Sex-Selective Abortions Lead China and India to Gender Imbalance

By Kseniya Kotlyarova

During the past few decades the number of newborn boys has largely overcome the number of newborn girls in many Asian countries. This fact is largely due to the practice of sex-selective abortion. Scientists estimate the normal male to female sex ratio at birth to be 105 to 100, however, it can vary up to 104 and 106, which is still considered to be normal.  Higher imbalance in the birth range is considered to be unnatural.

According to U.N. statistics, China counts 120 boys born for every 100 girls. Many Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. This means that in the next 20 years the gender balance will exceed by 10 to 20 percent. A similar trend can be traced in India, where 108 boys are born for every 100 girls. Other statistical sources state that nowadays India has 112 boys born for every 100 girls. Comparing these numbers to those of other Asian countries, we discover that in Vietnam the ratio is of 110 to 100. In South Korea the sex ratio at birth is regaining its balance, but the number of newborn boys still exceeds the number of girls. This situation is equally common for some parts of western Asia and Caucasian countries, where the gender imbalance is related to religious and cultural factors. Taking into account the fact that China and India are the most densely populated countries in the world, we arrive at the conclusion that their gender imbalances tilt the whole world gender ratio to an unnatural level – 107. Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted on a sex-selection basis.

The reason for this biologically impossible ratio cannot solely be blamed on the preference for boys in more traditional Asian societies. It is also due to the misuse of ultrasound technology for fetal sex recognition and the sex-selective abortions that follow that stand behind the gender disproportion. Introduction of sonogram technology made the birth-sex ratio reach the mark of 130:100 in some parts of China in 1992. In Northern India the gender disparity grew up to 125:100. Originally, the decision in favor of sex-selective abortions was predominantly made by those at the top of the socio-economic ladder who were able to afford early access to ultrasound technology. Later on, this behaviour became common in other social strata in developing countries. China’s birth control policy is often blamed as a key factor motivating women to have abortions in order to increase opportunities for having boys. But the reality is that the One-Child Policy is not the main reason for the gender imbalance. For example, India, a country without such a policy, faces the problem of sex-selective abortions at the same scale. In both countries people continue trying to ensure that their second or third baby is a boy if their first or second is a girl.

Evidently, the high gender disparity leads to social concerns in the long term. If we take a deeper look into the problem, we will see that choosing boys over girls and the consequent overabundance of men causes a whole range of social problems. Experts believe that the excess of men having difficulties getting married leads to an increase of violence and crime. Single men may become psychologically vulnerable. Generally, they accumulate in the lower social classes where the crime rate is already rather high. Chinese provinces with particularly high indices of gender disparities prove to demonstrate a high crime level. An imbalanced sex ratio is equally a predictor of violence and crime in India.

According to economists, the gender imbalance will also influence China and India’s economic growth. The preference for boys may have an impact on families’ consumption patterns and bolster some industries such as the property market in China. Families with sons tend to have a higher savings rate than families with daughters. Families with sons need to save up to secure brides for their sons, and so they feel it necessary to buy a house, in spite of the high housing prices.

Today the Indian and Chinese governments are undertaking measures aimed at reducing the gender imbalance. The banning of fetal sex determination is one of these steps. Still, recovery of the natural gender balance requires a great deal of time. The traditional preference for boys is still rather strong in Asian countries, and the most efficient way to overcome it is by strengthening education to reduce the deeply rooted cultural preference for boys.

A positive shift can already be seen in South Korea, a country with a strong patriarchal tradition. This represents a promising sign for other Asian countries. And still, although attitudes toward sex-selective abortions have been recently evolving, the high gender disparity created in the 1990s is believed to have caused around a two-decades long gender imbalance in China and India. According to expert analysis, people in these countries will have to wait for several decades to regain a natural gender ratio.

