The term BRIC was coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 to describe the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The BRIC powers had their first summit in 2009 in Russia. South Africa joined in 2010.

“We expect BRICS will give us a positive response to the request we have made,” foreign ministry spokesman Meles Alem told journalists, according to the state-run news agency ENA.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/ethiopia-asks-join-brics-bloc-emerging-economies-2023-06-29/

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The demobilisation of Tigray forces is seen as central to the Nov. 2 ceasefire agreement, alongside the restoration of services, resumption of humanitarian aid and withdrawal of Eritrean troops, who fought alongside Ethiopia’s army but were not party to the truce.

The conflict created famine-like conditions for hundreds of thousands of Tigray’s population, killed thousands and displaced millions across northern Ethiopia.

The handover in the town of Agulae, around 30 km (18 miles) northeast of the regional capital Mekelle, was overseen by a monitoring team comprising members of the two sides and a regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/tigray-forces-begin-handing-over-heavy-weapons-ethiopian-army-2023-01-10/

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The post Tigray forces begin handing over heavy weapons to Ethiopian army first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

On April 2, 2021, the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, issued a statement condemning atrocity crimes in Tigray and called for comprehensive responses: “We condemn the killing of civilians, sexual and gender-based violence, indiscriminate shelling and the forced displacement of residents of Tigray and Eritrean refugees.”

The statement continues that: “All parties must exercise utmost restraint, ensure the protection of civilians and respect human rights and international law. We urge parties to the conflict to provide immediate, unhindered humanitarian access. We are concerned about worsening food insecurity, with emergency conditions prevailing across extensive areas of central and eastern Tigray. We welcome the recent announcement from Prime Minister Abiy that Eritrean forces will withdraw from Tigray. This process must be swift, unconditional, and verifiable. We call for the end of violence and the establishment of a clear inclusive political process that is acceptable to all Ethiopians, including those in Tigray and which leads to credible elections and a wider national reconciliation process.”

The ongoing armed conflict began on November 4, 2020, when “Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered the Ethiopian Defense Forces (EDF) to militarily engage with the Tigray Regional Paramilitary Police and militia loyal to the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF) in what he stated was a response to multiple attacks by the Tigray security forces on the EDF North Command base in Mekelle and other military camps in Tigray Region.” A few days later, on November 9, 2020, evidence of the mass killing of several hundred people, mainly Amharans, in the western Tigray town of Mai Kadra, began to emerge. Subsequent weeks have seen reports of thousands killed, including civilians, and thousands fleeing to Sudan. In December 2020, the U.N. alleged violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law, including the deliberate targeting of civilians, extrajudicial killings, and widespread looting.

Recent months have seen more and more evidence of atrocities. End of March 2021, researchers from Ghent University, Belgium, reported on the staggering cost of the conflict, with 1,942 fully documented deaths, 6% of victims being children, including infants. However, this number is very conservative. As the report explains, there are 7,259 reported civilian causalities that are yet to be verified. “As lack of media access and a still ongoing communication blockage in many parts of the region make reporting very difficult, the number of verifiable sources is minimal and the number of casualties is most likely an extreme underrepresentation.” The authors of the report further compiled a list of 151 massacres, namely, of atrocities “in which at least 5 unarmed civilians were killed on the same day at the same location.”

To the list of causalities, we need to add the list of all those injured and in need of humanitarian assistance. The numbers are likely to increase. As the report notes, in November 2020, “the Government of Ethiopia stated that the military operation in Tigray was completed, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appointed an ‘Interim Government of Tigray.’ However, four months into the conflict, the armed conflict is still ongoing on a large scale, many people are internally displaced and the number of reports on severe atrocities against unarmed civilians is growing rapidly. These reports systematically document massacres, (often extreme) sexual violence, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and mass looting.” Furthermore, end of March 2021, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that while before the conflict, there were 950,000 people in need of aid, the conflict added (projected) 1.3 million people in need of aid.

G7 Foreign Ministers are right to condemn the atrocities and ask for comprehensive responses. However, it should not stop at words.

