It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, March 05, 2022
Doha hosts discussion on Afghanistan's humanitarian concerns
March 02 2022
Doha hosts discussion on Afghanistan's humanitarian concerns
QNA/Doha
Doha hosted a round-table discussion on current and future humanitarian concerns in Afghanistan, organised in co-operation between the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Qatar Red Crescent Society and its Afghan counterpart, with the participation of special advisors and ambassadors of several countries.
The sessions intended to support the humanitarian diplomacy efforts focused on by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, as an integral part of the efforts directed at helping and protecting the population at risk, at a time when the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan threatens the lives of millions of families, which created an urgent desire to discuss and determine the basic needs there.
The discussion were held in the presence of HE Secretary-General of Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) Ambassador Ali bin Hassan al-Hammadi, Assistant Secretary-General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Xavier Castellanos, and Acting President of the Afghan Red Crescent Maulvi Matiul Haq Khalis.
The Afghan Red Crescent expressed its views and assessments of the urgent needs of the Afghan population in light of the current and deteriorating humanitarian conditions in their country, and also reviewed the long-term solutions required to alleviate this crisis. The sessions witnessed great interest and interaction from the participants, who stressed the importance of supporting humanitarian efforts in light of the complex situation in Afghanistan, and the scale of the country's great needs in light of the exacerbation of natural hazards, droughts and floods, severe food shortages, and conflict for successive decades, as well as the crisis of Covid-19, making nearly half of the population in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
The meeting stressed the need to take urgent measures to overcome the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and limit its deterioration in light of food insecurity. It also stressed the need to lift restrictions and facilitate financial transfers to humanitarian organisations, and focus on supporting the capacities of the local community and local institutions such as the Afghan Red Crescent.
The three parties (the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the Qatar Red Crescent and its Afghan counterpart) discussed, in a meeting held on the sidelines of the round table, ways to develop co-operation between them and support the efforts of the Afghan Red Crescent, which has a strategic partnership with its Qatari counterpart since 2014. The partnership between the two sides result in dozens of humanitarian projects in the areas of emergency relief, shelter, water and sanitation, health, livelihood, and food security, in addition to winter aid, to meet the needs of the population in various Afghan provinces and regions.
In a related context, Qatar Red Crescent Society recently sent 10 relief shipments weighing 150 tonnes of humanitarian aid, which were distributed to the most vulnerable Afghan groups in co-operation with his Afghan counterpart. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and representatives from the Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese, Malaysian, Dutch, Spanish, Swiss, British and American embassies in Doha participated in the sessions and round-table discussions. (QNA)
Dust storm from Iraq, Syria and Jordan hits western Iran
March 5, 2022 -
TEHRAN – A dense mass of sand and dust storms entered western Ilam province from the deserts of Iraq, Syria, and Jordan on Friday morning.
The concentration of fine dust was recorded as 50 times above the standard range in some cities of the province.
Due to the intensity of PM concentration, the schools in all educational levels in the southern cities of the province were held online on Saturday, IRIB reported.
Also, the activities of the offices in these areas started with a 2-hour delay. The concentration of dust canceled flights of Ilam Airport.
Ali Mohammad Tahmasebi, head of the national working group for SDSs mitigation, said that internal dust sources estimated at 34.6 million hectares, generate an average amount of 4.22 million tons of dust per year, of which 122.7 kilograms is raised per hectare annually.
Of this area, about 1.4 million hectares are from arid wetlands and about 2.5 to 3 million hectares are in habitats managed by the Department of Environment. Other areas are in agricultural lands, rangelands, and deserts, which is managed by the Forests, Rangelands, and Watershed Management Organization, he explained.
A 10-year national plan has also been drawn up to deal with internal SDS hotspots, in which the task of all related bodies is specified, he stated, IRNA reported.
The total dust density is estimated at about 150 million tons and 540 kg of specific dust per hectare, which is about 3 times more than the dust generated in the country.
$2.1 billion damage to 6 provinces
"We conducted a study for 6 provinces of Khuzestan, Ilam, Kermanshah, Sistan-Baluchestan, South Khorasan, and Hormozgan. Based on which, this phenomenon incurred a loss of about 590 trillion rials (nearly $2.1 billion) in a 3-year period," he stated.