Severe weather: Tornadoes cripple the Southern and Midwestern United States

By Lucile Hoarau

As we have all seen in the news, states throughout Southern and Midwestern United States have been affected by deadly tornadoes over the last few days. State emergency management officials in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee have reported tornadoes in several areas. The massive outbreak began on March 2nd and extended into the next day, affecting about 17 million people from Indiana to Georgia. Thirty-nine were killed: twenty in Kentucky, fourteen in Indiana, three in Ohio and one each in Alabama and Georgia.

The center of West Liberty, Kentucky, was transformed into a ghost town after a tornado struck at 6:45 Friday night and continued overnight on March 2nd. The tornado ripped through buildings and flipped police cars along Main Street.

"There ain't nothing left of this town. It's just a tragedy," resident David Wilson said.

Kentucky’s governor declared it looked like a bomb that hit downtown West Liberty.  The tornado left a trail, 120 mph winds took down buildings, crashed cars, and torn off trees. Five people died in West Liberty, Kentucky. The police said the tornado left a disaster scene so dangerous they had to close off access to downtown.

One of the hardest hit towns is Henryville, Indiana where a baby girl is reported in critical condition after being found alone in a field near her home.  Hospital officials said her entire family, mother, father, brother and sister were all killed in the storm. Most residents lost everything they owned in the storm. “We have worked all our lives to have what we have, and it is all gone in 15 seconds”.

President Barack Obama offered his condolences and federal assistance if needed to the governors of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.

Why so many tornadoes?

According to a few weather consultants and meteorologists, large amounts of warm air are responsible for the formation of tornadoes and then a powerful jet-stream splitting, one part of the jet-stream is going to the north, another one is going to the south, and in between that split, there is an incredible amount of air raising in the atmosphere and that can lead to some very large storms. 

How should the U.S. government respond to the severe weather and what can be done after this week’s tornadoes?

The administration, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), is closely monitoring the storms and their impacts. FEMA has teams on the ground in hard hit areas like in Henryville, Indiana and is prepared to deploy additional teams and resources, if needed by the states. Teams have to identify the damages and to help the governor of each state and the leaders of each county to determine if additional federal support will be required.

FEMA maintains commodities, including millions of liters of water, millions of meals and hundreds of thousands of blankets located at distribution centers.  FEMA is also able to bring in thousands of mobile homes (trailers) where those without housing can stay while the towns rebuild.  The U.S. government in partnership with state and local officials will pay for the clean-up and rebuilding efforts.

An Incident Management Assistance Team and eleven community relations teams have also been deployed to Indiana to assist with situational awareness following the storms and to support the state as requested.

A national Incident Support Base has been established in Kentucky to stage commodities in strategic locations close to the impacted areas, if needed and requested by the state. More than 98,000 meals and 146,000 liters of water are sent to the Incident Support Base.

Local governments and voluntary agencies, such as the American Red Cross and Salvation Army, are providing shelter to disaster survivors who have been displaced from the storms. They have also set up a way people can donate money to help the families impacted by the storms.

New Index Measures Women’s Empowerment through Agricultural Practices

By India Meshack

Photo credit adapted from "Ngurumo Village-Takira (Kenya),"courtesy of 
Flickr user CGIAR Climate

In a big move towards the further mainstreaming of the global women’s empowerment movement, the United States government’s Feed the Future Initiative (IFPRI), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and Oxford University’s Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) teamed up to create the recently launched Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, a new index which measures women’s empowerment in developing countries by evaluating their level of involvement in agricultural practices. The index is a response to research establishing a link between a woman’s involvement in agricultural practices and her level of emancipation in other areas of daily life. According to Sara Immenschuh of the IFPRI, who took part in the development of the index, “’Agriculture is the most effective way to drive inclusive economic growth of the poorest communities’, which too often include women and children.” The index assesses five criteria, amongst them: degree of engagement in decision-making about agricultural production, level of access to resources and level of involvement in resource-related decision-making; extent of control over use of income; ability to have a leadership role in the community; and use of time.

