'Unseen' News and Views
17 June 2024 — In 2023, the nine nuclear-armed states spent a combined total of $91,393,404,739 on their arsenals – equivalent to $2,898 a second. ICAN’s latest report “Surge: 2023 Global nuclear weapons spending” shows $10.7 billion more was spent on nuclear weapons in 2023 than in 2022.
– Since 2008, farmland acquisitions have doubled prices worldwide, squeezing family farmers and other poor rural communities. Such land grabs are worsening inequality, poverty, and food insecurity.
Squeezing land and farmers
A new IPES-Food report highlights land grabs (including for ostensibly ‘green’ purposes), the financial means used, and some significant implications.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Powerful governments, financiers, speculators, and agribusinesses are opportunistically gaining control of more cultivable land.
The report notes the 2007-08 food price spike and financial crash catalysed more land acquisitions.
Quantitative easing and financialization after the 2008 global financial crisis enabled even more land grabs. Investors, agri-food companies, and even sovereign wealth funds have obtained farmland worldwide.
Agribusinesses and other investors want land to make more profits, urging governments to enable takeovers. Cultivable land is being used for cash crops, natural resource extraction, mining, real property and infrastructure development, and ‘green’ projects, including biofuels.
But what is desertification and what does the plastics crisis have to do with it? Let’s delve into and understand this multifaceted crisis together.
(UN News)* — As nearly 40 per cent of land across the planet is degraded with more acres lost every second, governments, businesses and communities must galvanize action to reverse the damage and protect Earth, the UN chief said in a strong message for the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, marked annually on 17 June.
A map of fake solutions shows projects with climate-friendly intentions or appearances but with counterproductive social and environmental impacts. Indigenous communities are one of the most affected population sectors. Credit: Platform for Climate Justice
JERUSALEM (WFP)* -– As fighting escalates in the south and centre of Gaza, the toll on civilians is devastating, and the continued hostile operating environment make it near-impossible for humanitarian operations to deliver desperately needed food aid, warned WFP’s Deputy Executive Director, Carl Skau as he on 14 June 2024 concluded a two day- mission to Gaza.
Brussels (IOM)* — The International Organization for Migration (IOM) on 14 June 2024 launched two new reports on Belgium’s remittances landscape and the impact of high transaction costs on remittance flows and development outcomes for 21 countries.
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Kriticos who is originally from Zambia and Tanzania and Jason from Rwanda are two of the many diaspora members who have embraced a new life in Belgium as well as their roots. Photo: IOM/Moayad Zaghdani
In Belgium, where one third of the population has a migrant background, over USD 7 billion (EUR 6.5 billion) in remittances were sent in 2023, but the costs of sending are high.
UNHCR warns against apathy and inaction amid spike in forced displacement.
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Forced displacement surged to historic new levels across the globe last year and this, according to the 2024 flagship Global Trends Report from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
The rise in overall forced displacement – to 120 million by May 2024 – was the 12th consecutive annual increase and reflects both new and mutating conflicts and a failure to resolve long-standing crises.
The figure would make the global displaced population equivalent to the 12th largest country in the world, around the size of Japan’s.
A sewer worker who is popularly known as Mithoo emerges from the sewer. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS
This is an all-too-familiar sight in Karachi, with its over 20 million residents producing 475 million gallons per day(MGD) of wastewater going into decades-old crumbling sewerage-systems.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 