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	The politicization of humanitarian aid through budget cuts by IPS, Watchlist on Children & Armed Conflict   Ahead of the the Secretary-General’s Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflicts, child protection actors share concerns about the politicization of humanitarian aid putting child protection capacities at a disadvantage.   UNICEF described 2017 a “nightmare year” for children living in war-affected regions.   Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba stated the progress made last year was outweighed by the “extremely worrisome situation” for children exposed to escalations of violence and denials of humanitarian aid.   “States don’t want to be on the same list as terrorist groups so they’ll do anything to stay off those lists. Blackmail is the most blatant example of politicization of humanitarian aid,” Dragica Mikavica, Advocacy Officer for Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, told IPS.   Saudi Arabia was the most recent publicized example of blackmail when former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon removed the Saudi-led Coalition in Yemen from the U.N. blacklist because its supporters threatened to cut U.N. funding. Saudi Arabia denied the allegations.   To deepen Saudi Arabia’s commitment to protecting children, current Secretary-General António Guterres added the Saudi-led Coalition to the annexes again — for killing and injuring 683 children in Yemen and 38 attacks on schools and hospitals in 2016, all incidents verified by the United Nations.   Though, according to Watchlist’s recommendations for the 2018 Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict, this year’s report draws a line between parties “that have put in place measures during the reporting period aimed at improving the protection of children” and parties who haven’t.   It’s a ploy to still list but concurrently appease Saudi Arabia. “They’re on the list but there is a list A and list B. On list A are parties that have not taken any measures to protect children and list B is for parties that have taken “positive measures.” The Saudis went straight to B because they are taking positive measures although none of us know what these measures are,” said Dragica Mikavica.   Child protection actors like Watchlist and Human Rights Watch now demand more transparent updates on the criteria for these lists. “Of course this is in the spirit of trying to be more proactive about efficiency in peacekeeping, it’s just gone under the radar that U.N. agendas have been undermined as a result.”   Mikavica presumes a much more substantial danger for agendas being eroded from below, “Member states essentially use budget negotiations to undermine agendas at the U.N.”   While some contributions are treaty-based and therefore compulsory, the United States provides 22 percent of the United Nations’ operating budget and around 28 percent for peacekeeping.   When the U.S. government pressed to cut financial assistance to member states that vote in favor of the U.N.’s calling for the U.S. to withdraw from its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, they eventually secured a $285 million cut.   The 2015 report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations previously pointed out that “too often, mandates and missions are produced on the basis of templates instead of tailored to support situation-specific political strategies, and technical and military approaches come at the expense of strengthened political efforts.”   Political agendas threaten peacekeeping’s principle of aid neutrality.   Negotiations within the United Nation’s budget committee recommended the General Assembly to adopt a $5.3 billion budget for the 2018/2019 biennium, five percent less than the budget approved for the previous biennium.   According to UNA-UK, the $5 billion budget saves member states around one billion dollars. Resources of large missions need to be drastically reduced, putting particularly child protection capacities at risk, notably in the war-affected regions of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.   Last year’s budget negotiations for MINUSCA, the mandate in the Central African Republic, suggested cutting off human rights posts of which 90 were intended for child protection.   In 2016, the number of child casualties in the Congo had increased by 75 percent compared to the previous year. One of the UN’s most complex missions, the Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), will see a budget reduction of $96 million.   As of August 2017, due to the lack of access to medical aid and excessive rates of malnutrition among children, over one million South Sudanese have fled to Uganda alone. The 1.0 percent budget cut to UNMISS, the U.N. Mission in South Sudan, came after a significant budget increase request and meant a fall by 10 percent to the number the U.N. projects the Mission will need.   These consequences fundamentally affect the security of children because of their unique vulnerability and exposure to exploitation and violence. “Rapidly shrinking place for the protection of children is given,” Dragica Mikavica concluded.   http://watchlist.org/publications/credible-list-recommendations-2018-annual-report-children-armed-conflict-listings/ http://watchlist.org/watchlist-news/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/03/politicization-humanitarian-aid-budget-cuts/ Visit the related web page
	Billionaires say poverty is decreasing. They couldn’t be more wrong by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Jason Hickel   Jan. 2018   At the moment the SDGs simply offer UN member states a free pass to pat themselves on the back, despite their collective failures, writes Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general of Civicus   Two years into their life, and amid the grim political realities of the last year, the sustainable development goals seem increasingly like warm words with little if any bite. With the clock counting down till 2030, we urgently need to find ways of driving real changes in behaviour, policy and investment if we are to create a more just and sustainable world. We need nothing short of an accountability revolution.   At many times in 2017, it has felt that progress towards the 17 ambitious goals is not only faltering, but going drastically backwards in too many countries, in part because the agenda lacks any real power on human rights. One only has to look to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen to see that little can be done to achieve goal 2 (freedom from hunger).   