Brazil
AIDS without the aid
Submitted by ni-radio on June 18, 2008 - 12:00am.
In the Western World it feels like HIV/AIDS is well and truly under control. Yet world figures tell a different story. HIV/AIDS kills more people than all world wars and conflict - 1.2 million in 2007. The United Nations estimate of the people living with HIV last year was over 33 million. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, over 2,000 men become infected every day. But while the United Nations has calculated that the world needs $41 billion annually by 2010 to reach full universal access to treatment prevention and care of AIDS, only a proportion of that has been pledged so far. and diplomat, Stephen Lewis, co-director of AIDS-Free World, and before that the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, joins Chris Richards to dissect the politics behind HIV/AIDS - the indifference of Western World governments; the negligence of international institutions; and the mass misogyny that has meant that women in parts of Africa are now being deliberately infected at a far greater rate than men.
• Brazil was the first nation to provide anti-AIDS therapies free to patients who were prescribed it. Dr André de Mello e Souza - from the Pontifíca Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro - explains how dusting-down the dollars that big pharmaceutical companies make from AIDS treatment produces better health for less cost in Brazil.
• The militias in Congo are using the genitals of women as a weapon of war on a massive scale - leaving their torn flesh open to HIV. Marie Claire Faray, spokesperson of COMMON CAUSE UK - a platform for Congolese women in the United Kingdom - explains the war on women and what the international community must do to help stop it.
• In Tamil Nadu in the south of India, there is now a whopping 99 per cent AIDS-awareness. Dheepthi Namasivayam talks with sex workers, who are now AIDS awareness workers with the Indian Community Welfare Organization, about the power of their voices.
The spotlight in this program is on Kenge Kenge - which, roughly speaking, means the fusion of small, exhilarating instruments. In the CD Introducing Kenge Kenge, traditional sound boxes, one-string-fiddles and gongs combine with modern day drums and flutes to produce their dance-until-dawn Afrobeat.
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Fuel for thought
Submitted by ni-radio on March 26, 2008 - 11:12pm.
The global impact of using food supplies to fuel cars...
As world leaders prepare to fly into Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, for the next round of United Nations climate change talks, we’re wondering – realistically – what these talks are going to achieve. They’re supposed to strengthen global action on climate change, but just how we’re going to achieve those all-important reductions in greenhouse gases and the cooling of the environment are no where in sight. Far from focussing on how to stop the very activities that we now know lead to higher carbon emissions, governments are hitching up to the big business bandwagon that biofuels (more accurately called agrofuels) offer an important plank in combating climate change. From the Rich World, it sounds promising – replacing oil with fuels that can be naturally grown. But what do the people of the Poor World where the crops are being grown think? Today’s program asks them.
- The current talks in Bangkok are framing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. Fiu Elisara from the O le Siosiomaga Society in Samoa assesses how effective the Kyoto protocol been so far in combating the effects of climate change in the Pacific.
- Rachel Smolker – author of a report called The Real Cost of Agrofuels: Food, Forest and the Climate – gives a global assessment of the impacts of pouring the world’s grain supplies into our cars.
- Lucia Ortiz – a Brazilian geologist – reports about how agrocrops are dispossessing her people of land and resources.
- We are being told that economic growth in developing countries like China and India will surely kill us all. But how often are these countries being asked for their side of the story? Soumitra Ghosh – who works with the North Eastern Society for Preservation of Nature and Wild Life in West Bengal, India gives his assessment of agrofuels.
- British-based Danny Chivers performs one of his action poems, offering a straightforward but supremely effective solution to reducing our carbon footprint.
Today’s CD is called Songs of the Volcano performed Bob Brozman and the Rabaul community’s local string-bands in Papua New Guinea. Two volcanic eruptions have destroyed Rabaul twice in a century so the energy in this CD reflects an unfailing optimism in the face of adversity – something that we’re going to need as we tackle climate change.
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Power to the people
Submitted by ni-radio on January 30, 2008 - 5:11pm.
'We are the millions of women and men, organisations, networks, movements, trade unions from all parts of the world. We come from rural zones and urban centres. We are of all ages, cultures and beliefs, but are united by the strong conviction that another world is possible. With our diversity - which is our strength - we invite all men and women to undertake throughout this week creative actions, activities, events and convergences focusing on the issues and expressing them in the ways they choose.' This was the call to action made by the organizers of the World Social Forum (WSF). The first year, 20,000 responded to such a call. The next year - 100,000. Now in its eighth year, an estimated million people took part in a Global Day of Action on 26 January 2008. Nicola Bullard, from Thai-based Focus on the Global South, joined Radio New Internationalist's Chris Richards to whip around the world so that we can hear what people were doing and saying out there on the streets.
- On the beach at Rio de Janeiro, Moema Miranda from the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE) remembers back to the conversations around the table at which the WSF was born.
- Outside a seminar room in Lahore, Mahar Safdar Ali - the General Secretary of Anjuman Asiaye Awam - explains the connections between nuclear weapons and visas.
- Fresh from a rally in Seoul, young organizer Mikyung Ryu explains the Korean issues that are motivating her people to act.
Befitting the diverse energy of the WSF Global Day of Action, African and Colombian beats collide in today's CD - Voodoo Love Inna Champeta-land performed by Colombiafrica: guaranteed to get all ages up from their seats and dancing in the streets.
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Radio New Internationalist – Common senses
Submitted by ni-radio on May 10, 2007 - 12:00am.
While mainstream media steer a hard right away from good news stories, the everyday ‘wins’ of ordinary people are getting ignored. As a consequence, opportunities to be inspired by and learn from the victories of progressive people in other countries get lost. This program showcases progressive people who are using common senses to get their messages across: people presenting their messages through our five bodily senses – taste, sight, hearing, touch and smell – in a way that dares us to dream and makes our souls smile. Together with co-host Dinyar Godrej – who for the past few months has been busy collecting big visions from the Majority World, we chat with:
- Walter Otis Tapfumaneyi, from Panos Southern Africa, about Radio Listening Clubs – a remarkably democratic initiative through which discussions amongst rural Africans are recorded, then played on national radio programs to relevant parliamentarians or policy makers for their response.
- Damian Platt from AfroReggae about how song and music is being used in Brazil to keep people alive.
- Francisco Pancho Ramos Stierle about a tasty bit of resistance from Latin America: an organic bread being baked to challenge Mexico’s largest bread-baking company thought by some Mexicans to be financing fraud by the current Government.
In addition, some poetry readings so that we can experience how sound can touch the heart. And ambient funk from Asia from our album of the week Ryukyu Underground. This CD takes original Japanese recordings and mixes them for dance.
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New Internationalist (NI) workers' co-operative exists to report on issues of world poverty and inequality; to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide; to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary to meet the basic needs of all; and to bring to life the people, the ideas and the action in the fight for global justice.
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