2009 October | Miren Gutiérrez

October 21, 2009

Q&A: Italian Women At A Loss

Filed under: Articles by IPS, Interviews by the Author — miren @ 8:26 am

Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli interview IVANKA CORTI, former president of the CEDAW Committee

ROME, Oct 21 (IPS) – On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Italy is far from attaining gender equality.

“I think that something is changing…however, the Convention is still not very well known in Italy, and what has been ratified hasn’t been implemented yet,” says Ivanka Corti, former president of the CEDAW Committee.

According to the latest global gap report index, in Europe only the Czech Republic, Romania, Greece, Cyprus and Malta have bigger gender gaps than Italy. Italy ranks 67 among the 130 countries in the index.

CEDAW was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979, and Italy ratified it in 1985. Italian women are 51.4 percent of the population and 55.8 percent of university students, but their political and economic power is way below equality.

Politics shows the biggest gap, but discrimination can also be found in the workplace, according to the report Education at a Glance 2009, published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). According to the report, having a university degree pays off 2.36 times as much for men than for women in Italy. The average for the OECD, which includes 30 of the most developed countries, is 1.4.

A quarter of a century after signing the Convention, Italy is worse off than, say, Uganda (ranked 43) or Lesotho (16).

In its combined fourth and fifth report on Italy published in 2004, the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women points to “low participation of women in public and political life, (and) the lack of programmes to combat stereotypes through the formal education system and to encourage men to undertake their fair share of domestic responsibilities.”

The CEDAW Committee, whose main responsibility is to support implementation of the convection, has called on Italy “to adopt a large-scale, comprehensive and coordinated programme to combat the widespread acceptance of stereotypical roles of men and women.”

It has also recommended that “the media and advertising agencies be specifically targeted and encouraged to project an image of women as equal partners in all spheres of life and that concerted efforts be made to change the perception of women as sex objects, and primarily responsible for child- rearing.”

So what has been done, and what remains to be done? IPS talks to Ivanka Corti -who was in the CEDAW Committee for 16 years, four of them as chair – about the status of women in Italy.

October 5, 2009

DEVELOPMENT: Plenty On the Plate – Part 2

Filed under: General, Interviews by the Author, New links — miren @ 12:36 am

By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli

An internally displaced person in Congo carries rations distributed by the World Food Programme.

Credit:U.N.

ROME, Oct 4 (IPS) – “From a current 6.5 billion population, a billion don’t get enough to eat right now. Extrapolate that to 2020, and you begin to recognise why this is not just a moral problem, it is a national security problem that has much more to do with civil strife, warfare, terrorism, immigration… This goes far beyond food.”

That is the issue on the plate for the World Summit on Food Security (Nov. 16-18), says Kevin Cleaver, assistant president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

And the results of the summit cannot be business as usual.

“I am not a NGO type,” he says. “But I agree the current food system is fundamentally not sustainable. A billion people go to bed without enough food. Something has gone terribly wrong. In the developed world, obesity is the problem. Poor people (in rich countries) are malnourished.”

What needs to be done?

For Cleaver, it is a clear, although not an easy choice. “Reallocate public resources to agriculture production in developing countries, where the epicentre of this crisis is. By the countries themselves, by the donor agencies run by the industrial countries, by the multilateral institutions like IFAD, the World Bank…A hard choice: it means shifting resources into agriculture, and taking them out of something else.

“Also, a lot has to be done in the area of policy,” he says.

“We find that when the food crisis occurred in 2008, many developing countries made the wrong choices, tried to impose price controls on farmers. Argentina, for example, squeezed the farmers by taxes. The result is always that the farmers stop producing or start smuggling. A very inefficient, shortsighted response.

“Other countries did stupid things. The Philippines started to buy massive amounts of rice and stuck it in a warehouse. Each time they went to the market, the price went to the ceiling…so poor countries were crushed,” he says.

“In industrial countries we have the most stupid set of subsidies…About 200 billion dollars a year are devoted to subsidies to U.S. and European companies, a bigger amount than all the aid of all institutions put together. We subsidise this tiny little group of corporate farms to the tune of gazillions. And what sort of farming do they practice? The kind the Slow Food movement criticises. Is this what we want to do with the money? No.”

