Where next for populism?

Gary Gibbon-9 Nov 2018Political Editor

How do you deal with rising populism? That was the dominant debate in the corridors at the EPP Summit in Helsinki this week.

As populist movements continue to grow in Europe and beyond, what is motivating them and where is it all heading?

In conversation with me for this week’s podcast is Professor Matthew Goodwin, author of ‘National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy’, and Dr Daphne Halikiopoulou of Reading University.

Goodwin believes cultural shifts are driving populism across the globe, whereas Halikiopoulou argues economic insecurity is a bigger factor at play.

Listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts here.

You can also listen on Acast, CastBox or Spotify.

The direct download link is here.

New episodes of my podcast Politics: Where Next? will be released every Friday. I’ll tackle a theme of the week’s politics with expert guests, who might know where all of this is going. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app to keep up to date.

You can also watch this week’s debate on YouTube:

U.S. postpones sanctions deadline on Russian tycoon's firms

FILE PHOTO: Russian aluminium tycoon Oleg Deripaska waits before the talks of Russian President Vladimir Putin with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia June 22, 2018. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin/File Photo

NOVEMBER 9, 2018 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Friday said it was postponing the enforcement of sanctions on Russian companies EN+ , Rusal and Gaz PAO for nearly four weeks as their top shareholder works on a plan to cut his stakes.

The U.S. Treasury Department had given Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska until Dec. 12 to reduce his holdings in the three companies but said in a statement that the deadline had been moved to Jan. 7, 2019.

“EN+, RUSAL, and GAZ are proposing substantial corporate governance changes that could potentially result in significant changes in control of these sanctioned entities,” Treasury said in a statement explaining why the deadline was postponed.

Rusal, En+ and GAZ declined to comment.

The U.S. Treasury imposed the sanctions in April on Deripaska and several companies in which he is a large shareholder, citing “malign activities” by Russia, as well as allegations of past crimes by Deripaska himself.

The sanctions, the toughest since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, have been postponed several times as the U.S. considers plans by Deripaska to divest shares in the companies so that he no longer controls them, among other moves.

Rusal and its parent En+ Group have recruited directors and management not linked to Deripaska in recent months as part of talks with Washington over easing U.S. sanctions.

Rusal named Evgenii Nikitin, who has been acting chief executive since May and previously headed its aluminum division, as its CEO last Friday. En+ also appointed a new CEO.

Friday’s move extends licenses relating to the sanctioned firms to authorize activities needed to wind down operations or contracts, according to a statement on the U.S. Treasury Department’s website. It also extends licenses to authorize transactions needed to divest debt, equity and other holdings.

Concerns over the impact of sanctions on Rusal have roiled aluminum markets. Rusal is the world’s second-biggest producer after China’s Hongqiao. Japan’s top aluminum rolling company, UACJ Corp, said on Nov. 1 that it was removing Rusal from its 2019 suppliers list due to uncertainty over the sanctions.

Reporting by Tim Ahmann and Susan Heavey in Washington, Nathan Layne in New York and Polina Devitt in Moscow; Editing by Susan Thomas

Trump’s Fool’s Gold in Venezuela

New sanctions on exports of the natural resource will punish Ankara more than Caracas.

A man shows off a gold stone at a gold mine in El Callao, Venezuela, on Feb. 25, 2017. (Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)

BY MEHMET OZKAN-

NOVEMBER 9, 2018, 2:58 PM

This month, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order sanctioning gold exports from Venezuela. As a way to punish the government in Caracas, the move made some sense. Venezuela has one of the largest gold reserves in the world. And as the country’s oil production has plummeted, President Nicolás Maduro has turned to mining and selling more for badly need income. Yet the decision was also curious, since Venezuelans involved in exporting the natural resource are likely to have already been hit with earlier rounds of sanctions.

In fact, the real targets of Trump’s order might be Venezuela’s partners in the gold trade: China, Russia, and especially Turkey. According to Marshall Billingslea, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department, Venezuela sent Turkey at least 21 metric tons of gold  in recent months, which makes up a majority of its total exports of the metal.

To be sure, ties between the two countries go beyond gold. Turkey has lately become one of Maduro’s favorite destinations. He has patronized the famous “salt bae” restaurant in Istanbul and has attended conferences there on everything from energy to religion. He has also called Erdogan “a friend of Venezuela and leader of the new multi-polar world.”

In return, Erdogan has declared that “Turkey won’t leave Maduro alone.” He made plans to visit Caracas in February, although he had to cancel at the last minute. And after an attempt on Maduro’s life in August, Erdogan, who had survived a failed coup two years earlier, made sure that Turkey was one of the first countries to condemn the attack. Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin even tweeted, “Stay strong mi amigo,” along with a photo of himself and Maduro.

Meanwhile, since 2016, when Turkish Airlines opened a flight from Istanbul to Caracas via Havana, officials from both countries have crisscrossed the globe to sign five agreements on trade, agriculture, tourism, aviation, and security in 2017 and several more on education and culture in 2018.