The destruction has occurred in different sectors of agriculture, household, industry, health, etc. Studies show that about 54 percent of the total damage was related to various agricultural sub-sectors alone, he lamented, emphasizing, a proper plan can prevent such considerable harm.
€370 million to combat SDSs
In the past four years, about €370 million has been spent from the National Development Fund to combat SDSs, which had good results, but it seems that the annual credit is declining as conditions improve, he added.
Last [Iranian calendar] year (March 2019-March 2020), €100 million was earmarked in this regard, but the next year's budget bill has proposed €20 million for SDS mitigation, which experts believe will even destroy those measures, he explained.
“However, various measures have been taken to fight the phenomenon, including, planting seedlings on about 26,000 hectares of dust centers in the past three years, as well as managing grazing in 2 million hectares of the protected areas and natural resources.”
Conservation agriculture (sustainable agriculture) was conducted on 160,000 hectares of farming lands, in addition to 100,000 hectares of dredging, he concluded.
FB/MG
UK
How Keir Starmer Defeated The Left To Seize Control Of The Labour Party
A GLEEFUL REPORT FROM THE RIGHT
Nearly two years since being elected, the leader's grip on the party is stronger than it's ever been.
HUFFPOST 05/03/2022 Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer ILLUSTRATION: DAMON DAHLEN/HUFFPOST; PHOTOS: GETTY
When the history books are written, this week may well be seen as the time when Keir Starmer’s takeover of the Labour party was complete.
At the first completely in-person meeting of the parliamentary Labour party since he became leader, Starmer made clear that any member – and, by extension, any MP – who draws “false equivalence” between Nato and Russia would be kicked out.
It was a clear repudiation of Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy as leader, which was marked by a suspicion of western intelligence, most notably after the Salisbury poisoning.
Just 48 hours later, former shadow chancellor (and Corbyn ally) John McDonnell pulled out of a planned appearance at a Stop The War ‘No To War In Ukraine’ rally after HuffPost UK revealed he faced losing the whip if he turned up.
As the second anniversary of Starmer being elected Labour leader approaches, here is the inside story of how he faced down the left to take control of his party. ‘A new era’
Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader on April 4, 2020, with a resounding mandate.
He received 275,780 votes, 56.2% of those cast, well ahead of left-wing candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey on 27% and Lisa Nandy on 16.2%.
On the same day, Angela Rayner became deputy leader with 52.6% of the vote.
“It’s the honour and privilege of my life,” Starmer said. “I will lead this great party into a new era, with confidence and hope, so that when the time comes, we can serve our country again – in government.”
But with a party still very much in the image of Jeremy Corbyn, his challenges were just beginning.
Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner at the Labour Party conference in 2021. STEFAN ROUSSEAU VIA PA WIRE/PA IMAGES
Taking back control
The prospect of Starmer standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street as prime minister seemed fanciful, however. He was taking over a party that had just suffered its worst election defeat since 1935, had lost dozens of formerly safe seats in the north of England and been left with just one MP in Scotland.
In order to stand any chance of winning the next election, Starmer needed to first try to unite a party that had become hopelessly split under his predecessor.
“There were two schools of thought,” says one Starmer ally. “One, that you should negotiate with the Momentum types in order to build as broad a church as possible. Two, that they were implacably opposed to Keir and Angela’s leadership and that, as disappointing as it is, they had no intention of ever being good faith partners.”
Labour’s ruling national executive council was split between those who wanted to keep the Corbyn flame alive and those who, like Starmer, believed the party needed to stop talking to itself and instead start talking to the country.
“Keir is not any sort of factionalist,” one senior party source told HuffPost UK, “but he quickly grew to understand that in order to get done what he wanted and needed, he would have to have more control.”
Winning a majority
When Starmer became leader, the NEC was finely balanced, meaning he could only rely on 18 votes on the 38-member body. This meant that his plans for changing the way the party operated could always be defeated by a united anti-Starmer majority.
“Almost every item on the NEC agenda was pushed to a vote, with the leader’s coalition usually winning by a single vote,” says one insider.
It meant that progress was repeatedly delayed, internal elections were postponed and important decisions were deferred. Clearly, this was an unsustainable position.
