Miren Gutiérrez

Miren Gutierrez* interviews HAZEL HENDERSON

ROME, Sep 18 (IPS) – Hazel Henderson is a futurist, an economic iconoclast, founder of Ethical Markets Media, and author of the books Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship, and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. Her main focus is exploring the “blind spots” in conventional economic theory.She has devoted her research to the creation of an interdisciplinary economic and political theory with a focus on environmental and social issues. For instance, she has investigated the “value” of fresh water and clean air, needed in huge amounts to sustain life, but taken for granted.

In the wake of the publication of the “Stiglitz-Sen report” – which says that countries need to find ways to measure well-being alongside raw economic growth, her views couldn’t be more pertinent.

Henderson spoke to IPS in an emailed interview.

IPS: We often hear that country X will not reach the Millennium Development Goals. According to Jan Vandemoortele, one of the architects of the MDGs, the MDGs have become money-metric and donor-centric, meaningless catch-all phrases. If there are no concrete, common, comparable targets, how do we know we have been successful?

HAZEL HENDERSON: We need to see the MDGs in the rapidly changing world context since 2000: the U.S. has lost its single superpower position. China, India and Brazil are now key global players, the G7 and the G8 are superseded by the G20, and soon the G192 will be the expanded venue for democratising the global economy after the crises in finance changed the game for all players.

So, we need to retain the MDGs as the goal and align them with the rapidly emerging consensus on climate change: the Global Green New Deal, lead by private investments by the world’s pension funds (assets of over 120 trillion dollars) and with low-risk government guarantees for 10 trillion dollars of Climate Prosperity bonds over the next decade.

Since all the old metrics: GDP-measured economic growth and traditional “efficient markets” model are now defunct, we need to not tie MDG goals to these old metrics. New scorecards of progress beyond money-coefficients now appearing in Europe, Canada, China, Brazil and many other countries will be able to track MDGs performance more realistically.

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Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli interview filmmaker ERIK GANDINI

ROME, Sep 15 (IPS) – Something new is appearing on the Italian screen. About time, some may say.A documentary titled Videocracy by Erik Gandini shows the face of Italian television, about 90 percent of which is controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi through his private media empire Mediaset and the state television RAI.Dissenting voices in RAI have been silenced since Berlusconi was first elected in 1994. And on Mediaset, gossip and cheap entertainment rule, and women have become decoration.

Artists are now speaking up, Gandini says in a telephone interview from Stockholm. Such as Lorella Zanardo who made the documentary Il Corpo Delle Donne. “Since we put our video on our website we have had more than 250,000 people (downloading the film).”

Produced in Sweden with the support of Scandinavian media organisations, Videocracy has been shown at the last Venice and Toronto film festivals. A trailer offered to Mediaset and RAI was not broadcast because it was considered a “political message” against the government. The film couldn’t have arrived at a worse time for Berlusconi, in the thick of sex scandals.

Gandini talks about the humiliating use of women’s bodies on screen and the brainwashing Italians have been subject to for three decades by Berlusconi’s TV empire.

IPS: You say in the film that we have to step into Italy’s television in order to understand it. But you are an Italian who has stepped out of Italy…

ERIK GANDINI: It is very difficult to make documentaries in Italy because television doesn’t finance them, and if they are shown at all on television, it is very late at night. Meanwhile, Scandinavia has a long tradition of documentary making. Documentaries here have more dignity, and they are funded by television.

In Sweden, documentaries are premiered in cinemas, and offered several times a week on television at prime time. On state television, they are considered a key part of society’s wellbeing. It could be the same in Italy; it is a question of choice. But this choice has never been made, and documentaries have been marginalised.

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In italiano

En español

Miren Gutierrez* interviews AHMED DJOGHLAF, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity

BELLAGIO, Italy, Jul 17 (IPS) – Declining amphibian populations, dwindling fish stocks, waning ocean biodiversity, loss of forests…All scientists acknowledge that the rate of species loss is greater now than at any time in human history.But there are forces that are attempting to stop and correct the damage.Ahmed Djoghlaf is one of the most well known global warriors against biodiversity loss. He is trying to make the most out of the International Year of Biodiversity next year, and of international meetings in the run-up to the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10) in Nagoya in Japan in October 2010.

Executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) since 2003, he has also been assistant executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), coordinator of UNEP’s division of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and general rapporteur of the preparatory committee of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), better known as the Rio Summit.