It makes sense that the two countries want to deepen their relationship. For Venezuela, friendly ties with Turkey are a way to avoid total isolation.

And for Turkey, association with Venezuela is a way to highlight discontent with the U.S.-led world order.

From a U.S. perspective, though, the relationship spells trouble.

In a panel interview at the Brookings Institution, the Iran expert Suzanne Maloney compared the relationship between Venezuela and Turkey to that between Iran and Turkey in the 2000s. Primarily through the gold trade, Turkey helped Iran evade sanctions. Today, she explained, if Turkey is refining Venezuelan gold, it risks “undermining the entire [economic] system” once more. And certainly, if the sanctions on Venezuela’s gold sector are any guide, Trump must want to head off the growing friendship as well.

Still, the relationship between Venezuela and Turkey faces some problems. For all their cooperation on trade, the two countries have had a hard time working together on other issues. Maduro has made several promises to shut down two Caracas-based schools run by Gulenists—the religious order thought to be behind the 2016 attempted coup against Erdogan—but has yet to do so. There’s also the problem that Maduro supports Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan’s sworn enemy. Caracas has even turned down Turkish humanitarian aid on the grounds that it doesn’t believe that Venezuela is facing a humanitarian crisis.

Beyond that, there is little institutional groundwork for turning personal friendliness between Erdogan and Maduro into a broader alliance. Distance, language barriers, and unfamiliarity make cooperation difficult at the lower levels of government.

At this point, then, Turkish-Venezuelan ties may be less a substantial threat to the international order than an annoyance. And rather than spend a lot of energy attempting  to distance Erdogan and Maduro, the West might try to use the relationship as an opportunity to bring Venezuela back into the fold. After all, Ankara is one of the few powers that can speak to both Caracas and other capitals in the region.

Turkey has very good relations with Colombia, for example, which has received more than a million Venezuelan refugees since 2016. A high-level delegation from the country even visited Turkey to see how it manages its 3.5 million Syrian refugees. According to Colombia’s former foreign minister, that visit helped shape his nation’s response to Venezuelan refugees. Turkey’s good relations with both sides may be useful for establishing a trilateral commission on the subject.

Erdogan might serve as a bridge in other ways, too—for example, in a possible rapprochement between the Venezuelan opposition and the Maduro regime.

If Erdogan enters that game, it will be similar to his initial efforts during the Syrian civil war, when he first attempted to protect Assad and urged him to take a soft approach to protesters. When Assad failed to do so, Erdogan turned on him and joined the West in backing the rebels fighting him. In Venezuela, too, Erdogan might be persuaded to draw a hard line around regime brutality.

With Erdogan considering a visit to Venezuela at the end of November as part of a trip to attend a G-20 meeting in Argentina, the United States should encourage Turkey to keep up communication with Venezuela as a way to slowly bring the country around to other negotiations. If that doesn’t work, of course, Trump can go back to the sanctions drawing board.

Federal judge blocks Keystone XL pipeline, saying Trump administration review ignored ‘inconvenient’ climate change facts

President Trump unveiled his administration's official go-ahead for the Keystone XL pipeline, a controversial project that was rejected by his predecessor, former President Barack Obama. (Reuters)

By Fred Barbash ,Allyson Chiu andJuliet Eilperin-November 9 at 9:29 AM

A federal judge temporarily blocked construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, ruling late Thursday that the Trump administration had failed to justify its decision granting a permit for the 1,200-mile long project designed to connect Canada’s oil sands fields with Texas’s Gulf Coast refineries.

The judge, Brian Morris of the U.S. District Court in Montana, said the State Department ignored crucial issues of climate change to further the president’s goal of letting the pipeline be built. In doing so, the administration ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires “reasoned” explanations for government decisions, particularly when they represent reversals of well-studied actions.

It was a major defeat for President Trump, who attacked the Obama administration for stopping the project in the face of protests and an environmental impact study. Trump signed an executive order two days into his presidency setting in motion a course reversal on the Keystone XL pipeline, as well as another major pipeline, Dakota Access.

The ruling highlights a broader legal vulnerability in the Trump administration’s push to roll back Obama-era environmental protections. Since Trump took office, federal courts have found repeatedly that his agencies have short-circuited the regulatory process in areas ranging from water protections to chemical plant safety operations. Robust environmental and administrative procedure laws, many dating back to the 1970s, have given the administration’s opponents plenty of legal ammunition.

Thursday’s decision does not permanently block a federal permit for Keystone XL, a project of the Calgary-based firm TransCanada. It requires the administration to conduct a more complete review of potential adverse impacts related to climate change, cultural resources and endangered species. The court basically ordered a do-over.

