By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 14 2025 – 2024 was a transitional period in Haiti’s history, marked by rampant political instability, brutal gang violence, and widespread civilian displacement. Since the eruption of hostilities in March 2024, the Caribbean nation has been in a state of emergency. In response, the United Nations (UN) Security Council approved The Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission in Haiti to assist the Haitian government in deposing gang activity and restoring order. However, the support mission has been largely ineffective as gangs continue to seize more areas in Haiti.

On January 7 2025, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a report that detailed the deteriorating conditions currently plaguing the Haitian people. According to the report, at least 5,601 people were killed last year in Haiti as a direct result of gang violence, marking an increase of over 1,000 civilian casualties since 2023. Approximately 2,212 people were injured and 1,494 kidnapped as well.

The report also documented at least 315 instances of lynchings subjected to gang members and people allegedly associated with gang activity. According to OHCHR, some of these lynchings were carried out by Haitian police officers. Additionally, there were approximately 281 cases of summary executions involving specialized police units recorded in 2024.

“These figures alone cannot capture the absolute horrors being perpetrated in Haiti but they show the unremitting violence to which people are being subjected. It has long been clear that impunity for human rights violations and abuses, as well as corruption, remain prevalent in Haiti, constituting some of the main drivers of the multi-dimensional crisis the country faces, along with entrenched economic and social inequalities,” said UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk.

December 2024 marked an escalation in hostilities for Haiti. On January 3, 2025, William O’Neill, OHCHR’s Designated Expert on Haiti detailed the most recent attacks on healthcare personnel in Haiti. On December 17, 2024, gang members attacked the Bernard Mevs Hospital in Port-Au-Prince. “Criminal gangs have murdered and kidnapped physicians, nurses and healthcare workers, including humanitarian workers,” said O’Neill, adding that the gangs had “burned, ransacked and destroyed many hospitals and clinics, forcing many to close or suspend their operations”.

On December 24, 2024, gangs attacked the Université d’Etat d’Haiti Hospital (HUEH), resulting in 4 civilian casualties. These attacks have underscored the sheer level of insecurity facing Haiti’s healthcare sector. According to O’Neill, only 37 percent of hospitals in Haiti remain fully functional. Additionally, gangs continue to issue threats of attack on healthcare facilities, making life-saving medical efforts much more difficult.

“The Haitian people – including hundreds of thousands of children living in very precarious conditions – are once again paying the high price of this violence with their right to health severely hindered,” said O’Neill. Healthcare is urgently required at this time due to the sheer influx of injured persons as a result of gang violence as well as the spread of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and cholera.

Over 2024, gang violence has led to a surge of internal displacements. According to a press release from the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, nearly 703,000 civilians have been uprooted from their homes in 2024, which is nearly double the amount of displacements recorded in the previous year. Additionally, insecurity has led to an omnipresent hunger crisis, with approximately 5.4 million Haitians facing acute food insecurity, which is nearly half of the nation’s population.

Heightened insecurity has also greatly impeded response efforts from the international community since the wake of this crisis. The UN-backed MSS mission has largely floundered as a result of exacerbated gang violence. In June 2024, Kenya had deployed 400 police officers to assist the Haitian government in deposing gang activity. However, they found themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed by the gang members.

Himmler Rébu, a retired Haitian army colonel and former presidential candidate, informed reporters on the general ineffectiveness of the Kenyan contingent mission’s response, saying, “I heard there were Kenyans in the country, but where are they? Why are they in Haiti if we don’t see any difference? Since the mission’s arrival, gangs have taken several villages and at least seven key towns that had been spared.”

Türk has reiterated the need to scale up MSS responses going forward. “The Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti needs the logistical and financial support it requires to successfully implement its mandate,” he said, adding that there must be a stricter arms embargo to prevent gang members from acquiring firearms and ammunition. Additionally, Türk stated the need for stronger oversight measures from the Haitian National Police (HNP) to track human rights violations and hold perpetrators accountable.

