Africa Wants Trump Given the Boot

African states attending COP23, the UN climate summit in Bonn, want America's delegation turfed out. From Deutshe Welle.

The Panafrican Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) represents a coalition of civil society organizations from diverse backgrounds across Africa. Secretary General of PACJA, Mithika Mwenda, told DW that part of the organization’s mission at COP23 is to push industrialized countries to set more ambitious goals to reduce their carbon emissions so that African states don’t have to contend with the adverse effects of climate change.

...

Mwenda also openly questions the presence of an official US delegation, out of fear it may prove to be a bad influence on other states that are already reluctant to take serious action on climate change – something he terms as the "Trump effect."

"[The US] withdraws from the Paris Agreement, yet they still want to show that they can negotiate the implementation framework," said Mwenda, "That’s why we are calling in delegates here to sign our petition to kick Trump and his government out of these negotiations. We have to make it very clear that we are not kicking [out] the people of America. We are in solidarity with [those who oppose Trump’s actions]. Our target is the Trump government."

Holding high-polluters to account – including the possibility of financial reparations for small-polluters, including African countries – is likely to be another flashpoint issue at this year’s COP, especially with island nation Fiji at the helm.

"It is quite symbolic that a small island state is hosting COP23,"Mwenda told DW, "[Developed nations] hold a lot of power in terms of determining what is on the agenda…The problem is the apathy of industrialized countries. We want to challenge them on that."

How's This For a Script? Warning - It's a Tough Read.

Young men and women, conscripts, manning the ramparts at Festung (fortress) Europa as legions of desperate migrants approach seeking safety. As the steely commander shouts the order the young defenders reluctantly open fire on the horde knowing they have no other choice - the migrants carry among them a highly infectious strain of cholera.

Sounds like utter dystopia, doesn't it? Well, relax, there is no Festung Europa yet and no infectious horde is marching on Europe yet, but... an outbreak of cholera is now sweeping Iran and experts warn that the impacts of war, climate change and this year's powerful El Nino, create ideal conditions for it and other infectious diseases associated with extreme, mass suffering to spread rapidly and far. From Foreign Policy:

Although the scope of the current outbreak is moderate so far, with fewer than 11,000 illnesses confirmed, it has already spread across an expanse far larger than the 1997 epidemic, taken a greater toll in the Middle East, and still threatens to travel with refugee populations to a even wider geographic area. Moreover, there is ample reason to believe the official tally is grossly undercounted.

At least 2,000 people in Iraq have contracted cholera since mid-September, and Vibriobacteria have contaminated the Euphrates River, possibly the Tigris, as well. The epidemic is thriving amid a perfect storm of failed-state capacity in Baghdad, even worse “state” failures in Anbar province and other regions controlled by the self-declared Islamic State, encampments of millions of Syrian refugees and other homeless displaced people, and harsh downpours slamming parts of Africa and the Middle East thanks to one of the worstPacific El Niño climate events in recorded history.

On Oct. 26, the Syrian American Medical Society, a nongovernmental organization providing aid inside the war-torn country, said it was “very likely” a child living outside of Aleppo died from cholera, possibly due to a widespread contagion in the area. Since January, UNICEF has reported more than 105,000 cases of acute diarrheal disease in Syrian children inside the country, though no laboratories there are available to determine the infectious cause of most of the illnesses. Some, perhaps many, could be due to cholera.

And there’s reason to fear the epidemic could spread further afield, too. Turkish officials have assured their people that no cases of cholera have been confirmed among Syrian refugees living in that country. In Lebanon, where millions of refugees reside and government chaos is responsible for a nearly four-month cessation of garbage collection,doctors warn that conditions are ripe for an explosive spread of the disease. On Oct. 2,Greek health officials placed a Dutch tourist in treatment in Athens after the individual developed acute diarrhea on the island of Kos, a landing point for thousands of Syrian refugees. Although cholera was feared, it was never confirmed. Nevertheless, there isgrowing concern in Europe that with the refugees will come the Vibrio cholerae.

But this year’s cholera crisis already goes far beyond the borders of Iraq or even the lengths of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.

...Cholera bacteria can travel from one place to another via two ways: through water systems or through infected people. When contaminated human waste is dumped into a river, cholera is carried downstream. Food that is irrigated with contaminated water, and then shipped to another region or country, may carry the disease to new areas if the produce is eaten raw and unwashed. In 1979, I was in a cholera epidemic in Tanzania that spread far and wide on cashew nuts that were packaged by the unwashed hands of people who were infected. International travelers may unknowingly carry cholera and pass it with their waste, spreading Vibrio bacteria from one country to another.