In a 54-page opinion, Morris hit the administration with a familiar charge that it disregarded facts, facts established by experts during the Obama administration about “climate-related impacts” from Keystone XL. The Trump administration claimed, with no supporting information, that those impacts “would prove inconsequential,” Morris wrote. The State Department “simply discarded prior factual findings related to climate change to support its course reversal.”

It also used “outdated information” about the impact of potential oil spills on endangered species, he said, rather than “'the best scientific and commercial data available.'”

“Today’s ruling makes it clear once and for all that it’s time for TransCanada to give up on their Keystone XL pipe dream,” said Sierra Club Senior Attorney Doug Hayes in a statement. The lawsuit prompting Thursday’s order was brought by a collection of opponents, including the indigenous Environmental Network and the Northern Plains Resource Council, a conservation coalition based in Montana.

“The Trump administration tried to force this dirty pipeline project on the American people, but they can’t ignore the threats it would pose to our clean water, our climate, and our communities,” Hayes said.

Hayes told The Washington Post that the company had already been moving equipment into place in Montana and South Dakota with the intent of beginning construction in early 2019.

“It’s clear that this decision tonight will delay the pipeline significantly,” said Hayes, who noted that a proper environmental impact statement of this scope usually takes about a year to complete. “TransCanada does not have an approved pipeline at this point.”

[Read the decision]

Morris, a former clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama.

His decision was one of scores of court rebukes to the Trump administration for decisions on the environment, immigration and transgender service in the military, among other issues, all made hastily and, in the opinions of dozens of judges, without the “reasoned consideration” required by federal law. Also on Thursday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump cannot immediately end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children from deportation.

The administration is appealing many of these rulings, and may challenge Thursday’s decision as well. The administration did not issue an immediate comment after the pipeline order.

In a statement Friday, TransCanada said it was not abandoning its plans to construct the pipeline. “We have received the judge’s ruling and continue to review it,” said company spokesman Terry Cunha. 

“We remain committed to building this important energy infrastructure project.”

The State Department has primary jurisdiction over the Keystone XL pipeline permit decision, by virtue of its authority to issue “presidential permits” for cross-border infrastructure projects.

The massive project remains one of the most controversial infrastructure proposals in modern American history, with its proponents and critics dueling in court and on the streets for a decade.

It aims to extend TransCanada’s existing Keystone pipeline, which was completed in 2013. Keystone XL (the initials stand for “export limited”) would transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta, Canada, and Montana to Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast. In the United States, the pipeline would stretch 875 miles through Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, with the rest continuing into Canada.

[The Keystone XL Pipeline and its politics, explained]

It has met sustained opposition from environmental advocacy groups, as well as from Obama, who rejected it three years ago on the grounds that it would accelerate climate change.

Activists argue the pipeline would be especially damaging to the climate because it would mean extracting thick, low-quality oil from Canada’s oil sands, with lots of tree-cutting and energy consumption in the process, which would increase greenhouse gas emissions. Native American groups in Montana and elsewhere fought the Keystone project as well, saying its route failed to adhere to historical treaty boundaries and would impinge on their water systems and sacred lands.

In 2015, on the eve of the international climate talks in Paris, the Obama administration appeared to bring an end to the seven-year-long saga when it announced it was halting construction of the pipeline, arguing that approval would compromise the country’s effort to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The United States, Obama said, was now a “global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change.”

“And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership,” he said, adding that the “biggest risk” the United States faced was “not acting.”

The decision to deny the pipeline permit came after the completion of a long-awaited final environmental impact statement — 11 volumes of analysis released in 2014.

It was this 2014 assessment that the State Department, under the direction of Trump’s January 2017 presidential memorandum, used to make its decision to approve the pipeline, The Post reported.

 According to the department, “there are no substantial changes or significant new information which would affect the continued reliability” of the report.

Morris said, however, that there were indeed changes since the 2014 assessment and that the Trump administration failed to consider them. He included among them pipeline leaks, the expansion of another pipeline called the Alberta Clipper and shifts in oil markets. Those could alter the overall impact of Keystone XL and should have been considered by the government.

Among the judge’s findings:

• The State Department, in issuing the permit, failed to “analyze the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions” of the Keystone project and the expanded Alberta Clipper pipeline. It “ignored its duty to take a ‘hard look’ at these two connected actions."
• The department “acted on incomplete information regarding” the potential damage to cultural resources in Indian territory along the route. “The Department appears to have jumped the gun.”
• The department failed to make a fact-based explanation for its course reversal, “let alone a reasoned explanation. ...'An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts' " in the present, he wrote, quoting judicial precedents.
• The department’s analysis that “climate-related impacts” from Keystone “would prove inconsequential” needed a “reasoned explanation.” It did not provide one. 

Jackie Prange, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the ruling a “huge win” not just for the environmental activists and tribal groups who have been fighting the pipeline, but for “anyone who cares about the rule of law and holding this administration to the facts.”

