Exposed: The Ugly Side of Food Production | LinkTV (Video)

(Earth Focus Episode 37) Food and social justice. Human rights abuses, rape and corrupt practices in the Bangladesh shrimp industry. A report by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation uncovers the human and environmental cost of shrimp farming and shows why buying shrimp from Bangladesh where they are exposed to pesticides and injected with dirty water may be hazardous to your health. UK’s The Ecologist investigates the plight of African migrant workers in Italy and looks how financial speculation is threatening the livelihood of Mexican farmers.

 

Impoverished Indian Families Buried Under Micro-loan Debts –By Jason Burke | Guardian UK

The morning routine in Palivelupa village, 100 miles north-east of Hyderabad in central India, has been established for years. Once the buffalo are taken to the fields, the tea made and the children sent to school, the women meet under the big neem tree and wait for the debt collectors.

Until recently, Rama Peadda Boiana, a 29-year-old farmer’s wife, laborer and mother of three, was in charge. “She was hardworking and clever,” Boiana’s sister-in-law, Taj Mani, told the Guardian. “That is why she ran the group.”

And that could be why she took her own life. Just after the new year, Boiana drank pesticide in the fields outside Palivelupa. She survived for four days in hospital. There were many reasons for her suicide, but the sums she and other local women owed to half a dozen microfinance firms played a big part. Some say Boiana felt responsible for the trouble the villagers were in. Others allege she used others’ repayments to pay off her own debts. “We are hardworking people. That’s all,” said Boiana’s husband, Chera Lu, 36.

The story of Boiana and of Palivelupa is that of a good idea gone drastically wrong, devastating the lives of millions of desperately poor people, threatening a banking crisis and revealing the dark side of India’s economic growth. Pioneered in Bangladesh in the late 1970s, microfinance involves granting small loans that no conventional bank would give to the very poor, allowing them to launch small-scale economic ventures. Around 30 million households in India have received £4bn in such loans over the past 15 years.

In recent months, however, the industry has been thrown into crisis as it has become clear that a significant number of borrowers – between a tenth and a third, depending on the estimate – cannot afford to repay their loans.

At the heart of this financial and social disaster is the central state of Andhra Pradesh, where the past five years have seen the aggressive selling of loans to often illiterate villagers, followed by equally aggressive debt collection.

“I have nothing, less than nothing left,” said Victoria Bandari, who lives in a one-room mud and brick home in Palivelupa. “All I have is debt, which I will pay for the rest of my life.”

Microfinance clients in the village of Gogipet. Photo: Kalyan3/Flickr

Excerpt, read:  Impoverished Indian Families Buried in Micro-loan Debts –By Jason Burke | Guardian UK

 

Increase in Forced Male Marriages | BBC News

Some men are forced to marry to protect the family reputation.

The government unit dealing with forced marriages received 65% more calls about male victims last year than the previous year, figures show. In 2009 it received more than 220 emails and calls to its help line about male victims, up from 134 in 2008. Many male victims were forced into marriage because their families know or suspect they are gay, it said. The majority of cases involve families from South Asia, particularly Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Professionals working with young people were urged to be vigilant during summer, a time when incidents increase. Men accounted for 14% of the total number of forced marriage cases, numbering 1,682, referred to the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) last year.

However, due to under-reporting, the figures are thought to be well below the actual number of forced marriages. It is estimated that there are more like 10,000 incidents of forced marriage involving British nationals each year and that up to 20% are men. The FMU, a joint initiative between the Foreign Office and the Home Office, said that men were often victims for a “variety of reasons”. They included family commitments and expectations, securing visas or the desire to control behavior and protect a family’s reputation, the unit said.

Ask For Help

So far this year, the unit has received more than 80 reports about male victims, with many cases linked to sexuality. Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne said: “Boys and men who are forced into marriage find it harder to ask for help than women, but we are urging males affected by forced marriage to speak out and seek the help that is available to them.”

Victims, usually aged between 15 and 24, are often locked up, subjected to physical and sexual violence and forcibly removed to other countries if they refuse to comply with their families’ wishes. Summer holidays often see an increase of incidents of young people being taken out of the country against their will.