Handily for Starmer, nine NEC seats – all held by members of the pro-Corbyn campaign group Momentum – were up for re-election in November, 2020.
Despite fierce opposition from the left, Starmer’s team successfully pushed for them to be elected by proportional representation. Momentum lost four of the nine seats they’d held, handing the new leader the NEC majority he craved.
A Labour insider said: “We now have NEC meetings that are focused and collegiate rather than miserable affairs. There are still disagreements, but they are within the spirit of the party.” The left strike back – then walk out
One memorable, if rather bizarre, incident perhaps typifies the marginalisation of the left in the post-Corbyn era.
In November 2020, just days after Starmer had finally secured his NEC majority, a virtual meeting of the ruling body convened to decide who would become its chair. Veteran MP Margaret Beckett, a former foreign secretary who had served as temporary party leader following the death of John Smith in 1994, was seen as the mainstream choice, but was opposed by the left.
The meeting took place barely 48 hours after Starmer had refused to restore the Labour whip to Corbyn over comments he made in response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report into anti-Semitism in the party when he was leader. This meant the left caucus were already spoiling for a fight.
They disapproved of Beckett, arguing that Ian Murray of the Fire Brigades Union should become NEC chair instead. With no hope of carrying the day, 13 of them staged a walkout – a protest which lost a lot of its impact on Zoom. Among the rebels was Unite’s Howard Beckett (no relation), who spent a minute stabbing at his screen trying to remove himself from the meeting while the others on the call looked on dumbfounded.
“Nothing sums up the left’s impotence more than a red-faced Howard trying and failing to hang up,” recalled one eyewitness.
Starmer wanted to make a clean break from the Jeremy Corbyn era STEFAN ROUSSEAU - PA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES The unions come aboard
As ever with the Labour party, gaining buy-in from the trade unions was crucial to the Starmer project, which is where backroom fixers Morgan McSweeney and Matt Pound come in.
Working in tandem, the pair – both hate figures for the left – were tasked with pushing through the internal changes Starmer believed were necessary if Labour were to stand any chance of winning the next election.
“Keir’s brief was very clear – he wanted the party to stop talking to itself and start talking to the country,” says one source.
After tense negotiations with union leaders, an agreement was reached that in any future leadership race, candidates would need to have the support of at least 20% of MPs – a high threshold virtually guaranteeing that no left-wing candidate can make it onto the ballot.
In addition, a six-month freeze date on party membership means left-wing activists are unable to simply join when a contest is announced, the tactic that proved so successful for Corbyn in 2015 and 2016.
Changes to the rules on “trigger ballots” have also made it much more difficult for local parties to dump their sitting MPs – a tactic regularly employed by left-wing activists during Corbyn’s time.
The changes – presented as “getting Labour election ready” – were passed at Labour’s annual conference last year, at a time when Starmer’s leadership was coming under pressure as the party failed to make much headway in the polls.
A source said: “There were powerful figures telling Keir and those around him not to push ahead with the rule changes, but it was utterly crucial.
“It’s never been about picking fights or settling scores – it’s about ensuring we face outwards, rather than worry about what factional groups within the party want. It’s no surprise that the loudest voices against were the factional warriors and the vested interests.”
‘No more Mike Hills’
McSweeney and Pound’s final task was to revamp the rules on candidate selection so that party bosses had the power to veto anyone deemed to be unsuitable. Or, as one insider put it, “to stop there ever being another Mike Hill”.
Hill was elected Labour MP for Hartlepool in 2017, but suspended by the party in September, 2019, over sexual harassment allegations. He was reinstated a month later, but quit parliament last year. The resulting by-election was won by the Conservatives’ Jill Mortimer.
According to Starmer’s team, the old candidate selection rules allowed shortlists to be stitched up by big-spending unions, and for would-be MPs to be parachuted in with little or no checks carried out on their suitability for the job.
“Imagine that you run your own business and have a family – you probably have loads of life experience that we need in the party,” says a source. “But you can’t get selected because you don’t have the time to attend every meeting or the money to run. We miss out on so many great candidates because of this.”
Once again, McSweeney and Pound – plus newly-appointed political director Luke Sullivan – managed to square off the unions so that new rules were brought in preventing local parties from blocking candidates, putting spending caps on campaigns and shortening selection timetables.