In 2011 pilot programs were launched in Bangladesh, Guatemala and Uganda, with results—the extent to which women were deemed empowered—based on how they fared in relation to the five criteria. A woman who scores a 4 out of the 5 is deemed empowered. According to the IFPRI, although they make up 43 percent of the agricultural labor force, women in developing countries own less land, are limited in their ability to hire farm workers and have less access to credit. In Immenschuh’s opinion, “Without addressing those inequities, women will be unable to effectively contribute to reducing global poverty and hunger.” IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Agnes Quisumbing adds, “We want to improve gender parity not by disempowering men but by bringing women up to the level of men.” This index is certainly a step in the right direction towards achieving that goal.

Source: http://gantdaily.com/2012/02/28/measuring-womens-empowerment-in-agriculture/

Want A Good Laugh?

By Astrid Vachette

Then read First Comes Love. Then Comes Malaria, by Eve Brown-Waite.

“If you go to Latin America, you'll come back fomenting revolution, if you go to Asia, you'll come back spiritually enlightened, and if you go to Africa, you'll come back laughing”. (Old saying in the Peace Corps)

First Comes Love. Then Comes Malaria,is not focused on war issues or ethical dilemmas of volunteers who are face to face with major human rights violations in host countries.

Rather it is simply the story of an everyday woman who started with the desire to help people in need, but not really knowing where or how to start. Eve Brown-Waite tells about her unforgettable years in humanitarian aid, first in Ecuador with Peace Corps and then in Uganda with her “do-gooder” husband.

Typical northen Ugandan houses

The author writes with lots of humor about those difficulties all volunteers have to face: difficulty of coping field trip with private life, gender and culture issues during the missions, the come-back to “normal life”.

Eve Brown-Waite's book is an easy-read book that simply shows how an everyday woman handled to live through several humanitarian adventures in spite of her fears and needs of western comforts. She got to find ways to get involved in many people's life and help them achieve their individual objectives. It is refreshing to read a simple human scale experience, which we, as beginners in the humanitarian world, can refer ourselves to.

The Ambivalence Of Internet In Human Trafficking

By Jeremy Frerelopez

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Those activities had been facilitated by the introduction of the internet in our society. By different means, it is used by traffickers to extend their networks. It is a tool, like any technology, that definitely helps human traffickers.

However, on the other hand, even if the internet is increasingly used for crime, it also contributes to help states and human rights organisations to fight against human trafficking by giving them new instruments to respond. Internet is definitely a Double-Edged Sword.  It offers new opportunities to traffickers to extend their influence. However it also provides to the global anti-trafficking community new ways to investigate, to fight, to cooperate and to prosecute trafficking.

It is obvious that traffickers take advantage from globalization. They are clearly benefiting in their criminal activities from advances in new technologies, especially the internet, which makes it more profitable, faster, easier to conduct and organize all kinds of transactions. Internet is certainly the most powerful weapon and useful tool for them. Internet, by contrast to the old school methods, enables criminals to distance themselves more efficiently and easily from the crime they commit. Emails, for instance, can be routed through different countries and different time zones. It is easy to create an email box in a cyber coffee, with false names and change every day. It is also easy to create a web site hosted in another country than the traffickers. Internet is used as well in order to exploit victims, particularly for sexual exploitation. It is used as a commercial tool in order to generate profit by selling pornographic images or services. Traffickers in this particular case are using chat rooms, websites, newsgroups, File Transfer Protocol, Peer to Peer networks (transmissions are not logged or traceable), bulletin boards or web message (spams etc...). For instance, the UNODC revealed that in 2000, Japanese women were trafficked in Hawaii for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

Nevertheless, new technologies and, particularly this very one, have influenced the fight against human trafficking lately. The Convention on Cybercrime has been crucial for that issue: it was signed in November 2001 and came into force in July 2004. Its purpose was not just to fight human trafficking, but it was part of it and especially because of its link with the Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. It mainly focuses on child pornography as far as human traffic is concerned. It is actually the first international treaty on crime that took effect on the internet. Traffickers can use internet to communicate information to each other very easily and rapidly so that the mainly concerned countries can investigate and arrest traffickers but also help victims. In addition, a European program named “SAFER INTERNET PLUS” has been created in order to prohibit abusive contents. It is the case for well-known and very often used websites such as “Youtube”, “Facebook”, “Myspace” or many others. When entering or trying to upload a video, users are told that any hateful or sexual content will be deleted or reported. This can be very dissuasive. However, we can wonder what the limit between abusive and non-abusive is.

