Showing posts from category Vietnam.
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On Building a Better (and More Resilient) World: Complexity, Community, and the Precautionary Principle
›April 3, 2013 // By Laurie Mazur
From the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Superstorm Sandy, the last decade has seen an incredible array of natural disasters. Of course, disasters of all kinds are nothing new, but, thanks to the growing scale and interconnectedness of the human enterprise – and the damage we have done to the natural world – the frequency, scale, and consequences of today’s calamities are truly without precedent.
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Paradigm Shift in Chinese Environmental Sector Needed, Says Activist Wang Canfa
›A well-known Chinese proverb describing the relationship between the central government in Beijing and its people says, “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away” (天高皇帝远, tian gao, huang di yuan). It’s not too far of a stretch to apply the same proverb to the current state of China’s environment sector, where relatively strong pollution control laws are poorly enforced on the ground.
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An Update on PRB’s Population, Health, and Environment Project Map
›As reproductive rights advocates reflect on their disappointment with the outcome of last week’s Rio+20 summit, it is encouraging to see that population, health, and environment (PHE) projects – which fundamentally connect women’s health with sustainable development – continue to sprout up around the world. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) launched their community-supported PHE Project Map in March 2010, and since then, the map has grown to include 76 projects across three continents, and has been viewed more than 82,000 times.
The goal of the map is to show which organizations are doing what PHE work where and when. While the map highlights expected hotspots like Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the Philippines, it also brings into focus countries that may not necessarily come to mind when thinking about PHE – South Africa, Venezuela, and Vietnam being among them. The map is updated on a rolling basis, and has grown substantially during its first two years.
These numbers should offer encouragement to reproductive rights and sustainable development advocates. Even if world leaders are still struggling to integrate these issues into a global development framework, NGOs, local nonprofits, and development agencies across the world are moving full-speed ahead to improve healthcare, strengthen ecosystems, and empower women and men across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
To add a project to the map, contact PRB’s Rachel Yavinksy at ryavinsky@prb.org. -
Richard Cronin, World Politics Review
China and the Geopolitics of the Mekong River Basin
›April 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Richard Cronin, appeared in World Politics Review.
Two decades after the Paris Peace Accord that ended the proxy war in Cambodia, the Mekong Basin has re-emerged as a region of global significance. The rapid infrastructure-led integration of a region some call “Asia’s last frontier” has created tensions between and among China and its five southern neighbors – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Both expanded regional cooperation as well as increased competition for access to the rich resources of the once war-torn region have created serious environmental degradation while endangering food security and other dimensions of human security and even regional stability.
China’s seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials and tropical commodities has made it a fast-growing market for several Mekong countries and an increasingly important regional investor. Economic integration has been boosted by a multibillion dollar network of all-weather roads, bridges, dams, and power lines largely financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that is linking the countries of the Lower Mekong to each other and to China. To date, the ADB’s Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) cooperative development program has primarily benefited large population centers outside the basin proper in China, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unfortunately, the same infrastructure that speeds the flow of people and goods to urban centers also facilitates the environmentally unsustainable exploitation of the forests, minerals, water resources, and fisheries that are still the primary source of food and livelihoods to millions of the Mekong’s poorest inhabitants.
No aspect of China’s fast-growing role and influence in the Mekong region is more evident and more problematic than its drive to harness the huge hydroelectric potential of the Upper Mekong through the construction of a massive cascade of eight large- to mega-sized dams on the mainstream of the river in Yunnan Province. The recently completed Xiaowan dam, the fourth in the series, will mainly be used to send electricity to the factories and cities of Guangdong Province, its coastal export manufacturing base some 1,400 kilometers away. China’s Yunnan cascade will have enough operational storage capacity to augment the dry season flow at the border with Myanmar and Laos by 40-70 percent, both to maintain maximum electricity output and facilitate navigation on the river downstream as far as northern Laos for boats of up to 500 tons.
Continue reading in World Politics Review.
Photo Credit: “Xiaowan Dam Site,” courtesy of International Rivers. -
Indonesia: Pioneering Community Outreach Creates Success Story
›January 31, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThis is the third post in a series profiling the process of building political commitment in countries whose governments have made strong investments in family planning. Previous posts have profiled Rwanda and Iran.
