By Isaiah Esipisu
HARARE, Oct 4 2024 – African policymakers, local leaders and the private sector have been asked to create an enabling environment that will help African traders and farmer folks build reliable systems for food security and resilience through territorial markets.

During a week-long 2024 Africa Agroecological Entrepreneurship and Seed Festival in Harare, Zimbabwe, experts observed that persistent crises have shown the importance of resilient close-to-home ‘territorial’ markets that feed billions of people every day—from public markets and street vendors to cooperatives, from urban agriculture to online direct sales, and from food hubs to community kitchens. 

“For instance, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global food prices spiked by 15 percent, forcing policymakers around the world to question how to reduce dependency on volatile global markets and strengthen food self-sufficiency,” said Dr. Million Belay, the General Coordinator at the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).

“Further, questions have been raised about how people are actually fed and by whom, prompting us to ask: in this century of crisis, what kinds of food supply chains and markets can build resilience and help fulfill the right to food—nourishing people around the world more sustainably and equitably?” asked Belay.

To answer the question, experts are calling for policies and a sound working environment that will empower territorial markets that promote dietary diversity and affordable nutritious foods for all, allow producers and food workers to retain control over their livelihoods, and produce food that is adaptable to climate change shocks and emerging crises.

These markets have been broadly defined as markets that are centered on small-scale agroecological food producers and business owners that produce and sell a variety of commodities, and often meet the preferences of the majority of farmers, traders and consumers.

Studies have shown that these markets play a crucial role in making food accessible and affordable, especially for low-income populations in the Global South, allowing for the purchase of small and flexible quantities of food, price bargaining, informal credit arrangements, and being located in or near low-income neighborhoods.

A new study launched on the sidelines of the Harare event that culminated into the fifth Biennial Africa Food Systems Conference, however, shows that profit-oriented corporate value chains are highly concentrated in Africa’s market places.

The report, titled ‘Food from Somewhere,’ by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES Food), finds that just seven grain traders control at least 50 percent of the global grain trade, six major corporations control 78 percent of the agrochemical market, the top eight carriers of freight account for more than 80 percent of the market for ocean freight capacity and globally, 1 percent of the world’s largest farms control 70 percent of the world’s farmland.

This, according to experts, amounts to a corporate capture of Africa’s food systems.

The report is therefore advocating for a paradigm shift, urging governments to reinvest in local and regional supply infrastructure, relocalize public purchasing and develop food security strategies for a more resilient and equitable approach to food security.

“The problem for smallholders is not of being connected to markets (most are already involved in markets) but rather the conditions of their access and the rules and logics by which markets operate—who determines prices and on what criteria, who controls the costs of production, who holds market power, among other issues,” said Mamadou Goïta, a member of IPES and the lead author.

A spot check at the Mbare Musika territorial market in Harare found a variety of foodstuffs sourced from all eight regions of Zimbabwe, among others from neighboring countries, such as apples and other fruits from South Africa, fish and ginger from Mozambique, groundnuts from Malawi, sorghum from Botswana, as well as grapes from Egypt and tamarind from Tanzania, among others.

“This is the central hub for smallholder farmers and traders, supporting over seven million people from all over Zimbabwe and other parts of the continent,” said Charles Dhewa, Chief Executive Officer, Knowledge Transfer Africa (KTA), whose flagship known as eMkambo (eMarket) is to create a physical and web-based market for agriculture and rural development, integrating the use of mobile phones and the internet to create, adapt and share knowledge.

Mbare Musika Market, which is in the outskirts of Harare, is located next to the main bus-park, through which food is brought in using informal means such as passenger buses and vans from different parts of the country, in small and big quantities, and of different varieties and qualities.

“The evidence is clear—localized food systems are vital for feeding an increasingly hungry planet and preventing food insecurity and famine,” said Shalmali Guttal, the Executive Director of Focus on the Global South. “They provide nutritious, affordable food and are far more adaptable to global shocks and disruptions than industrial supply chains,” she added.

Jennifer Clapp, professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada, pointed out that during this time of rising hunger and ecological fragility, global industrial food chains will be catastrophically liable to break down under the strain of frequent crises.

“To have a chance of reaching the world’s zero hunger goal by 2030, we need to re-imagine our food systems, and we need to bolster the food markets that serve the poor,” she said.

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct 4 2024 – The UN Office on Drugs and Crime hailed the recently agreed Cybercrime Convention as a ‘landmark step’ in cooperating to tackle online dangers. But human rights organisations aren’t so sure.

