#poor nations

[gameofthrones2020]

Ukraine War: The Grain Crisis and Mass Famine

Ukraine War the Grain Crisis and Mass Famine and how it will be affecting the most in the case of China and Africa.

Russia announced on Monday, 17 July 2023, that the Black Sea grain deal would not be extended since the start of the Ukrainian conflict in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea and the launch of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in February of that year has been renewed on average within 105 days. The trade agreement allowed Ukrainian great exports you pass from southern parts of…

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[averitt-phillips-world]

It has been easy to dismiss efforts to raise the prospects of the world’s poorest as an abject failure. The United Nations reported 712 million people living in extreme poverty in 2022, 23 million more than in 2019. The share of the world’s population suffering hunger rose from 7.9 percent to 9.2 percent over the period. And 2.1 billion people still cook with dung, wood, charcoal and the like.

But, if you zoom out, the track record of some of the world’s poorest nations in improving the living standards of their own people has been surprisingly robust — better than anyone could have guessed just a quarter-century ago, when the United Nations laid out its Millennium Development Goals.

“There has been a tremendous amount of progress,” noted Esther Duflo, the economist who co-directs the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Often without much outside money.”

Much of that progress is at risk.

[rjzimmerman]

Clean Energy Projects Are Booming Everywhere. Except in Poor Nations.

A big obstacle is the lack of loans, a subject of intense disagreement between richer and poorer countries. But in Congo, a hard-fought sola

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The world is racing ahead with enormous investments in renewable energy, for the first time this year plowing more money into solar power than oil.

But the world’s poorest countries, mostly in Africa, are effectively priced out of the action by a global lending system that considers them too risky for investment. Only 2 percent of global investment in renewable energy has been in Africa, where nearly a billion people have little or no access to electricity.

It’s a paradox, Africa’s leaders argue. Clean energy projects would help stabilize their countries and economies, they say, reducing the very risk that investors say they fear. It’s an issue that looms large this week at a climate summit in Kenya, as it will at climate talks sponsored by the United Nations later this year in Dubai.

It also preoccupies Archip Lobo, whose company, against the odds, raised $70 million in international funds this year — capping half a decade of effort — to build solar-powered microgrids in Congo.

What African leaders gathering in Nairobi, Kenya, this week for the first-ever Africa Climate Summit hope to do is persuade global investors and multinational development banks like the International Monetary Fund that African companies need not only more deals like Nuru’s but also better ones.

[thoughtlessarse]

Rich countries ‘trap’ poor nations into relying on fossil fuels

Campaigners criticise ‘new form of colonialism’, where countries in the global south are forced to invest in fossil fuel projects to repay d

Campaigners criticise ‘new form of colonialism’, where countries in the global south are forced to invest in fossil fuel projects to repay debts Richer countries and private lenders are trapping heavily indebted countries into reliance on fossil fuels, according to a new report. The pressure to repay debts is forcing poor nations to continue investing in fossil fuel projects to make their repayments on what are usually loans from richer nations and financial institutions, according to new analysis from the anti-debt campaigners Debt Justice and partners in affected countries. The group is calling for creditors to cancel all debts for countries facing crisis – and especially those linked to fossil fuel projects. “High debt levels are a major barrier to phasing out fossil fuels for many global south countries,” said Tess Woolfenden, a senior policy officer at Debt Justice. “Many countries are trapped exploiting fossil fuels to generate revenue to repay debt while, at the same time, fossil fuel projects often do not generate the revenues expected and can leave countries further indebted than when they started. This toxic trap must end.” According to the report, the debt owed by global south countries has increased by 150% since 2011 and 54 countries are in a debt crisis, having to spend five times more on repayments than on addressing the climate crisis. Daniel Ribeiro, a programme coordinator for the Mozambican environmental campaign Justiça Ambiental, said the country’s debt burden had been doubled by loans taken without parliament’s permission from London-based banks in 2013, based on projections of earnings from its gas field discoveries. Mozambique was plunged into a debt crisis when oil and gas prices fell in 2014-16, Ribeiro said, but the solutions from international lenders to bail out the country have relied on loans being repaid through future gas revenues. “The debt caused by fossil fuels are being structured to be paid back by fossil fuels, solidifying a vicious cycle of having to move forward and having very severe consequences of not wanting to continue with fossil fuels,” Ribeiro said.

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[thoughtlessarse]

UN warns of 'great finance divide' as Covid shocks, debt, hits poorest hardest | DW | 13.04.2022

While rich countries borrowed at low rates and saved their economies, poorer nations have spent billions servicing debt. The war in Ukraine

Rich countries avoided the worst economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic but poorer ones continue to deal with debilitating debt, the UN said in a report released on Wednesday, contributing to a global "great finance divide."

According to the report, 77 million people slipped into poverty in 2021 as governments struggled to service debts and secure early vaccine access.

Soaring food and fuel prices amid the Ukraine war are already impacting import-dependent countries, UN officials had previously said.

UN Under Secretary-General Liu Zhenmin, head of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs who led the report. 

Amina Mohammed, the UN Deputy Secretary-General said the new findings were "alarming" and called for "collective responsibility to ensure hundreds of millions of people are lifted out of hunger and poverty."

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[thoughtlessarse]

Drastic underfunding: Rich nations 'hugely exaggerate' climate finance: study

Rich countries have over-reported finance to help countries adapt to the impacts of climate change by $20 billion over the last decade, leaving at-risk communities drastically underfunded, a new analysis showed Thursday.

Under the 2015 Paris climate deal, countries are required to boost funding to hard-hit governments, evenly split between cash to mitigate global warming and to help them adapt to future climate impacts.

Developed countries promised to provide $50 billion in annual finance for adaptation by 2020. But official OECD figures show that in 2018 donors committed just $16.8 billion.

The true figure, according to an analysis by green group CARE International, is in fact far lower: just $9.7 billion.

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[sharmaheena850]

Vaccine storage demands could leave 3 billion people without access

The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator.

From factory to syringe, the world's most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine cold chain, nearly 3 billion of the world's 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.

The result: Poor people around the world who were among the hardest hit by the virus pandemic are also likely to be the last to recover from it.

The vaccine cold chain hurdle is just the latest disparity of the pandemic weighted against the poor, who more often live and work in crowded conditions that allow the virus to spread, have little access to medical oxygen that is vital to COVID-19 treatment, and whose health systems lack labs, supplies or technicians to carry out large-scale testing. Read More

[theyouthtimes]

Pacific Rugby: The Great Brawn Drain That Left Poor Nations Behind

Wellington - Rugby aims to open up new frontiers this year when Japan host the first World Cup held in Asia, but the talent-rich Pacific island nations feel they are still being neglected by the game's powerbrokers. The island nations of Fiji, Samoa and Tonga all boast a rich rugby heritage...