In conclusion, Internet has positive and negative effects. It increases human trafficking by helping traffickers to coordinate their actions, to seek victims, to exploit them or to ensure their transactions. But, at the same time, it erases boarders between states in the fight against cybercrime, it allows information to be easily and quickly located, it provides new traps, it increases prevention tools and helps people sharing information.

The only solution for the fighters of human trafficking is to cooperate, and to hire competent people, able to think like traffickers.The fight in the field of human trafficking, between traffickers and states and NGOs is definitely affected by the technological power of each actor. The fight against human trafficking would lead to a more secure world only if anti-traffickers develop new forms of technologies, able to stop the escalation of human traffick.

Rainy Season Caused Floods In Bolivia

By Mercedes Aguerre

Bolivia’s rainy season is causing great havoc in many regions of the country. The burst of the Acre River have caused floods and also landslides affecting around 11.458 families and leaving five deaths in La Paz when a minibus fell into a raging river in the south of the city after a bridge collapsed.

The most affected municipality was Cobija, located about 600 km north of La Paz in the Amazon Basin on the border of Brazil and Peru. On this matter, the State authority indicated that a Coordination Plan is going to be executed with the help of the national government, the departmental government and the municipal one in order to reconstruct Cobija. It has also been considered to incorporate of a new drain system.

Man trying to catch dead animals after the floods (Reuters)

Morales Government has declared a state of emergency in five of the nine Bolivians departments allowing local authorities to have access to satisfy the needs of the victims of natural disasters.

So far, the Ministry of Defense delivered 160 tons of humanitarian aid to the affected families, including 115 tents, 500 mattresses, 106 kg of flour, 40 kg of sugar and rice, 87 sacks of noodles, 500 unities of water and 34 boxes of oil to distribute between the nine accommodations established to shelter the victims of the floods. Three water purification stations were also delivered on Friday by a C-130 Hercules Aircraft to counteract the diseases which threaten the health of the affected families as consequences of the consumption of contaminated water.

By the end of this week, Civil Defense carried out a report which quantified the damage caused by La Niña ocean-atmosphere phenomenon from December 2011 to February 2012. So far, 107 municipalities and 912 houses have been affected and nine persons were found dead.

Teaching Humanitarian Aid Students: "Closed Encounters of The Third Kind"

By Clémentine Tholas-Disset

On December 14th, 2011, I received my schedule for spring semester. As my colleague Mrs. Henderson-Peal would be on sabbatical semester, I was to be in charge of two groups of master’s degree students majoring in humanitarian aid; I started panicking as I thought “What the hell am I going to do with these revolutionary hippies?” As a Doctor in American studies with a minor in communication and media, I was scared we would really have nothing to share… I spent hours and hours trying to figure out how to please them and to make them discover things I mastered and liked.

I have been a teacher for six years now and the first thing I have learned is never to judge a book by its cover. First, when I met them, these students were no hippies or revolutionaries, so I realized I totally made up the wrong cover. Moreover, after a few hours with them, the content of the book seemed both entertaining and thrilling. Actually, I discovered a group of strong-willed and open-minded young people with very pleasant personalities.

Teaching this course is actually quite a challenge for me because I need to reinvent and adapt my professional habits. After four years in the AEI department, making freshmen and sophomore students work, I now have to collaborate with graduate students who have high academic standards. I have the feeling I traded my role of “youth tamer” for a new part as a “partner in learning”. My main goal has always been to bring satisfaction to my students no matter their age or skills in English and I’m learning to do so with a new type of student population, older, more mature (maybe not every day), more active and definitely not impressed by my teacher position. As a result, I think I have to make sure I’m offering creative and unusual courses or activities to keep them interested and I’m in tune with their expectations.