In August an estimated one third of Bangladesh was under water; a news story many may be forgiven for missing between the unprecedented hurricanes in the Caribbean. Next door in Myanmar, despite goings on that have been condemned as “ethnic cleansing”, United Nations’ various bodies seem frozen and inactive. I could go on.   One cannot help noticing that, having failed to uphold the various international conventions and norms set in decades past, it seems the international community now favours much softer, less scary frameworks, like the lofty and ambitious SDGs.   Don’t get me wrong; I am one of the biggest supporters of the global goals. Their ambitions are exactly what we need, from gender equality and climate action, to freedom from hunger and inequality.   The problem is that the goals are being framed as apolitical, devoid of the need to scrutinise states for their actions. They lack a sense of accountability. In recent discussions at the United Nations I’ve noticed that human rights have all but disappeared from the vocabulary as member states talk about implementing the sustainable development goals.   But there is nothing apolitical about sustainable development. It’s not possible to separate food security from the wider political context of human rights.   Often these problems go hand in hand with crackdowns on the people and organisations that provide assistance to the poor and marginalised. Indeed, only 3% of the world’s population live in a country where the rights to protest, organise and speak out are respected, protected and fulfilled, according to the Civicus Monitor.   In Libya, where slave auctions were recently documented by journalists, incursions on civil society and media are common. Libyan journalists face continued harassment and intimidation from Libyan authorities. Meanwhile, international NGOs operating migrant rescue missions, including MSF, Save the Children and Sea Eye have been forced to cease operations due to hostility from Libyan authorities.   Notably the sustainable development agenda includes no references to press freedom or the media, yet press freedoms have undoubtedly seriously deteriorated since the goals were adopted, with attacks from US President Donald Trump emboldening other governments. Without basic protections for those who seek to implement the UN’s sustainable development goals, achieving them becomes considerably less likely.   Much hope was placed in the goals because they incorporated targets not only for people but also for our planet. Yet, again, a lack of respect for the human rights of people who seek to protect the environment also undermines the goals. Such as in Vietnam, where another blogger has just been jailed for seven years for reporting on a toxic spill.   The climate change and environmental ambitions in the SDGs also don’t go far enough to prepare for the imminent increase in displacement caused by climate change. The only way to addressing this impending problem, is if we go back to the days of past where UN agreements meant something. That means creating new laws to meet contemporary challenges, but more importantly enforcing the protocols and norms that already exist.   Warm and cuddly ambitions are simply no longer going to cut it. The UN system has to have the courage to hold its member states accountable. Otherwise, it seems as if the SDGs simply offer member states a free pass to pat themselves on the back, despite their collective failures. And the onus is also on those of us in civil society to remind citizens that the global goals are more than warm words, and that we need to hold those responsible for their delivery to account. http://www.civicus.org/   Billionaires say poverty is decreasing. They couldn’t be more wrong, says Jason Hickel.   Last week, as world leaders and business elites arrived in Davos for the World Economic Forum, philanthropist Bill Gates tweeted an infographic to his millions of followers showing that the world has been getting better and better. “This is one of my favourite infographics,” he wrote. “A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries.”   Of the six graphs – developed by Max Roser of Our World in Data – the first has attracted the most attention by far. It shows that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 94% in 1820 to only 10% today. The claim is simple and compelling. And it’s not just Gates who’s grabbed on to it. These figures have been trotted out in the past year by the Davos set to argue that the global extension of free-market capitalism has been great for everyone. Some have gone even further, saying we shouldn’t complain about rising inequality when the very forces that deliver such immense wealth to the richest are also eradicating poverty before our very eyes. It’s a powerful narrative. And it’s completely wrong.   There are a number of problems with this graph, though. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP – and that for only a limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It’s not science; it’s social media.   What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money.   The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.   Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity.   They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.   This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.   In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.   But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.   Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day.   So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away.   Moreover, the few gains that have been made have virtually all happened in one place: China. It is disingenuous, then, for billionaires to claim these gains as victories for Washington-consensus neoliberalism. Take China out of the equation, and the numbers look even worse.   Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in poverty gone up, the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%. It would be difficult to overstate the suffering that these numbers represent.   This is a ringing indictment of our global economic system, which is failing the vast majority of humanity. Our world is richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite. Only 5% of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60% – and yet they are the people who produce most of the food and goods that the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were condemned 200 years ago. It is madness – and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify it. http://bit.ly/2FSe8ss   * Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Visit the related web page
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