“In just two years, a dedicated team of Starmer enforcers have completely rewired the party, stamped down on factionalism, weeded out vested interests and given the leadership more control than any Labour leader has previously had,” says one insider. “The left really, really dislike this.”
The future
HuffPost UK understands that in the coming weeks, as working from home becomes a thing of the past, Labour officials loyal to Starmer will start moving into Southside, the party’s HQ five minute’s walk from parliament.
“Keir is adamant about the fact we have to keep pushing Labour away from its comfort zone and towards the voters,” says a source. “And he knows you can only do so much from the leader’s office or on Teams.
“You can expect to see some of his most loyal and effective people moving to Southside in the coming months. The work continues.”
Scattered corpses. A rain of rockets. A week inside Russia's war against Ukraine
Nabih Bulos Sat, March 5, 2022 A Ukrainian military vehicle speeds by on a main road near Sytnyaky, Ukraine. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
The shell that reamed the Russian soldiers' vehicle scattered them in all directions. One was face down on the asphalt, arms outstretched. Another was a mass of white and red in barely-there fatigues. Heat had singed the skin of the third, and the fourth had been thrown 130 feet, landing in a field by the road, torso mangled, legs twisted backward.
The firefight between Ukrainian and Russian forces — it had been a three-vehicle group, including an armored personnel carrier and a Ural truck — erupted on E40, an 8000-mile trans-European highway that threads its way from France’s Calais to Kazakhstan, passing through this spot near a roadside hotel. It's a 24-mile straight shot to the capital, Kyiv.
The battle ended Thursday morning. The cleanup began in the afternoon: A soldier directed traffic around bits of flesh, bone and metal; a tank jerkily hauled a burnt-out armored personnel carrier down the highway; men off to the side unloaded a truckload of large caltrops. Nobody touched the corpses.
This is Ukraine now. Eight years of fighting over the country’s breakaway Russian-backed eastern region have morphed into a vicious war for its existence. Kyiv is virtually encircled. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, suffers a daily pummeling from shells and missiles. Swaths of the nation's south have already fallen into Russian hands, as have parts of the east. A nuclear plant has been attacked; Russian shells rain on civilians, many of whom now sleep by the thousands in basements and subways.
More than 1 million have been turned into refugees. There are fewer safe places. The Ukrainian winter has turned to spring, but snow still falls through columns of smoke and over graves hurriedly dug.
A 500-mile drive through the country to outrun the start of the Russian blitz — from Shchastia in the disputed Donbas region to Kharkiv and back to the capital — underscores not only the challenges facing Moscow’s onslaught, but also the cost to Ukrainians grappling with the wounds of what had been for years called a “frozen conflict” before it exploded last month and startled the world. Residents carry supplies across a debris-strewn road Tuesday in Irpin, Ukraine. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
The most obvious expression of those wounds had been in eastern Ukraine. Driving through its towns and villages, one finds roads that just end.
Go down a street, take a turn and there’s a roadblock, a full-on security barrier or a checkpoint with stern soldiers admitting no passage. Beyond, just a few miles and a growing political chasm away, are the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics.
The two break-away states that Russian-backed separatists created in 2014 — and now the ostensible reason for Moscow’s war on Ukraine — amputated two-thirds of the two provinces (informally known as the Donbas region) from the country. Since then, Tania Nikolayevna, a pensioner in her sixties, has reckoned with that loss.
Before the war, she lived in Luhansk city, barely 10 miles away Shchastia, where like many of the provincial capital’s residents she would come to her family-owned dacha here. In 2014 it became her permanent home. What was once a 15-minute jaunt became an hours-long trek, a passage Nikolayevna didn’t do so much any more. She hadn’t visited her grandmother’s grave back in Luhansk for two years.
Wearing a red jacket and a white wool cap that framed her face, she stood with her husband — in gray overalls, an ill-fitting down olive jacket and fine-dotted black-and-white cap — queueing by a well, where residents moved a lever to pump water into plastic jugs. Such rituals had become a way of life.