On January 3, 2025, a contingent of 150 Guatemalan soldiers arrived in Haiti as a part of the MSS mission in hopes of restoring security. Normil Rameau, the Director-General of HNP, informed reporters that the most effective way of mitigating gang violence is through a “marriage” between the police and Haitian civilians.

It is also crucial for the MSS mission to receive proper funding to adequately respond to this crisis. The UN Trust Fund for the MSS mission has pledged approximately 96.8 million dollars. However, Miroslav Jenča, Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations, warns that much more is needed, adding that further delays or gaps in operation would present “a catastrophic risk of the collapse of national security institutions.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jan 14 2025 – Humanitarian aid operations in some places may become impossible in the future, experts have warned, as a new report shows a dramatic rise in the use of armed drones in conflict zones.

The report Hovering Threats The Challenges of Armed Drones in Humanitarian Contexts by Insecurity Insight, released on January 14, shows that recorded incidents directly affecting aid and health care programmes in conflict zones rose almost four-fold in the last year and that the share of drone-delivered explosives among all incidents where explosive weapons impacted aid or health care doubled.

It also warns that given that it is considerably cheaper to deliver explosive munitions with drones compared to piloted aircraft and that drone use carries minimal risk to operators, coupled with the increasing availability of components on both military and commercial markets, the frequency of drone use in conflict and with it the number of incidents where aid operations are affected is likely to rise in the coming years—both in scale and in the number of affected countries and territories.

“There could be some time where aid organizations will not be able to work in some conflict zones [because of the risks associated with drones],” Christina Wille, Director of Insecurity Insight, told IPS.

The report highlights how the use of drones in conflict zones has expanded exponentially in the last two decades, and especially in the last few years. This is increasingly impacting aid and healthcare in those areas, killing and injuring health and aid workers and destroying aid infrastructure, including warehouses, IDP or refugee camps, and health facilities and ambulances.

Insecurity Insight’s research shows that armed actors’ use of drones has been a factor in conflict dynamics since 2001, but the first recorded instances of drone-delivered explosives impacting health care services were not until 2016. Until 2022, the number of recorded incidents directly affecting aid and health care programmes remained below ten per year.

By 2023, however, 84 incidents of drone use directly impacting aid operations or health services were recorded, and this figure surged to 308 incidents in 2024. Additionally, the geographic spread of drone-related incidents directly affecting aid or health services expanded from five countries or territories in 2022 to twelve in 2024. The share of drone-delivered explosives among all incidents where explosive weapons impacted aid or health care in conflict zones increased from 6 percent in 2023 to 12 percent in 2024.

The report also says that during this period, for the first time, explosive weapons were the most commonly recorded form of violence directly affecting aid or health operations.

The organization says that between 2016 and 2024, at least 21 aid workers and 73 health workers, six of whom worked for health NGOs, were reportedly killed in drone attacks.

Aid operations or health care services in conflict zones were directly impacted by drone-delivered explosive weapons in at least 426 documented incidents.

The majority of incidents of drone-delivered explosives that affected aid operations or health care in conflict-affected areas documented by Insecurity Insight involved Russian and Israeli forces, and the impact of drone use on aid organizations operating in conflict zones in Ukraine and Gaza has been stark.

In Gaza, since the beginning of Israeli forces’ offensive against Hamas following the group’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, aid organizations in the region say healthcare and humanitarian operations have been devastated by Israeli strikes, some of which have involved the use of drones.

In Ukraine, the situation is similar.

Pavlo Smyrnov, Deputy Executive Director of the Ukrainian healthcare NGO Alliance for Public Health (APH), which has been running aid and healthcare programmes in Ukraine, including in front-line areas, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, said the risks to aid workers from drones were now so great that some areas had become off-limits to them.

“Because of drones, it is difficult to work in some places and impossible to work in others. In some places there are just so many drones we can’t work, and in other areas we can still work, but that work is much more limited,” he told IPS.

