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	Middle Income Nations Home to Half the World’s Hungry by IFPRI, UNU-Wider, Prensa Latina   Middle Income Nations Home to Half the World’s Hungry   Nearly half of the world’s hungry, amounting to about 363 million people, live in some of the rising middle income countries, including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).   The 2014–2015 Global Food Policy Report (GFPR) calls on these developing nations, described as “rising economic powerhouses,” to reshape their food systems to focus on nutrition and health, close the gender gap in agriculture, and improve rural infrastructure to ensure food security for all.   “It has become clear that the factors that influence people’s nutrition go well beyond food and agriculture to include drinking water and sanitation, the role of women, the quality of caregiving, among others.” -- Shenggen Fan   “It may seem counterintuitive, but these growing economies play a key role in our ability to adequately and nutritiously feed the world,” said Shenggen Fan, director general of IFPRI.   The report traces the link between sanitation and nutrition, with findings in Bangladesh that show “dramatic reductions in open defecation contributed to large declines in the number of stunted children.”   The research also found that “Bangladeshi children living in places where open defecation had been reduced were taller than children in neighboring West Bengal, India, where open defecation is still common, even at the same levels of economic wealth.”   “It has become clear that the factors that influence people’s nutrition go well beyond food and agriculture to include drinking water and sanitation, the role of women, the qual¬ity of caregiving, among others,” Fan said.   The study also finds strong evidence that food insecurity was a contributing factor to instability in the Middle East.   Additionally, it draws attention to the pressing need to regulate food production to prevent food-borne diseases, help small family farmers move up by increasing their incomes or move out to non-farm employment, improve social protection for the rural poor, and support the role of small-scale fishers in satisfying the global demand for fish.   Asked specifically about the impact of Middle East conflicts on food security, Clemens Breisinger, a senior research fellow in the Development Strategy and Governance division at IFPRI, told IPS food insecurity is quite obviously often a consequence of political instability and conflict.   As such, he said, the number of food insecure people has risen in many Arab countries since 2011, especially in Syria, Iraq and Yemen (three countries ravaged by political turmoil).   “But new research shows that food insecurity can also fuel conflicts, particularly in countries that are net food importing countries and thus vulnerable to global food price shocks,” Breisinger said.   He pointed out Arab countries import about 50 percent of their food and were thus hard hit by the global food price spikes in 2008 and 2011.   http://www.ifpri.org/publication/2014-2015-global-food-policy-report   More than 113 Million People live in Slums in Latin America. (Prensa Latina)   About 113.4 million people live in poor neighborhoods in Latin America and the Caribbean, reported today the Habitat International Coalition (HIC) addressing the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in Costa Rica.   The situation affects mostly women, old people, children immigrants and indigenous population, said HIC representative for human settlements María Silvia Emanuelli.   She recognized the different housing policies implemented in some countries in the area, and considered they have not been able to provide comprehensive responses and fulfill the human rights of people living in slums.   People living in this conditions of poverty, which represent a forth part of the population in the región, live under threat of forced eviction because of the lack of security of tenure of the houses due to real estate speculation, mega-events or urban beautification, she explained.   She added that Latina American countries have invested from 2 to 8 percent of the Gross Domestic product in housing programs for the poorest, but the deficit keeps growing, since building houses does not necessarily guarantees the universal right to have a home.   The number of poor people in the continent reached the 180 million. This is the first time this regional justice organization addresses the situation of economic and social rights in urban slums in the regions.   Why ending malnutrition is a quintessential 21st century development goal, by Lawrence Haddad.   In the run up to the announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) in September every development issue is clamouring for attention. The constituencies behind each issue run the risk of being accused of ‘bandwagoning’—linking their particular issue to the SDGs when the arguments for such a link are less than strong.   I am a big advocate of nutrition goals being strongly embedded within the SDGs. At present, the 17 Goals are underpinned by 169 targets and only one includes nutrition indicators (targeting malnutrition in under-5s). This is surprising. The just-released Global Nutrition Report, which I co-chaired, concludes that malnutrition—undernutrition, like stunting, and overnutrition, like obesity—affects 1 in 2 people on the planet.   In fact, only two countries, China and South Korea, fail to cross these nutrition and public health ‘red lines’, but they are both very close. Make no mistake, the consequences of malnutrition are severe.   Forty-five per cent of under-5 deaths are associated with undernutrition. Undernutrition represents a year-on-year drag on African and Asian GDP of 11%. Obesity in the US costs 10% of median income, and obesity in China is forecast to cost it 9% of GNP in 2025.   But some may argue that the large scale and serious consequences of a problem are merely necessary, not sufficient, features for an issue to make it into the SDGs. There are three other things needed to make a convincing case for an issue to be targeted by the SDG—and malnutrition has them all.   1. The issue has to have relevance for all countries: low-, middle- and high-income. The MDGs were about rich countries as donors and poor countries as recipients. Those days are waning because the SDGs will be funded by increasingly large domestic resource mobilization flows and affect all countries.   Nearly all counties are dealing with some type of malnutrition, whether calorie or micronutrient deficiency interacting with infectious diseases. Or overweight and obesity, which are major risk factors for diet-related chronic disease such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. In fact nearly half of all countries are dealing with both undernutrition and overnutrition at the same time.   2. The issue must be relevant for intergenerational equity. After all, this is the concept at the core of sustainable development: what does this generation do to enable or diminish the ability of the next to survive and thrive?   Malnutrition is very relevant for intergenerational equity, malnourished mothers are more likely to give birth to malnourished babies, the females of which are more likely to grow up to give birth to malnourished babies of their own.   