Dr. Ewelina U. Ochab

Dr. Ewelina U. Ochab is a human rights advocate, author and co-founder of the Coalition for Genocide Response. Ochab works on the topic of genocide, with specific focus on persecution of religious minorities around the world, with main projects including Daesh genocide in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram atrocities in West Africa, and the situation of religious minorities in South Asia. Ochab has written over 30 UN reports (including Universal Periodic Review reports) and has made oral and written submissions at the Human Rights Council sessions and the UN Forum on Minority Issues. Ochab authored the initiative and proposal to establish the UN International Day Commemorating Victims and Survivors of Religious Persecution. The initiative has led to the establishment of the UN International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief on August 22. Follow @EwelinaUO

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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2021/04/04/g7-foreign-ministers-condemn-atrocity-crimes-in-tigray/?sh=133c5ccb25c5

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The post G7 Foreign Ministers Condemn Atrocity Crimes In Tigray first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Rohingya refugees gather behind a barbed wire fence in a temporary settlement set up in the border zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh on April 25, 2018. YE AUNG THU/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

With its square white tents perfectly aligned against the yellow sands of the Sahara, Adam’s home could be a model refugee camp. Except it’s not. The government of Niger and the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, call the camp a “humanitarian site.” Real refugees, for the government, are those who come from the war-torn zones of neighboring Mali and Nigeria and who are housed temporarily until there is a lull in fighting, at which point they are expected to return to the other side of the border.

The Sudanese at the humanitarian site are different, caught between journeys. They fled the conflict in their homeland of Darfur and headed north, crossing various borders to reach Libya—which proved to be as dangerous as the country they had left behind. Then they went south to Niger, this time fleeing detention centers, slave markets, and arrest by European Union-backed Libyan coast guard units.

Before he came to Niger, on his first journey, Adam had even managed to reach Europe. He got to Italy but was arrested at the French border and deported to Sudan. Since then, he has gone by the nickname “Italy.” He isn’t happy waiting at the humanitarian site, but the UNHCR staff told him that if he didn’t like it there, Niger could send him back to Libya. In 2019, there were painfully few resettlement flights from the humanitarian site to Europe, but they did exist, and they gave Adam hope. He dreams of returning to the country that gave him his name. Or anywhere in Europe, really. The present offers no possibilities.

Getting to Europe is now almost impossible. The drip feed of resettlement was turned off in early 2020 as the virus reconfigured our world. In September, he texted us: “There is no future for me.”

Left: A migrant sits near a fire inside a tent at a camp outside Bihac, in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, on Nov. 19, 2019. ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: Migrants make their way through Serbia near the town of Subotica on Sept. 9, 2015, toward a break in a steel and razor fence erected on the border by the Hungarian government. CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

Since the beginning of the pandemic, drawbridges have gone up across the world, limiting the movement of business travelers, vacationers, and asylum-seekers. But while airlines eagerly anticipate tourism returning to normal, many of the limitations on asylum enacted during the current crisis are likely to be become permanent. This year, more than 90 countries have stopped processing asylum claims. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands of migrants, fleeing wars at home and looking for a route to Northern Europe, were interned in camps, while in Malaysia and Thailand, boats containing Rohingya refugees were turned away. In the Mediterranean, the virus has proved a potent weapon for politicians seeking ways to justify Europe’s blockade of irregular movement from the south.

The far-right’s political rhetoric blames refugees for carrying COVID-19. At the beginning of March, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, stated that he is “fighting a two-front war: One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus.” The right has conflated the two issues, building on a centuries-long history of scapegoating strangers as diseased. Asylum-seekers are actually no more likely than anyone else to carry the virus, and its initial spread followed the pathways of international air travel rather than irregular migration. But the pandemic is a useful excuse, according to Susan Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute, “for countries to put in place anti-asylum policies they would have pursued anyway.”

The measures taken in the last six months are not exceptional policies pursued in a time of crisis but a crisis put to good use to complete a project already 30 years in the making: an almost total blockade against refugee movement and the end of asylum as a practical possibility.

