Latest news with #globalSouth
South China Morning Post
7 days ago
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong's global mediation centre open to developed nations, Western countries
Western and developed countries are welcome to use services offered by Hong Kong's newly established global mediation centre, a senior official has said, dismissing concerns over the institute's founding members being primarily developing nations. Advertisement Deputy Secretary for Justice Horace Cheung Kwok-kwan on Saturday also addressed the possible direct competition with other dispute resolution hubs, including Singapore, outlining Hong Kong's distinct advantages such as its 'one country, two systems' policy. Hong Kong's International Organisation for Mediation, established last month to create an intergovernmental platform for resolving global disputes, has 33 founding member countries including Algeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, Belarus, Venezuela and Cuba. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also presided over the landmark signing ceremony. Asked on Saturday whether the centre's founding members comprised mainly developing countries, which could affect the perceived diversity of the convention, Cheung said all nations were welcome to use the services. Advertisement 'Many of the initiating countries are developing countries, or from the Global South,' Cheung told a radio programme.
The Guardian
12-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Dorothy Myers obituary
My friend and colleague Dorothy Myers, who has died aged 88, was a pioneering environmentalist. When she joined the Oxfam policy unit in Oxford in 1984, the organisation had just published David Bull's influential book Pesticides and the Third World Poor. Dorothy led Oxfam's input to teamwork with the global Pesticide Action Network (Pan) that challenged the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to stop export of pesticides banned in industrialised countries to the developing world. While at Oxfam, she helped establish the Pesticides Trust (part of the global Pan, and now Pan UK), which promotes safe and sustainable alternatives to pesticides. Dorothy's research identified pesticides with deadly impacts in the global south and contributed to the Rotterdam Convention, an international treaty effective since 2004 that agrees responsibility for dangerous chemicals. Her last study at Oxfam, co-authored with Joan Davidson, on poverty and environmental degradation, was presented to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. After leaving Oxfam, she joined Pan UK in 1994 to establish an organic cotton project with African partners. She helped the project identify methods of pest management that would safeguard health and reward farmers financially for growing organic cotton. Many thousands of farmers still benefit. Dr Abou Thiam, the former regional coordinator of Pan Africa, recalled how Dorothy was 'always available and always helpful' and'provided outstanding service to many peoples, farmers, communities and organisations in Africa'. Dorothy was thoughtful and strategic, with a great ability to turn abstract concepts into action. Friends around the world also remember her great sense of fun. Born in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, she was the daughter of Amy (nee Hinton) and Frank Halliman, both teachers, and went to Middlesbrough high school for girls. She gained a degree in geography from LSE in 1959, then joined her parents, who were teaching in Kenya. Working in Nairobi's town planning department from 1960, she highlighted the need for essential services in rapidly growing shantytowns. Dorothy met the environmentalist Norman Myers in Kenya and they married in 1965. In the late 60s they built up a wildlife photographic business, which supported them through a spell in California while Norman studied for a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972 they returned to Nairobi, where Dorothy became involved in local environmental action. In 1974, now with two young children, she helped establish the Environment Liaison Centre International, the local link to the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme. The family returned to the UK in 1982 and settled in Oxford, where Dorothy began her work with Oxfam. Dorothy separated from Norman in 1992. Launching a new challenge, she ran an English language summer school for foreign students, remembered fondly by many who worked there, which she continued for many summers while at Pan UK. Always able to effortlessly fit more into life, Dorothy loved music, art and gardening, and being surrounded by nature. After retiring in 2001 she bought a house near Limoux, France, where friends and family valued entertaining discussions. Dorothy is survived by her daughters, Malindi and Mara, and grandchildren, Juliette and Alex.
