Good News Agency
Weekly - Year V, number 9 - 2 July 2004
Managing Editor: Sergio Tripi, Ph. D.
Rome Law-court registration no. 265 dated 20 June 2000
Good News Agency carries positive and constructive news from all over the world relating to voluntary work, the work of the United Nations, non governmental organizations, and institutions engaged in improving the quality of life – news that doesn’t “burn out” in the space of a day. Editorial research by Fabio Gatti. Good News Agency is publishedin English on one Friday and in Italian the next. It is distributed free of charge through Internet to the editorial offices of more than 2,400 media in48 countries, as well as to 2,500 NGO and service associations.
It is a service of Associazione Culturale dei Triangoli e della Buona Volontà Mondiale, NGOassociated with the United Nations Department of Public Information. The Association has been recognized by UNESCO as “an actor of the global movement for a culture of peace” and it has been included as an international organization in the web site
Contents
International legislation – Human rights – Economyanddevelopment – Solidarity
Peace andsecurity – Health– Energyand Safety – Environment and wildlife
Religion and spirituality – Cultureandeducation
International legislation
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Clinched agreement on aConstitutional Treaty for the European Union
23 June - At the European Council meeting in Brussels June 17-18, 2004, the EU heads of state and government clinched agreement on a Constitutional Treaty for the European Union, which replaces the European Communities and the former European Union with a new European Union endowed with legal personality; spells out more clearly EU competences; and redefines qualified majority voting and the institutional setup, taking account of EU enlargement.
A significant innovation is the creation of a Union Minister for Foreign Affairs, merging the present tasks of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy with those of the Commissioner for external relations. Put at the head of a joint "European external action service", the Minister will be responsible for the representation of the Union on the international scene.
A Message from European Commission President Romano Prodi provides an excellent overview of the Intergovernmental Conference's final results:
All in all, it was a remarkable, positive reversal of the disagreement so clearly displayed just six months ago, and a testament to the Irish Presidency's efforts to find ways forward. As the Constitution is, in legal terms, still a Treaty, it must now be ratified by all Member States before it can enter into force. In a number of cases, this will require popular referenda.
International plant genetic treaty becomes law
Legally binding agreement - open access, benefit sharing, farmers' rights
Rome, 29 June 2004 - A crucial legally binding global treaty on sustainable agriculture has become law today, FAO announced. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture has entered into force, 55 countries having now ratified it.
"This is the start of a new era," said FAO Director-General, Dr Jacques Diouf. "The Treaty brings countries, farmers and plant breeders together and offers a multilateral approach for accessing genetic resources and sharing their benefits. Humankind needs to safeguard and further develop the precious crop gene pool that is essential for agriculture."
"The agreement recognises that farmers around the world, particularly those in the South, have developed and conserved plant genetic resources over the millennia. It is now up to countries to make the Treaty fully operative," he said. (…)
For the first time a binding treaty acknowledges the collective innovation on which world agriculture is based. It recognises the "enormous contribution that the local and indigenous communities and farmers of all regions of the world, particularly those in the centres of origin of crop diversity, have made and will continue to make for the conservation and development of plant genetic resources". (…) The world's most important gene bank collections, around 600 000 samples, held by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), will be put under the Treaty. (…)
Human rights
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ICRC photo exhibition in Monte Carlo
26 June - Women Facing War, an ICRC photo exhibition that first opened in Amman at the end of 2002 under the auspices of Queen Rania of Jordan and has since travelled to Beirut, Geneva and Paris, will be shown in Monaco, in Grimaldi Forum during the 44th Monte Carlo Television Festival.
The exhibition will run from 26 June to 9 July, presenting pictures of women caught up in war: women victims of sexual violence, women who have been forcibly displaced, women who have been arrested, either because they were suspected of having collaborated with the enemy or because they took part in the fighting, women anxiously awaiting news of missing relatives and women who are now at the head of their households because their menfolk are off fighting, have been killed or are being held in detention. Most of the pictures were taken by Nick Danziger (winner of the World Press Photo 2004 best portrait award), who spent nine months travelling through several countries at war.
In showing these striking pictures, the ICRC wishes to draw attention to the obligation that the 191 States party to the Geneva Conventions have at all times to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law, which affords protection to women affected by armed violence.