“It’s emblematic of what we’re seeing with the Trump administration, which is a very fast and sloppy reversal of prior decisions … in a way that doesn’t adhere to the rule of law,” Prange told The Post. “That’s why we keep winning in the court.”

Fears of worsening Yemen violence rise as UN peace talks pushed back

Chances of famine exacerbated by escalating fighting between Houthi rebels and Saudi-led coalition

Yemeni pro-government forces gather at Hodeidah, as they battle Houthi rebels for the control of the city. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Bethan McKernan-Fri 9 Nov 2018 17.41 GMT

Peace talks aimed at ending Yemen’s war have been pushed back to the end of the year, sparking fears that intense violence in Hodeidah will worsen and the country will be plunged into famine as the Saudi-backed coalition seeks to completely retake the vital port city.

Fighting in Houthi rebel-controlled Hodeidah has flared in the past week as militias loyal to the Yemeni government attempt to break the current stalemate before the end of November, when the US and UN had called for a ceasefire.

More than 200 coalition airstrikes have hit civilian neighbourhoods and at least 150 people have died after stepping on Houthi landmines or being caught in artillery fire, aid workers said.

The May 22 hospital in Hodeidah’s east – stormed by Houthis who took up sniper positions on the rooftop six days ago – had been emptied of staff and patients and the building had been engulfed in street fighting, local Baseem al Janani said. This has left the city with just one functioning medical facility.

“Before they left, the Houthis burnt down the section where paper records and files were stored,” he said. “They wanted to create fire and smoke so they are not easily spotted and targeted.”


A woman holds her malnourished boy at a feeding centre in a hospital in Hodeidah Photograph: Hani Mohammed/AP

If the gruelling urban warfare continues, Hodeidah’s vulnerable 600,000 population stands to suffer. Half are children, who are at increased risk of cholera and malnutrition.

Even a small amount of damage to the city’s port, through which 80% of the country’s food, fuel and aid flows, is likely to lead the UN to declare a famine. The fighting has already prevented aid from leaving Hodeidah, endangering 14 million starving Yemenis.

Since the peace talks have been delayed until the end of December, however, it is believed the coalition could continue with a full-scale assault, despite repeated calls from aid agencies for an immediate halt to hostilities.

“If the battle rages on at this level of intensity, I believe it will only take a month or a month and a half to liberate Hodeidah, unless the international community intervenes because of the dire humanitarian conditions and stalls the efforts of the coalition,” said local Ibrahim Seif.

The human cost could be the highest in Yemen’s three-year-old war to date, but similar coalition tactics managed to drive the Houthis out of Aden, another port city, relatively quickly in 2015.

My country is being systematically destroyed Tawakkol Karman, Yemeni Nobel peace prize laureate
“Hodeidah is on the verge of a terrible humanitarian disaster which will only add to the wider tragedy already suffered by Yemenis in this ugly war,” said Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni Nobel peace prize laureate. “My country is being systematically destroyed.”

The future of the vital port is unclear: the UN has repeatedly demanded it is placed under its jurisdiction, but forces loyal to Yemeni commander Tareq Saleh and the separatist Southern Transitional Council – on paper coalition members allied against the Houthis – are also likely to jostle for control.

Despite a vow from Houthi leader Abdel Malik al-Houthi that he would not surrender, many rebels fear that if Hodeidah falls, the capital of Sana’a is likely to be next.

While the coalition hopes removing the Houthis from Sana’a will bring the war to an end, the decades-old Houthi movement is, in reality, likely to retreat to its highland strongholds and continue to wage guerilla warfare.

Even in the face of the imminent military threat, peace talks planned for early December in Sweden were reportedly derailed by the Houthis, who objected to the American impetus and refused to come to the table unless several new demands were met.

“The UN isn’t blunt enough with them,” a source close to the talks said. “Certain Houthi leaders pay [UN special envoy Martin Griffith’s office] lip service about negotiation and they take it at face value.”

The last round of talks in Geneva in September failed after the Houthis failed to attend after three days, citing security concerns.

Adam Baron, a non-resident fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said: “There’s a lot of hopeful rhetoric on Yemen in Western capitals at the moment but it’s completely not in tune with what’s happening on the ground. Griffiths learnt a hard lesson when the Houthis failed to show up last time. It’s much better to delay talks than hold a hyped-up round that completely collapses.”

The Saudi-led coalition fighting to restore the exiled Yemeni government is under renewed pressure from allies in Washington and elsewhere to end its involvement in the war following the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul last month.

The US, however, is sending mixed signals on what it wants for Yemen’s future, after reports emerged on Thursday that Donald Trump’s administration is considering designating the Houthis, who receive military backing from Iran, a terrorist organisation – a move that observers say will further impede the faltering peace process.

Saudi regime: An embarrassment to Muslim umma

 Friday, 9 November 2018

The gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, details of which are slowly emerging in the public media outside Saudi Arabia, and the scandalous cover ups of the ‘heinous  crime’ has brought shame  not only to the rulers and subjects of that country but also embarrassment to Muslims all over the world, the umma.