While the two other countries profiled in this series, Rwanda and Iran, have only reinvigorated their family planning programs within the past 20 years, Indonesia’s story begins in the 1960s. In this respect, the world’s fourth most populous country is classified among the pioneers of family planning in the developing world and has been described as a “world leader” and “one of the developing world’s best.” An extensive community outreach program combined with a centralized government that made family planning a priority were key to Indonesia’s success story.
Jakarta Pilot and Religious Support Motivates National Scale-up
For a decade and a half after the struggle for independence from the Dutch ended in 1949, the government of President Sukarno ruled out any government support for family planning. According to a Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) report, the rate of contraceptive use among married women at the time was essentially zero. Fertility rose slightly during this period, from an average of 5.5 in the early 1950s to 5.6 children per woman a decade later. However, in 1965, Sukarno was overthrown, and the next year, a military general named Suharto assumed power in an uprising that left as many as half a million people dead.
Suharto’s regime would last until 1998. Though he operated with a “heavy hand” amidst personal corruption, Suharto also aggressively pursued economic development and brought about a policy shift towards promoting family planning. Despite initial reservations – Suharto believed that the people would oppose family planning on religious grounds – various domestic and international advisers convinced him otherwise.
General Ali Sadikin, the governor of Jakarta – a city of three million even then – was particularly influential in convincing Suharto. According to Australian demographer Terence H. Hull, who has written extensively about population issues in Indonesia, Sadikin was “quickly learning demographic lessons in his attempts to renovate a city with poor housing, schooling, transport, and basic services,” and he began to regularly speak out about the challenges that rapid population growth posed to his goals of urban development.Sadikin decided to support the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association, which had a network of clinics offering family planning, but lacked the funding to meet more than a small amount of demand. With the public support of Sadikin, a Jakarta-wide pilot program was operational in 1967.
Hull reports that a second integral event in the early years was a 1967 meeting between government officials and Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, and Hindu leaders representing four of the country’s major religions. Following the meeting, a pamphlet called “Views of Religions on Family Planning” was published, representing “a tipping point when national consensus around the morality of birth control was turning from strongly negative to strongly positive.”
A Strong Coordinating Board Reaches out to Communities
By late 1968, efforts were in place to scale up the family planning program in Jakarta to the national level. The National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN in Indonesian) was created and quickly became entrenched throughout the country thanks to generous funding, including from international donors.
The BKKBN’s emphasis on the community level, which ensured that family planning services and awareness-generating activities were reaching people around the country through multiple channels, was a key factor in the program’s achievements. The organizations involved in promoting family planning messages at the community level included youth, women’s and religious groups, employers, and schools, with high-level support reiterated regularly by the president. Hull described the BKKBN’s efforts as “a true collaboration because the program emphasized institutions not normally associated with family planning, but did so in a way that was both socially acceptable and socially invigorating.”
In the program’s first two decades, the contraceptive prevalence rate for modern methods rose from almost nonexistent to 44 percent, and fertility subsequently fell from 5.5 to 3.3 children per woman. These changes are widely attributed to robust government sponsorship from the highest levels, together with effective grassroots implementation that fostered support from nearly all sectors of society.
In subsequent years, Indonesia experienced rapid economic and social development. Per capita income increased more than 20 times over between 1966 and 1996, with initial growth largely due to oil revenues. Other development indicators also improved dramatically. The literacy rate is now over 90 percent, nearly all girls attend school, and half of women are members of the labor force. However, Hull cautions against proclaiming the family planning program the primary causal factor in these successes. Family planning and other development programs would not have been as effective, he says, without changes in the political structure, which steadily became more centralized and stable in its oversight of a very heterogeneous society.
A Recent PlateauAs Indonesia continued to develop and its political system evolved, the family planning program has faced some challenges in the past 15 years. Suharto resigned in the face of widespread opposition in 1998, after more than 30 years in power. While this brought positive movement towards democracy, the ensuring political uncertainty shifted the government’s energies away from reproductive health and other aspects of social development.
In the early 2000s, the family planning program was decentralized to district and municipal levels, in line with political reforms aimed at diminishing the role of central hierarchy nationwide. District leaders were charged with planning, budgeting, and implementing family planning and other primary health services. In accordance, BKKBN modified its strategies to become even more community-oriented. Still, observers judge the family planning program to have “weakened” following decentralization.