IPS: You said recently that “we receive increasingly strong signals of distress from the natural systems that provide the services that sustain our daily needs and livelihoods.” What are those signals, and is anything being done to respond to them? Ahmed Djoghlaf: The last assessment of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – done by 2,500 experts – demonstrated in 2007 that climate change is real, that it is happening now, and that we, human beings, are responsible for it. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment – in which more than 1,300 experts participated, launched in 2005 – demonstrated that the loss of biodiversity is real, and it is an unprecedented threat to the ecosystems. The current rate of extinction is a thousand times the natural rate. We are maybe reaching a turning point where we cannot reverse this crisis. We are experiencing the sixth global mass extinction of species, but the first human-caused mass extinction. Climate change is one of the main drivers of loss.

Djoghlaf spoke with IPS during a meeting on agricultural biodiversity organised by Bioversity International – the largest international research organisation dedicated to conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity.

IPS: Biodiversity loss and climate change are intimately linked. However, the recent G8 forum on energy and climate in L’Aquila, Italy, produced a declaration that included no concrete commitments on how much air pollutant emissions should be cut and when. What is your reading of the meeting?

Ahmed Djoghlaf: The declaration is important. Of course, long-term targets need to be set, as well as short-term targets. The leadership of the G8 should commit to a post-Kyoto agreement in Copenhagen (next December).

This has been the first time that these heads of state endorsed the biodiversity commitments contained in the Syracuse Charter on Biodiversity, issued during the G8 environment summit in April this year. The Syracuse declaration was a very strong statement to take leadership on biodiversity and to finalise the negotiation under the international regime by 2010 in Nayoga.

The climate change challenge is a technical and financial issue, but it is first an environmental issue. Tropical deforestation contributes to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Tropical forests are disappearing at a rate of about 13 million hectares per year, together with biodiversity that has yet to be recorded. Oceans absorb 20 percent of emissions; however global warming weakens the capacity of the oceans for natural abortion of emissions.

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En español

Yesterday, I received a phone call from Panama. It was Jorge Motley, former head of Interpol Panama. He called me to let me know that he had been exonerated of all charges against him. Former attorney-general José Antonio Sossa had sued Motley for trying to document Sossa’s involvement in money laundering. With this legal decision, Motley’s ten-year quest to clean his name ends. See the details of the Malocchio case in an old article below.

CORRUPTION: An Evil Eye Opens Up Again
By Miren Gutiérrez*

ROME, Feb 19 (IPS) – The departure of a Panamanian attorney-general has led to the review of a massive international money laundering case. Operation Malocchio (’evil eye’) as it was called, was “one of the biggest” anti-money laundering operations ever launched in Italy, says former prosecutor Giovanni Salvi who was in charge of the investigation together with his colleague Pietro Saviotti and investigating judge Otello Lupacchini. Investigation began in 1996 into hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds from the smuggling of 900kg cocaine out of Latin America. By 1997 the network was set to ‘import’ 5,000 kg of cocaine and buy a bank in Belize, according to a report by Espresso magazine in Italy. Operation Malocchio was launched after Italian authorities carried out “an information exchange with the U.S. FBI,” said a report issued in 2001 by the anti-mafia investigative unit (DIA) of the Italian ministry of interior. The aim was “dismantling a complex crime group involved in the trafficking of significant consignments of cocaine coming from South America, as well as in money laundering and in the re-investment of huge capital through international financial channels.” The probe led to several arrests in 1998. In 2001, 15 people were convicted for laundering money from narco trafficking, including kingpin Fausto Pellegrinetti. But he escaped and is still a fugitive. Appeals against the sentence were rejected.Accomplices in Panama, and also in Brazil and Belize (a tiny Central American nation with a population of 273,000 bordering Guatemala and Mexico) had a prominent role in the money laundering and re-investment scheme, according to documents seized by the Italian police.

In October 1997 Italian authorities asked Interpol in Panama for information that could link three suspect telephone numbers with well-known Panamanian politician Alfredo Oranges.

Oranges was then a serious contender for presidential candidacy in the 1998 elections from the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). Interpol Panama confirmed that the numbers belonged to Oranges..

The Financial Analysis Unit (UAF) in Panama then discovered that money from outside the country was being transferred regularly to and from the local bank accounts of the company Clark’s Investment Corp. Oranges was authorised to sign documents on behalf of Clark’s Investment, the UAF said.

This corporation “has served as bridge for a series of banking transfers that cross several countries without an apparent motive or commercial activity justifying them,” said the UAF. Some of the transfers were higher than a million dollars.

Edwin Arias Castillo, a Clark’s Investment executive and Oranges’ associate, was also treasurer in another corporation France Mistral, S.A., where Lillo Rosario Lauricella – kingpin Pellegrinetti’s right hand in Latin America – was vice-president, the UAF noted.

