- Subramanian panel bats for higher MSP, lifting pulses export ban:-
- Delink drug prices from R&D costs: UN
- Five museums from India among top 25 in Asia: Report
- India Loses WTO Appeal In US Solar Dispute
- Environment Ministry celebrates International Ozone Day
- Environment Ministry To Develop Next Generation Refrigerants
Subramanian panel bats for higher MSP, lifting pulses export ban:-
A panel led by Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has asked the central government to immediately set higher minimum support prices for all pulses and has sought development of genetically modified technologies and elimination of the export ban on pulses and stock limits.
In its report, the panel has recommended that the government should immediately announce an MSP of Rs 40 per kg for gram for rabi 2016, up from Rs 35 now, and Rs 60 per kg for both urad and tur for kharif 2017, up from Rs 50 per kg for the former and Rs 52.50 for the latter.
Minimum support prices for other pulses should be increased by the same percentage as calculated for tur, urad, and gram.
For long, pulses have been the step-child of Indian agriculture policy, compared with cereals.Time has come to change it.
The panel has recommended in its report that the government should build up 2 million tonnes of pulses stock with targets for individual pulses, especially tur (3.5 lakh tonnes) and urad (2 lakh tonnes). These should be built up gradually but opportunistically, buying when prices are low as in the current year.
To ensure effective procurement, a High Level Committee comprising Ministers of Finance, Agriculture, and Consumer Affairs and Principal Secretary to PM should be constituted. There should be weekly reporting by procurement agencies on the ground with physical verification of procurement.
The report also recommended that the government should procure pulses on a “war footing”, create a buffer stock of 2 million tonnes, push states to delist pulses from the APMC, and prescribed subsidies to farmers for growing pulses.
It is the strong view of this report that enhancing domestic productivity and production of pulses rapidly and sustainably is the only reliable way of minimising volatility in the market and safeguarding interests of farmers and consumers.
The CEA report pitched for encouraging “development of GM technologies” to boost pulses productivity. It also said expeditious approval should be given to indigenously developed new varieties of pulses.
Furthermore, it suggested elimination of the export ban on pulses and stock limits, and “more generally, the use of trade policy to control domestic prices, which induces policy volatility, should be avoided.
With the government gearing up to achieve storage of a record 2 million tonnes of pulses, the committee headed by chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian advocated setting up of a new body in public private partnership (PPP) mode to handle these stocks.
Delink drug prices from R&D costs: UN
As the debate over unaffordable blockbuster drugs such as Sovaldi and Epipen rages on, a landmark report by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines has called for delinking drug prices from research and development (R&D) costs.
The report calls for human rights to be placed over intellectual property laws and all countries must freely be able to use flexibilities granted under TRIPS to access affordable medicines.
Calls for sanctions
One of the key recommendations of the report is that countries that threaten, and retaliate against, generic drugs makers in countries such as India for using their entitlements under the TRIPS Agreement will be forced to face significant sanctions.
Further, the panel — convened to advise U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — has called for greater transparency in drug pricing and public health impact assessments in free trade agreements.
Policy incoherencies arise when legitimate economic, social and political interests and priorities are misaligned or in conflict with the right to health.On the one hand, governments seek the economic benefits of increased trade. On the other, the imperative to respect patents on health technologies could, in certain instances, create obstacles to the public health objectives and the right to health.
The report recognises the incoherence between the human rights and the intellectual property rules.
This report gets to the heart of the problem with access to medicines — that the intellectual property rules promoted by the pharmaceutical industry are at odds with the human right to health.
If implemented, the report’s recommendations will go a long way towards ensuring all people have access to affordable quality medicines.
Access to medicines is not just a poor country problem. The high price of drugs is crippling healthcare systems across the world.
Millions of people are suffering and dying because the medicines they need are too expensive.Few organisations have called on the U.N. panel to explore recommendations such as a ban on intellectual property rules in trade agreements and excluding medicines on national lists or on the WHO List for Essential Medicines from intellectual property rules
Five museums from India among top 25 in Asia: Report
Five Indian museums feature among the best 25 in Asia while Leh’s ‘Hall of Fame’ has topped the India list as a “must-visit” place by travellers in a survey.