With strong logistics, popular support, and donor assistance, contraceptive use continued rising during the years of political transition. By 2002-2003, 57 percent of married women were using a modern contraceptive method and the fertility rate had reached 2.6 children per woman. However, these indicators remained unchanged in the next national survey, conducted in 2007. Fertility in Indonesia is at the median for Southeast Asia – higher than Thailand and Vietnam and lower than Cambodia and the Philippines.
The Program Moves Forward
As democracy became more secure in the early 2000s, the country’s next generation of leaders kept sight of demographic issues. In 2005, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stated, “High population growth without rapid economic growth will result in poverty and setbacks … Large numbers of children and high populations will only bring advantages if they are skilled.” BKKBN and the Ministry of Health worked with USAID, public health researchers, NGOs and others to develop national family planning standards for quality of care, which were devised and implemented in the early 2000s.
Judging the program’s achievements to have been substantial and its momentum sustainable, USAID graduated Indonesia from population assistance in 2006, after 35 years. Though gaps remain, women’s fertility preferences are largely being met.
Today, 80 percent of all births are intended, and unmet need for family planning – the share of married women who wish to delay or prevent pregnancy but are not using contraception – stands at nine percent, two percentage points below the average for Southeast Asia and all developing countries. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s demographic profile looks much different than it might have. At the time of graduation, USAID reported that without its long-standing and well administered family planning program, Indonesia’s 2006 population would have been larger by 80 million people, or 35 percent.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Sources: Demographic and Health Surveys; Hull (2007); Management Sciences for Health; New York Times; UN Population Division; USAID.
Photo Credit: “Jakarta,” courtesy of flickr user frostnova. -
George Washington University’s PISA Helps Share Rural Vietnamese Climate Adaptation Strategies
›“Climate change is not a topic of debate in Vietnam, it’s a real challenge to future prosperity and security,” says George Washington University’s Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia (PISA) program in this video about their climate adaptation and mitigation work in Nam Dinh province. “[Vietnam’s] population density (265 people/square kilometer), its long coastline (3,444 km), its two major rivers (the Red and Mekong) – all help make it one of the 10 countries considered most vulnerable to climate change,” the narrator says.
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Jotham Musinguzi on Investing in Family Planning for Development in Uganda
›“What we are seeing is not adequate, but we think we are seeing very good positive movement, and we want to build on that,” said Jotham Musinguzi, director of the African regional office for Partners in Population and Development (PPD) in Kampala, Uganda. Musinguzi is a public health physician by training who previously advised the government of Uganda on population and reproductive health issues. “We think that [the government] is now on a firm foundation to continue investing properly in family planning,” he said.
Family Planning for Development
Uganda’s high population growth rate (the country has a total fertility rate of 6.4 children per woman, according to the UN) presents a number of challenges, said Musinguzi, exerting pressure on education and health systems, as well as on basic infrastructure, particularly for housing and transportation. Additionally, high levels of poverty and unemployment can become a source of instability.
Policymakers in Uganda are beginning to recognize the urgency of the issue, however, particularly in regards to young people, said Musinguzi. “They don’t have access to jobs, they don’t have the skills, and therefore the challenges of poverty eradication become even more important.”
Nonetheless, the country’s contraceptive prevalence rate is low, at 24 percent, with 41 percent of married women expressing an unmet need for family planning services, according to the 2006 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for Uganda. Low levels of investment and lack of government involvement remain the primary obstacles, according to Musinguzi, in addition to socio-cultural and religious barriers.
Uganda historically depended primarily on donor finance, rather than government funding, to support family planning and reproductive health services, Musinguzi said. However, over the past two years, the Ugandan government has increased investment due to concerted efforts by PPD, as well as USAID, the UN Population Fund, and civil society groups. “Our point was that if the government does not fund family planning, then they are going to find that achievement of the Millennium Development Goals…is going to be very challenging,” he said.
“I think the low investment in family planning in Uganda is a thing of the past, and we are now looking forward to really better investment in this field,” Musinguzi said. “I am sure we are going to witness quite a big change [in the 2011 DHS] in terms of access as a result of the proper social investment that the government is trying to do now.”
South-South Collaboration
“I have a keen and strong interest in South-South collaboration in the field of reproductive health, family planning, population, and development,” Musinguzi said. Countries in the South have experience linking programming on population and development, and may face similar challenges, he said. For instance, Bangladesh and Vietnam had successful family planning programs that helped blunt rapid population growth rates.