Ominously, the resolution that started the process, passed by the UN General Assembly in December 2019, was sponsored by authoritarian Russia and backed by some of the world’s most repressive states. Some of them already had cybercrime laws they use to stifle legitimate dissent. Many more have passed similar laws since.

When Russia’s resolution was put to a vote, the EU, USA and many other states, alongside human rights and digital rights organisations, urged states to reject it. But once the resolution passed, they had to engage with the process to try to prevent the worst possible outcome: a treaty lacking human rights safeguards that could be used as a repressive tool.

They succeeded in tempering some of the worst aspects of early drafts, but the results still leave much to be desired.

The treaty process

The December 2019 resolution established an ad hoc committee (AHC) to lead negotiations, open to the participation of all UN member states plus others as observers, including civil society.

The pandemic delayed the process, and the AHC’s first meeting, focused on procedural rules, was held in mid-2021. Brazil’s proposal to require a two-thirds majority for decisions when states couldn’t reach consensus prevailed over the simple majority rule favoured by Russia. The AHC approved a list of eligible stakeholders, including civil society organisations (CSOs), academic institutions and private sector representatives.

The first negotiating session in February 2022 took another important decision: consultations would be held between negotiations, including for CSOs, to provide input and feedback. Numerous human rights and digital rights CSOs took part, often working in coalitions. They made written submissions, attended face-to-face and online meetings and made oral interventions.

Damage control

Ahead of the first negotiating session, some 130 organisations and experts signed a letter urging the AHC to ensure the treaty included human rights protections, warning that otherwise it could become ‘a powerful weapon for oppression’. They were up against numerous states that didn’t agree human rights safeguards were needed.

By April 2022, many states initially opposed to the treaty had begun to participate actively, so civil society focused on damage control. By then it was apparent there wasn’t a clear definition of what constitutes a cybercrime and which crimes the treaty should regulate. Several states aggressively pushed for broad and ambiguous provisions they claimed were needed to combat extremism, hate speech and terrorism.

Civil society insisted the treaty shouldn’t be overly broad and should only cover core cybercrimes or cyber-dependent crimes: crimes committed against computer systems, networks and data, including hacking, computing system interference, ransomware and the spreading of malware. And even when dealing with these crimes, civil society warned, treaty provisions shouldn’t apply to security research, the work of whistleblowers and other actions that benefit the public.

Civil society insisted on the exclusion of cyber-enabled crimes: those that can be facilitated by ICTs but can also committed without them, such as arms and drug trafficking, money laundering and the distribution of counterfeit goods. This category could potentially include numerous offences that would repress the online exercise of civic freedoms.

A second major concern was the scope and conditions for international cooperation. Here too civil society urged clear definitions and a narrow scope. It argued that if not clearly defined, cooperation arrangements could mean enhanced surveillance and bulk data sharing, violating privacy and data protection provisions. It warned that in the absence of the principle of dual criminality – which means extradition can only apply to an action that constitutes a crime in both the country making the request and the one receiving it – state authorities could be made to investigate activities that aren’t crimes in their countries on other states’ behalf. They could effectively become enforcers of the repression of others.

Tech companies also shared civil society’s concerns about the potential for expansive electronic surveillance in the name of fighting crime.

Human rights sidelined

Civil society representatives see the final draft as not as bad as it could have been, but it still lacks clear, specific and enforceable human rights protections. Rather than applying them as international standards, the treaty leaves human rights safeguards up to each state’s domestic law.

Civil society advocacy led to improvements on the first drafts, including an expanded article on human rights that references civic freedoms, and the inclusion of the right to an effective remedy in the article on conditions and safeguards. The most blatant attempts to weaponise the treaty to criminalise expression failed, although some cyber-enabled crimes still made it into the text. The activities of journalists, security researchers and whistleblowers aren’t adequately protected.

The convention includes a chapter on crimes against computer systems, networks and data, plus a limited number of cyber-enabled crimes, such as child sexual abuse. But while the list of crimes is narrower than initially proposed, the scope of cooperation in collecting and sharing data became wider, raising real dangers of state overreach in the form of surveillance and invasion of privacy.

Still time

It isn’t game over. The final text will soon be put to a vote by member states at the UN General Assembly and, assuming a majority approves it, states will then need to ratify the convention. At least 40 ratifications will be needed before it enters into force, a process likely to take several years. Two years after the General Assembly vote, negotiations are expected to begin on an additional protocol covering further crimes, which won’t be concluded until 60 states have ratified the convention. Civil society fears this is when the worst proposals to criminalise speech will resurface.

Civil society will encourage governments to reject the convention and instead take a human rights-based approach. Once the UN General Assembly approves the convention, civil society will warn of the dangers it poses to human rights and civil liberties and oppose ratification.