This was last month, back in the "will he or won't he" phase of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to blitz into Ukraine with an estimated 190,000 troops. Those who thought he would invade surmised that he would satisfy himself with the declared borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics.
Shchastia was in the crosshairs. But Nikolayevna wouldn’t go.
“Of course we’re worried," she said. "But I’m afraid to leave because I have nothing."
Like many pensioners, she remembered better times, when this part of the nation was the industrial engine of Ukraine. The Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts cover some 9% of the country, but the war held 16% of the population in dense urbanized areas. Many of them grow around sprawling industrial projects such as the Luhansk power station. But fighting crept in, and things changed. An errant separatist shell had sheared some power lines and damaged it, authorities said, disrupting electricity and water pumping stations.
Young men had mostly vanished from these towns, seeking opportunity elsewhere after the war had denuded this area of economic life. For pensioners like Nikolayevna, whose best years were during the Soviet era, she reluctantly acknowledged that if the Russians came, it would perhaps be easier: She would be able to visit her Luhansk city again, its memory giving her voice a softer tone.
"It was beautiful: gorgeous parks, squares. But I also liked to walk in the forest,” she said. Now she was too afraid to go off-track “because of mines.”
And it didn’t matter to her if a person spoke Ukrainian or Russian, a division that had become almost a marker of loyalty. Most people in Shchastia spoke Russian, but Nikolayevna also "wished to hear Ukrainian." Soldiers check vehicles at a checkpoint on a main road entering Kyiv, Ukraine, on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
“I don’t want these parts to be separated,” she said, trudging a bit lopsided from the jugs.
“We don't care about money or salaries. All we care about is peace.”
But a fresh war came on the cold morning of Feb. 24. Shchastia, once a crossing into the Luhansk People’s Republic, was subsumed by the Russians on the first day of the offensive. Some who escaped sought sanctuary in Kharkiv, thinking that Ukraine’s second largest city, less than two dozen miles from the northern border with Russia, would hold special meaning for Moscow.
After all, they calculated, the bonds with Russia run deep: The city is largely Russian-speaking, and many have relatives across the border. Historically, Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine. When the pro-European protests ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, there were celebrations in Kyiv, but many in Kharkiv saw it as a coup. At one point, it was thought separatists would try to establish another pro-Russian breakaway enclave there.
Those bonds were tested but not broken after the 2014 war. Many spoke of relatives on the other side. They resented Kyiv’s dictats on using Ukrainian and demonizing the Russian language, feeling that the government was cutting another link with those they called brothers. A smoke column rises after an attack in Kyiv on Saturday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
But none of it mattered to Moscow. In recent days, Russia fired missiles into Kharkiv’s elegant squares and ornate government buildings, in scenes many said were reminiscent of the city’s 1941 fight against the Nazis. The ferocious Russian attacks perplexed Alexander, a 41-year-old martial-arts instructor from Kharkiv who gave only his first name for reasons of privacy.
“It’s as if it was to persuade a city, which was close to them, that they are invaders and aggressors,” he said.
Alexander spent six days in a shelter with his family before braving his way out of the city 20 minutes before an airstrike. Passing through the checkpoints, he spoke Ukrainian, a language he’s less comfortable with than Russian.
“I responded in Ukrainian to avoid any problems,” he said.
“Sure, we’d switch back after that to Russian, but it’s like a system, to determine if you’re friend or foe.”
Alexander would navigate a dangerous, new world, and with news of Kharkiv being surrounded, others raced toward Kyiv. Somehow, the internet was still working. Google Maps showed a do-not-pass sign on a few highways, but there still was a way out.
Ukrainian civilians pack a train leaving Irpin, Ukraine. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
It took hours, a dash through highways and pothole-scarred backroads that, when night fell, were illuminated only by a dim lamp at a checkpoint or the blaze of the Russian military truck torn in two by Ukrainian forces, a fire crackling out of its center.
Entering Kyiv, the highways were deserted. Cars sprinted nervously, with any distant explosion turbocharging drivers to greater speeds.
For months, Kyiv, a city of gold domes and a grand past bisected by the Dnieper River, found itself in the eye of a geopolitical storm. The cliche is that the storm is calmest at its center, and Kyiv had shown that, right up to the first day of the invasion. The Friday before it was, well, Friday night in a shabby but hip capital full of hip bars and hip restaurants now crammed with hordes of not-so-hip journalists quaffing hip-but-tasty cocktails alongside hip-looking Kyivites.
