“All trafficking is not sex trafficking,” argued Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow Pardis Mahdavi, at a recent Middle East Program event. Drawing on her ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates, Mahdavi analyzed the policy implications of the latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The TIP report offers information on modern day slavery–human trafficking–and includes comprehensive data on policies and enforcement in 155 countries and territories.

The TIP report paradoxically hurts the people it tries to protect, claimed Mahdavi, by placing too much emphasis on sex trafficking and failing to take into consideration other types of abuse, such as those against men and migrant labor workers. Mahdavi pushed for a “breakthrough of the labeling and politicizing of sex traffickers as women and children,” which depicts women as passive and helpless, while excluding male victims.

According to Mahdavi, in Dubai, 80 percent of the population are migrant laborers. Often, these foreign workers do not trust the government to protect them against trafficking abuses, particularly if they are working in the host country illegally. Thus, civil society organizations, and not the state government, serve as the major source of protection and recourse for abused migrant workers. In the Persian Gulf region, Mahdavi argued that the “TIP report needs to be rewritten…to include increased labor inspectors and police training,” and called for the increased “accountability and transparency” of civil society organizations.

Mahdavi cautioned countries against using the TIP report to enact policies that make migration illegal. Tightening borders forces workers into the informal economy, she maintained, where it becomes difficult to track and protect these individuals.

Although the TIP report has weaknesses, it does pressure countries to act, as Mahdavi has witnessed in the United Arab Emirates, where it has provided opportunities for dialogue on the various aspects of trafficking.

As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the Furra Institute for the second annual General Assembly of the Consortium for the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE).

The global recession has “been very hard on journalists,” explained Andrea Crossan, radio producer for BBC’s “The World”. “With these kinds of cutbacks, you really feel it when it comes to foreign coverage.” Along with Stephanie Hanson, associate director and coordinating editor of CFR.org, and Margaret McElligott, senior producer for washingtonpost.com, Crossan spoke about the International Reporting Project’s (IRP) Gatekeeper trip to Kenya at a Wilson Center event sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program.

“You’ve seen a lot of areas of the world that just aren’t getting the coverage these places deserve, and Africa is one of those places,” said Crossan, partly due to the expense of travel, security, and satellite equipment. IRP, a project of The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, aims to fill gaps in foreign reporting left by extensive budget cuts by offering U.S.-based editors and journalists opportunities to report on international stories.

“I’ve traveled a fair amount with the BBC, and I’ve seen some really difficult living conditions for people. I’ve never seen anything like I’ve seen in Kibera,” said Crossan. “We can look at all of the things we are talking about today”—environment, health, security—“through what’s happening in Kibera.”

Poverty and Pirates

At a meeting at the University of Nairobi, a student criticized foreign reporting of Kenya, saying that it “only seems to cover poverty and pirates,” said Crossan. That’s a slight improvement over previous years, when U.S. coverage focused on “witches and war,” noted an audience member.

McElligott, who previously worked for AllAfrica.com, agreed that U.S. media coverage of Africa is becoming richer, with fewer instances of racism accompanying reporting. “The world is so much smaller now,” with email, Facebook, blogs, and video providing additional venues and in-country contacts, she said.

The Kenyan press is the “most trusted institution” in the country, said Hanson. They expose corruption, report on health issues, and call the government to task. With the decline in U.S. journalists posted abroad, the support and stories provided by Kenyan reporters is crucial to getting coverage in the international media.

While pitching international stories to U.S. audiences might be a hard sell, “if it’s a good, compelling story, it will go up in a prominent place” with or without a U.S. angle, said McElligott. “It’s just about telling human stories,” said Crossan.

Kenya on the Edge: Drought and Conflict

“In the last months we’ve seen the food crisis grow in Kenya,” said McElligott. On the group’s visit to Laikipia, she noted the impacts of soil degradation, unsustainable water extraction from rivers, and the lack of governmental regulation. Lack of land and water is forcing pastoralists to travel miles away from home in order to feed cattle and goats.

“We’re desperate for water here,” said Laikipia resident Niyok Npanyaki in an IRP video report. “We’ve decided that if water is cut off, we’ll go to the water source on Mount Kenya, even if the government doesn’t let us. Otherwise we will die. People don’t start wars for no reason. If I am hungry, but if you have food, I’ll come to you and find it.”

“Loss of natural resources puts people under extreme pressure and people will go to extreme lengths in order to get those fundamentally important natural resources,” says Dr. Anthony King, director of Laikipia Wildlife Forum, in the video. Adding to the tension between farmers and pastoralists is the easy access to firearms in the Horn of Africa. “Almost every pastoralist will have an automatic weapon,” says King.

The IRP fellows visited the headquarters of the UN Environment Programme in Nairobi, but found it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of UNEP at addressing Kenya’s drought and deforestation. According to Crossan, UNEP has invested in a number of local programs, but the UNEP officials they spoke with seemed frustrated that the Kenyan government was not more involved in tackling the country’s environmental problems.

“Something I struggle with in my own work is trying to understand what actual effect these large multilateral agencies have on the ground. What is the World Bank actually doing in Ghana? What are they actually doing in Kenya?” said Hanson. “Does the money get distributed? Who does it go to? Having more Kenyans or Ghanaians who could report on these things and look into them in terms of transparency and accountability would be incredibly helpful.”

Malaria: A Disease of the Poor

“Malaria was, to be honest, not a disease that was really on my radar,” said Hanson. “I had, in a way, discounted its importance to what has happened on the continent.” At a children’s critical care unit in Nyanza Province, one of the poorest areas in Kenya with one of the highest rates of HIV and malaria, she saw beds filled with sick children. “This was shocking to me.”