With or without an international convention, civil society will continue to work to ensure cybercrime legislation at all levels meets the highest human rights standards, including respect for civic freedoms, and isn’t used as a means of repression.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

A longer version of this article is available here.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 4 2024 – Over the past few months, the escalation of gang violence and mass displacement in Haiti have been of great concern for humanitarian organizations. Severe levels of armed violence have resulted in significant instability, with food insecurity, sexual violence, civilian casualities, and restricted freedom of movement plaguing the nation. Displacement cases have risen sharply, to the extent that the Dominican Republic has ordered the return of thousands of Haitian migrants.

On October 3, the Dominican Republic’s government announced that they will be expelling approximately 10,000 Haitian migrants per week in an effort to reduce overpopulation in the country. This morning, Homero Figueroa, a spokesperson for Dominican president Luis Abinader, informed reporters that the expulsion order “aims to reduce the excessive migrant populations detected in Dominican communities”.

Last year, Abinader facilitated the return of over 250,000 undocumented Haitians from the Dominican Republic. The order announced today states that they plan to expel more than double this number, effective immediately. “We warned at the United Nations that either it and all the countries that had committed themselves [to helping Haiti] act responsibly in Haiti, or we will”, stated Abinader in a press briefing this morning.

This comes after the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) urged the United States and Haiti’s neighbouring nations to end forced returns of migrants to Haiti. On May 17, the UNHCR released a social media statement, asking the Biden administration to “refrain from forcibly returning Haitians who may face life-threatening risks or further displacement”.

Last week on September 27, the United Nations (UN) reported that at least 3,661 civilians had been killed in the first half of 2024 due to “senseless gang violence”, with over 100 of them being children. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) added that this is a clear indication that instability in Haiti had been “maintained”.

Conditions in Haiti have worsened in the past few months, with over 59 percent of the population living below the poverty line, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that over half of the 700,000 internally displaced persons are children. A quarter of those people live in highly insecure and overcrowded displacement shelters, lacking access to essential services such as healthcare, sanitation, and access to food.

President Abinader’s new mandate has been widely criticized by activists and humanitarian organizations, with many opining that it is fueled by xenophobia. 70 percent of the Dominican Republic’s population identifies as mixed race, while the vast majority of the Haitian population is black.

In a statement issued on August 28, Amnesty International stated: “Amnesty International has stressed the urgent need for Dominican institutions to eradicate racial profiling, structural racism and racial discrimination, and to guarantee respect for the human dignity and physical integrity of Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent.”

It should be noted that prior to this mandate being issued, there were reported cases of prejudice and mistreatment of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic.

“Organizations working on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic continually report cases of deportees being beaten by the Dominican authorities”, said Johanna Cilano Pelaez, regional researcher for the Caribbean at Amnesty International.

Additionally, Haitian migrants have been subjected to raids without warrants, kidnappings, and sexual violence, carried out by both uniformed and ununiformed agents.

The UN and its affiliated organizations are currently on the frontlines in Haiti, distributing resources such as food, water, cash transfers, and school kits. However, relief efforts have been severely underfunded, with only 30 percent of the requested 674 million dollars raised so far.

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By Khalid Saifullah
NEW YORK, Oct 4 2024 – The commonly used Bangla phrase for siphoning off money out of the country – “taka pachar” – is rather misleading. Because taka, the Bangladeshi currency, is never taken out of Bangladesh. It’s not useful anywhere else. What goes out is its equivalence in foreign currencies, especially, US dollars. The technical term for such criminal act is Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs). Mistakenly, sometimes IFFs are referred to as money laundering – a processing of criminal proceeds to disguise their illegal origin.

Money laundering and illicit transfers of funds

Although there are some links between money laundering and IFFs, they are not the same activity. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime defines money laundering as “the conversion or transfer of property, knowing that such property is derived from any offense(s), for the purpose of concealing or disguising the illicit origin of the property or of assisting any person who is involved in such offense(s) to evade the legal consequences of his actions”.

On the other hand, Illicit financial flows (IFFs) refer to illegal movements or transfers of money or capital from one country to another. However, sources of such funds may not be illegal (e.g., corruption, smuggling).

In practice, IFFs can also involve ill-gotten money – the worst case as in Bangladesh. The billions of dollars that were taken out of the country were mostly obtained through corruption and stealing of public funds.

How do illegal fund transfers happen?

Nearly US$3.15 billion flows out illicitly from Bangladesh annually. If a common person wants to travel abroad with a few hundred of thousand dollars, they can simply slip it in their pocket and catch a flight which is perfectly legal if that amount is within the legal limit of a country. For example, one can legally take out a maximum of AUD10,000 out of Australia (or bring in) without having to make declaration. For Bangladesh, it is only USD5,000.

