In this feature, part of a series exploring the fight against trafficking in the Sahel, UN News focuses on the illegal fuel trade in the region.
UNODC | Graffiti showing a fuel transporter in Porto Novo, Benin.
(UN NEWS)* — Kourou/Koualou, a tiny village in a neutral zone straddling Benin and Burkina Faso, was the centre of a one-million-litre-a-year cross-border illicit fuel trade, a snapshot of a phenomenon that spreads far across the 6,000-kilometre-wide African Sahel region.
Transported by criminal networks and taxed by terrorist groups, illegal fuel flows along four major routes snaking across the Sahel towards ready buyers, siphoning millions from nations on the road to stabilizing their security-challenged region, home to 300 million people.
MADRID, Jun 2 2023 (IPS)* – There is a tangled trafficking web that has been woven across the Sahel, which spans almost 6.000 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and is home to more than 300 million people in 10 countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, The Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.
Fake or substandard antimalarial medicines kill as many as 267,000 sub-Saharan Africans every year. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS
This is how several international specialised bodies, mainly the United Nations, depict the aggravated situation in this already highly fragile African region, which the UN describes as a region in crisis, as those living there are prey to “chronic insecurity, climate shocks, conflict, coups, and the rise of criminal and terrorist networks.”
Port-au-Prince/Santiago de Chile, 29 May 2023 (FAO)* – According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis (March 2023), 4.9 million people in Haiti – nearly half of the country’s population – are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity. This figure represents an increase of 200 000 people in just five months.
And of the total number of people affected, 1.8 million are in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) – up from the analyses in the last three years.
This means that households face large food consumption gaps resulting in high acute malnutrition and excess mortality, or are forced to adopt negative coping mechanisms to cover food needs, such as selling their productive assets or consuming seeds instead of planting them, increasing their vulnerability.
(UN NEWS)* — The UN in Bangladesh on Thursday []condemned a second cut in food rations for Rohingya refugees who are sheltering in the country, after a funding shortfall of $56 million compelled the World Food Programme (WFP) to enforce the cuts.
IOM/Mashrif Abdullah Al | Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are expected to receive less food aid following funding shortages.
The cuts will reduce the value of rations provided to Rohingya refugees to $8 per month, or 27 cents per day.
At the beginning of the year, refugees were receiving a ration of $12 per person per month, which was just enough to meet daily needs, but on 1 March, that was cut to $10 – due to lack of funding support.
It is remarkable how the media in a select few countries are able to set the record on matters around the world.
Meas Sokhorn (Cambodia), Inverted Sewer, 2014
The European and North American countries enjoy a near-global monopoly over information, their media houses vested with a credibility and authority inherited from their status during colonial times (BBC, for instance) as well as their command of the neocolonial structure of our times (CNN, for instance).
ROME, May 29 2023 (IPS)* – Please stop repeating all this softened wording, such as climate change, climate-related hazards, climate crisis, or extreme weather events… And just call it what it really is: climate carnage.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has now reported on the “Staggering’ rise in climate emergencies in the last 20 years.’ Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
Indeed, several scientific findings, released ahead of the 2023 World Environment Day (5 June), staggeringly indicate that the world-spread climate carnage is predicted to hit all-time records.
See: global temperatures are set to break records during the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on 17 May 2023 alerted.
Warmest year ever
“There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period, will be the warmest on record.”
In 1987, at the Organization for African Unity, Thomas Sankara said, “Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa.” Ethiopia might actually be better off if the US keeps the IMF from signing off on its latest loan request.
The US is holding up Ethiopia’s request for a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for postwar reconstruction and development. I spoke to Robert J. Prince, Retired Senior Lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies , about Ethiopia, Africa, and the IMF.
ANN GARRISON: A source who preferred to remain anonymous told me that the US is holding Ethiopia’s loan up, demanding accountability for wartime atrocities, but that their real goal is to force Ethiopia to distance itself from Russia and China, but most of all from Eritrea. That sounds plausible, but what do you think?
CAIRO, May 25 2023 (IPS)* – The conflict in Sudan is impacting the economy in Egypt, and those who make their living moving goods across the borders have spent weeks hoping the situation will normalize.
Long wait at the border between Sudan and Egypt. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS
Muhammad Saqr, a truck driver, left Cairo with a load of thinners on April 13, heading to Khartoum. By the time he had arrived at the border, the battle had flared up.
Saqr remained, like dozens of trucks, waiting for the borders to be reopened.
(UN NEWS)* — Swift action is needed to prevent flare ups of Israeli-Palestinian violence and avert a looming food crisis, the top UN official in the Middle East told the Security Council on Wednesday [].
UN News/Maher Nasser | Nearly 600,000 people have visited the Holy Sites in Jerusalem since the beginning of Ramadan.
“There is no time to spare,” said Tor Wennesland, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
“We must take action, not only to ensure Palestinian well-being and governance, but as an integral part of ending the occupation and restoring a political horizon toward a viable two-State solution, based on UN resolutions, international law and previous agreements,” he said, briefing the Council on recent grim and dangerous security and humanitarian concerns.
(UN NEWS)* — As a clearer picture emerges of the trail of destruction left by Cyclone Mocha in Myanmar and Bangladesh, humanitarians are continuing to provide life-saving assistance, and the need for an urgent increase in funding.
In Myanmar, the UN appealed on Tuesday [] for $333 million to assist 1.6 million of the most vulnerable people, many of whom have lost their homes as the cyclone hit the west of the country over a week ago.
The UN’s top aid official in the country, Ramanathan Balakrishnan, told reporters in Geneva that the disaster had left hundreds of thousands without a roof over their heads as the monsoon looms.
Among the priorities is providing people with safe shelter and preventing the outbreak and spread of water-borne diseases.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 