The El-Nino Conveyor.

Climate and weather play a key role. In the 1997-1998 epidemic, the disease’s spread was hastened by torrential downpours and mudslides from a periodic climate swing that occurs when transpacific winds change, for reasons unknown, pushing ocean currents out of their normal patterns. This weather pattern is called El Niño.

...By mid-October, the El Niño drama was clearly unfolding. The weather system was blamed for holding toxic air in a stagnant dome over Singapore, sending killer typhoons across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, causing a drought in usually drenched parts of West Africa, and showering parts of East Africa with sporadic rains of such force that mudslides and floods resulted. Changes in the hunting patterns of King Penguins have been blamed on El Niño, along with an overall East African drought so dire that the United Nations warns thatsevere food insecurity may loom. And on Oct. 25, an atmospheric scientist from Colorado State University credited El Niño with feeding Hurricane Patricia, which had record-breaking winds as high as 200 miles per hour.

El Niño’s impact on the Middle East, coupled with climate change, has been two-fold: First, temperatures from southern Iraq all the way into Turkey reached record highs this summer, topping more than 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire region is now locked in a severe drought, worse than the one some have credited with spawning the Syrian uprisings of 2011 that led to the Assad regime’s crackdown and current civil war.

Climate change, meanwhile, has hit the South Asia/Middle East region with severe drought causing some major rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates to be dammed by the countries they pass through. This slows or halts the flow of the rivers increasing the growth of cholera bacteria. Getting ISIS to open the Ramadi dam they control will not be easy. Meanwhile the river water and produce grown with that water become increasingly dangerous.

The Good News

So far the cholera that has spread from the Middle East into Africa is just one strain, Inaba, that is relatively easily treated and for which an effective and inexpensive vaccine is available but there are inadequate stocks of it. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a million doses but it intends to use half of that to vaccinate 250,000 displaced people in government-controlled regions of Iraq.

The Future

More than 10 million Iraqis, Syrians, and Kurds are now living in squalor, displaced within their own countries or in refugee settlements in the region. Among refugees over the last four years have been outbreaks of measles (1,000 cases currently inside Iraq), typhoid fever, hepatitis A, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and even polio, which was once all but eradicated from the Middle East. Conditions are ripe for a cholera epidemic that might take hold for a very long time.

Epidemiologists have been warning us for years that mass-migrations of the sort foreseen for much of this century will trigger and spread highly lethal epidemics. We live in a world in which more than one in three has no access to basic sanitation. In the Third World more people have cell phones than the number with toilets. Putting these people to flight from any cause - war, famine, water shortages, sea level rise, whatever - magnifies the risk of rapidly spreading, lethal epidemics.

This cholera epidemic is the world's wake-up call. Will we even hear it?

It is  

New Research Reveals How Quickly Climate Change Impacts Set In

The Sahara desert is about the driest spot in the world.  It wasn't always that way.  It wasn't always a desert.  About 10,000 years ago it looked like the grasslands of other parts of Africa today.  Then it changed and new research from the Horn of Africa shows it likely changed in a geological heartbeat.  It should be a warning to us all.

What the scientists found was that, far from shifting gradually from wet to dry, the climate in the Horn of Africa changed in perhaps as little as 100 to 200 years, incredibly quickly in geological terms. The reason north Africa warmed up, they believe, was a cyclic change in Earth’s orientation toward the sun (called precession) which caused more sunlight to fall during the Northern Hemisphere's summer. But the precession cycle is slow, taking 23,000 years to complete. So why was the changeover in the Horn of Africa so quick?

“It shows something really surprising,” says [Columbia University geologist Peter]  deMenocal. “It’s evidence that climate doesn’t respond gradually to gradual forcing. It would be wonderful in global warming if everything just kept pace with the gradual rise in CO2, then we could plan for this, we would know what is going to happen, there would be some predictability in it."

But what researchers like Tierney and deMenocal are increasingly finding is that climate doesn’t change in a linear fashion, but suddenly and seemingly unpredictably. That’s because there are positive feedback mechanisms that start to kick in and speed things up. For example, when the Arctic sea ice melts, as it has increasingly in recent years, the area of dark blue heat-absorbing ocean increases, raising temperatures, melting more ice, which in turn raises temperatures still further in an snowballing process.