The President of Turkey has accused the Saudi State directly for masterminding that murder. The order to neutralise Khashoggi appears to have gone from the Saudi Royal household. The world is obviously outraged and demands the UN to carry out an independent investigation. There is no place for the regime to hide its shame and stupidity.

Being the world’s largest oil producer with a huge petrodollar largesse, as a Sunni Muslim religious leader with sovereignty over the two holiest of Islam’s mosques in Mecca and Medina – the land of the Prophet of Islam, and as US’ invaluable “customer and ally”, the desert kingdom, in spite of all its tribal idiosyncrasies, is reluctantly courted by the weak and powerful within the family of modern nations but with different objectives.

While Saudi Arabia is an “eternal friend” of the US and long-term ally of the West, it is also a country that awkwardly carries the reverence of ordinary Muslims the world over. Yet, the Saudi political structure, its tribal governance, its archaic legal procedures and ultra-orthodox religious ideology have caused numerous instances of discomfort, displeasure and dissonance, which the Sunni Muslim world is compelled to ignore and tolerate for the sake of maintaining some semblance of unity. Yet, in many respects that country is in many ways an embarrassment to the umma.

From the point of view of Muslims living outside Saudi Arabia, there are at least three issues that cause serious discomfort, and at times even anger.  Firstly, a country that is named after and ruled by a family (there is no other country in the world that carries a family name), incarcerates and beheads the regime’s dissenters, and a leading partner in causing death and starvation to nearly fourteen million Yemeni Muslims audaciously declares the Holy Quran is its constitution. In the light of the way that country is ruled this is an insult to that holy tome.

Besides, everywhere and at all times constitutions are human creations and are subject to amendments, abrogation, arbitration and even suspension. Can the Quran be subjected to any of these? To Muslims, the Quran is the direct word of God revealed through Archangel Gabriel to Prophet Muhammad. It can be interpreted but not interfered with in any other manner. At best, Saudi Arabia can draw a constitution based on their interpretation of the Quran, and alter that constitution to suit its convenience. Instead, by calling the Quran itself as its constitution and trying to justify its actions in terms of the Quran, the Saudi regime is actually putting God on the dock? How can the umma tolerate this absurdity?

Secondly, the Saudi national flag carries in print Islam’s creedal essence, kalima shahada (la ilaha illallah Muhammad al-rasoolullah meaning there is no God but God and Muhammad is His messenger). Without confessing to this quintessential principle there is no sense in calling oneself a Muslim.

Late in the 1990s, the organisers of FIFA World Soccer Cup tournament quite innocently decided to emboss the flag designs of all participating countries on the leather of the ball. Obviously a soccer ball is meant to be kicked. What a shock it was when Muslims saw a ball with kalima on it being kicked around physically. It was the organised protest from Muslims world over that made FIFA to withdraw those balls.

This can happen again during anti-Saudi protests outside the country when protesters burn and vandalise the Saudi flag. Won’t that be considered as acts of blasphemy by Muslims? But who can blame the protestors for a Saudi stupidity? Does the umma of the Prophet deserve all this?

Thirdly, with sovereignty over Mecca and Medina, Saudi regime is able to politically determine who can and cannot perform hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage for all Muslims who could afford. In the hands of the Saudis a religious obligation has become a political tool to win Muslim support internationally. This is arrogant interference in God’s command. It is time the Muslim world demands Saudi Arabia to relinquish its control and transfer the management of hajj to a consortium of Muslim countries. If the OIC can act on this it would be a great service to Islam and Muslims.

Fourthly, the country’s Salafi ideology is the most ultra-orthodox, which has now come under intense criticism not only by Muslim scholars outside the country but also from within. A number of Saudi critics are already in prison or under house detention. However, the government’s endeavour to export that ideology with financial support to its adherents and with the blessing from US superpower is destabilising Muslim communities all over and especially in plural societies. There is no denying the fact that Saudi brand of Salafism is one of the contributory factors in the rise of Islamophobia.   

There are several other issues regarding the internal politics and governance of Saudi Arabia, which are matters entirely for Saudi citizens to settle.           

(The writer is attached to the School of Business and Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia.)

Slave Ships

Labour abuses, including modern slavery, are ‘hidden subsidies’ that allow distant-water fishing fleets to remain profitable and promote overfishing

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( November 9, 2018, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Global Slavery Index estimates that at least 40 million people are trapped in modern slavery, defined as any exploitation that a person cannot avoid, refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power or deception. It is particularly widespread in the textile, agriculture, construction and fisheries sectors, as well as in the sex industry and in forced marriages.