The other top four most rated museums of India are — Bagore Ki Haveli (Udaipur), Victoria Memorial Hall (Kolkata), Salar Jung Museum (Hyderabad) and Jaisalmer War Museum (Jaisalmer).
Darshan Museum (Pune), Don Bosco Centre for Indigenous Cultures (Shillong), Heritage Transport Museum (Taoru), Siddhagiri Museum (Kolhapur), and Gandhi Smriti (New Delhi) also figure in the top-10 list for India.
Museums provide a passageway into the history and culture of a place and the Travellers’ Choice awards for Museums are a ready reckoner for travellers keen to enrich their knowledge about the cities they travel to.
India Loses WTO Appeal In US Solar Dispute
India lost its appeal at the World Trade Organisation in a dispute over solar power , failing to overturn a US complaint that New Delhi had discriminated against importers in the Indian solar power sector.
The WTO’s appeals judges upheld an earlier ruling that found India had broken WTO rules by requiring solar power developers to use Indian-made cells and modules. The appeal ruling is final and India will be expected to bring its laws into compliance with the WTO rules.
US solar exports to India have fallen by more than 90 percent since New Delhi brought in the rules, the statement said.
As in the earlier ruling, which was issued in February this year, the judges said India could not claim exemptions on the basis of that its national solar power sector was included in government procurement, nor on the basis that solar goods were in short supply.
There was also no justification on the grounds of ensuring ecologically sustainable growth or combatting climate change.
The dispute, which the United States first launched in February 2013, involved an increasingly common target of trade disputes – solar power, with an increasingly common complaint – local content requirements.
The appeal ruling came just days after India launched a WTO complaint against subsidies for the solar industry in eight US states.
Environment Ministry celebrates International Ozone Day
HFCs are good in that they don’t contribute to ozone depletion, but they emit greenhouse gases, causing an increase in global warming. This increase will have a global impact, including India where floods and droughts will become more frequent
CFC, HCFC and HFC are all compounds of gases used in refrigerants, coolants, solvents, contact lenses and foam industry among others — the former two contain chlorine and flourine, two chemicals which are the major cause of ozone depletion, while HFC, though causing no harm to the ozone layer, contributes to global warming.
Environment Ministry To Develop Next Generation Refrigerants
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has announced an ambitious collaborative research and development programme to develop next generation, sustainable refrigerant technologies as alternatives to HFCs.
This initiative will bring government, research institutes, industry and civil society together to develop long-term technology solutions to mitigate the impact of current refrigerant gases on the ozone layer and climate.
With this initiative, India reaffirms its commitment to working with all other nations to safeguard the Earth’s natural ecosystem.
Some of the key players of the initiative include the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and its allied institutions; Department of Science and Technology; Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences; as well as key industry players in the sector.
Members of this initiative have already had multiple rounds of consultation to reach a consensus on the contours and decide on the roadmap for this initiative.
India has a small carbon footprint at the individual level and its sustainable lifestyle results in low contribution of the country to overall emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances, as compared with other developed countries.
However, there is an urgent need for developing new technologies indigenously as alternatives available today are patented apart from being expensive.
A research based programme to look for cost effective alternatives to the currently used refrigerant gases is, therefore, essential.
The initiative is a significant step forward in line with India’s national focus on research, innovation and technology development and Mission Innovation.
The research initiative of the Ministry will be led by the CSIR’s Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad.
The MoEF and CC, along with the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has also decided to create a corpus fund for this research programme, with Industry also committing to contribute to the effort.
The collaboration of research institutes as well as industry will create a larger ecosystem for developing sustainable solutions, and eventually deploying low global warming potential – GWP HFCs on a national scale.
By establishing an effective collaboration between all important stakeholders, the initiative is focused on prioritising areas of research in new refrigerant technologies and natural refrigerants.
This shall help the country leapfrog from the current technology high GWP HydroFluoroCarbons or HFCs to technologies with lower climate impact.
The ministry reiterated that the proposed initiative is an important step in the direction of enabling the country to achieve national development goals while continuing to maintain a sustainable environmental footprint.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.