International
World leaders call for urgent action on food security
AFP
by Leon Bruneau and Amelie Bottollier-Depois
World leaders called Tuesday for urgent efforts to address global food insecurity, with fears mounting of a disastrous harvest next year due largely to the war in Ukraine.
On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, ministers from the European Union, United States, African Union and Spain met on food shortages which are seen as a key factor in conflicts and instability.
“There is no peace with hunger and we cannot combat hunger without peace,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said as he condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February invasion of Ukraine.
“The truth is Putin is trying to blackmail the international community with food,” Sanchez said.
The Group of Seven major industrial powers at a June summit in Germany promised $5 billion to fight food insecurity but German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said there was still “great urgency.”
“The Russian war of aggression has caused and accelerated a multidimensional global crisis. Countries in the Global South with prior vulnerabilities have been hit hardest,” Scholz said.
President Joe Biden will address the General Assembly on Wednesday and announce new US aid, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
In his own address on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country will finance shipments of Ukrainian wheat to Somalia which is facing risk of famine.
Ukraine is one of the world’s largest grain producers and the Russian invasion sent global prices soaring.
Russia has cast blame on Western sanctions, an assertion denounced by the United States, which says it is not targeting agricultural or humanitarian goods.
Turkey and the United Nations in July brokered a deal between Russia and Ukraine to allow ships with grain to sail through the blockaded Black Sea.
Putin has recently criticized the deal, pointing to shipments that have headed to Europe. US officials say some of the grain is then processed and sent to poorer countries.
“Despite some of the misinformation that continues to come from Moscow, that grain and other food products are getting where they need to go to the countries most in need, predominantly in the Global South,” Blinken said.
“It’s also helped lower food prices around the world. So it needs to keep going, it needs to be renewed. That is urgent.”
Long-term fears
Concerns are also mounting on the long-term impacts. A recent report by the Ukraine Conflict Observatory, a non-governmental US group, found that around 15 percent of grain stocks in Ukraine have been lost since the invasion began.
Experts warn that disruptions in fertilizer shipments could seriously impede future harvests around the world.
“It’s very clear that the current food supply disruption and the war in Ukraine is having an impact on the next harvest,” said Alvaro Lario, incoming president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
“There’s one or two harvests per year, and already we’re seeing that it’s going to be devastating for next year,” he told AFP, warning that the impact could be “much worse” than Covid.
He called for longer-term action, which would entail billions of dollars of investment, to ensure the stability of food supply chains and to adapt to a warming climate.
“We know the solutions and we have the institutions to make that happen. What is currently lacking is the political will, in terms of the investment,” he said.
In a joint report in July, UN agencies including UNICEF and the Food and Agriculture Organization said that between 702 and 828 million people were impacted by hunger in 2021, or 9.8 percent of the world population.
The figure was up by 46 million people from 2020 and by 150 million from 2019, showing the heavy impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s food economy.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said recently that the world had enough food in 2022 but that the problem was distribution.
If the situation does not stabilize this year, in 2023 “we risk to have a real lack of food,” he said.
International
Trump appoints Stallone, Voight, and Gibson as special ambassadors to Hollywood
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced on Thursday the appointment of actors Sylvester Stallone (‘Rocky’) and Jon Voight (‘Midnight Cowboy’), as well as actor and director Mel Gibson (‘Braveheart’) as special ambassadors to the “very problematic” Hollywood.
“They will help me as special envoys to make Hollywood, which has lost many overseas businesses in the last four years, COME BACK BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER,” he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The Republican lamented all the “problems” he claims Hollywood faces and created this role with the aim of improving the situation from a business perspective.
“These three talented men will be my eyes and ears. I will do whatever they suggest,” he said.
Stallone had previously described Trump as the second George Washington, the first U.S. president (1789–1797) and one of the nation’s founding fathers, during a dinner after his victory in the November presidential elections, where he served as the master of ceremonies.
Meanwhile, Gibson attacked Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing her of having “the IQ of a fence.”
The Republican leader will be sworn in as president on January 20 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, succeeding Democrat Joe Biden.
