SAVING WOMEN'S LIVES
Afghan Women Refugees

In a Seattle Times' October 5 story, Abubakar Dungus, spokesman for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), appeared with Population Action International President Amy Coen at a recent Town Hall meeting sponsored by the World Affairs Council to discuss UNFPA's effort to save the lives of Afghan women refugees. Dungus warned, "Without quick action, thousands of Afghan women refugees will face a grave health care emergency and a terrible number will die." UNFPA is mounting its largest-ever humanitarian effort, asking donor countries for $4.5 million to provide Afghan women with reproductive health care services to assure safe deliveries, and with protection against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. UNFPA's effort will be discussed further at an audio news conference on Oct. 22. Seattle Times link.

In recent weeks, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a grassroots pro-democracy group that provides education, health care and economic opportunity to Afghan women, has helped focus media attention on Afghan women and their situation under the Taliban's gender apartheid policies. An October 10 story by The Chicago Tribune opened with, "Many heroes have emerged since the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the U.S. But perhaps none is braver than the women risking their lives to speak out about both the brutality and the hope among the Afghan people." In the U.S. News & World Reports October 15 cover story, another Afghan woman named Laila recalled her experience tutoring girls. It began with just with her neighbors' daughters, but it wasn't long before some 45 children a day were knocking on her door--and only a little longer before the Taliban discovered her underground school. She recalled, "They beat me in front of the children and told me that if I did one more thing against the Taliban, they would kill me." U.S. News and World Report link; Chicago Tribune link; Washington Post link; MSNBC link.

Women's Empowerment

At the opening of the third biennial meeting of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, Dr. Ally Mohamed Shein, Vice President of Tanzania, called on African governments to "invest in adult literacy programs and ensure a privileged position for girls' education." In an October 10 story disseminated by Africa News, Shein voiced his concern over massive numbers of school dropouts, mostly girls experiencing early pregnancies and marriages. "Parents in our continent have not attached much importance to the education for girls," he said. "The mentality still prevails that the place of a woman is in the kitchen." Agence France Press reported on October 11 that more than 60 percent of African women are illiterate, mainly because of discrimination, said Julienne Ondziel, official of the Organization of African Unity and the African Commission on human and people's rights. Africa News link.

In Bangladesh, where most of the country's 130 million people live in extreme poverty, women braved threats of violence and intimidation to exercise their right to vote on October 1. The country's eighth national election pitted the country's two most powerful women against each other. Agence France Presse reported that hundreds of women wearing black veils lined up at polling centers nationwide, and state-run radio reported a large turnout of women across Bangladesh. "I am not scared although there was lot of tension before the army arrived," said Shireen Begum shortly after placing her vote.

DEVELOPMENT: SEPT. 11 EFFECTS ON WORLD POOR

The World Bank reported that the flow of private capital into the developing world would fall significantly because of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, pushing an estimated 10 million more people into poverty and causing tens of thousands of deaths to children from easily preventable diseases. According to The Boston Globe's October 2 story, World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn said ''another human toll that is largely unseen'' will be felt in developing countries. "We estimate that tens of thousands more children will die worldwide and some 10 million more people are likely to be living below the poverty line of $1 a day because of the terrorist attacks." Boston Globe link.

On October 12, the Nobel Prize Committee announced in Norway that United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the United Nations would split the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10. The Associated Press reported that Annan said he believed the committee, which cited the United Nations and the secretary-general both for their work toward a "better organized and more peaceful world," also recognized their work against AIDS and against poverty. He has won high marks for focusing the global spotlight on poverty, human rights abuses, Africa's conflicts and the AIDS epidemic. The Associated Press link.

DROUGHT AND POVERTY

Severe drought causing hunger has pushed more people below the poverty line and is forcing people to migrate to better situations elsewhere. On the eve of World Food Day, Agence France Presse reported on October 15 that Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur, said 100,000 people were dying of hunger and its effects every day. This came at the same time as data from the World Food Programme (WFP) indicating that more than 300 million children suffer from chronic hunger, most of them girls. In Eastern India, starvation-death is a symptom of what some call the "silent creeping crisis" in India's rural areas. The Associated Press reported October 11 that according to India's federal government figures, 325 million people-nearly a third of India's billion-plus population-live below an officially defined "poverty line," and at least 50 million of these are on the brink of starvation.

In Pakistan, because of the lack of melting snow this year, persistent drought along the Indus river has pushed ten percent more of the country's population (around 4.6m people) below the poverty line, according to an analysis by a team of experts from the Social Policy Development Centre, an independent think tank based in Karachi. The Guardian (London) reported on October 10 that the ten percent pushed into poverty were in addition to the one-third of Pakistan's estimated 17 million people who were already living in poverty before the drought. In Afghanistan, a four-year drought and the local history of political instability have contributed to chronic food shortages and a failed economy, according to an October 2 story by The Chicago Tribune. To help the famine-stricken Afghan refugees during the U.S. bombardment, the United States also dropped 37,500 individual humanitarian daily rations, The Washington Post reported on October 8. Later reports upped the amount to more than 100,000 portions.