Labour abuses, including modern slavery, are ‘hidden subsidies’ that allow distant-water fishing fleets to remain profitable and promote overfishing, new research from the University of Western Australia and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia have found. Researchers found that countries whose fleets rely heavily on government subsidies, fish far away from home ports, and fail to comprehensively report their actual catch, tend to fish beyond sustainable limits and are at higher risk of labour abuses.

Crews on vessels from China, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Russia are particularly at high risk because of a lack of regulatory oversight in those countries combined with the complexities of jurisdiction at sea. This makes it easier to force people to work excessively long hours, often under appalling conditions, to extract as much fish as possible in exchange for a low – or zero – pay,” said David Tickler, lead author of the study from the University of Western Australia.

With global marine fish catches declining at a rate of 1.2 million tonnes per year since the mid-1990s, the only way many industrial countries’ fleets have been able to remain profitable is by receiving government subsidies. However, labour costs can typically only be lowered by reducing worker pay and conditions.

The lack of control over these boats makes them a fertile ground for labour abuses, as well as other crimes including illegal fishing. It also facilitates transshipment, where catches of multiple fishing vessels are often combined before landing. Thus, seafood caught illegally or under conditions of modern slavery is laundered by mixing it with legally caught fish before it enters the supply chain,” said Daniel Pauly, co-author of the study and the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us initiative at the UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.

This is how ‘low slavery risk’ markets, such as the US, the EU and Australia, end up consuming seafood that may have been caught by modern slaves.

“While domestically the average slavery risk in the United States is low, the U.S. accounts for about 14 per cent of global seafood imports and those imports have a slavery risk 17 times higher than fish caught by U.S. fleets domestically,” said Jessica Meeuwig, Director of the Marine Futures Lab at UWA and co-author of the study. “Since imported and U.S.-fleet caught fish are combined in local markets, the seafood available to domestic consumers in the U.S. is eight times more likely to have been produced or processed with modern slavery.”

Order and chaos in China’s cities of multi-million migrants

Nearly 60 percent of China's population live in urban cities. Source: Shutterstock

By Policy Forum | 9th November 2018

CHINA is experiencing the largest wave of urbanisation in human history.

In 1979, only 17.9 percent of the population (84.51 million) lived in cities. At the end of 2017, the urban population reached 813 million, 58.52 percent of the total. Migration on such a massive scale poses great challenges for urban services and governance.

Major cities in China these days each host millions of domestic migrants.

In Shanghai, there are 9.8 million migrants who are not from the city – 40.5 percent of the total population. In Beijing, this figure is 37.3 percent; for Shenzhen it’s 67.7 percent and for Guangzhou it’s 38 percent.

In smaller cities, the share of the migrant population could be even larger. For example, 75.7 percent of the long-term residents of Dongguan are migrants. On average, China’s migrant population has grown by about 3 to 5 percent each year from 2001 to 2016.

SEE ALSO: In China, even the way you walk is under surveillance

The above figures refer only to migrants who have lived in cities for more than six months. It is estimated that another 73 million people across China have lived for less than six months in cities as temporary residents.

In addition, at least 100 million farmers have been resettled to cities because of urban expansion, environmental protection, major infrastructure projects and poverty reduction.

Migrant workers either live in urban neighbourhoods alongside local residents or concentrate in peri-urban houses built by farmers. Resettled farmers usually live in purpose-built high-density neighbourhoods given to them as compensation for relocation.

A cluster of apartments in one of Shanghai’s urban residential neighbourhoods. Source: Shutterstock

The fast-growing migrant population is seriously challenging urban governments. An urban neighbourhood can accommodate 501 to 3,500 households (1,500 to 10,000 people).

Each neighbourhood has a Residential Committee (RC), a self-governing body that functions as a grassroots-level agency to implement government policies. Each RC has seven to nine government-funded staff members.

An RC is responsible for keeping social order, providing services designated by the government, coordinating third-party service providers, and resolving conflicts in the neighbourhood. Because of insufficient staffing, RCs tend to focus on administrative tasks which are heavily geared toward crime prevention. They have been criticised for the tendency to act on behalf of the government rather than serving the community.

Historically, urban neighbourhoods were responsible for providing accommodation to the employees of work units, such as state and collective enterprises and government agencies. Because these work units would provide a large part of the social services the employees would need, the residential neighbourhoods only provided minimal standardised services. In this sense, Chinese cities were defined for their role in supporting economic production.

As a result of the country’s labour market reform, which started in the early 1990s, employees no longer tend to work for a single employer their entire lives, and few work for employers that provide any social services.

Consequently, there is a growing demand for services where people reside. Moreover, as income inequality rises, urban residents are sorted into neighbourhoods according to their ability to pay.

The expectations for services vary greatly in different neighbourhoods, placing huge pressure on the small number of staff to deliver services and govern.

SEE ALSO: What China’s consumption downgrade means

In neighbourhoods where migrants concentrate, governments must improve safety, provide basic services, promote civic engagement and build a stronger sense of community. Such needs are currently not being met.