International
Latin American and Caribbean diplomats voice concern over U.S. mass deportation plan
Diplomatic chiefs from ten Latin American and Caribbean countries expressed their “serious concern” over the announcement of a mass deportation of migrants, a measure they consider incompatible with human rights, according to a joint statement released this Friday.
The statement, which does not attribute the measure to any specific country, refers to the announcement made by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to carry out the largest foreign deportation operation in the history of the nation once he takes office next Monday. “The announcements of mass deportations are a serious cause for concern, especially due to their incompatibility with the fundamental principles of human rights and their failure to effectively address the structural causes of migration,” the statement said, released by Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE).
The signing countries—Brazil, Belize, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela (almost all migrant-sending nations)—also committed to “defend the human rights of all migrants.”
This includes “rejecting the criminalization of migrants at all stages of the migration cycle” and “protecting them as a priority from transnational organized crime that profits from migration,” the document adds.
International
Noboa once again entrusts the Vice President of Ecuador to the vice president he appointed by decree
The President of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, returned this Thursday to delegate – for the second time – the Presidency to the Secretary of Public Administration and Cabinet of the Presidency Cynthia Gellibert, whom he himself appointed by decree vice president in charge, in the face of the open confrontation he maintains with the vice president, Verónica Abad.
As he did last week, Noboa again issued a decree in which he announces that he is absent from the Presidency from Thursday to Sunday, to make an electoral campaign in search of his re-election in the elections of February 9, and during that period of time it will be Gellibert who will be in charge of the head of the State.
This action of the president of Ecuador is a matter of evaluation by the ordinary and constitutional justice at the request of the vice president, Verónica Abad, who claims to assume the presidential functions during the full period of the electoral campaign, in which according to the Constitution the head of state must ask for leave for being a candidate for re-election.
In his decree, Noboa argues that, although the Constitution determines that the Vice Presidency must assume the head of State in the event of the absence of the president, this “is not limited to the elected vice-president, but to the person who to date is exercising the functions of the Vice Presidency.”
Before appointing Gellibert as vice president in charge by decree, Noboa sent Abad to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Turkey, after a judge annulled the five-month suspension that the same Government had imposed on him. Until now, the vice president remains in Ecuador to claim to be the one who temporarily assumes the Presidency.
The new period of Gellibert with presidential powers began at 18:00 local time (23:00 GMT) this Thursday and is scheduled to end at 22:00 (03:00 GMT) next Sunday, time at which the debate between presidential candidates is expected to end where Noboa is summoned to participate.
After the debate, Noboa plans to travel to Washington to attend Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, according to the Ecuadorian Presidency.
After the first assignment of the Presidency to Gellibert, Abad denounced a “coup d’état” and urged the Organization of American States (OAS) to apply the Democratic Charter, considering that the constitutional order had been broken because it had not received the presidential powers, as contemplated in the Ecuadorian Constitution.
In addition, he filed a protection action with which he seeks that the Justice annul the decrees in which Noboa appointed Gellibert as vice president in charge and delegated the Presidency to him. A court admitted the appeal on Friday, but did not accept some precautionary measures that Abad also asked for to suspend those effects immediately.
Controversies like this will be part of the analysis and evaluation of the electoral observation mission (EOM) of the European Union (EU) for the Ecuadorian elections, as anticipated on Wednesday by its leader, Spanish MEP Gabriel Mato.
The confrontation between Noboa and Abad began in the electoral campaign for the second round of elections for the extraordinary elections of 2023, and was reflected when he assumed the charges, when in one of his first decisions, the president sent the vice president to Israel as ambassador, with the mission of seeking peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Abad has denounced Noboa for alleged political gender violence and has accused her of leading a harassment against her to force her to resign and thus avoid having to delegate the Presidency to her during the electoral campaign period, which runs from January 5 to February 6.
The titular vice president has also accused the Government of being behind the corruption investigation in the offices of the Vice Presidency that involves her son in a case where the Prosecutor’s Office also sought to indict Abad, but the National Assembly (Parliament) voted mostly against lifting the jurisdiction, although the ruling party voted in favor.
The general elections in Ecuador are called for Sunday, February 9 and, according to the polls published so far, Noboa and the candidate of the correismo Luisa González appear as prominent favorites to move on to the second round.
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