During the festival, the ICRC will also award, for the second year in a row, its press prize for the documentary or news programme that has best promoted the principles of international humanitarian law. (…)
Activists and officials in Bangladesh trade places to improve access to justice
21 June - Human rights activists in Bangladesh recently traded places with public servants to try to understand the difficulties in making the cumbersome criminal justice system work. As part of a national consultation on access to justice and human rights, the activists tried to resolve real-life legal problems and address human rights concerns as officials - with actual, but bemused, public servants looking on.
The novel approach seeks to break down barriers between different groups working on criminal justice issues, said UNDP Programme Officer, Monjurul Kabir. "We want to map out a set of commonly agreed and doable recommendations that the Government can adopt, and UNDP can incorporate into a large-scale programme in the area of human rights," he said. "We are pursuing a human rights-based approach in our programmes in the justice sector, focusing on disadvantaged groups." (…)
Economy and development
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35EW Growing trees on farms to reduce hunger and poverty
To restore degraded land and provide wood, food, medicine and forage
Orlando, Florida, 30 June - Trees grown on farms could help to alleviate poverty by providing income and food for poor farmers, whose livelihoods are increasingly threatened by harsh environmental conditions and land degradation, FAO said today. (…)
About 75 percent of the world's poor - some 1.2 billion people - live in rural areas. Most of them rely on small-scale agriculture and the intensive use of natural resources for nutrients, medicines and other products to generate income.(…) Diversifying income-generation from natural resources is key to the sustainability of smallholder farms, FAO said.
FAO has been assisting countries to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor by designing policies and developing field projects on agroforestry. Among them, a two-year community based FAO project in northern Namibia has enabled local farmers to select, plant and manage fruit tree species and to produce and market fruit-based goods.
In Vietnam, a project has been launched to diversify agricultural output by planting trees on farms. The project will provide capacity building and technical support for the development of market-oriented forest gardens and agroforestry systems in Quang Nam Province, so that the farmers may benefit from the sale of their farm produce. .
WRI inks pact with Indian industry to promote green business
Mumbai, India and Washington, DC, June 24 - The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) agreed today to collaborate on various projects to advance sustainable enterprises in India. The agreement was announced during the Green Power 2004 Conference organized by the CII, the US Agency for International Development and ICICI Bank, June 24-25, 2004, in Mumbai. (…)
Under the agreement, the CII and WRI will set up a program to assess, measure and report greenhouse gas emissions following the internationally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol ( developed by WRI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
CII and WRI will also help to expand markets for renewable electric power, promote sustainable enterprises and build public-private partnerships to attract significant investment in green technology, following WRI’s New Ventures model ( (…)
The agreement will initially run for one year, though both organizations envision that it could extend to four years. (…)
Panel on civil society relations sees a networked UN
United Nations New York, 21 June - People's organizations and businesses are key actors in the world's political and social affairs, and the United Nations needs to involve them more actively in the processes leading up to decisions by governments, according to the report of an independent panel released today. The panel was chaired by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Among the recommendations of the 12-member Panel of Eminent Persons on UN-Civil Society Relations, appointed last year by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, are that the General Assembly involve civil society organizations more regularly in its affairs, that civil society dialogue with the Security Council be extended and deepened and that civil society groups should be more closely involved in UN field work. The Panel also suggests the establishment of a special fund to help civil society organizations in developing countries build up their capacity to work effectively with the UN. (…)
Africa's countries reaffirm world population consensus
Reproductive health, gender equality key to breaking cycle of poverty, they declare
Inaction could cost more than 10 million lives by 2015, Kofi Annan warns
Dakar, Senegal, 11 June – All African countries today reaffirmed their strong commitment to the Programme of Action of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, stressing that the Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved unless the Cairo Programme is fully implemented.
Apart from being important ends in themselves, gender equality and the empowerment of women were “key to breaking the cycle of poverty and improving the quality of life of the people of the continent”, the countries emphasized.
The nations of Africa expressed their view on the Cairo consensus when their ministers for population and development adopted a declaration and a report from a preceding meeting of more than 400 experts from all parts of the continent. (…) Today’s ministerial meeting was organized by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) to review the implementation of the Cairo Programme of Action. It was supported by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.
According to today’s declaration, the countries of Africa decided to intensify and “exert maximum efforts” to build on the progress achieved in the last 10 years through the Cairo and Dakar-Ngor programmes and to implement proposals in the report from the expert meeting. More efforts will focus on poverty eradication, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, maternal death and the empowerment of women. (…)
Water and sanitation investment highly cost-effective, say top economists
The Copenhagen Consensus panel of leading economists agree that the lack of safe and affordable access to water and sanitation services is a great burden for more than a billion of the world's poorest people.