After being so afraid and worried, I must admit I am fulfilled because the moments I spend with the humanitarian aid students are synonymous of exchange. They may not have turned me into a relief work aficionada, willing to spend all her spare time volunteering all over the world, but I feel more concerned than before. I also became aware of some connections between professorship and aid work: you do both because you care about people, and, in both cases, it’s some kind of calling.

My conclusion will be simple: I don’t know if the humanitarian aid students are having a good time with me, but I am! So I guess it may be reciprocal…and if not they are very good at pretending!

Brigitte Piquard's Interview

By Fatim Hien, Kseniya Kotlyarova, Violette Moutard & Jeannette Nguyen

Brigitte Piquard is an anthropologist and holds a PhD in International Relations from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. She is currently Co-Director of the Master’s degree in International Humanitarian Aid at Paris-Est Creteil University in France and a senior lecturer in International Humanitarism at Oxford Brookes University in England.

Q: What made you want to work in the humanitarian field?

Brigitte Piquard: Originally, working in humanitarian field meant two things for me. My first idea about humanitarian activities was idealistic. We can put it this way: I wanted to make things change, to make the world full of problems and injustice a little bit better, and working on humanitarian issues presented a good opportunity for me to do it. The second reason why I decided to turn to humanitarian work was more pragmatic: this kind of professional experience gave me some interesting career opportunities, so I decided to grasp them.

Q: What was your first humanitarian work experience?

BP: My first humanitarian work experience was a volunteer experience with a French NGO in Pakistan in 1987. At that time I was a 21-year-old student majoring in sociology and anthropology. My task was to make an assessment of the situation. This first experience was followed by many other humanitarian missions in the following 20 years.

Q: Are there times when you have doubts about your commitment? For example, when you appear to be in a difficult situation, or when you have to work in some hard conditions where humanitarian intervention is extremely difficult to do. Do you feel weary sometimes? Have you ever thought of giving up?

BP: Naturally, it happens to everyone working on humanitarian issues to feel helpless or weary not only in the field but outside the field as well. Humanitarian work is a very challenging kind of work. At times you have a feeling that your personal work input can’t make a difference to the global situation. But, certainly, it is very important not to give up. Every working process has its difficulties and hard moments.

Q: In which regions do you prefer working?

BP: I enjoy working in Asia, namely in Central Asia and South Asia. Besides, the Middle East is a very interesting region for me. I did my second 4-year university degree in Islamic studies, so working in this region is directly related to my university major.

Q: Why have you chosen to teach this master’s degree course?

BP: When I was proposed to administer this course, a similar course existed already in Belgium. Besides, I had a part-time teaching position in England. When I was offered to start an International Humanitarian Aid Master’s course here in Paris, it presented a very interesting and a challenging task for me, I was motivated to develop a new full-time course. It was an opportunity to step outside the routine and to come to France. This is the fifth year I administer this master’s course. And it is always interesting to train people, to be at the beginning of students’ career in humanitarian field. The humanitarian needs to have qualified humanitarian workers.

Q: Has this decision affected the vision that you have of the humanitarian world?

BP: Of course it did. Today we can observe a real shift in the global humanitarian activity, many things are changing. There is a huge need to accumulate already existing humanitarian experience, to capitalize experience, and to make a further research in this field.

Q: What do you think when you look at your students?

BP: It is always a pleasure for me to see the results of our work, when I meet my former students who graduated from this Master’s course a couple of years or a year ago. I keep in touch with many of them and regularly meet some of them at the conferences or meetings on humanitarian issues. It is always interesting to learn how they apply the knowledge they received while studying here, and what questions they ask themselves and what challenges they meet in their work. Sometimes they even suggest some changes or new directions in the programme.

Thank you!

How Planting Mangroves Can Mitigate Disasters Caused By Natural Hazard And Yield Profits In Viet Nam

By Soraya Prudent

"Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) is the concept and practice of reducing disaster risks through systematic efforts to analyze and reduce the causal factors of disasters. Reducing exposure to hazards, lessening vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment, and improving preparedness for adverse events are all examples of disaster risk reduction" (UNISDR - United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction).