But cronies of the Hasina’s kleptocratic regime robbed and transferred millions and billions of dollars. According to a recent report, close to US$150 billion was siphoned off the country during 15 years of kleptocratic Hasina regime’s mis-rule. So, they must have carried out these very illegal activities through legal channels. How did it work though?

Well, it’s very difficult to know for sure, but it is believed that most IFFs happen through trade mis-invoicing or trade-based money laundering. Let’s try to understand the design with an example.

Let’s say, you want to launder one million dollars. Either you or your accomplice have an export-import business. Let’s say you need to import 10,000 units of a product each costing $50. But instead of $50, you declare that their unit value was $150. By “securing” assistance from some key people within the authorities, you get Bangladesh Bank to transmit one and half million dollars as the payment for your grossly over-declared imports to a foreign company you set up for this purpose. You pay the exporter half a million dollars for your legitimate imports, and in the process, you have succeeded in laundering the one million dollars you wanted to get out of Bangladesh. The same can be done for exports but in reverse. This is of course a simplistic example and there can be many creative variations of this menace.

There are reasons to believe that this happened a lot in the case of Bangladesh. Why? Well, to begin with, Bangladesh does have a vibrant export-import sector which can make trade-based money laundering accessible and difficult to trace. Secondly, many of Hasina’s cronies themselves were involved in international trading. Thirdly – and I don’t think many people know this – Bangladesh stopped sharing detailed international trade data with the UN after 2015. There can of course be other explanations for this, but the timing nevertheless raises questions. UN Comtrade, world’s largest source of international trade data, has data on most countries in the world but not Bangladesh, world’s eighth largest population and thirty-fifth largest economy.

We need detailed trade data

International trade data has the special characteristic that it’s a two-sided account. Bangladesh’s export of cotton T-shirts to US is also US’ import of cotton T-shirts from Bangladesh. In practice, there are some other factors at play but overall, this is how it is. Users can easily compare international trade data and any glaring disparities become immediately apparent.

One could argue that this still could be done since Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), Exports Promotion Bureau (EPB) and Bangladesh Bank (BB) all publish external trade data. It would seem so but that’s not really the case. Without going into much details, the data published by these agencies lack the necessary details to be comparable. Their data is at an aggregated level and not disseminated in a comparable manner. EPB doesn’t even publish imports data (it’s probably not in their mandate).

Then, there’s the issue of accuracy. Weeks before Sheikh Hasina’s ouster, BB revised exports data stating that EPB’s figure was 10 billion USD higher than actual exports. The Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus in his most recent address to the public promised to publish accurate trade data. It is a very necessary and welcome step. However, it is not sufficient. We need the necessary details in the data to allow for comparison with our trading partner countries’ data. In particular, we need:

• Data by calendar year (Jan-Dec) and not only fiscal year.
• Data by monthly frequency.
• Breakdown by commodity codes up to at least HS (Harmonized System) 6-digits level. There are around 6,000 HS 6-digits codes available from the World Customs Organization (WCO). These codes can specify a commodity with sufficient details.
• Commodity descriptions.
• Breakdown by trading partner (ISO codes for country of origin for imports, country of last known destination for exports).
• Breakdown by country of consignment (ISO codes for any third country the commodities may have passed through).
• Mode of transport (sea, air, road, rail, etc.).
• Breakdown by customs procedure codes (for what purpose the commodity was imported or exported).
• Breakdown by trade flow (exports, imports, re-exports, etc.)
• Value (free-on-board basis for exports; cost, insurance, and freight basis for imports), net weight and quantity.

Towards modernization and automation of financial intelligence

Accurate, timely and detailed trade data is important for analyses of possible trade mis-invoicing but it’s not sufficient in preventing money laundering altogether. What we need is an overhaul and automation of financial intelligence itself.

The backbone of such an automated system should be a Business Register (BR). A BR is exactly what it sounds like – it’s a register of all businesses in a country. A key component of the BR is the unique identifier. Each business or enterprise is assigned a unique ID. Once set up, businesses must be required to use this ID in all types of activities, from setting up bank accounts to trading.

The BR can contain many other information on the businesses including size, sector, economic activities and so on. Thanks to the unique identifier, BR can be used to link data from different domains, e.g., linking trade data with businesses and their banking activities.

Given the treasure trove of linked data available from customs declarations, banks and other sources – much of which cannot be published for public use due to confidentiality- the information can nevertheless be used to build very intelligent and sophisticated systems thanks to statistical modelling, machine learning and artificial intelligence which can flag any suspicious activities in real time. I mean, something has to be “off” in a transaction involving money laundering and the technology is out there to detect it.