A group of young Afghan boys stand outside a tent supplied by UNHCR at a camp in Pakistan on Jan. 1, 1989. HOWARD DAVIES/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The right of asylum has always been ambiguously positioned between law and geopolitics. When the U.N. Refugee Convention was first adopted in 1951, it applied only to Europeans trying to find their place in a new jigsaw of nations following World War II. All the focus of postwar discussion was on “non-refoulement,” the principle that means asylum-seekers cannot be sent back to the countries from which they fled if they would continue to be persecuted there. The enshrining of non-refoulement was a reaction to the original sin to which the convention was a response: that many countries refused entry to Jewish refugees during the war. That refugees can’t legally be sent back to dangerous places, however, doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed a place to go—a limitation in the convention that is brutally exposed by stories like Adam’s.

Not that Adam was much thought about when the convention was signed. It would take until 1967 for a protocol to be signed that generalized the right of asylum outside of Europe to anyone with a reasonable fear of persecution on the basis of their political opinions or membership of a persecuted group. Even after the signing of the protocol, the right to asylum remained fragile. While in theory, signatory countries have to take in asylum-seekers, no one country has a duty to do so, and in reality, asylum policies are always sculpted by the demands of national immigration politics.

In the 1950s and ’60s, there were relatively few asylum cases in Europe and the Anglophone world, simply because workers were needed, immigration rules relatively lax, and it was easier to migrate than to go through complicated asylum procedures. Those who did apply could be held up as political victories: the victims of communist systems in Hungary and Poland whose failure was evident in their flight.

As the oil crisis unfolded in the 1970s, bringing soaring unemployment to Europe, the demand for immigrant workers slackened, immigration restrictions hardened, and immigrants became useful punching bags for politicians looking for scapegoats for the global economic downturn. The seeds of popular discontent took root after the guest workers who had come to Europe in the 1950s and ’60s stayed, becoming the target of political anger. The firming up of immigration policies was accompanied by a rise in the number of people applying for asylum, as those fleeing conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the wars of Central America tried to get to safety.

From the beginning, the institution of asylum was bound up with the political economy of nation-states. With the crises of the 1970s came the institutionalization of a new way of keeping asylum-seekers out: the refugee camp.

Tents tightly packed together are lit up at night at the Shah Mansoor relief camp in Swabi, Pakistan, on June 21, 2009. PAULA BRONSTEIN /GETTY IMAGES

Ethiopian refugee women wait to receive items distributed by the Kenyan Red Cross at the newly built Somare refugee camp in Moyale, Kenya, on March 19, 2018. BRIAN OTIENO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Syrian refugee from Aleppo sits with his children in a makeshift tent in a camp in the town of Kab Elias in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 20, 2016. PATRICK BAZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Over the last 30 years, such a journey has become increasingly difficult, and most refugees now live in camps in countries like Kenya, Lebanon, and Pakistan, next to the war zones from which they have fled. At the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and 85 percent of them were hosted in the developing world.
While it is very difficult to get asylum, it is easy to get into a refugee camp. Building a good life there, however, is nearly impossible.

Residency in such camps is predicated on the idea, enshrined at the heart of UNHCR, that refugees will either be resettled or will return home. This means that most refugees are not allowed to work, do not get citizenship in their host country, and are provided only minimal services designed to maintain life—but not build a good one. Camps are supposed to be temporary, but with resettlement increasingly difficult and wars never-ending, many never leave. The consequence? In places like the Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, hundreds of thousands of people have grown up without citizenship, dependent on handouts, and waiting for futures that will never arrive.

From the perspective of UNHCR, such camps save lives. In historical perspective, however, such camps are devices to manage uprooted populations. Effectively, camps function as cages, as the American sociologist David Scott FitzGerald names them, designed to keep people from coming to wealthy countries and applying for asylum.

A man gives water to migrants heading to the border with Guatemala as they travel aboard a truck in Cerro de Hula on June 3. Nearly 100 migrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Cuba headed in a caravan from Choluteca, Honduras, to Mexico were stopped by the police for sanitary controls amid the coronavirus pandemic. ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Since the 1990s, Europe, the United States, and Australia have tried to prevent asylum-seekers from making applications inside their territories, despite legally remaining signatories to the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol. The measures they have taken include the tightening of the global visa regime and limitations on travel, as well as the externalization of border controls far from the actual frontiers of the nation-states in question. Since the 1980s, the U.S. Coast Guard has increasingly intercepted asylum-seekers at sea and forcibly repatriated them without legal hearings, while Australia offshores its asylum-seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru much as companies move factories overseas—it saves money, and horrors are easier to bear if they don’t take place in the homeland.

