geopolitics. As transformations in the environment continue to reshape the distribution of natural resources and states are forced to seek out new ones, resource competition will arise like never before.

- Derek Bolton is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. Originally published by Institute for Policy Studies licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

In Australia, suffer the children under new rules (PERSPECTIVE)

(PHOTO: Sydney Morning Herald) By Kathryn Wicks

A year from now, my six-year-old son will no longer have autism. But I have not discovered a miracle cure - nor do I feel like jumping for joy.

The criteria for an autism diagnosis, as defined by the authors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), is about to change so dramatically that parents across the world are fearful children classified as having high-functioning autism, Asperger's syndrome or pervasive development disorder are likely to lose their diagnosis - and with it, their therapy and educational entitlements.

It is teachers who should be complaining the loudest. They will be the ones left to manage untreated children with less help from special needs staff because fewer children will be classified as special needs.

Parents and psychologists fear the changes to the diagnostic criteria are driven by an American government wanting to reduce the rate at which autism is diagnosed - now one in 100 - so as to reduce the cost of supporting services which help children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) fit into society, and the classroom.

The clinicians on the DSM taskforce claim changes to the manual will not change the rate of diagnosis. They argue they are simply trying to reduce the subcategories and cover all afflicted children with one blanket label, autism spectrum disorder, to achieve better clarity on diagnosis.

But the devil lies in the detail of the changes between the present manual and the proposed new manual, to come into effect next year, and experts fear a large drop in the number of diagnoses.

A diagnosis of ASD, which can include the subcategories such as Asperger's, is given if a child ticks enough boxes across three categories of impairment - social interaction, speech and language, and behaviour. Each category has four ''boxes''.

Now, a diagnosis of ASD is allowed if six of the 12 impairments are present, two of which must be impairments in social interaction. Under the proposed changes, a child will need to have all four social interaction deficiencies before a diagnosis is given. In the second category, communication, a diagnosis now requires one deficiency; under the changes, it will require two.

According to Professor Allen Francis, the chairman of the taskforce responsible for the present manual, to gain a diagnosis, there are 2688 possible combinations of the 12 deficiencies.

However, under the changes, there will be only six possible combinations. ''The method of deriving the new DSM-5 criteria is suspect and its claim to be rate neutral seems simply absurd,'' Frances wrote in the Huffington Post.

And he is dead right. Diagnosis rates, especially for high-functioning and Asperger's children, will fall dramatically. I know my son ticks six of those 12 boxes, but under DSM-5, he will not tick the right six boxes. He will be reclassified as having a ''social disorder'', not an autism spectrum disorder. It won't change his life; he has used his funding and successfully made the transition to mainstream school.

But what will it do to an equally afflicted child who fails to get a diagnosis in future? Will he learn to say ''mum'' and look her in the eye? Will he learn to use his nice voice when talking to his friends? Will he learn to share toys? Will he learn to cope with a routine being thrown out? Will he be able to sit still in class, listen and learn? Without therapy, probably not.

In Australia, a child diagnosed with any ASD is entitled to funding of $12,000 over two years up to age six, paid directly to service providers of multidisciplinary therapy. Such therapy may include applied behaviour analysis (ABA) therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy. It doesn't cover the cost, but it helps. The result of the therapy, especially ABA, is priceless, often getting autistic children across the line into mainstream schooling.

This funding means children are getting help when it helps them most - ages two to five, when the brain is described as being more ''plastic'' and thus more influenced by therapy. By the time they get to school, provided they have their two years of therapy, a child with autism but a normal IQ is often able to function in a normal classroom environment (as long as no one moves his pencils out of place). ABA teaches children to behave appropriately through the consistent and exhaustive reinforcement of good behaviour over a sustained period. It works.

Take therapy away, and Kindy Blue turns into Kindy Beirut pretty quickly.

Teachers and all parents should picture this: in 2018, a teacher could be dealing with a child with untreated ''social disorder'' rolling around the floor and refusing to sit at his desk, not teaching the other 19 neurologically normal children in the room.

The time to speak up is now.

 --- Kathryn Wicks is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist and her piece originally appeared HERE.