The existence of such a system itself could lessen the problem of money laundering to a great extent because it will serve as a strong deterrent. Building this level of data capacity will of course take investment. But looking at the estimated 150 billion dollars laundered by Sheikh Hasina’s kleptocratic regime, it seems the return on investment is very enticing.

Khalid Saifullah is a trained statistician with 14 years of experience working in international organizations.

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Excerpt:

Khalid Saifullah, Fellow, Save Bangladesh USA Inc.

By Anna Kornyliuk
KYIV, Ukraine, Oct 4 2024 – Over the coming month, the United States has a window of opportunity to lift a multi-billion-dollar burden from Ukraine, and other countries in financial distress, without costing the US taxpayer a dime.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is currently considering ending its controversial “surcharges” — punitive fees that it imposes on countries whose debt exceeds a certain threshold. These surcharges come on top of regular interest and service costs, and can increase the cost of borrowing by as much as 40 percent.

By piling additional fees onto already onerous debt burdens, surcharges make it harder for struggling nations to reduce debt to sustainable levels, while siphoning off scarce resources that are needed for health, education, climate action, and development.

In theory, surcharges are meant to disincentivize reliance on IMF lending. But the countries that have been forced to turn to the IMF face bigger challenges than a lack of incentive.

Over the last five years, developing countries have been plagued by devastating global crises far beyond their control: COVID-19, debilitating food and energy price shocks, skyrocketing interest rates, and increasingly frequent and ferocious climate disasters. In this period, the number of countries paying surcharges has skyrocketed from eight to twenty-two.

Clearly, surcharges are failing to achieve their goal.

My country, Ukraine, is a case in point. Forced further and further into debt while defending itself from a catastrophic and illegal invasion, Ukraine is now the second largest payer of surcharges in the world. In the last five years, we’ve paid roughly $750 million in surcharges. Over the coming decade, surcharges will cost us an additional $3 billion.

This $3 billion may not be make-or-break for Ukraine’s future. But in times of war, every dollar counts. That’s $3 billion from Ukrainian hands to the world’s biggest multilateral financial institution — $3 billion that cannot be spent on defense, humanitarian needs, or reconstruction.

Other countries suffer unjustly as a result of surcharges too. In 2022, unprecedented flooding left a third of Pakistan’s entire territory underwater, and 8 million people displaced. Over the next five years, while attempting to recover from this catastrophe, Pakistan will be forced to pay $445 million in surcharges.

Egypt — which has experienced growing hunger since Russia’s war disrupted its wheat imports — Kenya — which has been wracked by deadly unrest due to its crushing debt burden — Barbados — which was recently slammed by a record-breaking hurricane — all are paying significant portions of their budgets, above the regular cost of lending, as punishment for needing the IMF’s help.

Experts and activists have long warned that surcharges are harmful and counterproductive. Members of the US Congress, UN human rights experts, leaders of developing countries, Nobel laureate economists, and hundreds of civil society groups, including Ukrainian organizations like my own, have all called to end the policy.

That effort got a sudden boost this year when the IMF announced that its precautionary balances, which are, in part, built up using surcharges, had reached their target level. In other words, the IMF already has what it needs to mitigate potential losses, without squeezing the very countries it is meant to help.

Forcing countries like Ukraine to make up for funding shortfalls from wealthy countries by using surcharge income to finance the Fund’s concessional lending programs, as some have proposed, is simply backward.

With the Biden administration’s support, the IMF recently initiated a review of the surcharge policy. A final decision is expected by the Fund’s October meetings, making this month the sole window of opportunity to ensure that the result of this long-awaited surcharge reassessment is not a checked box and a tweak at the margin, but their complete elimination.

There is plenty of precedent. The IMF has implemented surcharge-like policies multiple times in its 80-year existence. On each occasion, the Fund ultimately determined the policy to be a failure and reversed course. This time, it should do so for good.

But that can’t happen without US support. As the largest single voter at the IMF, any policy change effectively runs through the Biden administration.

That should be an easy win. While funding for Ukraine has become increasingly contentious in Congress, the IMF’s surcharge review presents President Biden with a chance to save Ukraine — and other heavily indebted developing countries — billions of dollars, without a political fight and at zero cost.

Opportunities like this don’t come along often, particularly in the last months of one’s presidency. For the sake of Ukraine, and citizens of indebted countries around the world, President Biden should seize it.

Anna Kornyliuk is a senior policy and data analyst at the Kyiv-based Institute of Analytics and Advocacy.

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