To overcome staff and funding shortages, some city authorities are adopting a ‘co-production’ model for service delivery and governance.

In this model, private and non-profit actors, charitable funds, and volunteers are all encouraged to play a part as initiators, funders, or providers of services, and the government’s role is limited to coordinating or partially funding the activities involved.

Unlike many other parts of the world where co-production emerged from the bottom up, in these Chinese cities, local governments have been the ones initiating, and at times aggressively championing, the co-production model. RC staff members are coached to fund and run co-production activities and encouraged to work together with multiple stakeholders.

Co-production activities may include: community patrolling; public infrastructure improvement and communal gardens; the operation of libraries, function rooms and sports facilities; the organisation of festival activities; old age support; and after-school childcare. These activities and community-based projects can be subsidised by the government directly or funded through participatory budgeting.

A crowd of shoppers on the Dongmen Pedestrian Street in Shenzen. Source: Shutterstock

We studied four pilot cities and found that despite all the effort by local governments, migrant participation in co-productive activities is still limited. One reason might be that many RCs still attempt to maintain significant control over the process, in particular when RC staff members believe co-production may reduce their importance in the community and threaten their jobs.

SEE ALSO: Is the future of Australia’s ‘Asian invasion’ dystopian or utopian?

However, it takes time, effort, a sense of belonging, and often money to turn a housing estate full of strangers into a real community, let alone develop active public engagement. It is not always realistic to wait for self-governance and self-service to emerge and become self-sustaining on their own.

The fact that China’s RCs and local authorities are taking the lead on co-production has enhanced awareness and ignited enthusiasm for community-based activities, such as the establishment of neighbourhood watches and social clubs.

If RC staff members believe in the power of co-production and can find ways to exercise it effectively, their organisations can function as long-standing coordinators of migrant participation in China.

This could help ensure that the largest wave of urbanisation in human history is less of an ordeal for the millions of people experiencing it first-hand.

This piece by Bingqin Li, Bo Hu, and Tao Liu was first published at Policy Forum, Asia and the Pacific’s platform for public policy analysis and opinion. 

A packet of rice for a family of nine: Why Yemenis are starving

Thousands of NGOs work in Yemen, and food is available in markets - but millions of Yemenis remain on the brink of starvation

Friday 9 November 2018

TAIZ, Yemen - Bashir al-Sofi remembers making a living as a construction worker. That was before the war.

Work is scarce today, and the 48-year-old father of seven now struggles to feed his family in his village south of the city of Taiz. His children don’t get three meals a day and they haven’t eaten meat or fruit in a long time. Such staples have now become a luxury.

“One of my children suffers from malnutrition because he was born at the beginning of the war and I couldn't provide him with milk and proper food," Sofi tells Middle East Eye.

With 500 grammes of rice, 1kg of flour, and the occasional 500 grammes of fava beans split between nine people, each member of the Sofi family eats an estimated 500 calories a day - less than a quarter of what is needed for a healthy balanced diet

Most days, the family subsists on bread and tea for breakfast, rice or aseed - a traditional Yemeni dish made with wheat, salt and water - for lunch, and bread and tea again for dinner.

With approximately 500 grammes of rice, 1kg of flour, and the occasional 500 grammes of fava beans split between nine people, each member of the Sofi family eats an estimated 500 calories a day - less than a quarter of what is needed for a healthy balanced diet.

Photographs of skeletal Yemeni children have shocked the world into paying attention to the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in the war-torn country, where 18 million of the country’s 28 million inhabitants are food insecure and eight million rely completely on external assistance, according to the UN's World Food Programme.

According to Save the Children, more than 50,000 Yemeni children died of starvation and disease in 2017 alone - roughly as many as the estimated number of casualties of armed violence in the country - 56,000 - since January 2016.

The reasons behind the slow starvation of Yemen are complex, but for many in the country, the consequences are deadly.

Agriculture targeted

After nearly four years of war, the violence has damaged the country’s food supply.

The battle for the coastal city of Hodeidah, which has recently escalated after months of stalemate, has long been viewed as crucial due to the city’s strategic port, which receives an estimated three-quarters of Yemen’s humanitarian and commercial cargo.

Vital food infrastructure in areas held by Houthi rebels has been targeted by the Saudi-led coalition since the early stages of the war, London School of Economics professor Martha Mundy highlighted last year.

But just as importantly, Mundy noted, “agricultural land was the target most frequently hit” by coalition air strikes in almost every governorate in Yemen, despite representing only three percent of the country’s lands.

Children in the city of Taiz eat a breakfast consisting of bread, some bell peppers, and tea (MEE)

“In short to target agriculture requires a certain aim,” she wrote, adding that “placing the rural damage alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas, we find strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production in the areas" controlled by the Houthis and other pro-Houthi groups.

 The problem is not a shortage of food in markets but that we do not have money to buy food that is now expensive

- Bashir al-Sofi, Yemeni father of seven

While agriculture and food distribution suffer from the war, food remains available in markets across the country - but few can afford it.

