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Category: Africa

Southeast Asia remains world rice bowl as pockets of region suffer crop disasters

Editor013 mins

Rice crops in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have taken a hit from flooding and conflict this year, casting a shadow on a mostly sunny outlook for Southeast Asia’s output of the key grain as the region deals with other potential longer term supply troubles, farm officials and researchers say. Poverty and hunger are stalking some rural communities in peninsular Southeast Asia, also called Indochina, as a result of lost crops, hitting populations still struggling to recover from lost income and other fallout from widespread economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, the poorest Southeast Asian nations, are not major players in rice production in a sector dominated by Thailand and Vietnam, which lead the world in exports of the grain. Southeast Asia accounts for 26 percent of global rice production and 40 percent of exports, supplying populous neighbors Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as Africa and the Middle East, according the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. But their harvest shortfalls have to be made up from other suppliers, and any serious deterioration in rice output could have ripple effects on import-dependent countries in Asia. The challenge is more acute at a time of deepening worries over food security and rising food prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has removed those countries’ key grain exports from global supplies. A man transports bags of rice in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Oct. 17, 2019. Credit: AFP Cambodia’s National Committee for Disaster Management reported early this month that floods inundated some 770 villages in 22 provinces, including Banteay Meanchey, Battambang, Pursat, Siem Reap, Kampong Thom and Preah Vihear. More than 150,000 hectares of rice paddies were flooded more than 100,000 families were affected by the floods, a committee official told local media. Banteay Meanchey farmer Voeun Pheap told RFA that floods destroyed more than four hectares of his farm and brought immediate hardship to his family as it wiped out his crop and the hope of paying off what he borrowed to plant. “I couldn’t make much money, I lost my investments, and I am in debt,” he said. In Laos, an agriculture and forestry official in Hua Phanh province told RFA that flooding in two districts had wiped out rice crops and left 200 families with no harvest to eat or sell. “Sand is covering the rice fields all over due to heavy rain, which destroyed both rice paddies and dry rice fields,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons. “Families that have been affected will go hungry this year. The damage is so enormous that villagers will have to seek food from the forest or sell other crops that were not affected,” the official added. People reach out to buy subsidized rice from government officials in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 27, 2008. Credit: AFP Fear, fighting leave fallow fields More than 18 months after a military coup toppled a popular civilian government and plunged Myanmar into political and military conflict, the country of 54 million faces security threats to its rice supply on top of the environmental and economic problems faced by its neighbors. “I am too afraid to leave my home,” said Myo Thant, a local farmer in the town of Shwebo in the Sagaing region, a farming region in central Myanmar that has been a main theater of fighting between ruling army junta forces and local militias opposed to army rule. “I can’t fertilize the fields and I can’t do irrigation work,” he told RFA “The harvest will be down. We will barely have enough food for ourselves,” added Myo Thant. Farmers groups told RFA that in irrigated paddy farms across Myanmar, planting reduced due to the security challenges as well as to rising prices for fuel, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Growers are limiting their planting to rain-fed rice fields. “Only 60 percent of (paddy) farms will grow this year, which means that the production will be reduced by about 40 percent,” Zaw Yan of the Myanmar Farmers Representative Network told RFA. Senior Gen Min Aung Hlaing, the Myanmar junta chief, told a meeting August that of 33.2 million acres of farmland available for rice cultivation, only 15 million acres of rainy reason rice and 3 million acres of irrigated summer paddy rice are being grown. Brighter regional outlook This year’s flooding has caused crop losses and concern in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, but so far it doesn’t appear to have dented the regional outlook for the grain, thanks to expected big crops and surpluses in powerhouse exporters Thailand and Vietnam. World stocks have been buoyed by India’s emergence as the top rice exporter of the grain. In this June 5, 2015 photo, workers load sacks of imported Vietnam rice onto trucks from a ship docked at a port area in Manila, Philippines.Credit: Reuters Although Myanmar is embroiled in conflict and largely cut off from world commerce, Cambodia exported 2.06 million tons of milled and paddy rice worth nearly $616 million in the first half of 2022, a 10 percent increase over the same period in 2021, the country’s farm ministry said in July. Laos was the world’s 25th largest rice exporter in 2020. A report released this month by U.S. Department of Agriculture saw continued large exports from Thailand and Vietnam likely into 2023, offsetting drops in shipments of the grain from other suppliers. While the USDA has projected that Southeast Asia’s rice surplus will continue, a research team at Nature Food that studied rice output in Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam suggested the region might lose its global Rice Bowl status. The threats include stagnating crop yields, limited new land for agriculture, and climate change. “Over the past decades, through renewed efforts, countries in Southeast Asia were able to increase rice yields, and the region as a whole has continued to produce a large amount of rice that exceeded regional demand, allowing a rice surplus to be exported to other countries,” the study said. “At…

