Tag Archives: security
Iran sees deal in year in historic US talks
Iran sees deal in year in historic US talks (AFP) / 27 September 2013 Iran said on Thursday it hoped to seal a deal on its nuclear program within a year as its foreign minister held historic talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry shook hands and met briefly one-on-one with a smiling Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on the sidelines of the United Nations in one of the foes’ highest-level encounters since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The top US diplomat pulled his Iranian counterpart aside saying “shall we talk for a few moments” after a meeting between Iran and six world powers that aimed to revive long-stalled negotiations over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program, a US official said. They met alone with no note-takers for about 30 minutes. The US-educated Zarif, tapped by new moderate President Hassan Rohani to lead the nuclear dossier, said the talks agreed to “jumpstart” work on a deal and “move towards finalising it, hopefully, within a year’s time.” “I thought I was too ambitious, bordering on naivete, but I saw that some of my colleagues were even more ambitious and wanted to move faster,” Zarif told a think tank forum as he joined Rohani on one of a slew of appearances during his week in New York. Kerry said he and his counterparts from the great powers contact group found Zarif’s 20-minute presentation “very different in tone, and very different in the vision that he held out with respect to the possibilities in the future.” Nuclear talks will resume on October 15 and 16 in Geneva, boosting hopes Iran will bring tangible proposals to the table on how to move forward as the West seeks to rein in its atomic programme. It was an extraordinary contact between the two countries that have had no diplomatic relations since 1980, when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held hostages for 444 days after the revolution that toppled the pro-Western shah. It is the first time that ministers of the two countries have sat together at talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes but Western officials fear could be a covert grab for an atomic bomb. Rohani swept to power in June elections on promises to ease the nuclear-related tensions with the West, which have led to tough sanctions that have caused severe economic pain in Iran. Rouhani, a moderate cleric who replaced the firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Iran was committed to negotiate in “good faith.” “We are fully prepared to seriously engage in the process toward a negotiated and mutually agreeable settlement and do so in good faith and with a business-like mind,” Rohani told the think tank forum. Kerry pledged to remain cautious, saying “there’s a lot of work to be done” with plenty of questions still remaining about Iran’s nuclear program. “Needless to say one meeting and a change in tone, which was welcome, doesn’t answer those questions yet,” Kerry said. But speaking separately to CBS News, Kerry said Iranian hopes for a quick deal — and relief of sanctions — were possible. Asked about Rouhani’s earlier statement that a deal could take place in six months, Kerry said: “It’s possible to have a deal sooner than that depending on how forthcoming and clear Iran is prepared to be.” In an address to a UN conference on disarmament, Rohani called on Israel to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel is widely believed to have a nuclear program but does not acknowledge it. “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the risk of their use, threat of use and proliferation persist. The only absolute guarantee is their total elimination,” Rohani said. A State Department official, meanwhile, cautioned that it was early days yet and the “devil is in the details.” Zarif made a “thoughtful presentation” which laid out “their desire to come to an agreement fully implemented within a year’s time,” the official said. Until the teams get “down to work at an expert level to know … what they are willing to do in concrete terms, we have a good atmosphere, but we don’t have a result yet,” the official added. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton organised the talks with Zarif, which involved the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — as well as Germany. Continue reading
Syria meets deadline for chemical weapons disclosure
Syria meets deadline for chemical weapons disclosure (Reuters) / 22 September 2013 Syria has handed over information about its chemical arsenal to a UN-backed weapons watchdog, meeting the first deadline of an ambitious disarmament operation that averted the threat of Western air strikes. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said on Saturday it had “received the expected disclosure” from Damascus, 24 hours after saying it had been given a partial document from Syrian authorities. It said it was reviewing the information, handed over after President Bashar Al Assad agreed to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons in the wake of a sarin gas strike in Damascus’s suburbs last month – the world’s deadliest chemical attack in 25 years. The timetable for disarmament was laid down by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a week ago in Geneva when they set aside sharp differences over Syria to address the chemical weapons issue. Their plan set a Saturday deadline for Syria to give a full account of the weapons it possesses. Security experts say it has about 1,000 tonnes of mustard gas, VX and sarin – the nerve gas UN inspectors found had been used in the Aug. 21 attack. The US State Department said on Friday, after the OPCW announced Syria’s initial declaration, that it was studying the material. “An accurate list is vital to ensure the effective implementation,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said. Once the OPCW executive has voted to follow the Lavrov-Kerry plan in a meeting expected early next week, the Security Council is due to give its endorsement of the arrangements – marking a rare consensus after two years of East-West deadlock over Syria. However, the two powers are divided over how to ensure compliance with the accord. US President Barack Obama has warned that he is still prepared to attack Syria, even without a U.N. mandate, if Assad reneges on the deal. Russia, which says it is not clear who was behind the August 21 attack and has a veto in the Security Council, opposes attempts by Western powers to write in an explicit and immediate threat of penalties under what are known as Chapter VII powers. It wants to discuss ways of forcing Syrian compliance only in the event that Damascus fails to cooperate. But a senior Russian official suggested on Saturday that if there were clear indications that Assad were not committed to handing over chemical weapons, Moscow may stop supporting him. “I’m talking theoretically and hypothetically, but if we became sure that Assad is cheating, we could change our position,” said Sergei Ivanov, chief of staff for President Vladimir Putin. Ivanov said it would take two to three months to decide how long it would take to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons, a task that the Kerry-Lavrov agreement aims to complete by mid-2014. The accord has been welcomed internationally because of its potential to remove a toxic arsenal from Syria’s battlefield and possibly revive international efforts to press for a political solution to the civil war. But it has done nothing in the short term to stem fighting with conventional weapons, which has