Papua New Guinea
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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Labour the point
Submitted by ni-radio on August 15, 2007 - 12:00am.
Each time a person becomes rich, you can bet your bottom dollar that it has come at a cost to the wealth or health of others. As an upper class of millionaires emerges in any country, they often do so off the backs of imported labour, creating a layer of second-class citizens. China is no exception. More than 120 million rural workers have now left their land and migrated to factories and developments both inside and outside their country. Once there, they can earn a better living than in their fields by mortgaging their bodies to their bosses. But what are these capitalist realities doing to socialist principles? And is the Chinese Communist Party bringing their people out of poverty or throwing away a whole generation of its citizens to feed capitalism's new machines? Through a range of revealing discussions, Monina Wong, from Labour Action China, helps us find some answers.
- In foreign policy, the Chinese Government is substituting development aid for diplomacy. Nicola Bullard, a senior associate with Focus on the Global South, and Daniel Bibiero from the Mozambiquen NGO Justicia Ambientale investigate the results.
- When Chinese state-owned enterprises export Chinese workers to develop and construct their overseas projects, cultural clashes and conflict result. Yat Paol, who works with the NGO called the Bismark Ramu Group in Madang Province in Papua New Guinea, lays out the concerns held by Papuans about the Ramu nickel mine development, owned and operated from China.
- Then today's microphones turn to Iran, to hear Pakistani sociologist Farida Shaheed explain why women are still being stoned to death, and the international campaign that's now developing to stop it.
Carrying on with the Asian and Pacific themes in today's program, the music that you'll be listening to comes from the CD Nankuru Naisa - in which Bob Brozman's island-beats intertwine with the Japanese songs of Takashi Hirayasu.
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Radio New Internationalist – Landing rights
Submitted by ni-radio on March 2, 2007 - 11:48pm.
Today we accompany Indigenous people through battles won and battles won in Africa and the Pacific. Although these are battles with no gunfire, the cultural and economic injuries are just as momentous. Jim Brooks – an Australian human rights lawyer who’s worked with Aboriginal people for the last two decades and was the chief administrator on Australia’s Stolen Children’s Inquiry – co-hosts today’s program as we start off by exploring the forced removal of Indigenous kids that has shamed countries like Canada, the United States and Australia. Then its off around the world:
- To Botswana, where the Jumanda Gakereborn and the Kalahari Bushmen are returning home triumphant after rolling back attempts by their Government and De Beers to rob them of their land for diamond mining;
- To Hawai’i, to learn the language of self-determination… and dispossession with author and human rights advocate Haunani-Kay Trask. It’s not black and white, you know. Haunani shares also with us some of her poetry about self-determination from her latest book;
- To West Papua, as former Political Counsel in the US Embassy in Jakarta, Edmund McWilliams, updates us about Indonesia’s military occupation of West Papua, and the arms that the US continues to give the Indonesian military effort; and
- To Papua New Guinea, where Annie Kajir from the Environmental Law Centre in Port Moresby tells us how the lobbying done by herself and other PNG campaigners have reduced Europeans imports of PNG wood by 80 per cent.
Some juicy audio morsels pepper this week’s program from Rene Lacaille and Bob Brozman’s fabulous album DigDig … where the pulse of the Pacific melts into the arms of Bluegrass and Latin. You’ll find them in the Riverboat Records Series on the World Music Network’s website.
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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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