However, the report points out that the use of drones is rising in other conflicts around the world. In 2023, the use of drone-delivered explosives affecting aid or health operations was reported for the first time in Burkina Faso, Lebanon and Sudan. In 2024, incidents involving drone-delivered explosives that impacted aid or health care were reported from more countries and territories, including for the first time in Chechnya, Colombia, Mali, Niger and Russia.

Experts say this proliferation of drone use is not just dangerous in itself—proliferation of any weapon increases risk—but because their specific nature means their use threatens to create bloodier conflicts where previously accepted humanitarian laws and rules of war will be more frequently broken.

“What is particularly worrying is how these weapons change the way combat is carried out. When you have people directly confronting each other, who knows what will drive people to make decisions [on weapons use] in these circumstances? But these drones are being used remotely, often by people a long way away, in rooms. It’s almost like playing a video game,” said Wille.

“What we can expect drone operators to do may be very different from what happens in a situation where someone feels their own life under threat because they are in a combat situation with a direct adversary. To some extent, the use of drones has led to prescribed norms being more frequently ignored by conflict parties and also because using drones to deliver explosives is so much cheaper. If you have to spend half a million dollars to hit a target, you will self-restrain because of the cost, but if it costs much less, it is easier to just say, ‘OK, we’ll hit a target now because we feel like it’. The drones have removed a lot of the cost barriers [that led to conflict parties using some restraint in their attacks],” she added.

Experts have also linked these rising attacks with a lack of meaningful global action over deadly military strikes on health and humanitarian operations in war zones, particularly those seen in Ukraine and Gaza.

“In the past, many conflict parties may have felt constrained in what they could do because they would fear some serious reprimand, even from allied states, but that seems to have disappeared now. Other regimes see states getting away [with attacking humanitarian groups] and are emboldened to do the same themselves,” said Wille.

She said this was making it much harder for aid agencies to know where they can safely operate.

“They cannot rely on parties to conflicts to regulate their actions to ensure they stay within prescribed norms,” she said.

Another problem related to drone attacks is that civilian populations in areas of conflict have begun to associate all drones with nefarious or lethal operations against them.

“One of the key challenges with the multiplication of drones in conflict and humanitarian contexts is their psychological and ‘chilling’ effect: a lot of people/civilians in those contexts associate drones with possible attacks or surveillance. The more drones there are, the more worried and ‘paranoid’ people become,” Pierrick Devidal, Senior Policy Advisor at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told IPS.

“Because it is virtually impossible for people to distinguish drones used for civilian/humanitarian and military purposes, this lack of distinction compounds the problem and deepens an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. These perceptions and psychological issues are likely to create problems for humanitarian organizations wanting to use drones for humanitarian/operational purposes, as those uses may be (mis)perceived as related to military/security objectives,” Devidal added.

The Insight Insecurity report has a list of recommendations for measures aid agencies can take to mitigate the risks posed by the use of armed drones, including not just practical operative measures to ensure safety if drones are in an area but also the use of humanitarian diplomacy and deconfliction to avoid being targeted.

However, experts say with parties in conflicts appearing to be uninterested, or unable, to observe deconfliction agreements and the costs of implementing safety measures increasingly prohibitive—for example, in some places here you cannot operate anywhere in a vehicle without having a drone jamming device on your car—this is a requirement set by the police. These are expensive though,” said Smyrnov—many groups will struggle to keep operations going in areas where drones are frequently used.

“If the risks [of operating in a conflict zone] increase so too do the costs for the aid agencies,” said Wille.

“Security risks from the use of drones, e.g., mistargeting, drones failing and falling, etc., represent an additional security risk—a source of risks that did not exist before—in conflict and humanitarian settings to which civilians and humanitarian organizations will have to adjust and adapt. This will require more resources, time and energy that will not be spent in delivering aid. In short, it is not good news,” added Devidal.

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By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 14 2025 – Neglected indigenous crops, rich in nutrition and resilient to climate change, are key to tackling global hunger only if governments invest in research and development (R&D) to tap the potential of such innovations.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates are calling for investment in moonshot technologies to realize the potential of innovative solutions such as these hardy crops, warning that without swift action, there is a “food insecure, unstable world.”