In Europe, the last 30 years have seen the continent’s borders moving steadily south, even as North Africans find it increasingly hard to cross the Mediterranean. In recent years, African and European officials have called Niger, Libya, and Sudan “Europe’s new southern border.” This new frontier wall is constituted by an expanding set of drones and border fences, sometimes guarded by militia forces subcontracted by Europe that can intercept migrants in places where human rights abuses are less visible. While Australia has built buffers in other countries and constructed a system of offshore processing for asylum, Europe has focused on blocking asylum-seekers south of the Mediterranean. Amid all its other disagreements, on the necessity of this new frontier, as the writer Thomas Meaney noted last year, Europe is singing from the same hymn sheet.

A group of migrant men, mainly from Niger and Nigeria, travels across the desert in northern Niger toward the Libyan border post of Gatrone on Jan. 15, 2019. SOULEYMANE AG ANARA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Migrants stand on an inflatable boat during a rescue operation by a French NGO in the Mediterranean Sea on Aug. 10, 2019. ANNE CHAON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Sudanese refugees from Darfur gather amid tents during a sit-in outside the UNHCR office in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Dec. 12, 2015, demanding better treatment and acceleration of their relocation. KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Life in Libya wasn’t easy. Adam moved between temporary jobs, working in restaurants and for construction firms, being beaten and harassed, and eking out a hard-scrabble existence at the edge of Libya’s civil war. After a year, he decided to leave for Europe. In 2016—the peak year for sea crossings to Italy, with 181,000 arrivals—he boarded one of four dinghies, each filled with 140 migrants. He made it to Sicily and traveled to Rome, intent on heading to France, but he was arrested just before the border in Ventimiglia and driven to the Sudanese Embassy, where he was interrogated and deported to Sudan. On arrival, he was extended the common welcome that Sudanese intelligence customarily affords returnees and was brutally interrogated.

Adam’s deportation was enabled by a deal that Italy—like several other European countries—struck with Sudan that allowed Sudanese intelligence agents to come to Europe and interview asylum-seekers in order to facilitate deportations. This deal was struck with the very Sudanese regime that Adam fled, effectively ensuring his refoulement. Following Adam’s deportation, a group of Sudanese nationals won an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights against their deportation under the same scheme. Amid this and other legal challenges, Europe continues to rely on the externalization of its borders as its principal means of evading legal scrutiny.

In 2016, the EU signed a 6 billion euro ($6.6 billion) deal for Turkey to keep Syrian refugees on its soil—including those returned from Greece. In effect, Turkey became a cage, much like the refugee camps farther south. In the same year, Niger—a major recipient of EU aid, with one billion euros (about $1.18 billion) earmarked for 2017-2020—enforced a new law that allowed its forces to arrest migrants as early as Agadez—the last sizable town at the edge of the Sahara, still 700 miles from the Libyan border. This, according to EU officials, is a model arrangement.

The borders of Europe are moving south, and with this expansion, the border guards are also changing. In 2009, then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made an agreement with Libya’s leader at the time, Muammar al-Qaddafi, that enabled Italian coast guard units to swiftly deport immigrants to Libya. In the intervening years, there has been regime change in Libya, but Italy’s priorities have remained unchanged.

A weak Government of National Accord (GNA) was established in Libya in March 2016, though it barely had control of parts of Tripoli. The fictional sovereignty of the GNA didn’t stop the EU, led by Italy, from training the Libyan coast guard. Many of those coast guard units had, until recently, been militias involved in migrant smuggling. Adam had left Libya from a terkina (corner—a name used for the places that migrants gather before boarding boats) in Sabratha, thanks to a smuggler connected to Ahmad al-Dabbashi, otherwise known as Al-Ammo, “the uncle,” who had risen from being a wheelbarrow porter to the most famous migrant smuggler in Libya. He was shortly to diversify his business and become a coast guardsman as well.