Pacific Asia is one of the region hardest-hit by natural hazards and disasters. With its peculiar

geography, Vietnam is extremely vulnerable to natural hazards. Indeed, its coastline is subjected to typhoons, its mountainous terrain is hit alternately by floods and drought and its wide river deltas are particularly predisposed to flooding.

The impacts of these hazards are unpredictable; they can create extreme environments for unprepared populations and lead them to an extreme state of vulnerability.

In order to prevent such a dire situation, DRR programs are established by NGOs, local organizations and governments. These programs are mainly focused on prevention and preparedness. They consist in training local population to adopt the right behavior, gestures, etc. in front of the hazard. It will help them to know what to do during the crisis

and how to manage it before it happens and after.

However, for several years, these organizations have been trying to combine environmental and economic aspects to the projects they are developing. In Vietnam, the environmental aspect focused on mangroves.

For instance, in 1994, the Vietnamese Red Cross initiated a “Mangrove Forest Project Implementation”. This project, financed by the Danish Red Cross, aimed at helping preventing disasters by restoring natural barriers and ecosystems and at reducing poverty for the inhabitants by creating income generating activities.

Mangrove

Mangrove forests have various benefits for people in tropical and subtropical coastline ecosystems. Indeed, the massive root systems of mangrove forests mitigate the effect of strong surge storms on low-lying coastal communities by decreasing wave and wind velocity. According to the United Nations, “mangroves can absorb 70-90% of the energy of a normal wave.” The forests also can store carbon dioxide and aid in erosion control.

Moreover, mangroves capture rich sediments in their roots and also attract a variety of species (shrimp, lobster, oysters) which can be harvested, sold and eaten by local populations.

So, since the start of the project, a “green wall” of nearly 9000 acres of mangrove has been replanted in about 166 local authorities. In Dai Hop local authority (North), the mangrove offers a profit between 4 and 5 billion Dongs (approximately between 146 100 and 183 000 euros). Not to mention that, according to statistics, the « green wall » will absorb at least 16 million tons of CO2, between now and 2015.

In 2010, another partnership was born between the Vietnamese, the Danish and the Japanese Red Crosses, in order to extend the mangrove nursery to ten other districts. At the same time, CARE France also launched a project of Disaster Risk Reduction which includes a mangrove tree nursery.

We can only be pleased about these initiatives which lead to the man-made reestablishment of natural resources. It certainly proves one thing: man can learn from his/her mistakes and it's not too late to action action and try to fix them.

Pumalín: A Wild Kingdom In Patagonia

By Astrid Vachette

Douglas Tompkins, a successful businessman, founded Esprit and The North Face, two clothing lines.  His wife made her fortune thanks to a popular clothing line in Patagonia.  Both having deep roots in the outdoor clothing and equipment, and because they felt guilty by of buying useless things with all their generated profits, they decided to invest their money to protect biodiversity. Thus in the 1990’s they purchased thousands of hectares in Patagonia cutting Chile by half and giving rise to the Pumalín Park.

The 300 000 hectares are home to the selva valdiviana (a deep humid forest), inaccessible mountains, fjords, volcanoes, lakes, rivers and animals which have disappeared everywhere else on earth.  This area makes up one of the richest natural wildlife reserve of the world.  The Pumalín foundation employs 185 people in Chile, mainly botanists, farmers, mechanics and activists, but not only.  Indeed, this huge private natural reserve is a test of reasoned agriculture and “slow living”: the organic attitude. 

However, the ecological philanthropy of the couple has aroused controversy. Pumalín Park is indeed dividing public opinion between those in favour of a radical protection of the environment and those supporting the local economic growth and development.

Pumalín National Park

The Tompkins’ project is to create a life reserve for the planet and not a tank of natural resources that the country could use to encourage its growth. Transportation between the north and south of the park is greatly constrained for the general public to a single ferry route, which is leading local government authorities and the general public to request a road system connecting north and south along with power generating hydroelectric wires. The local population views Tompkins’ reserve and ecological worries as a brake on growth and development.