Yes, they had trained in the territorial defense force, and yes, they had prepared the guns. But people enjoyed a night out. Then the invasion began; rifles were handed out to all who were able, and homemade bombs were bottled. And now with a Russian convoy dozens of miles long waiting 18 miles away, what has the capital become? A waypoint on a desperate scramble? A city on borrowed time? A trap-filled fortress with an army and ready-insurgents, its boulevards a trap-filled gantlet promising death to all who pass unpermitted?
Either way, curfews descended. The war hadn’t fully entered Kyiv; it still remained calmest inside the storm.
Instead, the violence was intense at the periphery, near the Ukrainian soldiers stationed on E40 and in Makariv, a village of 10,000 people a few miles closer to Kyiv. On Wednesday, the Ukrainians clawed it back from Russian control, but only just — it remained surrounded on all sides, said Julia, an English teacher for children now turned translator for checkpoints.
The 27-year-old said Ukrainian troops had forced back part of a Russian column to the nearby fields and forests.
“They're panicking. It was a very long column, lots of tanks. Our army stopped them and they're now around our city,” she said to a sporadic snare-drum of cannon and artillery fire in the background. A Ukrainian tank driver stand ready on a tank in a ready position on a highway near Sytnyaky (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
Many others said they were determined to protect their homes. But Julia, who gave her first name for reasons of safety, gave a simpler reason why she and her husband were still in Makariv: “We didn’t have time.”
She was terrified, especially at night. But everyone left in the village was working to repel the Russians. That included a man nicknamed Malina, an old pensioner in an ancient-looking brown camouflage outfit, a toothless grin and bright-but-sad blue eyes. They didn’t seem anywhere near enough to face the firepower behind them.
“We’re pushing them back,” Julia said, “because this is another way to Kyiv.”
Not far away, and days later, the dead Russian soldiers lay in the cold, a hint of snow in the air. A battle had come and gone. More were in the offing. The sounds no one wants to hear were moving closer. A bit farther up the road lay a heart without a body. It was unclear from which soldier it had come.
The project goes beyond production: the cooperative’s laboratory is also a space for social and community meetings to fight for rights and generate collective awareness.
Maleza has come a long way in a short time and currently produces 400 bottles of shampoo and 600 bars of soap a week, as well as facial creams and makeup remover, among other products. They are sold across Argentina through the cooperative’s own digital platform and other marketing channels.
The cooperative is a powerful example of the so-called popular economy, through which millions of people unable to access a formal job or a bank loan fight against the lack of opportunities, in the midst of the overwhelming economic crisis in this South American country, where more than 40 percent of the population of nearly 46 million people lives in poverty.
The National Registry of Workers in the Popular Economy (Renatep) lists 2,830,520 people who earn their living from street vending, waste recycling, construction, cleaning, or working in soup kitchens.
A glance at Renatep provides a reflection of which social groups face the greatest disadvantages in the labor market, as there is a majority of women (57 percent) and young people between 18 and 35 years of age (62 percent).
The picture is completed when the numbers are compared with those of registered private sector wage-earners, where both women and young people are in the minority – 33 and 39 percent, respectively.
As part of its social assistance program focused on supporting the popular economy, the Ministry of Social Development granted Maleza a subsidy that enabled it to purchase the glass tubes, thermometers, oil extractors, steel tables and office equipment that today furnish what was once the dismantled warehouse of an old factory.
The young women rented the 213-square-meter premises in January 2021.
By moving out of the kitchen of a house and into a spacious, well-conditioned place of their own, they were able to increase production by 500 percent due to better working conditions and the possibility of stockpiling raw materials.
It took the young women themselves three months to renovate the property, which now has a meeting room, offices, bathrooms, dressing rooms and a large laboratory.
Letsy Villca (left) and Brisa Medina show some of the products made by Maleza. The members of the cooperative work four hours a day for an income equivalent to half the minimum monthly wage, paid by an employment incentive program of the Ministry of Social Development, whose amount will change as their business begins to make a profit. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
Changing the future
“’Maleza’ or weed is a plant that is pulled out of the ground and grows back again. A plant that is rejected, but resists, because it is strong and always grows back. That’s why we chose the name,” Brisa Medina, 22, explains to IPS.