After his interrogation, Adam returned to Darfur, to the same internally displaced persons camp in which he had grown up. It was still guarded by the same militias that were still killing his people. “We haven’t seen you for a long time,” they said. “Where have you been?” Adam resolved to leave again. He was fed up with being hunted and chased.

When Adam returned to Libya in 2017, the situation had changed. Al-Ammo was no longer a famous smuggler in command of a militia but the head of an anti-migrant force recognized by the GNA. His terkina—a former Italian tuna factory—was now an official detention center for migrants. Rumors of a 5 million euro ($5.9 million) grant from the Italians, though, proved blood in the water, and the sharks circled. Rival smugglers attacked Al-Ammo and expelled him from Sabratha, as 10,000 migrants fled once again, this time from what became known as the Sabratha war, only to be arrested by Al-Ammo’s rivals and caged in deportation centers along the coast.

No matter which commander is in charge, the militia forces have proved themselves to be adept jailors. In 2018, at the EU’s behest, Libya’s so-called search and rescue zone was recognized, allowing the coast guard to expand its area of operations away from the coast. The results were impressive. The number of arrivals in Italy decreased from 181,000 in 2016 to just 23,000 in 2018.

Officially, the EU condemns the arbitrary detention of migrants in Libya, which is still not a signatory to the 1951 convention. In reality, of the approximately 500 million euros ($590 million) the EU has given to the GNA since 2016, some proportion has gone to the coast guard. It’s the numbers that matter. In 2018, one high-level EU official told us that “our goal is for the numbers of migrants arriving in Europe to decrease. Our policies are successful. We don’t care about the consequences in Libya or Niger.”

A woman carries a child past flames after a major fire broke out in the Moria migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Sept. 9. ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

In Europe, populist politicians have used the pandemic to stoke fears of migrants. Sicily’s regional president, Nello Musumeci, attempted to close all the migrant centers on the island at the end of August—before he was blocked in court—and blamed immigrants for spreading the virus. Musumeci’s rhetoric echoes that of the former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who is attempting to restart his stalled political career by calling for a halt to all migrant boats landing in Italian waters. Port after port has been turning away migrant boats during the last few months, with front-line states like Malta announcing blanket bans on NGO vessels carrying migrants disembarking on their shores.

This leaves people like Adam trapped. When he returned to Libya, he fell into the same cycle, stuck in abusive jobs that refused to pay him. He resolved to leave, for Niger. In Agadez, he was pushed into the humanitarian site a few miles away from town. There he waits, unwilling to return to the government militias waiting for him in Sudan and unable to get to Europe.

The emphasis on non-refoulement in the legal architecture of refugee law has created a situation in which—thankfully—some people are not returned to war, but neither are they able to make new lives. Instead, they are caged in camps and detention centers and effectively left stateless.

In Libya and Niger, UNHCR has effectively become a proxy for the EU, its second-largest donor. It’s not entirely UNHCR’s fault. Even before the pandemic, of the 50,000 registered refugees and asylum-seekers in Libya, UNHCR was only able to resettle 2,000 people per year, mainly to Europe, due to governments’ reluctance to accept refugees. In such a mismatch between demand and supply, UNHCR has focused on keeping refugees warehoused.

The 1951 convention is no longer fit for purpose. In 1949, a group of intellectuals, including Albert Einstein—himself a refugee—and Bertrand Russell wrote a public letter to U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie suggesting a more cosmopolitan way of dealing with refugees. “History made them citizens of the world, and they should be treated as such.” The refugee problem was rather an opportunity, the letter held, to “let the ideal of world-citizenship subsist not exclusively in theories and programs, but also in courageous experimenting and in a genuine respect for the human person.”

The International Refugee Organization (IRO)—the precursor to UNHCR—reacted with hostility to the suggestion of a world passport for the displaced: Refugees were a problem, there were no international rights, and repatriation or resettlement was the only way for refugees to find their place in a world of nation-states. The result, 70 years later, is a growing population of stateless people across the world—the very situation that the IRO and UNHCR were designed to prevent.