One way to increase food production in dry areas is to dramatically expand "low-till" agriculture. The Financial Times reported on October 3 that Prof. Timothy Reeves, Director-General of the agricultural research institute, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), said: "This region of 1.3 billion inhabitants is beset by overcrowding, poverty and misery. To feed soaring populations, farmers must increasingly use more fertilizer, water and herbicides to get the same or greater crop yields from their land. Low-till agriculture enables them to increase their productivity while at the same time decreasing, not increasing, these inputs." link The Guardian; link The Chicago Tribune; The Financial Times link; The Associated Press link; The Washington Post link.

HIV/AIDS

Prior to the Sixth International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, the Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic Network released a report commissioned by the United Nations that found the disease has begun spreading rapidly through Asia and the Pacific after more than a decade of relatively low rates of infection there. The Associated Press reported October 4 that in the last two years, "the picture has changed dramatically,'' the Network said in its latest report. "Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Nepal and Vietnam...have all registered marked increases in HIV infection in recent years, while in China - home to a fifth of the world's people - the infection seems to be moving into new groups." At the Congress on AIDS, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told health ministers and government representatives from 35 countries that "HIV/AIDS has the potential to compound poverty and reverse the gains of years of economic and social development. Poverty reduction efforts are an integral part of reducing vulnerability and the impact of AIDS on our countries." Also revealed at the gathering was word that developing countries will be faced with an HIV/AIDS drug bill that could reach $5 billion dollars next year, according to an October 6 story by Agence France Presse. Associated Press link.

In other news on HIV/AIDS, President Benjamin William Mkapa of Tanzania urged women to make sure they know their HIV status before conceiving. Africa News reported on October 15 that Mkapa's appeal comes amid reports that each year, over 70,000 Tanzanian newborns are HIV-positive, and that 10 percent of Tanzanians have that status already. He told the public not to be fooled by the availability of retroviral drugs, as they are not the solution to the killer disease. Africa News link.

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

In the October 13-19 issue of The Economist, the issue of reproductive health commodities security was addressed in an article titled, "Contraceptives in Poor Countries: A Fertile Future?" As a part of a larger feature on the 50th anniversary of Carl Djerassi's invention of the contraceptive pill, the article quoted Tracy Clarke of the International Planned Parenthood Federation as saying, "Improving access to contraception in the developing world will take a lot of money. The contraceptives themselves are cheap. The problem is that aid agencies need lots of them, and donor countries have been cutting their budgets." The article noted that greater political will is also necessary. Poor-country governments need to start thinking about contraception as an essential public-health measure, and to provide money and manpower to ensure a continuous supply in the field. UNFPA estimates that as many as 100 million unwanted pregnancies occur each year. A fifth of these end in unsafe abortion, and more than half a million women each year die in consequence. The Economist link.

OPINIONS AND EDITORIALS

Many opinion pieces and editorials considered international relations and foreign policy issues in the wake of the terrorist attacks. In a September 26 op ed in The Baltimore Sun, the President of the Population Institute, Werner Fornos, pointed to the 1986 public report of the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism that warned: "The motivations of those who engage in terrorism are many and varied, with activities spanning industrial societies to underdeveloped regions. Sixty percent of the Third World population is under 20 years of age; half are 15 years or less. These population pressures create a volatile mixture of youthful aspirations that when coupled with economic and political frustrations help form a large pool of potential terrorists."

The Washington Post's October 5 editorial stressed that the link between foreign aid and national interest should prompt a welcome stock-taking of America's development aid budget, which has fallen from 0.45 percent of GDP in 1965 to just 0.11 percent. The Post's editorial also noted that the United States must be clear when rewarding allies with money that it knows the money is buying cooperation rather than poverty reduction. Meanwhile, if the United States is serious about fighting poverty, it must allow aid dollars to flow without geopolitical factors dictating their direction, such as the global gag rule, the Post said, adding that a good way to insulate this aid from politics would be to channel more of it through the World Bank. Washington Post link.

In an October 7 Seattle Post-Intelligencer opinion piece, John Flicker, President of the National Audubon Society, said international family planning had to be part of the solution to terrorism. He referred to Norman Borlaug's 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which Borlaug called on the world to "bring into balance population growth and the carrying capacity of the environment on a worldwide scale." If the world could do this one thing, Borlaug said, "Mankind itself would qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize." Flicker agreed. "Thirty years later Congress still has the opportunity to help humanity win that prize. Without a doubt, it remains the most important prize not yet won."

On October 4, The Indianapolis Star ran a letter from Peter Purdy, President of the U.S. Committee for UNFPA, that responded to Ruth Holladay's Sept. 27 column that questioned the need for reproductive health services in the wake of Sept. 11 events. In his letter, Purdy said, "To characterize the United Nations Population Fund as "opportunistically" using refugee situations as a means to some nefarious end badly misinterprets what the fund is supporting and displays ignorance as to the nature of the refugee environment to which the fund is responding. Many refugee women come to that situation pregnant. The fund has responded with safe birthing kits to ensure as clean and safe a delivery as possible." The Indianapolis Star link.

The above analysis was written by Elena M. H. Cabatu and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700.

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