The project goes beyond production: the cooperative’s laboratory is also a space for social and community meetings to fight for rights and generate collective awareness.
Maleza’s facility is located on the southside of the city of Buenos Aires, in Villa Lugano, a neighborhood of factories and low-income housing, far from the most sought-after areas of the Argentine capital.
The members of the cooperative – mainly women but also two men – live some 25 blocks (about 2.3 kilometers) from the plant, in Villa 20, one of the city’s largest shantytowns, home to more than 30,000 people.
Most of those who live in Villa 20 are Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants who work as textile workers for clothing manufacturers in precarious workshops set up in their own homes.
The trade is passed down from generation to generation, as are the harsh working conditions, in exchange for remuneration that is fixed unilaterally by the buyers, without the right to negotiate.
“We wanted to do something else: to have a project that was our own, that we liked, with a decent place to work, that would allow us to study and where we could use our knowledge, because many of us were classmates at a chemical technical school, but it is almost impossible to find a job,” Letsy, 22, tells IPS.
To their technical know-how, acquired through different courses after high school, the young women at Maleza added the ancestral knowledge handed down by their families, to manufacture cosmetics that are free of polluting chemicals and are produced in an environmentally friendly way.
“Since I was a child, I used to watch my mother prepare and sell medicinal herbs and natural products. That’s when I started to learn,” says Ruth Ortiz, who is 23 years old and has a four-year-old daughter.
Ruth adds that the goal was to make a product with which they could dream big in terms of sales, as many in the Villa earn some extra income by baking bread or cooking meals, but sell their goods only to neighbors.
“As soon as we felt ready, we started selling at street fairs and gradually improved our products and packaging,” she says.
For many of them the cooperative was more of a necessity than a choice, she acknowledges: “It is very difficult for anyone to get a job, but it is harder for people from the Villa. When you say where you live, they don’t want to hire you.”
Ruth is the only member of the cooperative who is a mother. She started working when her daughter was an eight-month-old baby. She often takes her to the laboratory and they all take turns caring for her, since one of the fundamental premises of Maleza is that women should be able to work outside the home, generate their own income and not be caught in the trap of unpaid housework.
Wages paid by social assistance
Brisa, who used to work as a cashier in a hairdresser’s shop, was left without a job in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and all non-essential businesses in Argentina were ordered to close. “Maleza was my salvation,” she says.
After the socioeconomic catastrophe of the first year of the pandemic, 2021 was a year of economic recovery in Argentina, although marked by an alarming level of precariousness in labor: official data show that almost three million jobs were created last year, but almost all of them are unregistered employees (1,329,000) and self-employed (1,463,000).
Informal or unregistered and self-employed workers are also the hardest hit by the loss of purchasing power in an economy with an inflation rate of over 50 percent a year.
Against this backdrop, Maleza is looking for a way forward. The factory’s current income is enough to pay the rent of the laboratory plus electricity, water and internet services and other expenses, but still not enough to pay the members wages.
“We are looking for ways to lower costs and increase profitability. Although sales have not yet reached the levels we believe they could, we are making progress in advertising and opening new marketing channels, so we hope to turn a profit by the middle of this year,” Julia Argnani, another member of the cooperative, tells IPS.
Today, Maleza is divided into four work areas: administration, production, marketing and communication, which includes the design and administration of social networking. It also seeks to be a tool for empowering other social cooperatives, by delivering, for example, its products in reusable bags manufactured by another group of women.
All the members of Maleza have a fixed income thanks to the fact that they are beneficiaries of Potenciar Trabajo, a plan for socio-productive inclusion and local development administered by the Ministry of Social Development.
The program gives Renatep registrants half of Argentina’s minimum wage: 16,500 pesos (approximately 150 dollars) a month, in exchange for a four-hour workday.
In this Southern Cone country, 45 percent of the population receives some form of social assistance through a vast network that includes direct economic assistance, food aid, subsidized electric and gas rates and vocational training.