killed more than 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. Rebel forces, some of whom accused the West of betrayal when Obama stepped back from air strikes against Assad’s forces three weeks ago, seized several villages south of Aleppo on Saturday. Their offensive was the latest effort to cut Assad’s supply lines to Syria’s biggest city, preventing reinforcements by road from Damascus to the south. Video posted on the Internet showed rebels from the Tawhid brigade firing from a tank and a truck-mounted machine gun at army positions near the Sheikh Said suburb south of Aleppo. Further south, in Hama province, soldiers and pro-Assad militiamen killed at least 15 people, including a woman and two children, in the Sunni Muslim village of Sheikh Hadid, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The opposition Syrian National Coalition rejected an offer by Iran’s president Hasan Rohani to help start talks with the Syrian government, saying Tehran could not mediate while providing political, economic, and military support to Assad. “If serious, the Iranian government would withdraw its military experts and extremist fighters from Syria before embarking on dialogue proposals,” it said in a statement. Continue reading
Trade and Environment Review 2013
Book Information UN Symbol: UNCTAD/DITC/TED/2012/3 Order from UN Publications Wake up before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing Full Report ( 4979.96 KB ) Highlight Developing and developed countries alike need a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a “green revolution” to a “truly ecological intensification” approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agro-ecological system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g. water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity, and recreation) UNCTAD’s Trade and Environment Review 2013 (TER13) contends. TER13 highlights that the required transformation is much more profound than simply tweaking the existing industrial agricultural system. Rather, what is called for is a better understanding of the multi-functionality of agriculture, its pivotal importance for pro-poor rural development and the significant role it can play in dealing with resource scarcities and in mitigating and adapting to climate change. However, the sheer scale at which modified production methods would have to be adopted, the significant governance issues, the power asymmetries’ problems in food input and output markets as well as the current trade rules for agriculture pose considerable challenges. TER13, entitled Wake up Before it is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in a Changing Climate was released on 18 September 2013. More than 60 international experts have contributed their views to a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and the most suitable strategic approaches for dealing holistically with the inter-related problems of hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, social and gender inequity, poor health and nutrition, and climate change and environmental sustainability – one of the most interesting and challenging subjects of present development discourse. Agricultural development, the report underlines, is at a true crossroads. By way of illustration, food prices in the period 2011 to mid-2013 were almost 80% higher than for the period 2003-2008. Global fertilizer use increased by 8 times in the past 40 years, although global cereal production has scarcely doubled at the same time. The growth rates of agricultural productivity have recently declined from 2% to below 1% per annum. The two global environmental limits that have already been crossed (nitrogen contamination of soils and waters and biodiversity loss) were caused by agriculture. GHG emissions from agriculture are not only the single biggest source of global warming in the South, besides the transport sector, they are also the most dynamic. The scale of foreign land acquisitions (often also termed land grabbing) dwarfs the level of Official Development Assistance, the former being 5-10 times higher in value than the latter in recent years. Most important of all, despite the fact that the world currently already produces sufficient calories per head to feed a global population of 12-14 billion, hunger has remained a key challenge. Almost one billion people chronically suffer from starvation and another billion are mal-nourished. Some 70% of these people are themselves small farmers or agricultural laborers. Therefore, hunger and mal-nutrition are not phenomena of insufficient physical supply, but results of prevailing poverty, and above all problems of access to food. Enabling these people to become food self-sufficient or earn an appropriate income through agriculture to buy food needs to take center stage in future agricultural transformation. Furthermore, the current demand trends for excessive biofuel and concentrate animal feed use of cereals and oil seeds, much too high meat-based diets and post-harvest food waste are regarded as given, rather than challenging their rational. Questionably, priority in international policy discussions remains heavily focused on increasing industrial agricultural production, mostly under the slogan “growing more food at less cost to the environment”. The strategy recommended to developing countries of relying on international markets to meet staple food demand, while specializing in the production and export of ‘lucrative’ cash crops has not produced the intended results, because it relied on low staple food prices and no shortage of supply in international markets, conditions that have drastically changed since the turn of the century. Globalization has also encouraged excessive specialization, increasing scale of production of few crops and enormous cost pressure. All this has aggravated the environmental crisis of agriculture and reduced agricultural resilience. What is now required is a shift towards diverse production patterns that reflect the multi-functionality of agriculture and enhance close nutrient cycles. Moreover, as environmental externalities are mainly not internalized, carbon taxes are the rare exception rather than the rule and carbon-offset markets are largely dysfunctional – all factors that would prioritize regional/local food production through ‘logical’ market mechanisms – trade rules need to allow a higher regional focus of agriculture along the lines of “as much regionalized/localized food production as possible; as much traded food as necessary”. Climate change will drastically impact agriculture, primarily in those developing countries with the highest future population growth, i.e. in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Against this background, the fundamental transformation of agriculture may well turn out to be one of the biggest challenges, including for international security, of the 21st century. Much slower agricultural productivity growth in the future, a quickly rising population in the most resource-constrained and climate-change-exposed regions and a burgeoning environmental crises of agriculture are the seeds for mounting pressures on food security and the related access to land and water. This is bound to increase the frequency and severity of riots, caused by food-price hikes, with concomitant political instability, and international tension, linked to resource conflicts and migratory movements of staving populations. Downloads Trade and Environment Review 2013 – Wake up before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate (UNCTAD/DITC/TED/2012/3) 18 Sep 2013, 4980.0 KB Continue reading