There are among us plenty of people who think that a few degrees of warming would be just dandy.  More golfing in February sort of thing.   These types assume we can warm without destabilizing the climate with potentially very dangerous consequences.  And, yes, these climatic triggers are measured in parts per million.  Anyone who doubts that should read Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky" and look at the latest numbers on ocean warming and acidification.  That might just jolt you out of your complacency.

Is China Grooming Africa for Half a Billion Surplus Chinese?

The theory, published in Asia Times, is that Chinese authorities have figured out their homeland can support a population of 700-million, max.   With current numbers at 1.2-billion, China has to jettison hundreds of millions of people.

"While a cottage industry of "China-in-Africa" experts has emerged over the past five years, on balance their explanations of why a magnetic like pull exists between the two continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one denies an array of state-to-state economic and geopolitical incentives recognized by both sides. After all, the simplified resources-for-infrastructure win-win is rather obvious.

"Yet and still neither of those benefits - Africa's gain of badly needed dams, roads, pipelines and bridges and China's receipt of desperately needed oil and minerals - is as compelling as the widely rumored and highly plausible determination that China's mainland can only sustain 700 million persons. Therefore at least 300 million to 500 million of its current 1.2 billion population must go elsewhere. The "elsewhere" is Africa... "

It's difficult to imagine how, short of an outright military takeover, China could compel African states to become a repository for surplus Chinese.    Then again the idea that China may not be able to sustain a permanent population in excess of 700-million is more than plausible and does beg the question of now the Too Many Peoples' Republic can resolve what could pose a mortal, internal threat to the state.

Uganada, Ghana, Now Kenya - Africa's War on Gays

Well it's "Mission Accomplished" for the Christo-Fascist evangelists who've worked so hard to convince Africans that homosexuals present a dire threat to their children and their societies.  Now it's Kenya where the Prime Minister Raila Odinga has ordered a nationwide crackdown on gays.

Addressing a rally in Nairobi on 28 November, Odinga ordered the police to arrest and bring criminal charges against anyone found engaging in sex with someone of the same gender. He added that the country’s constitution made it clear that homosexual activity was not tolerated.

...Homophobia is widespread in Kenya, but this is the first time such a senior political figure has openly called for legal action against homosexuals. In October, a cabinet minister who called for tolerance towards gays was urged to resign for promoting “un-African” culture.

Joseph Musili, a local pastor, said he fully backed the prime minister. “I am happy, but it took him too long; this is something he should have ordered a long time ago because you can’t allow things like homosexuality under the pretext of human rights and expect to have a moral society,” he said.

As reported here yesterday, U.S. evangelists have been instrumental in stoking the fires of homophobia in Africa where Uganda is proposing to make homosexuality a capital offence. 

All They Have Left to Steal

Africa is well steeped in colonialism. For more than two centuries, European masters from Britain to Belgium carved the place up and helped themselves to the spoils the lands had to offer. Africa has been a bountiful source to meet a great many Western needs from hordes of slaves to gold, diamonds and oil. There's a reason Africans didn't get prosperous from that bounty. We pretty much took what we wanted and, when that got tired, we handed those countries over to petty thugs and criminals who did our bidding in the name of their countrymen. All in all it was a good run, so long as you weren't African.

In taking our leave, we bequeathed Africans the gifts of war, plagues and famine. We had carved up the place into nations that reflected the interests of European rulers, not the ethnic and social realities of the local peoples. The mess we left behind can be measured in the millions of innocents slaughtered in states most of us can't even find on the map - Congo, Rwanda, Chad, Nigeria, the list goes on.

Africa is Ground Zero when it comes to climate change. The wretched irony is that most of those hardest hit have a carbon footprint that's barely discernible. Chalk it up to just another gift the West has bestowed on them. But we're not done with these people, not yet. We've taken their natural riches, we've even taken their bodies but they've still got something left - their land.

There's a looming, global food shortage. World food stocks have been shrinking since 1999. For most of your lifetime, the world maintained grain reserves of about 115- 120 days. By 2006, grain reserves had fallen to 57-days, a situation that's going to get a lot worse very, very soon.