Discussions around a Global Compact on Refugees in 2018 might have enabled a real discussion of how to reform the practice of asylum in the 21st century. Instead, there was little change to the current legal framework, and even those changes were spurned by the United States and Hungary. On a map of nation-states painted with an increasingly thick brush, there is no room for asylum, and for those like Adam, the future may be a country he shall never visit.

In December 2019, several hundred Darfuri refugees walked out of the humanitarian site and organized a protest in front of the UNHCR office in Agadez. After three weeks, Niger’s security forces pushed them back to the camp and arrested more than 300 of them, including Adam, who spent two months in prison.

In July 2020, the refugees resumed their protests, this time in the humanitarian site itself. One of their WhatsApp messages this month reads: “7 September, the 50th consecutive day of our peaceful protest to ask our rights to decent life, and the UNHCR didn’t visit the camp. They left us in the desert.”

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/11/new-refugee-convention-asylum-libya-italy/

The post The World Needs a New Refugee Convention first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Somalia has declared a national emergency as large swarms of locusts spread across east Africa.

The country’s Ministry of Agriculture said the insects, which consume large amounts of vegetation, posed “a major threat to Somalia’s fragile food security situation”.

There are fears that the situation may not be brought under control before the harvest begins in April.

The UN says the swarms are the largest in Somalia and Ethiopia in 25 years.

Meanwhile, neighbouring Kenya has not seen a locust threat as severe in 70 years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

However, Somalia is the first country in the region to declare an emergency over the infestation.

• Drones tested to combat desert locusts

Somalia’s unstable security situation means that planes cannot be used to spray insecticide from the air.

In January, the FAO called for international help in fighting the swarms in the Horn of Africa, warning that locust numbers across the region could grow 500 times by June.

The swarms spread into east Africa from Yemen across the Red Sea, after heavy rainfall in late 2019 created ideal conditions for the insects to flourish.

Locusts can travel up to 150km (93 miles) in a day. Each adult insect can eat its own weight in food daily.

In December, a locust swarm forced a passenger plane off course in Ethiopia. Insects smashed into the engines, windshield, and nose, but the aircraft was able to land safely in the capital, Addis Ababa.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51348517

The post Somalia declares emergency over locust swarms first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The worst outbreak of desert locusts in Kenya in 70 years has seen hundreds of millions of the bugs swarm into the East African nation from Somalia and Ethiopia. Those two countries have not had an infestation like this in a quarter-century, destroying farmland and threatening an already vulnerable region with devastating hunger.

“Even cows are wondering what is happening,” said Ndunda Makanga, who spent hours Friday trying to chase the locusts from his farm. “Corn, sorghum, cowpeas, they have eaten everything.”

When rains arrive in March and bring new vegetation across much of the region, the numbers of the fast-breeding locusts could grow 500 times before drier weather in June curbs their spread, the United Nations says.

“We must act immediately,” said David Phiri of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, as donors huddled in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a three-hour drive away.

About $70 million is needed to step up aerial pesticide spraying, the only effective way to combat them, the U.N. says. That won’t be easy, especially in Somalia, where parts of the country are in the grip of the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group.

The rose-colored locusts turn whole trees pink, clinging to branches like quivering ornaments before taking off in hungry, rustling clouds.

Astonished by the finger-length insects, children dash here and there, waving blankets or plucking at branches to shake the locusts free. One woman, Kanini Ndunda, batted at them with a shovel.

Even a small swarm of the insects can consume enough food for 35,000 people in a single day, said Jens Laerke of the U.N. humanitarian office in Geneva.

Farmers are afraid to let their cattle out for grazing, and their crops of millet, sorghum and maize are vulnerable, but there is little they can do.

About 70,000 hectares (172,973 acres) of land in Kenya are already infested.

“This one, ai! This is huge,” said Kipkoech Tale, a migratory pest control specialist with the agriculture ministry. “I’m talking about over 20 swarms that we have sprayed. We still have more. And more are coming.”

A single swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer of farmland, an area the size of almost 250 football fields, regional authorities say.

One especially large swarm in northeastern Kenya measured 60 kilometers long by 40 kilometers wide (37 miles long by 25 miles wide).

