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Ezatullah Zawab and Abdul Samad Rohani – Pajhwok Afghan News*

KABUL, Jan 26 2006 (IPS) – The Afghan government s fight against illegal poppy cultivation will be a key point on the agenda at the London conference to discuss Afghanistan s future. More than 70 countries will be attending the two-day meeting, which starts Jan 31.
The international community has pumped in millions of dollars into Afghanistan to stop farmers from growing opium.

The United Nations Organisation for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has committed 70 million dollars for the development of alternative agricultural livelihoods in just one province, eastern Nangarhar, this year. Opium is the basis of 50 percent of Afghanistan s domestic output and virtually all its export and personal wealth.

Accord…

Ángel Páez

LIMA, Mar 2 2006 (IPS) – A report by the Office of the People s Defender in Peru states that the basic rights of indigenous communities living near the Camisea gas field have been affected by the foreign companies operating in the country s Amazon jungle region.
The report, The Camisea Project and Its Effects on the Rights of People , also contains harsh accusations regarding the failure of the Peruvian government to defend the lives and rights of indigenous residents of the Nahua-Kugapakori reserve in southern Peru.

Most of the Camisea gas field wells exploited under concession by the Transportadora de Gas del Perú (TGP) consortium are located in the indigenous reserve.

The consortium is made up of the Argentine firms Techint and PlusPetrol, Hun…

Interview with Curtis Ellis, documentary filmmaker

SAN DIEGO, California, Apr 9 2008 (IPS) – Browsing through the aisles of the local supermarket, few consumers fully grasp the role corn plays in their daily lives.

Curt Ellis (right) and Ian Cheney taste their harvest in Greene, Iowa. Credit: Sam Cullman

Corn, it turns out, stands at the top of the food pyramid aside from its status as a vegetable. U.S. farmers grow mountains of the high-yield crop as a base ingredient for thousands of…

Keya Acharya

KOLKATA, May 19 2008 (IPS) – Ranjini Gupta who works with the urban development department located in the heart of this bustling city snacks occasionally at the street food stalls nearby unmindful of food safety concerns.
One can t really attribute any serious health issue from eating at these stalls, says Gupta, a doctoral student on solid waste management at Kolkata s prestigious Jadavpur University. There are other eating places in this city where food hygiene is of far lower standards than that of the street food vendors, she avers.

Gupta, like many other people who live and work in Kolkata, are beneficiaries of a successful project to turn this eastern metropolis cheap, mouth-watering variety of ready-to-eat street foods into a safe and hygienic exp…

Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2009 (IPS) – At 37, Dimo Kokorkov, a carpenter from Stara Zagora in central Bulgaria is broken-hearted . Dimo says this to describe his sense of deep injustice after being systematically abused in prison because of his disabilities.
Officially diagnosed as mentally disabled, Dimo suffers from frequent headaches, nausea and loss of control over his body. According to him, his problem has been caused by the pain I endured during and since my prison term.

Dimo received a 23-year prison sentence for theft. After my mother remarried, I was left on my own, I was poor, so I had to steal in order to eat, he told IPS. I started doing the usual things, stealing copper and wires. I know what I did was not right, but the sentence was extremely u…

South Africa is leading in the scaling up of Kangaroo Mother Care, a lifesaving intervention that mothers can easily practice. Pictured here are Charlene Paul and her baby in front of their house, next to Athlone Training Stadium in Cape Town. Credit: Ann Hellman/IPS

JOHANNESBURG, Apr 23 2013 (IPS) – A young mother – who only wants to be identified as Karren – beamed as she nursed her newborn baby at the University of Witwatersrand’s Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, in Hillbrow, South Africa. 

It is her first pregnancy and Karren had to learn, from a qualified nurse, how to hold and care for her baby.

While Karren will soon be counting her baby’s …

A group of children being instructed by a teacher in an inner-city community. She has painted blackboards on walls to continue her lessons in the pandemic after schools were closed. Credit: Kate Chappell

KINGSTON, Jamaica, Dec 16 2020 (IPS) – In Jamaica, school playgrounds are deserted, filled only with phantom shrieks of delight. Blackboards remain devoid of arithmetic and uniforms hang wrinkle-free in closets. When the first case of Covid hit Jamaican shores in early March, the government closed primary and secondary schools and over 500,000 children transitioned to remote learning. The majority of schools have yet to resume face-to-face classes since the March 1…