This cycle perpetuates malnutrition, poor educational attainment, and poverty across the generations. Malnutrition requires different sectors (health, agriculture, social welfare, education, science) and different stakeholders (government, civil society, business, international development partners) to come together to resolve the complex set of issues which revolve around an interplay of deprivation, behavioural changes, and enabling environments.   3. The development issues of the twenty-first century defy single-sector solutions. Climate change, resilience to shocks, migration, illegal drug flows, all require whole of society approaches. Finally the problems require collective action—nations need to work together.   Does malnutrition really require collective action?   Surely countries can do this on their own? Well, they can, but because of the strong link to diet choices and greenhouse gas emission levels (healthy diets tend to have lower carbon footprints) the power of working together to find ways of changing norms and environments to promote healthy eating is enormous.   Add to that a set of proven interventions with high-benefit cost ratios (median of 16:1 across 40 countries) and you have a perfect case for the inclusion of, at a minimum, the six nutrition indicators that have been agreed by all 193 health ministries around the world and enshrined in the World Health Assembly in 2012.   This is why nutrition improvement is a quintessentially twenty-first century issue: it affects nearly every country, damages intergenerational equity, and requires collaboration across a wide set of actors and countries. We know what to do to turn the tide of malnutrition and thanks to growing knowledge, commitment, and domestic sources of funding, we have the best ever chance to implement the necessary scale up of efforts. The health of the people, and the planet, depend on it.   * Lawrence Haddad is Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The source for all statistics is the Global Nutrition Report 2014: http://globalnutritionreport.org/ Visit the related web page
	It already looks to be a busy year for human rights in business by Sudeep Chakravarti India   The International Corporate Accountability Roundtable is an influential coalition of nearly three dozen human rights and corporate accountability organizations with global bandwidth. It already looks to be a busy year for human rights in business. Developments that will compel businesses worldwide to keep a sharper eye on corporate social responsibility and human rights violations. Or else, suffer the increasing attention of watchdogs and risk losses on account of negative publicity, even lawsuits.   Alongside ongoing and increasingly emphatic moves at the United Nations Human Rights Council by some African, South American and Asian countries to bring about a binding treaty on human rights, I would put efforts by the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) at the top of the list of learn-and-apply.   ICAR is an influential coalition of nearly three dozen human rights and corporate accountability organizations with global bandwidth. Based in Washington DC, the organization’s steering committee includes Amnesty International, EarthRights International, Global Witness and Human Rights Watch.   The coalition has launched a new programme, the Parent Company Accountability Project.   “One of the largest barriers to remedy for victims of human rights violations by business is the limitation of liability of parent companies for the actions of their subsidiaries,” ICAR’s project parameter states. Structuring businesses as a network of distinct entities, maintains ICAR, “gives corporate groups access to tax and financial benefits, but it also allows them to avoid liability for the harmful and illegal actions of their subsidiaries”.   The project that runs until June 2015 seeks to explore ways in which US law, both federal and state, can be applied “for holding parent corporations (or the entire enterprise) liable for actions for their subsidiaries and/or business partners”.   As interesting as this exercise is in the context of ongoing and future corporate behaviour—besides what corporate jargon terms legacy issues—this year will see the cohesion of another ICAR project. Launched in 2014 and titled Commerce, Crime and Human Rights: Closing the Prosecution Gaps, the rationale for the project seeking to bring transnational corporations to accountability is blunt: “When businesses engage in illegal conduct that results in serious human rights abuse, they rarely, if ever, are held to account. This problem is particularly acute in the context of business activity involving multiple jurisdictions.”   They mean different countries, and they mean such corporate crimes that require prevention, investigation, punishment and redress to victims. A team of top legal experts expect to publish a final framework this September. Accountability is on the map in Africa too.   A high-level panel, a joint effort of the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa has released a report titled Illicit Financial Flows: “Track it. Stop it. Get it”. The report of the panel chaired by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, focuses on how businesses—hydrocarbons and mining to accountancy and legal—funnel substantially more than $50 billion a year that could otherwise be used for economic development across the continent.   Such processes identified on a country-by-country basis involve, among dozens more, transfer pricing, profit-shifting, and plain old money laundering. Then there are flows, as the report puts it, that “by nature are secret and cannot be properly estimated, such as proceeds of bribery and trafficking of drugs, people and firearms”.   The work of such panels, including that of proposing policy to remedy situations seeking to reduce the suborning of governments by businesses—the necessary first step to using, misusing or entirely bypassing the law of a land—is really in the nature of advocacy.   Of proposing changes and leaving the players to sort matters out. But it is important that a major regional institution (equivalents closer to home would be South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or Saarc; and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean) has undertaken to shine the spotlight on dirty, open secrets.   This makes it less easy for business and governments to dismiss it than, say, the work of a human rights organization as being detrimental to the interest of a country—the current situation in India. This year’s Vedanta, as it were, is likely to be Rio Tinto Plc., the British-Australian mining and metals behemoth. Activists and some media are pressuring the Greater Manchester Pension Fund to pull out an estimated £170 million worth of investment in Rio Tinto. The immediate trigger is several deaths at a Rio Tinto-operated mine in Indonesia and alleged uranium pollution at its mines in Australia and Namibia. As I mentioned earlier: a busy year.   * Sudeep Chakravarti’s latest book is Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India. (Livemint.com India)   http://accountabilityroundtable.org/ http://www.commercecrimehumanrights.org/ http://www.escr-net.org/thematic-focus/corporate-accountability http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Business/Pages/OHCHRstudyondomesticlawremedies.aspx http://jamesgstewart.com/category/blog/corporate-accountability/ Visit the related web page
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