Three proposals, including small-scale water technology for livelihoods, community-managed water supply and sanitation, and research on water productivity in food production, were regarded as likely to be highly cost-effective, and were placed sixth, seventh and eighth in the panel's ranking. The panel was asked to address ten challenge areas and to consider "the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional US$ 50 billion (EUR 41 billion) of resources were at governments' disposal?" The panel gave highest priority to proposals on control of HIV/AIDS (disease challenge), providing micronutrients (malnutrition), trade liberalisation (subsidies and trade barriers), malaria control (diseases) and the development of new agricultural technologies (malnutrition).
Solidarity
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Rotary clubs build safe water and sanitation systems in Bolivian schools
By Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga (Rotary International)
25 June - Two years ago, Edward Coman of the Rotary Club of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA, had scant knowledge of Bolivia but lots of questions about how he could help make a real difference in the lives of that country's poor. For answers, he turned to his friend Enrique Via-Reque of Wheaton, Illinois, a physician who had organized several medical missions to Bolivia. The doctor introduced him to Alfonso Via-Reque, his brother, who is a member of the Rotary Club of Cochabamba in a Bolivian city of the same name. (…)
Soon, Coman learned that many schools on the outskirts of Cochabamba, a city of 600,000, lacked proper bathroom facilities and relied on a contaminated supply of water, which posed serious health concerns. The two clubs teamed up to sponsor a clean water and sanitation project targeting four elementary schools where conditions were actually worse than in the poor neighborhoods they served. (…)
Members of the Rotary Club of Glen Ellyn sold fresh grapefruit and oranges ordered directly from groves in Florida to raise US$5,000 for the initiative. The Rotary Foundation and District 6440 (Illinois, USA) each contributed $2,500 in matching funds and District Designated Fund allocations toward the project. (…) Underground water tanks and septic tanks were sunk or built up on rocky terrain, often from scratch; bathrooms demolished and rebuilt, repaired, or constructed anew; and plumbing unblocked. Parents often volunteered their labor to help with excavation. With freshly painted walls, patched roofs, properly insulated electrical wiring, and newly flushing cisterns connected to elevated water tanks or underground tanks serviced with efficient water pumps, the bathrooms once again became safe and hygienic for the children. (…)
WFP feeds thousands of new refugees from DRC in Burundi, Rwanda
Bujumbura, 16 June – The United Nations World Food Programme is feeding thousands of refugees who have crossed into Burundi and Rwanda from the Democratic Republic of Congo to escape violence that temporarily paralysed WFP’s aid operations in much of eastern DRC. (…)
The first WFP food was distributed at the three sites of Gatumba, Cibitoke and Rugombo last Saturday and more rations were handed out yesterday. (…) WFP has also supplied almost 20 tonnes of food to some 2,300 Congolese who have crossed into Rwanda from the eastern DRC city of Bukavu since 27 May. A new distribution will take place this week. Renegade troops captured the capital of South Kivu province on 2 June and subsequent looting and violence halted most of WFP’s aid operations in the east. Rebel forces pulled out a week later and government troops took control of Bukavu on 8 June.
In a separate operation, WFP is sending food from the northeastern DRC city of Bunia for more than 260 families who fled their homes in Drodro in Ituri district in the last two weeks after an attack on civilians by a dissident militia commander. The displaced include women and children – some of whom are wounded or suffering from malnutrition. German Agro Action, WFP’s partner in the area, will also provide food and distribute it to the displaced. (…)
ADRA Cookies ‘Smile’ at North Korean Children
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, June 18 - To help fight child malnutrition in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK), the Adventist Development and Relief Agency’s (ADRA) bakery in Pyongyang, DPRK is producing high-nutrient, whole wheat cookies to benefit 32,000 children. Daily, 300,000 cookies are produced in two shifts by the 50 bakery staff. The cookies are delivered to the provinces of North and South Pyongan where they are packaged and weekly transported by ox cart to 450 local kindergartens. The biscuits, each imprinted with a smiley face, are lightweight, easily stored, and readily packaged and transported.
The machinery and personnel costs of this joint venture are co-funded by ADRA Switzerland and Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (DWHH)/German Agro Action (GAA), and are valued at more than $100,000. In addition, raw materials are being funded by DWHH.
In 1995, ADRA started project activities in North Korea that included the distribution of food, medicine, and seeds. ADRA has also introduced solar-powered cooking to parts of North Korea where electricity and heat are not readily available. (…)