Neglected crops are indigenous crops that have been lost or forgotten over time. They are important for the food security of resource-poor farmers and consumers, especially in Africa.

In an open letter to the “Agricultural R&D Moonshot: Bolstering U.S. National Security” meeting in the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture in Washington, DC, this week, the Laureates called on world leaders to prioritize urgent agricultural research to meet the food needs of nearly 10 billion people by mid-century. They urged for financial and political support to develop “moonshot” technologies with the greatest chance of averting a hunger catastrophe in the next 25 years.

“The most promising scientific breakthroughs and emerging fields of research that should be prioritized to boost food production include research into hardy, nutrition-rich indigenous crops that have been largely overlooked for improvements,” the Laureates of the Nobel Prize and the World Food Prize said, citing other moonshot technology candidates as improving photosynthesis in staple crops such as wheat and rice to optimize growth and developing cereals that can source nitrogen biologically and grow without fertilizer.

“The scale of ambition and research we are advocating will require mechanisms to identify, recommend, coordinate, monitor and facilitate collaborative implementation of the proposed food security moonshots,” the Laureates said, in advocating for research investment to ensure the world’s future food and nutrition security.

Research to Rid the World of Hunger

While agricultural research had favourable returns on investment, the Laureates bemoaned that it was failing to provide people in developing countries with a nutritious diet in a resilient, environmentally sustainable, and cost-effective manner. The Laureates are convinced that improving agricultural productivity will be enough to meet the world’s future food needs but caution that if we do not prioritize agricultural R&D the global farming systems will be tied to the increased use of diminishing non-replenishable resources to feed humanity.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates call for urgent “moonshot” efforts to avert global hunger catastrophe. Credit: World Food Prize Foundation

The world was “not even close” to meeting future food needs, with an estimated 700 million people already going hungry and an additional 1.5 billion people needing to be fed by 2050, the Laureates said, urging for the transformation of the global food value chain.

Other moonshot initiatives that should be researched include the enhancement of fruits and vegetables to improve storage and shelf life and to increase food safety, and the creation of nutrient-rich food from microorganisms and fungi.

In 2007, African Union member countries pledged to invest one percent of their GDP by 2020 in science and research, an ambitious bid for science-led development but a goal many countries have failed to meet.

Science, technology and innovation have been identified as key to Africa’s development under the Africa Agenda 2063—a development roadmap for the next fifty years adopted by African Heads of State.

Climate Change Affecting Food Security

Climate change is projected to decrease the productivity of most major staples when substantial increases are needed to feed a world, which will add another 1.5 billion people to its population by 2050.

For maize, the major staple for much of Africa, the picture is particularly dire, with decreasing yields projected for virtually its entire growing area. Increasingly common extreme weather events associated with climate change will only make matters worse. Moreover, additional factors such as soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, conflict, and policies that restrict innovation will drag crop productivity down even further.

“Yet as difficult and as uncomfortable as it might be to imagine, humanity is headed towards an even more food insecure, unstable world by mid-century than exists today, worsened by a vicious cycle of conflict and food insecurity,” said the Laureates, who include Robert Woodrow Wilson, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery that supported the big bang theory of creation and Wole Soyinka, the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“The impacts of climate change are already reducing food production around the world, but particularly in Africa, which bears little historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions yet sees temperatures rising faster than elsewhere,” Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, who received the World Food Prize in 2017, said in a statement. “In low-income countries where productivity needs to almost double by 2050 compared to 1990, the stark reality is that it’s likely to rise by less than half. We have just 25 years to change this.”

Other notable signatories to the letter include the 14th Dalai Lama., Ethiopian-American plant breeder and U.S. National Media of Science recipient Gebisa Ejeta, Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank and Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate, who is also the outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security who coordinated the appeal.

“We must take bold action to change course,” said the Laureates, adding, “We must be prepared to pursue high-risk, high-reward scientific research with the goal of transforming our food systems to meet the nutritional needs of everyone sustainably.”

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