Companies explore giving humanitarian assistance to Iran

U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said on Thursday the United States was in talks with at least two more companies that would like to send food and medicine to Iran through the Swiss humanitarian channel.

Hook told reporters there was a lot of interest in the Swiss network, intended to supply goods to struggling sectors of Iran’s population without tripping over U.S. sanctions.

Food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are exempt from the sanctions that Washington reimposed on Tehran after President Donald Trump walked away from a 2015 international deal over Iran’s nuclear program. But the U.S. measures targeting everything from oil sales to shipping and financial activities have deterred several foreign banks from doing business with the Islamic Republic — including humanitarian deals.

The Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement (SHTA) seeks to ensure that Swiss-based exporters and trading companies in the food, pharmaceutical and medical sectors have a secure payment channel with a Swiss bank, through which payments for their exports to Iran are guaranteed.

[Reuters]

UN official calls Syrian refugee crisis “cruel beyond belief”

The United Nations’ human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, on Tuesday called the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Syria “cruel beyond belief.”

Since December, 900,000 civilians have been forced to flee Syrian and Russian bombs in the northwest. Most are women and children.

This is a war that never ends. Nine years of terror, and in Idlib, where there are more than three million people crammed into Syria’s last major rebel stronghold, they still live powerlessly and impotently as their own government bombs them out of their homes.

The regime’s latest offensive, which is backed by its ally Russia, has forced hundreds of thousands of them to flee for their lives and left people homeless in the middle of a bitter winter.

“I’m begging for a place to shelter my kids,” Fared Alhor told CBS News. “The bombs didn’t kill them, and I don’t want them to die of the cold.”

The children of Idlib have grown up in a time of bloodshed and don’t know what it means to feel safe. One video apparently shows a father trying to protect his 3-year-old daughter from the reality of war. She thinks the bombs and mortars are part of a game.

[CBS]

Desert locust plague in Horn of Africa

Locusts are the world’s oldest and most destructive migratory pest. 

And today, the locust infestation in Kenya is the worst in 70 years. Somalia and Ethiopia are experiencing their worst outbreaks in 25 years, putting crop production, food security and millions of lives at risk. Swarms crossed into Uganda overnight, and Tanzania and South Sudan are now “on the watch list”, the UN’s top humanitarian official reported. 

An average swarm, which contains up to 40 million insects, can travel up to 150 km in a single day and can devour enough food to feed 34 million people within that time. 

Somalia and Sudan faced a famine threat in 2017, and communities have also weathered poor rains, drought, and floods in the past two years. 

The current infestation is threatening food security in Kenya and other African countries, according to the country’s UN Ambassador, Lazarus O. Amayo. “It is also a challenge for pasture, especially our communities that keep livestock,” he added. 

“Without rapid action, we will be facing a rapidly-expanding humanitarian crisis. The Desert Locust swarms are growing exponentially”, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu warned in a video message.   More on the subject

[UN News]

Freezing weather compounds crisis for displaced in Syria

A military offensive on an opposition-controlled region of northwestern Syria has created one of the worst catastrophes for civilians in the country’s long-running war, and a bitter winter has compounded the pain.

The weather has contributed to at least 10 deaths, including four who suffered hypothermia, a family of four that died of suffocation in their tent and two who burned to death when their tent caught fire, according to Mohammed Hallaj, a coordinator for the area’s Response Coordination Group.

“The temperatures was no less than -8 or -9 degrees Celsius (15 degrees Fahrenheit) and this is rare in Syria,” a survivor said, speaking to The Associated Press from the Idlib town of Binnish.

The government’s Russian-backed assault on Idlib, the Syrian opposition’s last stronghold, has uprooted more than 830,000 people since Dec. 1, most of them fleeing toward safer areas near the border with Turkey, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. “Humanitarian needs are increasing exponentially,” Dujarric said. “The ongoing emergency compounds the already dire humanitarian situation for people in the northwest, who have been made vulnerable by years of crisis, violence, economic downturn and, of course, multiple displacements,” Dujarric said.

Around half the territory’s population had already been displaced from other parts of Syria, so formal camps are full.

“It’s cold, it’s snowing and our life is terrible, we can’t take this cold and neither can the kids,” said a woman, who identified herself by her nickname Um Muhammad, who recently fled and was staying at a tent camp near the Turkish border.

[Associated Press]

Mexican migrants sent record $36B in remittances in 2019

Migrant workers sent a record amount of remittances to their home countries in 2019. 

Mexico’s Central Bank reported that Mexican migrants working overseas sent home a record-high $36 billion in remittances in 2019, a 7 percent increase from 2018.

States with the largest population of Mexican-born immigrants rank highest in remittance transfers. The states with the highest transfers include California ($8.84 billion), Texas ($4.3 billion), Illinois ($1.4 billion), New York ($1.8 billion), Florida ($1.15 billion), and Georgia ($1.0 billion).

Comparatively, Mexico receives about $25 billion from foreign tourism, and $22.4 billion in annual petroleum exports.

Remittance flows could remain high with Mexico’s economy projected to remain sluggish. The International Monetary Fund predicts meager economic growth for Mexico at 1 percent in 2020.

