Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jun 6 2007 (IPS) – A new U.S. government report acknowledges that coca crops expanded last year in Colombia, despite the heavy herbicide spraying carried out under Plan Colombia, which has been loudly protested by neighbouring Ecuador for causing damages to human and animal health and food crops in border areas.
Credit: Acción Ecológica
Coca will never disappear, said a woman sitting in a bus ridden by this reporter from the Pacific port city of Buenaventura to Cali, in the western Colombian province of Valle del Cauca. The driver and passengers sitting nearby nodded.
Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jul 4 2007 (IPS) – Having won over conservative communities in three Sri Lankan districts, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) is confident that the problem of stigma and discrimination faced by people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) can be overcome.
There have been no great strides towards total acceptance, but social worker Swarna de Silva believes communities can be guided to accept their neighbours who are HIV positive.
We have a good rapport with all the people in the village (name withheld). We visit all of them in our support activities and don t discriminate against each other, she told IPS.
As territorial coordinator for HIV/AIDS and Anti-Human Trafficking of the Salvation Army in Sri Lanka, de Silva has many hear…
Anjulika Thingnam
IMPHAL, Manipur, Aug 7 2007 (IPS) – For the past fortnight, the menu on the Manipur state government s table has changed from the staple of fighting HIV infections to stamping out an outbreak of avian influenza.
That effort has paid off. On Monday the state, which shares a 1,600 km-long border with Burma, was confident enough to lift a ban on the import of poultry feed.
With a population of 2.2 million people Manipur already has and estimated 15,000 HIV positive people and 800 full-blown AIDS cases keeping the health department on a high alert. The state government additionally grapples with a long-standing armed separatist insurgency.
Eleven days after the bird flu outbreak was made public, around 350,000 birds, including some of the state g…
Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA, Sep 4 2007 (IPS) – Garishly made-up sex workers hang around the seedy street that leads to Nirmal Hriday , the home for the dying founded by Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa, in a portion of an abandoned temple to the Hindu demon-slaying goddess Kali.
Volunteers Take a Break at Nirmal Hriday Credit: Sujoy Dhar
Ten years after Mother Teresa #39s own passing, Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) presents the same image of both hope and despair an image that is sure to continue as its celebrated founder moves up the fast track to sainthood.
Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Oct 3 2007 (IPS) – At a pay-and-use toilet at Karachi s Civil Hospital, Rustom Ali asserts: I m an employee here so why should I pay? Hari Ram, the 60-year-old caretaker, is too meek to argue and lets Ali in. Very few people pay, Ram mutters.
The four-unit squat latrine, two each for men and women, was constructed in 2003 near the hospital s outpatient department by the Citizen Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), an organisation originally formed in this southern port city to help tackle crime. It has since taken on the task of providing Karachi #39s citizenry with public toilets that work.
A little over a hundred people use this public toilet on a given day, according to Ram. Because the toilets in the wards are filthy the users include patients …
Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Oct 30 2007 (IPS) – A young woman lost her job in a small town in Serbia after she gave birth to a baby boy and was to be absent from work for a year. That sacking shook up a nation.
The case stirred strong public emotions, prompted fierce reactions among women #39s groups, and led to outrage even among some government ministers.
The young mother was head of the municipality of Knic, 140 km south of Belgrade. She was voted out of the job by councillors who said work has to go on, and she would be absent for a year.
The outrage was particularly strong because it is official policy to stimulate births, as the nation is among the ten eldest in the world, together with Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, San Marino (an…
Adrianne Appel
BOSTON, Nov 29 2007 (IPS) – The United States has slashed the AIDS death rate among white and wealthy U.S. citizens, but the disease continues to ravage the black community at full force, leaders say.
HIV/AIDS protesters march in New York in 2006. Credit: Kaitlyn Tikkun
African Americans are 13 percent of the U.S. population but are 50 percent of those diagnosed with HIV each year and 50 percent of those who die of AIDS annually, according to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control (CDC).
We are in a publi…
Sam Olukoya
LAGOS, Jan 10 2008 (IPS) – The Federal Government policy to stop gas flaring commences on Jan. 1, 2008, and any company which flares gas after that time would be shut down. This was the strong warning from the Nigerian government in October last year to multinational oil companies operating in the country.
Gas flaring continued in 2008 in defiance of the Nigerian government s warning that the act would not be tolerated in the new year.
Responding to pressure from oil companies, the Nigerian government pushed the deadline back on Jan. 6. A press statement issued by Levi Ajuonuma, group general manager of public affairs for the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), announced a shift of deadline from December 2007 to December 2008.
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Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 18 2008 (IPS) – The agriculture industry in Argentina is enjoying the boom in demand for soybeans and other commodities and the subsequent high prices, which are also fattening the state coffers. But the question of the unsafe handling of pesticides and fertilisers has basically been ignored amidst the collective euphoria.
According to the Secretariat of Agriculture, the latest harvest set a new record of nearly 95 million tons of grains, half of which were soybeans.
This year, the harvest should exceed 100 million tons, and the state expects to take in 7.5 billion dollars in tax revenue as a result.
Last year, farmers purchased more than 5,000 tractors, a similar number of sowing machines and 2,000 harvesting machines. But as…
Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Mar 20 2008 (IPS) – New technology, religion and the market must be harnessed to secure basic toilet facilities for Asia s rural and urban poor, sanitation experts from the region said here Thursday.
Currently, over 2.6 billion people across the world have no access to an organised system of toilets, of which some 1.5 billion people live in the Asia-Pacific region, states Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a regional U.N. body based in Bangkok, which hosted a conference on sanitation.
And every year, over 200 million tonnes of human waste go uncollected and untreated globally, adds ECSAP. This not only fouls the environment and spreads diseases, but forces the people with no access to toilets to live in deepe…