Home - IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

Photo: Around 15,000 farming households hit by Tropical Cyclone Idai will receive agricultural kits including early-maturing maize and bean seeds to grow their own food again. Credit: FAO

FAO Starts Giving Much-Needed Seeds to Cyclone Hit Mozambique

By Santo D. Banerjee

NEW YORK | ROME (IDN) – While clock is ticking to reboot agriculture as secondary growing season is .already underway, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has started distribution of much-needed seeds and tools in cyclone-ravaged Mozambique.

Nearly three weeks after the Tropical Cyclone Idai, which was one of the worst long-lived storms on record, that caused catastrophic damage in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, farmers in Mozambique have started to receive much-needed agricultural inputs.

: Santo D. Banerjee; THE WORLD; Africa; 14 April 2019

India Between Democracy and Religious Nationalism

By Milan Vaishnav

The following are extensive excerpts from the Executive Summary of a study on 'The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism' published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.The views represented herein are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees. The article refers to the general elections under way in India, the country’s seventeenth held since independence in 1947. Nearly 900 million Indians are eligible to cast their ballots. – The Editor

: IDN-INPS Asia Editor; THE WORLD; Asia-Pacific; 14 April 2019

Photo: ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn and Bekele Gonfa attended the AU Peace and Security Council in Addis Ababa to lobby for signature and ratification of the #TPNW. Credit: ICAN France

African Nations Can Choose Their Own Destiny

Viewpoint by Beatrice Fihn

Following are extensive excerpts from International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Executive Director Beatrice Fihn’s address to the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council on April 4, 2019 at the organization's Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

ADDIS ABABA (IDN-INPS) – Across the world we have seen the devastating impacts of weapons on civilian populations. Humanitarian disarmament is a preventative approach aimed at reducing human suffering through the creation of norms and laws around weapons with indiscriminate and inhumane impact on civilians.

: IDN-INPS UN Bureau; THE WORLD; Africa; 13 April 2019

Photo: South African nuclear weapon. Credit: The National Interest.

South Africa a Shining Example of Dismantling Nuclear Arsenal

By J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – As the nuclear weapons and fossil fuel divestment campaigns gather steam, their political impact could be as powerful as the divestment campaign against South Africa in the late 20th Century, which was a critical factor in moving the South African government to end apartheid in 1994, anticipates Thies Kätow, researcher for the World Future Council.

There are hardly any signs that such an expectation will be realized and the campaign under way would persuade heavily armed nuclear states to disarm. Yet South Africa remains a shining example of a country that went from developing its own nuclear arsenal to dismantling it and being an outspoken advocate against these weapons of mass destruction.

: J Nastranis; THE WORLD; Africa; 13 April 2019

Call for Renewed U.S.-Russian Strategic Dialogue

By Daryl G. Kimball*

WASHINGTON , D.C. (IDN-INPS) – In the latest in a series of expert conferences and dialogues in Moscow and Washington, a group of distinguished U.S. and Russian experts released a public statement calling on U.S. and Russian officials to get back to the arms control negotiating table, with the first order of business being agreement on a five-year extension of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), as allowed for in Article XIV of the treaty, and talks designed to head-off new arms competition in the wake of the likely termination of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

: Daryl G. Kimball; ARMAMENTS; Nuclear Weapons; 12 April 2019

Image: Reversing the financial interests in fossil fuels and the nuclear arms race. Credit: nuclearweaponsmoney.org

Moving Money for a Nuclear-Free and Eco Friendly World

By Jamshed Baruah

GENEVA | BASEL (IDN) – While Fridays for Future protests underline a global dissatisfaction with the continuing failure of governments and industry to protect the climate, the setting of the Doomsday Clock hands to 2 minutes to midnight in January 2019 signifies a continuing high risk of a nuclear clash with disastrous consequences for human beings and the planet Earth.

But devastating climate change and the risk of a nuclear war will not be prevented unless the international community tackles the economic and political influence of the fossil fuel and nuclear weapons industries: this is the crux of the message expected to emerge from an international conference organized by the Basel Peace Office and taking place in Basel, Switzerland on April 12-13, 2019.

: Jamshed Baruah; SUSTAINABILITY; Climate Action; 11 April 2019

Call for UN Summit on Digitalization and Sustainability

By Rita Joshi

BERLIN (IDN) – A new report has called on Germany and the European Union to convene a United Nations summit on 'Digitalization and Sustainability' in 2020 – 30 years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development, widely known as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The central theme of the summit should be reaching agreement on the necessary fundamental steps to be taken to achieve digitally supported sustainable development and to avoid the risks involved in digital change, say the authors of the report entitled 'Towards our Common Digital Future', presented by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) to Federal Minister of Education and Research Anja Karliczek and Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze on April 11, 2019.

: Rita Joshi; SUSTAINABILITY; Climate Action; 11 April 2019

Hookah Culture Invades Central Asia

By Milena Melnikova*

NAYRN, Kyrgyzstan (IDN) – The culture of smoking hookah is becoming popular among young adults in the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, because of its affordability as well as due to its being legal as a way to relax and get rid of the accumulated stress, in the absence of other forms of entertainment. Cafes and restaurants seem like an expensive choice, discotheques are almost non-existent here.

: Kalinga Seneviratne; CENTRAL ASIA; 10 April 2019

Rich Nations Slash Development Aid to Neediest Countries

By Krishan Dutta

PARIS (IDN) – “Donor countries are not living up to their 2015 pledge to ramp up development finance and this bodes badly for us being able to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría has cautioned.

The warning of the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) comes at a time when, according to preliminary data collected by the OECD, official development assistance (ODA) from 30 member countries of the club of rich nations fell 2.7 percent in 2018 from 2017. The worst affected by the declining share were the neediest countries.

: Ramesh Jaura; SUSTAINABILITY; Global Partnerships; 10 April 2019

Photo: Mao's calligraphy of his poem "Qingyuanchun Changsha". CC BY-SA 3.0

Dictators Striving to be Thinkers and Writers

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – “Since the days of the Roman Empire”, Daniel Kalder wrote in his book ‘The Infernal Library’, “dictators have written books, but in the twentieth century there was a Krakatoa-like eruption of despotic verbiage, which continues flowing to this day.”

It’s a strange thing but true that many dictators began their working lives as writers “which probably goes a long way towards explain[ing] their megalomaniac conviction in the awesome significance of their own thoughts.”