Across the wider Latin America region, remittances grew by 4.7 percent in 2019, according to a study published by Manuel Orozco, director of the Migration, Remittances, and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. Mass protests and civil unrest across Central and Latin America were a primary factor in the rise of remittances.

[Fox News]

Unprecedented locust invasion in Africa and Asia

Locust swarms of biblical proportions are threatening crops across a wide swath of Africa and southwest Asia—spurring alarm among top international officials.

A major concern is famine. The United Nations is warning that mass swarms of desert locusts are endangering food supplies in eastern Africa. Officials in Rome noted the situation has a high potential to devolve into a full-blown crisis. Dominique Burgeon, an emergency services director at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said the locust infestation in Africa is now FAO’s top priority.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres took to Twitter in an effort to draw global attention to the worsening outbreak. The swarms are now threatening farms in parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia but are expected to spread to neighboring countries and India soon.

The U.N. chief pinned blame for the crisis squarely on global warming. Cyclones that struck the driest parts of the Arabian Peninsula last year triggered the current crisis, creating ideal conditions for the desert locust species to multiply. “Desert locusts are extremely dangerous,” Guterres wrote. “Triggered by the climate crisis, the outbreak is making the dire food security situation in East Africa even worse.”

The desert locust is a particularly ravenous species that can eat its own weight in food every day. Swarms easily consume entire fields and form mass clouds large enough to block out the sun. They’re quick, too, moving up to 150 kilometers in a day. More breeding cycles are expected. The swarms increase in size twenty-fold with each successive generation and could reach India by June.

“It’s certainly the most dangerous migratory pest in the world, desert locust,” said Keith Cressman, FAO’s senior agriculture officer. “A swarm the size of Rome can eat enough food in one day as everybody in Kenya.” Cressman said FAO is now classifying the situation as “an upsurge, which is one step before a full plague.”

[Scientific American]

Africa’s under-reported humanitarian crises

In Madagascar, three-quarters of the country’s population is living on less than $3 per day. Recent drought has meant people have resorted to eating cassava leaves and the fruits from cactuses that grow locally.

The Suffering in Silence report released on Tuesday by aid agency CARE found the severe drought in Madagascar was the least-reported major humanitarian crisis of 2019, with the United Nations estimating a global humanitarian funding gap of $28.8 billion, showing a correlation between under-reported crises in Africa and a lack of humanitarian funding.

The report found nine of the 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises are located in Africa, many of which have been caused or worsened by climate change.

The brutal conflict in the Central African Republic is the second-least reported crises on the list, followed by climate change issues causing drought in Zambia.  Other crises in Burundi, Lake Chad Basin, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have all been reoccurring more than once over the last four years of CARE‘s reports.

Nairobian writer and award-winning political cartoonist Patrick Gathara believes the under-reporting of Africa in Western media in general is an important but complex issue. Paying attention to crises in Africa can often be about charity rather than justice, Gathara believes, which he said also raises issues with the media’s portrayal of the region. “There is little money to be made in reminding Western audiences that their privileged lifestyles are underwritten by the suffering in other parts of the world,” he told the ABC.

[ABC.net.au]

The spread of the coronavirus beyond China

Coronavirus cases have spread to at least a dozen countries around the world, now confirmed on 4 continents: Asia, North America, Europe and Australia.

A leading Hong Kong researcher, Gabriel Leung, warned on Monday that the outbreak “may be about to become a global epidemic”, as he released new unofficial estimates of between 12,000 and 44,000 current infections in Wuhan.

While China has imposed unprecedented city-wide quarantines and travel restrictions in hotspot areas, including Wuhan, the city’s mayor on Monday said five million people had likely left the city before the quarantines were in place.

Thailand’s health ministry reported eight cases as of Monday – the most of any jurisdiction outside mainland China.

Vietnam is investigating if one of its confirmed cases became sick after a family member returned from Wuhan. This would be the first known case of human-to-human transmission outside China, the World Health Organization says. The other global cases so far are among people who had traveled to China.

Taiwan announced moves that would essentially shut its borders to many mainland Chinese. North Korea has also reportedly closed its borders to foreign tourists, the vast majority of whom come through agencies based in China.

The United Kingdom and the United States have stepped up health screenings at major airports.

But there’s disagreement among public health professionals about whether screenings and border shutdowns are effective – or even counterproductive. “Evidence shows that temperature screening to detect potential suspect cases at entry may miss travelers incubating the disease or travelers concealing fever during travel,” the WHO said in its 24 January advisory for containing the outbreak.

A study published in The Lancet medical journal also on 24 January suggested the virus can spread through patients who aren’t showing symptoms.

[The New Humanitarian]

Chinese leadership calls situation grave as China scrambles to contain virus

China’s leader Xi Jinping called the accelerating spread of a new virus a grave situation, as cities from the outbreak’s epicenter in central China to Hong Kong scrambled to stop the spread of an illness — coronavirus — that has infected more than 2,800 people and killed more than 80.

Travel agencies have also been told to halt all group tours.

The city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started and its 11 million residents are already on lockdown, banned most vehicle including private cars in downtown areas, state media reported. Only authorized vehicles to carry supplies and for other needs would be permitted after that, the reports said.

The U.S. government is said to be arranging a flight to the U.S. to evacuate Americans from Wuhan.

[AP]