“Countries, like Uganda, and others which haven’t gotten there yet, could learn from these other countries,” said Musinguzi, by sharing best practices and lesson learned, and replicating applicable solutions.
PPD also has a regional project reaching out to policymakers to increase commitment and accountability for family planning and reproductive health services. For instance, parliamentarians may not realize that they can play a significant role, but they have a unique function in providing government and budget oversight, Musinguzi said. Furthermore, they can create legal and administrative frameworks that prioritize family planning programs.
“We continue to make the case for more investment in family planning and reproductive health, but also making sure we hold leaders accountable, to show more commitment, and make sure they improve on the welfare of the people that they represent,” Musinguzi concluded.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: MEASURE DHS, UN Population Division. -
Rare Earths No More? Mineral Discoveries a Potential Game-Changer for East Asia
›July 7, 2011 // By Schuyler NullDiscoveries announced in a journal article over the weekend may prove a game-changer for global rare earth supplies and recent diplomatic maneuvering in East Asia between China, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. A team of researchers from Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology published findings in Nature Geoscience that indicate vast underwater reserves of rare earth minerals are scattered across a huge swath of the Pacific, including south and east of Japan. The U.S. Geological survey estimates current global reserves of rare earth minerals at about 110 million tons; Yasuhiro Kato, the lead author of the Japanese team, told Reuters that the sites surveyed could contain an additional 80 to 100 billion metric tons (yes, with a “b”) of the valuable resources.
The authors write that an “area of just one square kilometer, surrounding one of the sampling sites, could provide one-fifth of the current annual world consumption of these elements.” The team collected data from 78 sites in total, with the largest concentrations centered east of the Hawaiian and Polynesian islands (see a map of the surveyed areas here).
Resource Relationships
The discovery could prove crucial for Japan, as it has been seeking alternative sources of rare earth minerals after an embargo earlier this year by China, which controls 97 percent of the world’s current supply. The embargo (which China denied) was imposed in October of last year after the Japanese navy arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat, which was alleged to be encroaching on Japanese territorial waters. China’s response increased tensions across the region and produced a flurry of warnings in Washington over the security of U.S. supplies.
Although the embargo was later lifted, Japan and Vietnam reached an agreement for development of Vietnamese mines in November. The tensions sparked by the encounter also spread to the South China Sea where Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino forces have stepped up their jockeying over disputed and resource-rich waters to the highest levels in years. Vietnamese and Chinese naval forces recently held mirror exercises, and Filipino officials invoked a 1950-era defense pact with the United States. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai told reporters in June: “I believe the individual countries are actually playing with fire, and I hope the fire will not be drawn to the United States.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called concerns over navigability and Chinese insistence on bilateral (as opposed to multilateral) negotiations in the South China Sea a matter of “national interest” for the United States last year.
The Japanese team’s discovery has the potential to significantly impact the power dynamics behind these tensions. China has used its rare earth monopoly to pressure Japan and the United States, which in turn may have also helped embolden its recent more aggressive maritime policies. If the new rare earth discoveries prove viable, that calculus could change considerably.However serious questions remain: Many of the discoveries lie outside of established exclusive economic zones, so who has the rights to mine them? They’re also between 11,500 and 20,000 feet below the surface – how long before we have the technologies to extract them at an industrial scale? And how safe – both for humans and the environment – will those processes be? Aboveground rare earth mines are some of the most damaging to the environment – part of the claimed reason China curbed overall exports earlier this year, which drove up global prices and drew the ire of the World Trade Organization.
For more on the importance of rare earth minerals to the defense and electronics industries, see New Security Beat’s “Rare Earth: A New Roadblock for Sustainable Energy?” and “Reading Radar: The Mineral Security of the United States.” For more on the exclusive economic zones map, see “Eye on Environmental Security: Natural Resource Frontiers at Sea;” and on the South China Sea and what it reveals about future diplomatic fault lines between the United States and China, see “U.S. v. China: The Global Battle for Hearts Minds and Resources.”
Sources: Asia Sentinel, The Atlantic, BBC, Government Accounting Office, Nature Geoscience, The New York Times, Reuters, Tech News Daily, U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “USS Mustin underway in the Pacific Ocean,” courtesy of flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery, and “Exclusive Economic Zone,” used with permission courtesy of Theo Deutinger and TD Architects.