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Outside of China, concern exceeds optimism as Xi Jinping begins third term as ruler

Editor021 mins

The Chinese Communist Party wrapped up its 20th National Congress at the weekend, granting an unprecedented third five-year term to CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping. Xi, 69, is set to have his term as state president renewed by the rubber-stamp National People’s Congress in March. RFA asked experts on key aspects of China for their impressions of the congress and expectations of Chinese policies as Xi enters his third term after already a decade at the helm of the world’s most populous nation. China-U.S. relations and foreign policy Oriana Skylar Mastro, Center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and author of The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime: The bottom line is, the next five years is undoubtedly going to be more rocky for U.S.-China relations and for other countries with security concerns in the region. The issue is not that Xi Jinping really has nailed down the third term. It wasn’t the case that his position was so precarious that he couldn’t be aggressive before. However, it was unlikely that he was going to take moves to start some sort of conflagration that would extend into the party Congress. So the party Congress did serve as a restraint in so far as it was useful to wait until afterwards to take any more aggressive actions against Taiwan, for example. But the reason it didn’t happen previously is largely based on China’s military capabilities. Xi Jinping has been relatively clear since he took power in 2013, where his goals were in terms of promoting territorial integrity, is trying to define that and resolving a lot of these territorial issues, enhancing their position in Asia to regain their standing as a great power. The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and a dominant position in Asia of which it had previously been decided not only by Xi, but by strategists, analysts and pundits ever since. [Former President Barack] Obama mentioned in his State of the Union that he wouldn’t accept the United States as number two. It had already been decided that there was going to be conflict with the United States if China wanted to be number one in Asia. And so Xi Jinping has been on a trajectory, China has been on a trajectory that’s been relatively consistent, that includes an improvement in military capabilities and thus a heavier reliance on those capabilities to achieve their goals over time. So with the frequency and intensity of competition and conflict, the general trend is that it increases over time. Denny Roy, Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii and author of Return of the Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security: At least two messages from the CCP’s 20th Party Congress bode ill for China-U.S. relations.  The first is that a shift in the international balance of power creates an opportunity for China to push for increased global influence and standing.  This is a continuation of a reassessment reached late in the Hu Jintao era, and which Xi Jinping has both embraced and acted upon.  There is no hint of regret about Chinese policies that caused alarm and increased security cooperation among several countries both inside and outside the region, no recognition that Chinese hubris has damaged China’s international reputation within the economically developed world, and no sense that damage control is necessary due to adverse international reaction to what has happened in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.  Instead, Beijing seems primed to continue to oppose important aspects of international law, to resist the U.S.-sponsored liberal order, and to extoll PRC-style fascism as superior to democracy.  This orientation portends continued if not increasing friction with the United States on multiple fronts, both strategic and ideological.  Secondly, while the Congress expressed optimism about China’s present course, it evinced increased pessimism about China’s external environment, especially what Chinese leaders call growing hostility from the United States.  Not long ago, PRC leaders perceived a “period of strategic opportunity” within which China could grow with minimal foreign opposition.  Increasingly, however, PRC elites seem to believe that alleged U.S. “containment” of China will intensify now that the power gap between the two countries has narrowed and China has become a serious threat to U.S. “hegemony.” PRC efforts to undercut U.S. strategic influence, especially in China’s near abroad, will continue.  Beijing will try to draw South Korea out of the U.S. orbit, and may wish to do the same with Japan and Australia, although in those cases it may be too late.  Beijing will continue to try to establish a Chinese sphere of influence in the East and South China Seas, while laying the groundwork for possible new spheres of influence in the Pacific Islands, Africa and Central Asia. Human rights William Nee, Research and Advocacy Coordinator at China Human Rights Defenders: To some extent, the 20th Party Congress will not see any dramatic break from what is happening thus far–and that’s exactly the problem. China is experiencing a human rights crisis: human rights defenders are systematically surveilled, persecuted, and tortured in prison. There are crimes against humanity underway in the Uyghur region, with millions of people being subjected to arbitrary detention, forced labor, or intrusive surveillance. The cultural rights of Tibetans are not respected. And now, Xi Jinping’s ‘Zero-COVID’ policy is wreaking havoc on China’s economy, and particularly the wellbeing of disadvantaged groups, like migrant workers and the elderly. But there have been no signs whatsoever that the Communist Party is ready to course correct. Instead, after the 20th Party Congress, we will see a new batch of promotions, with these Communist Party cadres more indebted to Xi Jinping’s patronage for their positions of power. In other words, Xi Jinping will have created an incentive structure in which these sycophantic ‘yes men’ will only repeat the ‘thoughts’ of the idiosyncratic leader to prove their loyalty. This makes it even more unlikely that Xi or the Communist Party will even see the necessity…