The Falkland Islands, AKA The Malvinas issue takes another turn

(VIDEO: `CrossTalk: Falklands-Malvinas'/RT)

The Malvinas AKA as The Falklands issue has taken another turn, which could heighten diplomatic tension regarding sovereignty between Argentina and Britain after one of the drilling platforms hired by a Malvinas company was found exploring in Argentine waters on Thursday.

The LeivEiriksson platform bears the Bahamas flag and was contracted by Borders & Southern Plc and Falkland Oil and Gas Ltd and can be added to the same list as the Ocean Guardian, the oil rig hired by Rockhopper Exploration Plc which has been exploring to the north of the islands since 2010.

The LeivEiriksson, which is 120 metres long and 86 metres high, moves with the support of two ships: the Toisa Intrepid and the multipurpose ToisaSonat.

At the end of last month, the LeivEiriksson was located very close to 200 miles from the Argentine continental shelf, which caused alarm among local authorities.

However, in recent days both the LeivEiriksson and its accompanying vessels have violated the borders of what Argentina denominates the nation’s Economic Exclusion Zone.

Its mission, according to the oil company, is to drill two deep wells to the south and southeast of the archipelago, at the edge of Argentina’s national territory.

According to what Ambito.com could learn, the platform advanced between 8-10 nautical miles beyond the pre-determined limits, to 190 miles off the Argentine coast.

(PHOTO: The area where the platform has allegedly been spotted, located in Argentine territorial waters/Buenos Aires Herald) The oil rig and companion ships spent over 90 hours in that location exploring or carrying out exploratory tasks, which led to speculation that the company is considering a third well, located within Argentine territorial waters. Irrefutable satellite images show that on Wednesday the platform was located at the coordinates -53°59’54’7 south -58°76’51’1 west. However, by midday yesterday it had retreated and briefly sailed toward the Islands before dropping anchor at 53°35’44’63 south and 58°45’55’13 west. According to sources with access to the Mompesat satellite monitoring system, the positioning of the platform was brought to the attention of the authorities.

"In recent months we detected that they were on the point of violating our economic exclusion zone and for this reason we have been constantly monitoring," said the source.

Meanwhile, sources linked to the Foreign Ministry confirmed that this is not the first time that an oil rig violates the zone limits, although it is the first time that this has happened since the diplomatic conflict bubbled to the surface in January. According to those sources, the Ocean Guardian, exploring to the north of the archipelago since 2010 is also positioned within Argentina's continental shelf.

The same sources also stressed that Argentina has often protested to the United Kingdom and that organizations like the UNASUR, CELAC and the UN Convention on Rights to the Sea (CONVEMAR) have often been notified of these infractions.

"This exploration is illegal. The coastal state which should be providing exploration licences for this area is Argentina and not the United Kingdom," revealed a source. Argentina also sent notes of discouragement to the companies involved — both the oil companies as well as the accompanying ships and support vessels.

The real conflict between Great Britain and Argentina is that they do not agree on the limitations of the continental shelf. For the Argentine state, according to the presentation by COPLA (National Committee for the Limit of the Continental Shelf) to the United Nations, "the continental shelf of a bordering state includes the sea bed and sub-marine layers which extend beyond its territorial sea and across the length of the natural extension of its territory to the outer border of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 miles counted from the base lines from which the borders of the territorial sea are measured, when the outer border of the continental margin does not reach the same distance."

However, this position conflicts with the United Kingdom, who, taking the "bordering state" to be the Malvinas Islands, consider a large part of the waters around the islands to be their exclusion zone.

-- Originally appeared in the Buenoes Aires Herald

RELATED

The Malvinas AKA The Falkland Islands inhabitants face food shortage

(PHOTO: The Malvinas AKA The Falkland Islands/PressTV) Egg shortage came as the first sign of difficulties faced by the inhabitants of the Falklands AKA the Malvinas islands after South American countries unanimously decided to help Argentina move ahead with its peaceful efforts to resolve the issue of sovereignty over the archipelago as Britain compounds the situation by ruling out the possibility of negotiations.

