News headlines in 2020, page 51

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 23 (IPS) - Covid-19 is expected to take a heavy human and economic toll on developing countries, not only because of contagion in the face of weak health systems, but also containment measures which have precipitated recessions, destroying and diminishing the livelihoods of many.

MONTPELLIER, France, Jul 22 (IPS) - Elwyn Grainger-Jones is the Executive Director of the CGIAR System Organization.The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the structural weaknesses of today's food systems, showing how quickly global networks of food production, trade and supply can waver under the impact of a single disease.

BRUSSELS, Jul 22 (IPS) - While the ‘CGIAR System' may sound like a technocratic body, few organizations have exerted as much influence on today's food systems as this network of global agricultural research centres.

HYDERBAD, India, Jul 22 (IPS) - With Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) around the corner, 11-year-old Fatoumata Binta from Terrou Mballing district in M'Bour, western Senegal, wakes up early and joins her brothers Iphrahima Tall and Ismaila to fetch water from a river several miles from home.

NEW YORK, Jul 22 (IPS) - Dr. Joseph Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau. His books include Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination.In the words of (ret.) Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of Defense Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, the Trump Administration has been dangerously "poking China in the eye."

NEW YORK, Jul 21 (IPS) - The world is in the midst of the Great Migration Clash, a bitter struggle between those who "want out" of their countries and those who want others to "keep out" of their countries. More than a billion people would like to move permanently to another country and no less than a billion people say fewer or no immigrants should be allowed to move into their countries.

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 21 (IPS) - Catherine Bertini, former executive director of the World Food Programme, began the IPS United Nations Bureau webinar "The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women and Girls" by reminiscing on a talk she gave in 1995 entitled "Women eat last". She remarked that after 25 years, the phrase is still something that is relevant to the present day.

CHEPKITALE, Kenya, Jul 21 (IPS) - The Ogiek community, indigenous peoples from Kenya's Chepkitale National Reserve, are in the process of implementing a modern tool to inform and guide the conservation and management of the natural forest. The community has inhabited this area for many generations, long before Kenya was a republic. Through this process, they hope to get the government to formally recognise their customary tenure in line with the Community Land Act.

BANGKOK, Thailand, Jul 21 (IPS) - A factoid is unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. One such factoid repeatedly echoed across the globe by the tobacco industry is that tobacco tax increases worsen cigarette smuggling.

BERLIN and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 21 (IPS) - GDP has been increasingly challenged on many grounds as a measure of economic and social progress. Clearly, GDP does not take account of other dimensions of wellbeing, natural resource depletion or environmental damage.