Things are changing. In large swathes of the world's food belt water is becoming a critical issue. The two emerging economic superpowers - China and India - are both facing the prospect of mass famine as the Himalayan glaciers that feed their main agricultural rivers recede. By some estimates, India could be looking at the Ganges turning into a seasonal stream, running dry precisely when its waters are needed to irrigate Indian farmland. It's predicted that India could find itself simply unable to feed up to 250,000,000 of its people. China is looking at the same situation, perhaps even worse. You can't let that many people starve without enduring massive social unrest and you do what you can to postpone the inevitable just as long as humanly possible. Just look at the arms races underway in both India and China. Somebody's gearing up for something very, very bad. (Hint to 'Michael' - this is a reality we ignore at our peril)

But what does all this have to do with Africa? Actually quite a lot. The United Nations Humanitarian Affairs office has released a chilling account of how Big Agriculture is moving in on what remains of Africa's best farmland to meet the world's demand for food and biofuel.

Rich countries and firms are leasing or buying massive tracts of land in developing nations for the production of food or biofuel. An area equivalent to Germany’s farmed land is at stake, and tens of billions of dollars on offer.

On the plus side, agro-industrial production could develop underused land, and broaden the world’s food production base while providing much needed resources for poor countries. But is the land really idle and currently unused? Are small-scale farmers going to be “tractored out” in a murky neo-colonial “land grab”?

Food-importing countries that lack land and water but are rich in capital, such as the Gulf States, are initiating deals to produce food in developing countries, where land and water are more abundant and production costs much lower. Vast tracts of land and huge amounts of money are involved: 15 million to 20 million hectares, almost equivalent to the total area under cultivation in Germany, according to analysts at the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Investment so far adds up to $20 billion to $30 billion, dwarfing foreign aid budgets for agriculture.

Joachim von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick of IFPRI point out in a new policy brief that developing countries with large populations, like China, South Korea and India, are seeking similar deals, including growing biofuel crops. The institute warned that there was a "lack of transparency" in many deals, with the amounts involved "often still murky".

... in its 2008 report on "land grabbing", GRAIN, a Spain-based NGO that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity, warned that the "very basis on which to build food sovereignty is simply being bartered away" in the deals.

"These lands will be transformed from smallholdings or forests, or whatever they may be, into large industrial estates connected to far-off markets. Farmers will never be real farmers again, job or no job," GRAIN cautioned.

Various Gulf States have struck most of the deals in East Africa, which is facing some of the biggest food shortages globally. IFPRI's von Braun and David Hallam of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) told IRIN it was "too early" to assess the impact of the deals on food security and farmers in the lessor countries.

Unease, resistance and protests Farming and pastoralist communities in the delta of Kenya's Tana River have reacted strongly to reports of government's intention to lease a chunk of this rich coastal land to Qatar. Kenya is facing huge food shortages and high prices after a third consecutive year of drought.

The spectre of poor countries facing famine selling their best farmland to foreigners, exporting the very food products their own people need, is truly depressing. Is this what we've become?

Read more here and be sure to check out the map of which countries are buying and which countries are selling their land:

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=84320

Too Little, Too Late? Fighting Soil Degradation in Africa

Is there anything more bland to talk about than soil, dirt?

Unfortunately soil issues today have become as critical as freshwater shortages in some parts of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The core problem is that you can farm soil to death and global warming is rapidly accelerating the process.

Farming practices in conjunction with climate change impacts can deplete soils of mineral and organic nutrients. Once the organic component becomes sufficiently degraded the soil is readily compacted and turned sterile, the precursor in many cases to desertification - the transformation of once arable farmland into useless desert. This is a problem that's spreading rapidly in China.

A major project is now underway to create a digital map of the entire African continent to show show soil conditions in all 42-countries. The effort involves everything from analyzing soil samples to satellite observation.

The idea is to identify areas most in need of remediation and the techniques best suited to rehabilitating farmland in each region.

It's a great idea and badly needed, especially in those parts of Africa where hunger is a chronic and endemic problem. The challenge will be to understand and stay ahead of the steadily increasing impacts of global warming. The race is on.

They'll Just Have to Find Some Other Way to Die

I know how callous and cynical that sounds but if you regularly read reports coming out of sub-Saharan Africa, news of an effective, cheap meningitis vaccine is a "one step forward, nine back" sort of thing.

The good news - a cheap and effective vaccine has been tested and will be available for that region in 2009. Unlike standard vaccines that cost $10-20 per dose, the new product can be produced for 40-cents per dose. That means that mass vaccinations can be achieved at $1 per patient. The vaccine has been found highly effective against the most common strain of meningitis found in 85% of infected Africans.

The new vaccine protects individuals for ten years instead of the two-year duration of the more expensive products. It is safe to be given to children under two and it works preventatively as well as therapeutically.

Now, if we can just find these people water, something to eat and maybe a patch of arable land...