When a family member is stricken with malaria, the burden of care is typically falls upon the mother, who often must travel long distances to the nearest hospital—“some of them had walked hours with a sick child,” said Hanson—leaving their other children at home and farms largely untended.

“When these women have to leave their farms to come to the clinic, they’re losing work days on the farm,” said Hanson. “That just means that their farms are less productive. They have less money to send their children to school, give their children medical care, and feed their children.”

“These macro-political issues—disputed elections, post-election violence—are actually connected to daily issues like malaria infections, hospital capacity rates, agricultural yields, and without a government that can address those things it is very difficult to see how a place like Kenya can move forward,” concluded Hanson.

Drafted by Sajid Anwar and Meaghan Parker.
Edited by Meaghan Parker.

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“Family planning is one of the biggest success stories of development cooperation,” said Bert Koenders, Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation, via video at a Wilson Center roundtable discussion on the future of family planning funding. Koenders was followed by representatives of three of the field’s largest donors, Musimbi Kanyoro, director of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Population and Reproductive Health Program; José “Oying” Rimon, senior program officer for Global Health Policy and Advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Scott Radloff, director of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health.

“The downward trend, in terms of donor funding for international family planning, since the middle of the 1990s to around 2006 has been reversed,” José Rimon II, senior program officer for global health policy and advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko following a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“Poor countries can’t begin to deal with food issues, with economic pressures, with conflict and shortages of water and grassland that may lead to social conflict, unless they begin to deal with population problems,” journalist Nicholas Kristof tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in a video interview.

“Water shortages,” warns South Asia scholar Anatol Lieven, “present the greatest future threat to the viability of Pakistan as a state and a society.

This warning may be overstated, but Pakistan’s water situation is deeply troubling, as described in a new report from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.

Water availability has plummeted from about 5,000 m3 per capita in the early 1950s to less than 1,500 m3 per capita today. As Simi Kamal reports in the first chapter of Running on Empty, Pakistan is expected to become “water-scarce” (below 1,000 m3 per capita) by 2035—though some experts project this could happen in 2020, if not earlier.

In an unstable nation like Pakistan, water shortages can easily become security threats. In April 2009, alarm bells sounded when the Taliban pushed southeast of Swat into the Buner district of the Northwest Frontier Province. Not only is Buner close to Islamabad, it lies just 60 kilometers from the prized Tarbela Dam, which provides Pakistan with billions of cubic meters of precious water for irrigation each year.

Soaked, Salty, Dirty, and Dry

According to Kamal, Pakistan faces significant and widespread water challenges:

• Inefficient irrigation.
• Abysmal urban sanitation.
• Catastrophic environmental degradation.
• Lack of water laws to define water rights.
• Lack of a sound policy on large dams.

An arid country dependent on agriculture, Pakistan allocates more than 90 percent of its water resources to irrigation and other agricultural needs. Unfortunately, intensive irrigation and poor drainage practices have waterlogged and salinized the soil.

Women and Water in Rural Pakistan

Rural women and small farmers are particularly affected by Pakistan’s water crisis. Women bear the primary responsibility for obtaining water, but have been traditionally been shut out of government water-planning and decision-making processes. However, government and media initiatives, described by Sarah Halvorson in Running on Empty’s chapter on water and gender, are increasingly highlighting the importance of women’s participation.

Meanwhile, Adrien Couton reports that Islamabad’s water projects mainly benefit large and wealthy farmers—even though Pakistan has approximately four million farms smaller than two hectares.

Pakistan’s Thirsty Cities

With most of Pakistan’s water dedicated to agriculture, less than 10 percent is left for drinking water and sanitation. A quarter of Pakistanis lack access to safe drinking water—and many of them reside in the country’s teeming cities.

Worse, the drinking water that does exist is quickly disappearing. Lahore, which relies on groundwater, faces water table declines of up to 65 feet, as described by Anita Chaudhry and Rabia M. Chaudhry in their chapter on the city.

The scarcity of clean water in the cities—exacerbated by a lack of wastewater treatment—is a leading cause of deadly epidemics. At least 30,000 Karachiites (of whom 20,000 are children) perish each year from unsafe water.

Pakistan Must Act Now To Solve the Water Crisis

Pakistan arguably has the technological and financial resources to provide clean water. So what’s the hold-up? In her chapter on public health, Samia Altaf argues that the problem is the absence of a strong political lobby to advocate for water—and that no one holds Islamabad accountable for fixing the problem.

The report offers more recommendations for addressing Pakistan’s water:

• Invest in existing infrastructure and in modest, indigenous technology.
• Strike appropriate balances between centralized and decentralized management.
• Devote more attention to water allocation and distribution on local/individual levels.
• Understand the links between agricultural and urban water pressures.
• Embrace the role of the private sector.
• Conserve by favoring water-saving technology; less water-intensive crops; and water-conserving urban building design.
• Address structural obstacles like systemic inequality and gender discrimination.
• Take immediate action. Tremendous population growth and rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas ensure that the crisis will deepen before it eases.

The need for immediate action cannot be overstated. While Pakistan’s water crisis may not threaten its viability, it is undeniable that so long as the crisis rages on, essential components of the nation—such as the vital agricultural economy, the health of the population, and political and economic stability—lie very much in the balance.

Michael Kugelman is the Wilson Center’s South Asia specialist. He is co-editor, with Robert M. Hathaway, of the recently published Wilson Center book Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis, on which this post is based. Much of his work has focused on resource shortages in Pakistan and India.

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Celebrity philanthropists such as Bono, Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney have shined their star power on global issues like AIDS, genocide, and refugees. In last month’s Vogue, supermodel Christy Turlington turned the light on one of the most overlooked problems: maternal mortality.