So what will happen during the summit?

“This is an effort by FAO to be relevant. They recognise the crisis, and they want to have a discussion at the global level to solve it,” says Cleaver. “The problem with these big U.N. gatherings, however well intentioned, is that they don’t actually change much. In 1974, there were some institutional changes. I hope this food conference leads to an equivalent kind of response. But my guess is it won’t change much.

“The most we can hope,” he adds, “is that it will raise awareness in the public about the stakes. The press is not reporting the issues, only pieces of it. They haven’t quite caught on to the global dimension of this dilemma. This summit could manage to get the word out beyond a few bureaucrats.”

Do others hope more from the summit?

The third big U.N. agency headquartered in Rome, the World Food Programme (WFP), specialises in delivering food to people who are caught in a humanitarian crisis, such as a drought, flood or war. “Simply put, it keeps people from starving to death,” says the WFP site.

The most urgent problem facing the WFP now is the food emergencies in about 30 countries.

“Food prices on international markets reached a peak in mid-2008 and since then we have witnessed a decline. However, the cost of food in many markets in the developing countries where WFP works has remained stubbornly high,” says Greg Barrow, global media coordinator of the WFP.

DEVELOPMENT: Rome, Food Capital of the World – Part 1

Filed under: Articles by IPS, General, Interviews by the Author, New links — miren @ 12:34 am

By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli

A farmer harvests sorghum seeds in Sudan. The price of the seeds has doubled over the last two years.

Credit:U.N.

ROME, Oct 3 (IPS) – It was once true that all roads led to this ancient capital. Today it is the furrows of maize, wheat and rice fields that take you to Rome, where the biggest global food organisations are headquartered, and the World Summit on Food Security (Nov. 16-18) is being organised.

The situation couldn’t be more momentous.

“The global food insecurity situation has worsened and continues to represent a serious threat for humanity,” says the summit website. According to the latest U.N. projections, the world population will rise from 6.8 billion to 9.1 billion in 2050 – a third more mouths to feed. Most population growth will occur in developing countries.

High food prices in developing countries, a global economic crisis affecting jobs, deepening poverty, and more hungry people combine to paint a bleak picture.

So, what are the expectations of the food organisations present in Rome?

Kostas Stamoulis, head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) agricultural development economics division, says this summit “is not a fund- raising exercise…the original position is that we eliminate hunger, preferably by 2025, although I am not sure if this will be the summit’s objective, because the countries have yet to agree on the targets…”

One of the concrete issues on the table, he says, is “reform of the global governance of food security. It has to be better coordinated, because so far every crisis turns into a big disaster. Also, despite all the wealth in the world, we have seen chronically hungry people increasing since 1996.”

A recent paper by FAO says that “producing 70 percent more food for an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050 while at the same time combating poverty and hunger, using scarce natural resources more efficiently, and adapting to climate change are the main challenges world agriculture will face in the coming decades.”

For Stamoulis, in order to produce more food, “we have to make sure that farmers are properly supported in the developed and developing countries, not at the expense of each other.” So far we are not doing a good job, he says. “Developed countries support farmers tremendously, while developing countries do not have the means.

“Part of the objective too is to make sure that countries realise that a lot more resources have to be devoted to agriculture. Not necessarily during the summit…this is not a pledge summit. That happened in July, when the G8 pledged 20 billion dollars to support agriculture. This is a summit where countries, at the highest level, reconfirm their support.”

At the summit of the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful countries, held in July in the Italian city of L’Aquila, they decided to mobilise 20 billion dollars over three years to fight the food crisis, and it was said the money could be used to promote agriculture rather than as aid. But people like Paolo di Croce, secretary-general of Slow Food International, were sceptical. “We have to change the model that caused this situation (of food crisis), not patch up the gaps with some crisis money,” he said in an earlier interview with IPS.

For Stamoulis, this is a good point. The money should be invested primarily on small farmers, he says. Investments should be made too in infrastructure – roads, ports, storage facilities. “In terms of technology and access to markets, we have to make sure small holders take a fair share of this allocation, so they increase their productivity.”