"All kinds of food and other items are available in the market. The problem is not a shortage of food in markets but that we do not have money to buy food that is now expensive," Sofi said.

The collapse of the Yemeni currency, which went from 215 rials to the dollar in 2015 to 750 rials for one dollar in 2018, has been blamed for the sharp rise in the prices of everyday necessities.

A 50kg bag of wheat that used to cost some 4,500 Yemeni rials in 2015 is now sold for 13,000 rials, and many other commodities have witnessed similar price increases.

Yemen was already the poorest country in the Arab world before the war, but the United Nations warned last month that it could face the "worst famine in the world in 100 years" if the fighting goes on.

While the UN speaks of impending famine, for many Yemenis, it is already there, with non-governmental organisations standing as the only barrier between them and starvation. It is a weak barrier. 

NGOs powerless to stop the tide of hunger

Like many other Yemenis, Sofi, the father of seven, gets up early every morning to try to register with several organisations in Taiz to receive food aid.

"Most needy people depend on organisations to provide them with food as the war has deprived us of our sources of income," he explained. "Each organisation provides us with only a small quantity of food and this is not enough. Moreover, this aid does not last long because there are people in need of assistance in different areas."

Ibrahim Haroun, aged 36, is not as lucky. Since he and his family fled Hodeidah for Taiz - over 200 km away - in July, he says he has not received aid.

"The battles in Hodeidah forced me to flee my house towards Taiz, where I know some friends, but here I have not been able to get food from organisations for my four children," Haroun told MEE.

While some organisations registered Haroun and his family on their waiting lists, due to the large number of needy people, Haroun has been told the earliest he can expect to receive aid is in early 2019.

“I hope I will receive food soon so my children can get enough meals every day,” he said. “Nowadays they sometimes only have two meals per day."

More than 8,300 registered civil society organisations and 102 international NGOs work in Yemen, in addition to an estimated 3,000 unregistered civil society groups. Yet despite their large number, they have failed to stop the relentless creep of starvation in the country.

"I know those organisations do their best to help us. I thank them for their efforts to help and I hope they could help more beneficiaries, because the number of needy people is increasing every day," Sofi said.

"Most Yemenis are jobless, and they receive food from organisations, so this puts pressure on those organisations," Haroun added.

While thousands of organisations supposedly provide food aid in the country, they remain unable to provide for all needy Yemenis (AFP)

Yasmin Thabet, the founder of a civil society organisation in Taiz called "We Love You", said that while local and international organisations work side by side to provide aid, local organisations often struggle with financing.

"We depend on generous people and expatriates to support our foundation," Thabet explained.

"However, the real problem is that every day there are more people who need our help, and we cannot help them all because we do not have enough money."

Thabet added that some civil society organisations rely on international NGOs to provide them with food, but that even the foreign organisations can't supply enough to fulfil the demand.

Meanwhile, a source from the Ministry of Social Affairs in Sanaa said most civil society organisations "don't play any role in stopping the coming famine", either because their work is focused on raising awareness, or they simply don't have the budget for it.

The ministry source, who requested anonymity, also said a number of local organisations were embezzling donations. While not naming any organisations, the source said the ministry revoked some groups' licences, but that many continued their work, even without a licence.

"Corruption is everywhere,” the source said. "I call on all the civil society organisations to remember that they are collecting money for the sake of helping needy people and not for themselves.”

The war is the reason 

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Lise Grande, said that as many as 13 million civilians could be at risk of dying of starvation in the country if the Saudi-led military coalition backing exiled President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi does not halt its campaign in Yemen.

Many Yemenis, such as Sofi, hold out hope that an end to the war will allow them to provide for their families independently once more.

"It is the war that deprived us of work and turned us into dependents on organisations, so I hope the war will end so I can resume my work as before," he said.

Thabet agreed. "The ongoing war is the main reason behind the coming famine in Yemen,” she said.

The path to solving hunger starts with peace

- Wilf Dinnick, Mercy Corps communications manager

“The only solution is peace. Without an end to the war, organisations cannot stop famine - and instead many diseases may appear in society."

Wilf Dinnick, the Middle East communications and media manager for Mercy Corps, said that since 2014 his organisation had screened nearly 18,000 Yemeni children under the age of five for acute malnutrition, including 5,000 who were treated for severe acute malnutrition.

For Dinnick, the debate on whether a famine is imminent or already occurring is beside the point.

"The important point here isn't whether there's technically famine or not, because there are millions of people in desperate need of assistance," he told MEE.

While noting that “many areas [of Yemen] were emergencies before the conflict," Dinnick condemned the war for its devastating impact on the humanitarian situation.

“Conflict and famine are intertwined. It displaces populations, it disrupts agricultural and food markets," Dinnick said. “The path to solving hunger starts with peace. It's the first way to help those who need food and water."