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Countries under Trump's travel ban are unique subjects of American imperialism
The list of countries banned by the Trump administration's newest order seems to have no rhyme or reason. Little connects Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, all targeted for a total ban, or Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela, all targeted for restrictions. The reasoning stated in the order is that they all pose security threats measured by 'whether each country has a significant terrorist presence within its territory, its visa-overstay rate, and its cooperation with accepting back its removable nationals'. Visa overstays, the order elaborates, 'indicates a blatant disregard for United States immigration laws'. Yet the latest data on overstays from Customs and Border Protection does show these countries high on the list, along with others not included. If we sit with this list a little longer, though, with attention to the history of the world we share, we can see a different unifying logic. All of these countries are in the global south, their citizens are racialized as Black or brown and Muslim. Most have high poverty rates that hover at or above half their population. Several have recently been sites of social upheaval or horrific wars. Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan, for example, all appear on the World Food Program's list of the world's most dire food crises. These facts do not, as the travel ban assumes, tell of the inherent violence of people from these nations, nor of a penchant to 'disregard' law. In fact, even the data on overstays says nothing of people's legal status. Nationals of Afghanistan, Burma, El Salvador, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela have long had a right to apply for temporary protective status due to the insecurity of their countries. We do not know how many of the so-called 'overstayers' applied for other protections like asylum. The poverty and insecurity of these nations are mainly an indication that they have been subject to imperialism, including US military and economic intervention and coercion. You cannot understand the endemic violence or economic destitution that forces people to leave Haiti without attending to both the French extortion of the island nation in exchange for their freedom from enslavement, and the United States' occupation of it. You cannot understand the mass exodus of people from Afghanistan, one of the world's largest refugee populations, without understanding the United States' funding of the Mujahideen, or the so-called 'war on terror', that did little more than further destabilize the nation. Iran's current regime is only possible because the US supported British efforts in destroying Iranian democracy to save British Petroleum. US sanctions, whether in Iran or Venezuela or in Cuba, have not contributed to pressuring regime change, but rather to economic devastation and mass displacement. American shrapnel has been pulled from the bodies of Yemeni children. Since March, 250 people have been killed in US strikes on Saada and Sanaa, at least 68 of whom were detained African migrants. Time and time again data shows that African countries such as oil-rich Equatorial Guinea and Chad, ravaged by companies such as Exxon Mobile, and gold-rich Sudan, are not victims of poverty, but victims of theft. The United Nations estimates that $86bn leaves the continent each year in 'illicit financial flows', or theft through criminal activities and tax evasion. What's more, between 1970 and 2022, countries in the global south, including those on this list, are estimated to have paid more than $2.5tn in interest alone to the benefit of the global north. Thomas Sankara, a former president of Burkina Faso, once called debt a 'skillfully managed reconquest of Africa'. The wealthiest nations in the world are causing the climate crisis that the poorest nations pay for. Climate activists estimate that governments in the global north owe $5tn each year to countries in the global south for the devastation they are causing them. Seen from this vantage, Trump's travel ban, which proudly cites what came to be known as the 'Muslim ban' of his first administration in its opening paragraphs, is a cruel escalation of a longstanding policy of profiting off Black and brown lives and disposing of the most vulnerable among them. In displacement camps in New York and Tijuana and the Aegean islands of Greece, I have met pharmacists, artists, DJs and journalists from many of the targeted countries. Just this week I spoke to a political activist who, forced to flee a massacre in one of the targeted countries, left her three young children behind. Speaking to me after the issuance of this ban, she worried whether she would be able to secure her asylum, which is currently being adjudicated, and whether she could ever reunify her family. Her voice broke as she said: 'I wish they could understand that I never wanted to come here.' Trump justified the ban by referencing a recent incident in which an Egyptian man in Boulder, Colorado, injured 12 people calling for the release of Israeli hostages (though notably Egypt is not on the list). That this one act justifies the banning of millions of people is absurd. This latest ban is simply another installation in a series of policies meant to 'Make America white again', following a ban on asylum and a cancellation of humanitarian parole. It comes as attacks on our immigrant students continue, particularly those who dare speak out against the US funding of Gaza's decimation. It is not the people of these nations that are a threat to the security of the United States. It is the United States that has long been a threat to them, robbing them of their wealth, destroying their institutions and environments, and then denying them participation in the safety built at their expense. We should be atoning for our sins, not exacerbating them.
The Guardian
31-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Are there billions more people on earth than we thought? If so, it's no bad thing
According to the UN, the world's population stands at just over 8.2 billion. However, a recent study suggests the figure could be hundreds of millions or even billions higher. This news might sound terrifying, but it is important to remember that anxieties about overpopulation are rarely just about the numbers. They reflect power struggles over which lives matter, who is a burden or a threat and ultimately what the future should look like. The world's population reached 1 billion just after the turn of the 19th century. The number of people on the planet then began to grow exponentially, doubling to 2 billion by about 1925 and again to 4 billion about 50 years later. On 15 November 2022, the UN announced the birth of the eight billionth human. As it is not possible to count every single person in the world, the UN's population figures are calculated by dividing the Earth's surface into a grid and using census data to estimate how many people live in each square. This method provides a rough estimate, but until now it was thought to be reasonably reliable. A recent study by Dr Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University in Finland discovered that UN estimates undercount the number of people living in rural areas by more than 50%. This is because census data in the global south is often incomplete or unreliable outside big cities. Consequently, UN figures probably underestimate the world population by hundreds of millions or several billion. Many people argue that our planet does not have the resources to support 8 billion people. 'Overpopulation' is seen as the root cause of many of the world's biggest problems. But these concerns are nothing new. In 1988, the US sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov used what he referred to as 'my bathroom metaphor' to illustrate his fears about population growth. 'If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom.' But if 20 people live in the same apartment, they will impinge on each other's liberty one way or another. According to Asimov, rapid population growth creates a similar problem. It not only places enormous pressure on natural resources, but also erodes autonomy, dignity and civility. 