Kenya needs more spraying equipment to supplement the four planes now flying, Tale said. Ethiopia also has four.

They also need a steady supply of pesticides, said Francis Kitoo, deputy director of agriculture in southeastern Kenya’s Kitui county.

“The locals are really scared because they can consume everything,” Kitoo said. “I’ve never seen such a big number.”

The locusts eat the fodder for animals, a crucial source of livelihood for families who now worry how they will pay for expenses like school fees, he said.

His own concern about the locusts?

“They will lay eggs and start another generation,” he said.

A changing climate has contributed to “exceptional” breeding conditions, said Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker.

Migrating with the wind, the locusts can cover up to 150 kilometers (93 miles) in a single day. They look like tiny aircraft lazily crisscrossing the sky.

They are now heading toward Uganda and fragile South Sudan, where almost half the country faces hunger as it emerges from civil war. Uganda has not had such an outbreak since the 1960s and is already on alert.

The locusts also are moving steadily toward Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, the breadbasket for Africa’s second-most populous country, the U.N. says.

“The situation is very bad but farmers are fighting it in the traditional way,” said Buni Orissa, a resident of Ethiopia’s Sidama region. “The locusts love cabbage and beans. This may threaten the shaky food security in the region.”

Even before this outbreak, nearly 20 million people faced high levels of food insecurity across the East African region long challenged by periodic droughts and floods.

As exasperated farmers look for more help in fighting one of history’s most persistent pests, the FAO’s Locust Watch offers little consolation.

“Although giant nets, flamethrowers, lasers, and huge vacuums have been proposed in the past, these are not in use for locust control,” the U.N. agency says. “People and birds often eat locusts but usually not enough to significantly reduce population levels over large areas.”

Still, it offered recipes. One suggested seasoning in Uganda is chopped onion and curry powder. Then fry.

___

Anna reported from Johannesburg. Frank Jordans in Berlin and Elias Meseret in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, contributed.

Source: https://time.com/5771621/locust-swarms-africa/

The post ‘This Is Huge’: Worst Locust Swarm in Decades Destroy Crops in East Africa first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Villagers mill around a house that had collapsed and killing one person on spot over ongoing heavy rains. File

The ongoing rains have killed at least 100 people since last month, authorities have said.

Most of the victims lost their lives in landslides, while others drowned in swollen rivers and flash floods.

On Monday, more bodies were recovered from cold mud in West Pokot where a landslide on Saturday buried parts of Tamkal and Nyarkulian villages.

Area Senator Samuel Poghisio said at least 56 people died, while Governor John Lonyangapuo said 43 people were killed in the disaster.

In a press conference in Nairobi on Monday, Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i said the national government would verify the numbers.

In Kajiado, five members of a family died on Monday morning after their car was swept off as they crossed a flooded Ng’tataek bridge between Namanga and Bissil.

Kajiado Central sub-county police commander Daudi Ole Lornyokwe said the victims included a woman, her two children, and two men.

The deaths bring to more than 100 people killed since the short rains began last month.

Earlier this month, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, citing figures from the Kenya Red Cross Society, said the rains had killed at least 48 people by November 8.

Matiang’i asked those living in low-lying areas in Murang’a Kiambu, Nyeri and Taita Taveta counties to take precaution because those places were prone to mudslides.

“We are urging people to move to safe grounds. Of course, it’s uncomfortable. But at this time we’d rather they feel funny but safe,” Matiang’i told reporters during a press conference at Wilson Airport.

He was accompanied by Devolution CS Eugene Wamalwa and Inspector General of Police Hilary Mutyambai.

Matiang’i said they were forced to turn back mid-air on their way to West Pokot.

He said they were traveling in two police helicopters but the pilots were advised the weather was too risky.

“We were forced to land in Eldoret. We had left Nairobi at 8 am but in Eldoret we were told it gets even worse in the afternoon. But we will try again tomorrow (Tuesday) morning,” he said.

Matiang’i said the Meteorological Department has warned the ongoing rains will continue until mid-December.

“Because of technology, these warnings are highly reliable and should not be ignored,” the CS said.

Mutyambai said police in North Rift had joined efforts to distribute food and non-food items like blankets and mattresses to victims in West Pokot.