On Saturday 11 February, the state-run BBC reported that the inhabitants of the islands are facing shortage of eggs and fresh vegetables, blaming the South American countries for the shortage and saying that they are “working hard to cut the islands off.”

Nevertheless, the state-funded BBC made no mention of the fact that the South American countries’ support for Buenos Aires over the issue came after Britain “militarized” the South Atlantic by sending a nuclear-armed destroyer to the area.

In response to Britain’s intimidating acts, Mercosur members, including Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, decided to turn vessels carrying the Falklands’ flag away from their ports.

Furthermore, the Chilean government that had announced plans in early January to join the South American countries in denying entry to its ports to Falklands-flagged vessels expressed its solidarity with Mercosur members.

The Chilean government also operated the only air link between the islands and the South American countries. There is one flight a week from Punto Arenas in southern Chile to the islands.

However, in response to Britain “militarizing” the area, Argentina raised the possibility of closing the only air route to the islands which passes through Argentina’s airspace.

In line with Argentina’s peaceful efforts to resolve the issue through diplomacy and negotiations, Argentinean Foreign Minister Hector Timerman submitted an official complaint to the United Nations Security Council against Britain’s militarizing the islands.

Nevertheless, Britain’s UN envoy Mark Lyall Grant said the militarization issue was “rubbish” claims made by Buenos Aires while he refused to make any comments on whether Britain has sent a nuclear-armed destroyer to the South Atlantic.

Grant also insisted that Britain would not take part in any negotiations over the sovereignty of the islands as it would only take the interests of the inhabitants into consideration.

However, Britain’s determination to dodge negotiations, despite UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s call for negotiation, and the shortage faced by the islands’ inhabitants, shows that the country is not concerned about the inhabitants’ wellbeing as it claims to be.

-- Originally published on PressTV

Timor-Leste: Everybody needs good neighbours (PERSPECTIVE)

(VIDEO: Al Jazeera, East Timor, 10 years old.)

By The International Crisis Group’s Jim Della-Giacoma

Early in 2010, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was sitting in Kabul with some diplomats who had served in Indonesia and Timor-Leste.

'Is it true', he asked, 'that Indonesia just walked away from East Timor after 1999?'

'Absolutely', they replied.

Karzai is a natural sceptic, but he saw something to be admired in the way Indonesia had turned its back on a conflict by which it had so long defined itself. 'This is not something well understood', he said.

Last month at the Australian Civil-Military Centre I was asked to remember what had been learnt from the first three international interventions in East Timor between 1999 and 2002, each often cited as a success story. First, UNAMET ran the referendum that certified the Timorese desire for independence. Then INTERFET enforced the peace and guaranteed the outcome of the vote would be respected. Finally, UNTAET brought the country to independence.

In 1999, UNAMET, while nominally a UN mission, was an extension of Canberra's foreign policy with the whole of government behind it. Prime Minister Howard rolled up his sleeves and negotiated with President Habibie all sorts of details, including the number of UN civilian police supervising the ballot and the establishment of an Australian consulate in Dili. Foreign Minister Downer proclaimed there should be no logistical reasons for delaying the ballot. If the UN needed something, it would be provided.

Proximity gave Australia both motive and means to back this and subsequent missions. It would not have and could not have done the same for either Sri Lanka or Singapore.

As UNAMET proceeded, the ADF quietly planned for the day when things did go wrong and UN personnel and their families, as well as prominent citizens such as Nobel laureate Bishop Belo, needed sanctuary. This evacuation rolled into INTERFET, which saw an unprecedented mobilisation of Australian diplomatic, military, and financial muscle in support of a peace enforcement operation. About A$740 million later, Australia handed responsibility for security to UNTAET in early 2000.

Most contemporaneous lessons learnt focused on UNTAET's technocratic failings. If you were in it, as I was, you knew it was an ad hoc adventure and a bit chaotic. The experts concluded the UN was unequipped for such a mammoth task and needed to be reformed to meet future challenges. Yet while UNTAET was flawed, it did hand over a functioning government for the Timorese to run on 20 May 2002.

One key factor in the success of these missions is often neglected — the absence of external spoilers. This is what President Karzai saw too.