'As you put more and more people on to the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears.' At the turn of the 19th century, when there were fewer than a billion inhabitants on Earth, Thomas Malthus was already convinced that 'the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived'. Malthus's inability to predict that technology would revolutionise food production did not dent his popularity. On the contrary, as the world population grew, the prophets of doom grew ever louder. Neo-Malthusian anxieties reached fever pitch with Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb – subtitled Population Control or Race to Oblivion (1968). This hugely influential, bestselling book warned: 'The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.' These devastating predictions encouraged governments and international agencies to take drastic action. As fertility rates were already falling in most high-income countries, these efforts concentrated on Africa and even more so Asia. USAID funded family planning programmes across what was then referred to as the developing world. Millions of Indian men were sterilised during the Emergency of the mid-1970s. In 1979, the Chinese Communist party introduced the one-child policy and a few years later launched a mass sterilisation campaign, which focused mainly on women. Today, plenty of people remain concerned about overpopulation, but their apocalyptic visions now concentrate on climate change, resource depletion and biodiversity loss. Despite stark disparities in consumption – Americans consume 360 times more carbon per capita than Somalis, for example – population control still focuses on the majority world. Thankfully, the coercive policies that took place in India, China and elsewhere are no longer in vogue. The new approach to population control focuses instead on women's empowerment. Educating women and giving them control over their lives has proved remarkably effective at reducing fertility rates. In the 1960s, women had on average five children each. Today, the figure is 2.3 per woman – just over what is needed to keep the population stable. By 2100 the global birthrate is projected to fall to 1.8. According to the UN, the world's population will peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. After this it will stabilise, then fall. The exponential growth that gave Malthusians so many sleepless nights has been halted. That many people will put considerable stress on the Earth's resources, but if consumption is managed responsibly and sustainable technologies are developed, the world will avoid an apocalyptic catastrophe. Returning to Asimov's bathroom metaphor, as anyone who has crammed into one house with their extended family over Christmas knows, many people sharing few bathrooms creates a suboptimal situation. You won't be able to shower exactly when you want – and you'd better make it a short one. But this hardly amounts to the end of civilisation. In fact, compromise and sharing is probably closer to most people's idea of a good life than having the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Population growth varies starkly between regions. In most high-income countries, fertility rates are already well below the replacement level. The African continent is projected to account for over half the world's population growth in the next three decades, with Asia and Latin America responsible for the rest. As the historian Alison Bashford points out, concerns about overpopulation are often not really about there being too many people but too many of the wrong kind of people. Ethnonationalists in Europe and North America see the disparities in birthrates as an existential threat to 'western civilisation'. They worry about their countries being indelibly changed by mass migration. But the cold hard truth is that in a few decades our shrinking, ageing societies will desperately need these newcomers to pay taxes and work in healthcare and social care. This vision of the future may be unsettling for some, but the alternative is much worse. To extend Asimov's metaphor, the populist right advocates a sort of bathroom apartheid. They are en suite isolationists, who want to retain exclusive use over one of the bathrooms in the apartment, and force the 19 other flatmates to share. At first, this approach has its advantages. They can soak in the bath all day. They can sit for hours on the can reading the news. But sooner or later they will come a cropper. Perhaps the other toilet becomes blocked and the whole flat is inundated with raw sewage. The other flatmates might forcibly seize control of the personal bathroom. Or as the en suite isolationists grow old and infirm, they'll find themselves with no one to bathe them or wipe their bottoms. Jonathan Kennedy teaches politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, and is the author of Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
The Independent
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
China establishes mediation forum in Hong Kong to rival International Court of Justice
Dozens of countries joined China on Friday in establishing an international mediation-based dispute resolution group. Representatives of more than 30 other countries, from Pakistan and Indonesia to Belarus and Cuba, signed the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organisation for Mediation in Hong Kong to become founding members of the global organisation, following Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi. The support of developing countries signaled Beijing 's rising influence in the global south amid heightened geopolitical tensions, partly exacerbated by US president Donald Trump 's trade tariffs. At a ceremony, Mr Wang said China has long advocated for handling differences with a spirit of mutual understanding and consensus-building through dialogue, while aiming to provide 'Chinese wisdom' for resolving conflicts between nations. 'The establishment of the International Organisation for Mediation helps to move beyond the zero-sum mindset of 'you lose and I win,'' he said. The body, headquartered in Hong Kong, aims to help promote the amicable resolution of international disputes and build more harmonious global relations, he said. Beijing has touted the organisation as the world's first intergovernmental legal organisation for resolving disputes through mediation, saying it will be an important mechanism in safeguarding the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. It also positioned Hong Kong as an international legal and dispute resolution services center in Asia. Mr Wang said the city's rule of law is highly developed, with the advantages of both common law and mainland Chinese law systems, asserting that it possesses uniquely favorable conditions for international mediation. Hong Kong leader John Lee said the organisation could begin its work as early as the end of this year. The ceremony was attended by representatives from some 50 other countries and about 20 organisations, including the United Nations. Yueming Yan, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the new organisation is a complementary mechanism to existing institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. 'While the ICJ and PCA focus on adjudication and arbitration, IOMed introduces a structured, institutionalised form of alternative dispute resolution — namely, mediation — on a global scale,' she said. Although many details about the new body are yet to be clarified, it could open the door for greater synergy between formal litigation or arbitration and more flexible methods like mediation, she said. Shahla Ali, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, said the International Organisation for Mediation would have the capacity to mediate disputes between states, between a state and a national of another state, or in international commercial disputes. 'Conventions can provide opportunities to experiment with new approaches," she said, noting rising interest in mediation globally as a means to resolve investor-state disputes.