“Vast amounts of money from outside were deposited through Panamanian corporations in local bank accounts, where they would stay for a couple of days and later were transferred to a bank in another country,” Jorge Mottley, former head of Interpol Panama told IPS in a telephone interview. Mottley had joined investigation of the Panamanian ramifications of the case.

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Miren Gutierrez interviews ELISA MUÑOZ, project coordinator of The Global Report on Women in the News Media

ROME, Jun 24 (IPS) – For the first time in 15 years, an organisation, the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), is attempting to measure the progress, or lack of progress, of women in media organisations globally.The IWMF is a global network dedicated to strengthening the role of women in media as a way to further worldwide freedom of the press.

Its report – to be released in 2010¬ is examining the structure of the news media industry worldwide from a gender angle.

In a previous article on the same issue, IPS found that women’s representation at the higher echelons of power in media organisations is very low, even in the best cases. For example, in Sweden three out of four leaders in the media industry are men, according to the 2007 report ‘The Gender of Journalism’, authored by Monika Djerf-Pierre.

In e-mailed and phone interviews from Washington, Project Coordinator Elisa Muñoz (also the director of research of the IWMF) spoke to IPS.

IPS: What are the premises of the research?

ELISA MUÑOZ: The IWMF is undertaking the most comprehensive international study ever conducted on the status of women in the news media. The study will sample 500-600 news organisations in some 66 nations (internet-only companies, news magazines and news agencies are not included). A previous study, ‘An Unfinished Story: Gender Patterns in Media Employment’, was published in 1995 by UNESCO. It was written by Margaret Gallagher, who is on our Research Task Force.

Conducted in 43 countries, Gallagher’s study found that in most countries women’s professional representation in the news and other branches of the media ranged from a high of around 30 percent down to the single digits, except in a few Nordic countries, where women were on par with men.

In our own study, we have refined the methodology (e.g., definitions of occupational categories) and evened out geographic representation.

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En español

Sabina Zaccaro and Miren Gutierrez* interview three ‘GUARDIANS OF DIVERSITY’

ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) – How many varieties of date palm or melon exist? And why should we care? IPS spoke to three ‘Guardians of Diversity’ so named by Bioversity International for their contribution to conservation.Bioversity International is the largest international research organisation dedicated to conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity.

Slimane Bekkay is a farmer in Ghardaia, Algeria. Conservation of date palm diversity has been his mission for a long time, both for scientific and cultural reasons. His lexicon of date palm varieties explains the different terms used in Arabic, Mozabite (an ethnic language in central Algeria) and French in order to provide insight into the role of the date palm in Arabic and Mozabite culture.

Jose Esquinas-Alcazar collected seeds of nearly 400 varieties of melon while a young man in his native Spain. Today, these form the basis of the national melon diversity collection. For 22 years, Esquinas-Alcazar served as secretary of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) commission on genetic resources for food and agriculture; he is now professor of plant production at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and director of studies on hunger and poverty at the University of Córdoba in Spain.

Panagiotis Sainatoudis is the coordinator of Peliti, a non-governmental organisation in Greece that distributes local crop varieties to growers. To date, roughly 50,000 packages of 1,500 varieties of vegetables and cereals have been collected and distributed to farmers around Greece.

IPS: What prompted you to start collecting and tracking plants?

SLIMANE BEKKAY: What led me to date palms is their longevity and the importance that the Islamic religion bestows on the date palm. It appeared together with human beings on earth.

JOSE ESQUINAS-ALCAZAR: In the 1970s there was a tremendous amount of melon diversity in Spain. I wanted to prevent this abundance from being lost, together with traditional knowledge. When I started to collect seeds, I found 380 different varieties of melon; nowadays only 10 or 12 of them are available in the markets or cultivated at all.

PANAGIOTIS SAINATOUDIS: In January 1991 a friend asked me if I wanted to buy some seeds that he had brought from abroad. He said they came from a bank of seeds in the U.S. The parcel contained seeds and roots from various plants from all over the world; the most impressive was a variety of maize that was very colourful and was cultivated by Amerindians, a population that had almost disappeared!

The following year, I went home for the marriage of my brother. In a courtyard I saw a kontoroko black corn. I asked the owner, an old lady, for a few seeds. So I got this idea of asking people to share with me seeds from their own varieties. I collected seeds of maize, pumpkins, beans etc…From then on, wherever I went, I asked the local people which seeds they cultivate, and also how to cook and maintain them. In the beginning I did not realise their value. Only after many years I began to see their political, economic, social and cultural dimension.

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En español