Many voices have been rising against Tompkins who is seen as taking profit of a poor country, just as Benetton brothers or Ted Turner did in the past years. After all Tompkins used to be a capitalist boasting the three top competing companies for outdoor enthusiasts.

In spite of his promises to turn over his natural reserves to government authorities as soon as it will be sustainable, Tompkins is still seen as a “gringo cabrón” – a bloody foreigner.

This is not the first occurrence of private or commercial efforts to protect Mother Nature.  While the efforts which are more or less moral present major contradictions to essential growth of the local population, the number of protected areas increases, especially in developing countries and above all in Africa.  For instance, in many African countries, local populations are forbidden to hunt, practice cultural rituals or even walk through the lands which are the only place they have lived for thousands of years.

Nowadays, it is easy for developed countries to worry about environmental impact after much of the northern hemisphere improved through the industrial revolution and thereafter urban explosions of those last two centuries. On the contrary is it ethical to stop the developing countries which are in great need of using their own land to reach and sustain economic growth?

If all the developing countries were to utilize as much fossil energies, lands and inconsideration for nature, it would be a disaster, and maybe sooner than we think. However everything is about means and measures, and exploiting the population, their own land and their own resources is above the limits of human consideration, even more when no real substantial efforts are made on the territories of developed countries.

Tom Clancy, a world renowned fiction writer, illustrates in his ever-popular novel Rainbow Six what dangers are generated by putting the environment and animals above human being.

Leonardo da Vinci once said: "The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men”.  It is sad that the current human populations of this planet have to wake up to the harsh reality of how right he was. Let’s just hope that looking at the murder of animals will never make us blind to the murder of men.

Ecuadorian Government Ambivalent About Oil Use

By Anne-Cécile Lautridou

In 2007, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa made a revolutionary proposition to the UNO, known as the Yasuni ITT (Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha) Project. This proposition’s aim was to forego oil extraction and to renounce to the 20 % of oil reserves in the country. In order to reach this goal, Correa asked to other nations to assist in financing the preservation of the environment, which includes the reduction of carbone emissions and the greenhouse effect.

At the national level, this project would help to protect the population living in Yasuni National Park, which is registered by the UNESCO as one of the most bio-divers in the world. Moreover, the money paid by the other countries will benefit the Ecuadorian social security system and contribute to reduction of poverty in the country. At international level, if the project succeeded, it would represent a huge achievement for environmental protection.

José Gualinga, Sarayaku President is blowing Horn
Photo by Andrew Miller/Amazon Watch

Unfortunately, in Ecuador’s Amazonian forests, aboriginal communities do not have the same advantage of receiving governmental protection. The Kichwa community of Sarayaku fight peacefully against oil companies for the settlement of their land for more than 25 years. In 2002, 400 workers and 600 soldiers illegally invaded and began exploiting their land. Some workers were kidnapped by Sarayaku’s women and these women took the weapons of the soldiers. Thanks to the determination of The Sarayaku people, oil companies gave up and went from their land. In 2005, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights required that Ecuadorian government removed explosives that workers leaved from the Sarayaku’s territory. However in October 2011, a new exploitative proposition emerged from the government. This proposition includes Sarayaku’s territory as well as aboriginal territories in the Amazon forest, which comprises a landmass of between 4 and 5 million hectares. This exploitation would lead to environmental and socio-economical disasters. Sarayaku’s inhabitants know it will be a long way until oil companies and Ecuadorian government renounce to oil prospection. But they have trust in the future, because, they know this fight is fair. As explained by José Gualinga, the president of the community, “we have already won, because what we do is fair”.

We must question the reasoning behind this level of ambivalence from Correa’s government and demand that projects like Yasuni ITT be available for all communities. Sarayku’s people peace resistance is an exemplary fight. Maybe it should be also a way for us to think about our way of living and to question our unrestrained consumption.