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By Milena Melnikova*
CHOLDALA, Southern Kazakhstan (IDN) – "I work six days a week, like my wife. I can sometimes take extra hours, and she takes work home. We don’t have time to grow something or raise cattle," says Andrei Pan, who has been living in Choldala about 580 miles (or 933 km) south of the country's capital town Nur-Sultan for the past six years. He and his family moved from the nearby city Of Taraz in 2013 after numerous attempts to find affordable housing there.
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE (IDN) – India’s needs to redouble its efforts to reduce stunting among its children not only because this would improve their mental and physical development, learning capacity and life chances but also, to meet the 2022 deadline set by its National Nutrition Mission and enable the world to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
According to India’s National Family Health Service-3 and 4 (NFHS-3 and 4) figures, the proportion of its children under five years of age that are stunted declined from 48% in 2006 to 38% in 2016. While the decadal decline is significant, the reduction per year was just 1%.
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) – In the run-up to the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, twenty-eight leading companies have responded to a call-to-action campaign and committed themselves to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels with a view to reaching net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. In doing so, they are contributing to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), endorsed by the international community in September 2015.
By Shanta Roy
NEW YORK (IDN) – When a High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) concluded its four-day ministerial meeting assessing the current status of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one irrefutable fact stood out: despite “encouraging progress”, many of the goals were lagging far behind in their implementation since they were adopted by the General Assembly back in 2015.
After four long years, the UN’s much-touted development agenda, described as a panacea for some of the world’s socio-economic ills, remains in limbo.
79-Nation ACP and UN's Food and Agriculture Organization Collaborate
By Jaya Ramachandran
NEW YORK (IDN) – Wrapping up the ministerial segment of the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on July 19, Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) President Inga Rhonda King said the session had contributed significantly to advancing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. But she urged governments to "reinvent themselves” and be more agile in finding "ways to engage the poorest and most vulnerable in the decisions that impact on their lives”.
Viewpoint by Darío Soto Abril & Roberto Vélez
Darío Soto Abril is CEO of Fairtrade International and Roberto Vélez is CEO of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC).
BONN | BOGOTA (IDN) – The global coffee industry is facing an unprecedented price crisis which not only threatens our daily cup of the black stuff but also – far more importantly – jeopardises the livelihoods of millions of small-scale growers around the world.
Coffee traders, roasters and retailers must face the fact that not paying a fair price to farmers risks the future economic sustainability of the global coffee business.
By Ramesh Jaura
BERLIN | ROME (IDN) – With the election of Qu Dongyu as Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), China has made yet another stride in its unrelenting efforts to take over a signature role in strategic UN organisations and foster its massive 'Belt and Road' infrastructure initiative spanning the globe.
Qu takes over from Brazil's José Graziano da Silva August 1. He was first elected in 2011 and has served two consecutive terms. The new FAO chief is expected to find in LI Yong, the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) Director-General since 2013, an example of how a UN organisation can be deployed to proselytise the advantages of the Belt and Road initiative.
Yet Another Challenge to Global Goals
By Jaya Ramachandran
NEW YORK (IDN) – Compared to 7.7 billion today, around 8.5 billion people are expected to inhabit the planet Earth within little more than a decade, and almost 10 billion by 2050, with only a few countries accounting for most of the increase, says to new United Nations report.
The World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights, published by the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), provides a comprehensive overview of global demographic patterns and prospects. The study concludes that the world’s population could reach its peak around the end of the current century, at a level of nearly 11 billion.
By Ronald Joshua
ADDIS ABABA (IDN) – Africa’s future economic and social progress is under threat from alarmingly high levels of child hunger, and the severity and scale of the problem is such that it requires nothing short of a radical and transformative political and economic agenda, according to a new study released at the Eighth International Policy Conference on the African Child.
The report pleads among others for: (i) political commitment at the highest political level; (ii) a constitutional or legal commitment to ensure that no child goes hungry and to make it obligatory for governments to provide universal access to a minimum acceptable amount of food for all children; and (iii) provision of targeted social safety nets and school-feeding programmes across regions and communities.
By Radwan Jakeem
NEW YORK | PARIS (IDN) – UN biodiversity experts have warned in a hard-hitting report into the impact of humans on nature that "the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide" are being eroded. Current efforts to conserve the earth’s resources will likely fail without radical action, said Sir Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
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