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Coup in China

Is there a possibility of a Military Coup in China?

Editor05 mins

The world of social media is buzzed with the speculation that Xi Jinping is up for huge trouble. The possibility of a military coup in China is on the cards. From the past 3 days trends #XiJinping, #ChinaCoup and #XiJinpinghousearrest. Following is an analysis of these trends on Google. Google Trends Twitter Trends The analysis for Twitter is also an interesting watch. There were over 86K tweets and over 24.4M impressions just on 23rd September 2022 from all corners of the world containing the word “Xi Jinping” to find out about the News of his coup. Following is the data at a glance. What is happening in China? Many leaders of the CCP got sentenced to death and life imprisonment earlier this month. This was the beginning of all the speculations as China is heading toward the 20th National Congress (NPC). Xi’s participation in the SCO meeting ends a 1,000-day period in which he did not leave China in line with Beijing’s national “dynamic zero COVID” policy that has put the world’s most populous country on virtual lockdown. Xi is facing growing resentment back home due to the Zero-COVID policy that has resulted in mass unemployment, increasing crimes, deaths, suicides, mental health issues, and over 450 protests this year as we reported earlier on Ij-Reportika. People noticed the uneasiness in Xi’s body language in Samarkand and the fact that he left earlier fueled these speculations further. Furthermore, mass cancellation of flights, especially in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the movement of military convoys towards Beijing were also observed by the Chinese natives. They shared these reports on Weibo, and other world social media users picked up these reports and shared them on Twitter and Facebook. Here is the exact data shared: The Chinese officials famous for their “wolf warrior diplomacy” and Chinese State-affiliated Media houses never cleared the air around all these issues. Moreover, independent media houses around the world pointed out that Xi Jinping Disappeared from the public eye after returning from the SCO summit, and there was a possibility that he was under house arrest. Prominent Media Houses even published articles citing Xi’s absence from the national defense and military reform seminar, which further fueled the speculation of a ‘coup’. All these issues one after another points to something big happening before the 20th National Congress of the CPC. It may or may not be a coup but it is clear from Google and Twitter Trends that it has ruffled a lot of feathers around the world and raised the concerns of common Chinese citizens amid the draconian Zero COVID Policy.