Reprint: Increase in Forced Male Marriages | BBC

 

Rohingya: “Hell on Earth!”

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — It’s there in their faces, in the dark night of their eyes and in the sag and slump of their shoulders. It’s unmistakable, the despair of the Rohingya, the fear for departed husbands and fathers, the daily abrasions of poverty, sadness and the world’s indifference.

More than a quarter-million Rohingya – an ethnic Muslim minority from western Myanmar – have come here to southern Bangladesh to escape the hunger, humiliation and official brutalities in their homeland. Many have landed in a place called the Kutupalong Makeshift Camp.

It is an obscenity, this camp, a festering hell of lost hope and inhuman squalor. No water, power, schools or medicine. Occasional stoop-labor jobs carrying bricks or making salt. Huts made of leaves and branches. There is no music.

“The worst conditions you could imagine anywhere on earth,” says a well-traveled international aid worker. “Total despair,” says another.

These are the luxuries in the camp: a packet of cookies, a crayon, a new battery for an old radio, a small breeze on a sweltering night.

Refugee Sano Ara, 30, sits with her mother, left, and her children at an unregistered refugees camp, outside the official camp at Kutupalong, run by Bangladesh government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, near Cox's Bazar, a southern coastal district about 183 miles (296 kilometers) south of Dhaka, Bangladesh. (AP Photo/Pavel Rahman)

Difficult enough are their journeys from Myanmar to the camp. Even more dangerous are the attempts by thousands of Rohingya men and boys to emigrate each year, starting with perilous sea voyages to Thailand. After that comes an overland trek to Malaysia, a country that has become a kind of Muslim El Dorado for the Rohingya. There might be friends or family connections there, and perhaps jobs that allow for money to be sent to families back in the camps.

These trips often begin in leaky boats that are underpowered and overloaded. Hundreds of Rohingya die at sea each year, and hundreds more are rescued, adrift at sea, by navies in the region. And thousands are detained each year by the Thai authorities. Human rights groups were outraged recently when it became known that the Thai military had roughly detained several dozen Rohingya men on a remote island, then packed them into a boat with few provisions and towed them back out to sea.

“Pushbacks” is what aid workers are calling this tactic.

How to measure or comprehend the terror – or perhaps it’s the love – that propels a man to leave his family, quite possibly forever, and climb penniless into a boat to find uncertain work a thousand miles away in a place where he knows he’ll be both unwelcome and liable to arrest? For that matter, what hellish existence could send a family fleeing to a refugee camp where conditions resemble, charitably, the 12th century?

The Rohingya number about 750,000 in Myanmar. But the military junta does not recognize them as one of the 135 “national races” in the mostly Buddhist nation. And so, in the face of forced labor, arbitrary arrest, stolen land and even starvation, they flee to the makeshift camp. (An adjoining settlement of 20,000 residents has water, electricity and other basic services. Run by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, it is known as the official Kutupalong camp. Some Rohingya have lived there for more than a decade.)

Hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya ethnic group have fled to Bangladesh to escape persecution in neighboring Myanmar only find themselves trapped in a hellish international limbo. As Muslims, they were unwanted in Buddhist Myanmar. As foreigners, they are unwanted in Muslim Bangladesh.

Every day more Rohingya arrive at the Bangladeshi camps, stateless, sun-blasted refugees carrying their meager bundles. The newcomers, largely from Rakhine State in Myanmar, are often so traumatized that they’re unable to tell aid workers what they have fled.

Another one million Rohingya are scattered about the world – there has been a major diaspora from South Asia in recent decades – and they have flung themselves from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Thailand to Indonesia. The men lay asphalt and pour cement in Riyadh. They haul fishing nets in the Andaman Sea. They pull rickshaws in Jakarta. The children, with their small hands, peel shrimp and weave carpets in Karachi.

But no country claims the Rohingya. No country welcomes them. For many, Islam is the only sanctuary left. “They still have faith,” says an aid worker, “that Allah will protect them.”

This article was reported by a reporter for the International Herald Tribune in Cox’s Bazar and by Mark McDonald in Hong Kong. It was written by McDonald.

Source: New York Times

References: Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch Report, Physicians for Human Rights