“All county commissioners and police commissioners are on alert,” he said.

The heavy downpour has been attributed to the unusual warming of the Indian Ocean.

The phenomenon, called the Indian Ocean Dipole, happens nearly every 10 years, unleashing destructive rains and flooding across East Africa.

More than one million people have been displaced in Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Tanzania – but scientists say more misery is coming.

The Indian Ocean dipole, sometimes called the Indian El Niño, is an irregular change in the sea temperature in the western (near Kenya’s coast) and eastern (closer to Australia) areas of the Indian Ocean.

When the ocean around East Africa is far warmer than usual, there is higher evaporation and moist air flowing inwards into East African countries as heavy rains.

Scientists say this year the strength of the dipole is of a magnitude not seen in years, perhaps even decades.

edited by peter obuya

Source: https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2019-11-26-at-least-100-killed-since-start-of-heavy-rains/

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Australia: ‘Land of drought’

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, addressing the drought in the state of New South Wales, which produces one-quarter of the country’s agricultural output, said, “Now we are the land of drought.” Australia recently passed legislation to provide hundreds of millions of dollars worth of relief aid to farmers, including funds for mental health support.

Ethiopia: The end of nomadic life?

Ethiopia has been suffering from ongoing drought conditions since 2015, causing massive food shortages. The Ethiopian government said that some 8.5 million citizens required emergency food assistance in 2017 and that nearly 400,000 infants suffered acute malnutrition. Furthermore, the drought threatens to end traditional nomadic herding in the region.

South Africa: The looming prospect of Day Zero

Conservation and late-season rains saved South Africa’s Cape Town from an apocalyptic Day Zero scenario, in which water would have to be turned off and emergency rations issued, The drought, which was one of the worst in decades, emptied water reservoirs and caused some experts to suggest hauling icebergs from Antarctica avert a crisis.

Europe: Withering crops

Europe’s sweltering heat has been compounded by a lack of rain. Not only have citizens been suffering the health consequences, which affect health care systems and labor productivity, crops have also been hit hard. Farmers across the continent fear bankruptcy due to poor crops and the EU Joint Research Center predicts “an increase in drought frequency and intensity in the future.”

Greece: Lost villages reappear as crops die

Greece has been facing the dual problem of flash flooding in some regions and drought in others. Crete’s farmers said they could lose up to 40 percent of their crop this year due to an extremely dry winter. Though they are watering, they say it is not enough to nourish their crops. Water levels are so low that previously submerged villages have begun to reappear in reservoirs across the country.

Sweden: Worst drought since 1944

Sweden, which has not seen rain for over three months, is experiencing its worst drought since 1944. The situation threatens to cause severe crop losses costing farmers hundreds of thousands of euros. Sweden has been the site of massive forest fires and has even seen temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic Circle.

UK: ‘Tinderbox conditions’

The United Kingdom fears serious threats to its food supply chain due to the effects of this summer’s drought. The country’s National Farmers Union said the country is experiencing “tinderbox conditions.” This adds to problems brought on by the prospect of needed self-reliance in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

India: Running out of water

India has been plagued by water shortages due to rising population and mismanagement but also aggravated by drought, causing many areas of the country to run out of water. Bangalore was recently added to the list of global cities most likely to run out of drinking water. Other cities on the list include Cape Town, South Africa; Jakarta, Indonesia and Sao Paolo, Brazil.

USA: Back to the Dust Bowl

The US government said 29 percent of the country is currently experiencing drought, with conditions affecting some 75 million people. Although wildfires in California have captured the world’s attention, farming states, like Kansas, have once again been suffering. Kansas was one of the states crippled by the famous 1930s Dust Bowl.

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“I am announcing $91 million in additional humanitarian assistance for the people of Ethiopia,” Green said after a meeting with Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn in the capital Addis Ababa. “This funding will provide additional emergency food assistance and vital medical care.”

He also called on the government to create the political space to allow all sides of the political spectrum to have a say following protests that killed hundreds of people last year. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Maggie Fick)

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-4840064/US-gives-91-million-additional-food-aid-drought-hit-Ethiopia.html

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