In the case of Potenciar Trabajo, it is currently paid to 1,200,000 informal sector workers, according to data supplied to IPS by the Ministry of Social Development. The 150 dollars a month they are given amounts to a quarter of the income needed to keep a family of four out of poverty, according to the official statistics institute.
“Our goal is also to be proud of where we started from and to show that a women’s cooperative like ours can make quality products,” Julia explains.
Demonstrators gather at the Vancouver Art Gallery in support of Ukraine on Saturday, Feb. 26. Emad Agahi / Global News
Vancouver is set to play host to the latest in a series of rallies in support of the people of Ukraine on Saturday, as Russia’s war with the Eastern European country escalates.
Demonstrators are set to gather at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s north plaza at 1 p.m.
“The war is not over — the bombs are still killing civilians in Ukraine. People are losing their homes, savings, assets, and most importantly — their lives,” organizers wrote in a Facebook post for the event.
More than 1,000 rally against Russian invasion of Ukraine in Downtown Vancouver
More than 1,000 rally against Russian invasion of Ukraine in Downtown Vancouver
“It is our duty as people of this city to show support and stand in a united front against Russian invasion and annexation of a sovereign state.”
Another rally is scheduled for Sunday at 1 p.m. at Vancouver’s Jack Poole Plaza.
Western solidarity demos demand end to Ukraine war In the centre of Rome, unions and organisations rallied in a large 'procession of peace' (AFP/Filippo MONTEFORTE)
Filippo MONTEFORTE Sat, March 5, 2022
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday in cities from Paris to New York in support of Ukraine, demanding an end to Russia's invasion.
Citizens worldwide have been horrified by Russian President Vladimir Putin's attack, which began on February 24 and appeared to be entering a new phase with escalating bombardment.
Around 41,600 people demonstrated in 119 protests in towns and cities across France, according to interior ministry estimates. In Paris itself, some 16,000 turned out.
"Despite the suffering, we are going to win, we are sure of it," said Nataliya, a Franco-Ukrainian with the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag draped over shoulders, at the Paris protest.
She declined to give her full name because of concerns about the safety of her son in Ukraine. "We are proud of their courage, their determination," she added.
"We will be here every weekend, in Paris or elsewhere, until Putin leaves, withdraws his tanks," said Aline Le Bail-Kremer, a member of Stand With Ukraine, one of the organisers of the protest.
One of the largest rallies to demand the withdrawal of Russia's troops from Ukraine on the invasion's 10th day was in Zurich, where organisers believed 40,000 people took part
Switzerland's ATS news agency reported.
Demonstrators in the largest Swiss city called for "peace now", while others carried signs saying: "Stop War" and "Peace".
Hundreds also turned out in London, including Ukrainians whose families were forced to flee Russian bombs.
"We need to keep on reminding everyone, we need to stay united to support our country," said Olena Marcyniuk, 36, at a protest in central London's Trafalgar Square with her children aged 14 months and nine years.
"Maybe somehow (we can) get through to Russia as well that the world is for Ukraine and that it needs to start acting to stop the war."
Much of her family had fled, but her uncle stayed in Kyiv to "fight for the city", she said.
- 'No to Putin, no to NATO' -
In the centre of Rome, unions and organisations rallied in a large "procession of peace", demonstrating against Putin but also NATO.
"No base, no soldier, Italy out of NATO," chanted pacifists preceded by a large flag in the colours of the rainbow.
"This is perhaps one of the first real demonstrations for peace," Italian cartoonist, actor and writer Vauro Senesi told AFP.
"Here no one believes we make peace with arms, that we make it by sending arms to one of the parties (Ukraine)."
More than a thousand people also demonstrated in the Croatian capital Zagreb with banners saying: "Stop the War, Save Europe" and "Glory to Ukraine".
In the Balkans, the invasion has revived dark memories of the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which killed more than 100,000 people during a series of conflicts.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, several thousand people gathered in New York's Times Square.
They carried sunflowers, Ukraine's national flower, and signs calling to "Stop Russian terrorism".
At a podium, several speakers echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which NATO has so far resisted for fear of triggering a direct conflict with Russia.
Last weekend, hundreds of thousands also turned out in yellow and blue across Europe including in Russia, Germany, Spain, Finland and the Czech Republic.