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Top UN court rejects Myanmar objections in Rohingya genocide trial

Editor08 mins

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) rejected on Friday all of Myanmar’s objections to a case brought against it by Gambia that accuses the Southeast Asian country of genocide against the mainly Muslim Rohingya minority. Myanmar’s military regime had lodged four preliminary objections claiming the Hague-based court does not have jurisdiction and that the West African country of Gambia did not have the standing to bring the case over mass killing and forced expulsions of Rohingya in 2016 and 2017. The ruling delivered at the Peace Palace in the Dutch city of The Hague by ICJ President, Judge Joan E. Donoghue, clears the way for the court to move on to the merits phase of the process and consider the factual evidence against Myanmar, a process that could take years. Donoghue said the court found that all members of the 1948 Genocide Convention can and are obliged act to prevent genocide, and that through its statements before the U.N. General Assembly in 2018 and 2019, Gambia had made clear to Myanmar its intention to bring a case to the ICJ based on the conclusion of a UN fact-finding mission into the allegations of genocide. “Myanmar could not have been unaware of the fact that The Gambia had expressed the view that it would champion an accountability mechanism for the alleged crimes against the Rohingya,” the judge said. The military junta that overthrew Myanmar’s elected government in February 2021 is now embroiled in fighting with prodemocracy paramilitaries across wide swathes of the country, and multiple reports have emerged of troops torturing, raping and killing civilians. In the initial hearing of the case in 2019, Gambia said that “from around October 2016 the Myanmar military and other Myanmar security forces began widespread and systematic ‘clearance operations’ … against the Rohingya group.” “The genocidal acts committed during these operations were intended to destroy the Rohingya as a group, in whole or in part, by the use of mass murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, as well as the systematic destruction by fire of their villages, often with inhabitants locked inside burning houses. From August 2017 onwards, such genocidal acts continued with Myanmar’s resumption of ‘clearance operations’ on a more massive and wider geographical scale.” Thousands died in the raids in August 2017, when the military cleared and burned Rohingya communities in western Myanmar, killing, torturing and raping locals. The violent campaign forced more than 740,000 people to flee to squalid refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. That exodus followed a 2016 crackdown that drove out more than 90,000 Rohingya from Rakhine. The Gambia has called on Myanmar to stop persecuting the Rohingya, punish those responsible for the genocide, offer reparations to the victims and provide guarantees that there would be no repeat of the crimes against the Rohingya. The Myanmar junta’s delegation protested at a hearing on Feb. 25 this year, saying the ICJ has no right to hear the case. It lodged four objections, all of which were rejected by the ICJ on Friday. The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and was established in 1945 to settle disputes in accordance with international law through binding judgments with no right of appeal. The U.S. has also accused Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya. Secretary of State Antony Blinken ruled in March this year that “Burma’s military committed genocide and crimes against humanity with the intent to destroy predominantly Muslim Rohingya in 2017.” The State Department said the military junta continues to oppress the Rohingya, putting 144,000 in internal displacement camps in Rakhine state by the end of last year. A State Department report last month noted that Rohingya also face travel restrictions within the country and the junta has made no effort to bring refugees back from Bangladesh. Myanmar, a country of 54 million people about the size of France, recognizes 135 official ethnic groups, with Burmans accounting for about 68 percent of the population. The Rohingya, whose ethnicity is not recognized by the government, have faced decades of discrimination in Myanmar and are effectively stateless, denied citizenship. Myanmar administrations have refused to call them “Rohingya” and instead use the term “Bengali.” The atrocities against the Rohingya were committed during the tenure of the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, who in December 2019 defended the military against allegations of genocide at the ICJ. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and one-time democracy icon now languishes in prison — toppled by the same military in last year’s coup. In February, the National Unity Government (NUG), formed by former Myanmar lawmakers who operate as a shadow government in opposition to the military junta, said they accept the authority of the ICJ to decide if the 2016-17 campaign against Rohingya constituted a genocide, and would withdraw all preliminary objections in the case. “It is hard to predict how long this case could take to reach the final verdict. Most likely it could take several years, even a decade,” said Aung Htoo, a Myanmar human rights lawyer and the principal at the country’s Federal Legal Academy. Written by Paul Eckert.

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Investigative Journalism Reportika © March 2022 by Ij-Reportika is licensed under CC BY 4.0