Timor-Leste was a lucky country that came of age just as Indonesia democratised and its military was leaving the national stage. The post-Soeharto civilian political leadership quickly turned its back on the former province and got on with the business of internal reform. It repealed the 1976 integration law in October 1999 and left the territory to the UN. Then Mines and Oil Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono renounced Indonesia's claim on Timor's oil, thereby making the new republic economically viable.

By the time the UN was ready to give the country back to the Timorese in May 2002, Indonesia had been through three presidents. Megawati Soekarnoputri, the one least supportive of East Timor's plight, magnanimously showed up for the party.

But, Mr. Karzai, Indonesia did not just walk away from Timor, it did something much more extraordinary: it enthusiastically embraced the idea of an independent Timor-Leste.

Such diplomatic gymnastics still startle the old hands every time one of the Indonesian veterans of 1999 blogs, tweets, or posts pictures of new found Timorese friend who was once their adversary. Despite the odd hiccup (the two countries still cannot agree on a land or maritime border), the relationship is increasingly broad and mutually profitable.

After UNAMET was over, UN officials wrote to Australian counterparts to tell them we could not have performed the mission without them. Indonesia never received such thank-you letters, as its turn-around from belligerent party to good neighbour took some years. Also, its misbehaviour and scorched earth policy in 1999 has never been forgotten and neither have the crimes against humanity that took place on Jakarta's watch, which are still to be properly accounted for.

But how did a friendship blossom amid such bitter memories? Most importantly, the Timorese were ready to trade justice for peace. The realpolitik moment was the final report of the imperfect 2005-2008 Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF). In turn for not pursuing crimes against humanity against Indonesian perpetrators, Timor-Leste, through the CTF, gained a sense of equality with its former coloniser; Indonesia lost the pebble in its shoe as it aspired to fill the boots of a being a regional power.

But such morally ambiguous deals do not negate the strategic reality that is clear now, a decade after independence; you really do need good neighbours to make a complex peace operation work. In the case of Timor-Leste, it took one with deep pockets and can-do spirit to the south as well as another to the west ready to leave quietly, do nothing and then overcome its enormous loss of face to want to try again to be best friends with the new nation over its back fence.

--- Jim Della-Giacoma is the South East Asia Project Director for the International Crisis Group & The Interpreter

Warnings of Second African Drought in Sahel (NEWS BRIEF)

As many as 10 million people are threatened by drought in the Sahel. CREDIT: Shannon Howard/WFP

(HN, February 16, 2012) -- A persistent drought in the Sahel region of Africa could turn into a famine and threaten up to 10-million people.

This was the main conclusion of an emergency meeting of UN agencies, NGOs, governments and donors hosted Wednesday in Rome by the World Food Programme (WFP).

"We have a short time to act. We have two to three months, no more than that," the head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, José Graziano da Silva, said in no uncertain terms at a press conference after the meeting.

Also attending were representatives of the African Union and the Economic Community Of West African States - as well as the executive director of WFP, Josette Sheeran, the UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Valerie Amos, the administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Helen Clark, the assistant administrator of USAID, Nancy Lindborg and the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, Kristalina Georgieva.

Said Sheeran: "We are having an emergency meeting to avoid a full blown emergency, before we see the effects which are long lasting and devastating. We know what needs to be done. We have learned some lessons from the Horn of Africa. While we can't prevent drought, we can prevent famine. "

More than 10 million people in the Sahel are threatened because late and erratic rains have ruined harvests in parts of Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Senegal, Gambia, Burkina Faso and northern Nigeria.

Food shortages have pounded the region at least five times in the past 10 years. Farmers in the region have seen harvests fall by 14 percent in Burkina Faso and 46 percent in Mauritania, says WFP.

The government of Niger says that over 5.5 million people in the country are at risk of going hungry and that a rapid response will be needed to avert a full scale food crisis.  In Chad, 6 out of 11 regions in the Sahelian parts of the country are reporting “critical” levels of malnutrition, with the other 5 at levels described as “serious”.

However the crisis cannot only be blamed on Mother Nature - fighting in Mali has resulted in thousands of refugees fleeing into neighbouring states, including Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso.

- HUMNEWS staff