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South Sudan customs dispute taxes a long-suffering population
Even as three-quarters of South Sudan’s people face starvation, a squabble between the government and the UN over import taxes is leaving vital aid trucks stuck at the border.
The background: South Sudan’s trade ministry ordered this week that all goods trucks entering the East African country must pay a $300 tax. The measure was meant to ensure that the government got its share of revenue from imports that are often underbilled or misrepresented. There was supposed to be a carveout for UN aid vehicles, but if so, officials at the Ugandan border didn’t get the memo – at least not yet.
The bigger background: South Sudan is one of the world’s newest countries – and one of its poorest. After coming into existence in 2011 following years of war with the Sudanese government, it fell into its own civil war, which killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The legacy of that conflict – along with frequent natural disasters – persists: Seven million of the country’s 12 million people are facing hunger in the coming months. The harrowing civil war in Sudan, which just entered its second year, has exacerbated things, driving an estimated 500,000 people across the border into South Sudan, straining the country’s resources further.
Why the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not on track to be financed soon
The world faces a sustainable development crisis, and while most countries have strategies in place, they don’t have the cash to back them up. How far off track are we with the financing needed to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, ranging from quality education and health care to climate action and clean water?
Shari Spiegel, who runs the UN’s Financing for Sustainable Development Office, sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings this week. She explains that the SDGs were off track even before the pandemic and that now, owing to global crises, many poorer countries have slipped backwards.
“We actually started backtracking on many of these goals as countries were under enormous stress, and particularly the poorest countries,” she said, noting that the global output of many of the poorest nations has fallen by 30% — and some, such as the Small Island Developing States, by 40%. This has led to an enormous finance divide — raising SDG financing and investment gaps from $2 trillion a few years ago to around $4 trillion today.
So how can the UN restrengthen multilateralism and, in turn, help narrow this gap? Watch here.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
No pain, no grain
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s weekend meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has failed to revive the Black Sea grain deal. The UN-brokered agreement, which guaranteed safe passage for Ukrainian grain shipments to markets in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, had been on hold since July. Russia refused to extend the deal, citing a failure to honor a parallel agreement to remove obstacles to its food and fertilizer exports.
On Monday, Putin reiterated this demand. "We will be ready to consider the possibility of reviving the grain deal … we will do this as soon as all the agreements on lifting restrictions on the export of Russian agricultural products are fully implemented.” Moscow is also demanding that the Russian Agricultural Bank be reconnected to the SWIFT international payments system, from which it was cut off as part of EU sanctions for its invasion. The UN had offered to reinstate this relationship in July to keep the grain deal alive.
Erdogan offered his own prescription for reviving the deal: “Ukraine needs to especially soften its approaches in order for it to be possible for joint steps to be taken with Russia" and export more grain to Africa rather than Europe. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba “took note” of Erdogan’s position, but added, "We should not continue to be hostages to Russian blackmail, where Russia creates problems and then invites everyone to solve them.”
To deflect criticism that Russia is starving developing nations of much-needed food, Russia is set to supply up to one million tons of grain to Turkey at reduced prices for processing at Turkish plants and shipping to countries “most in need.” Putin is also brokering a deal to send free grain to six African countries: Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Eritrea, and Central African Republic.
But Russia’s moves aren’t all bread and roses: They will also conveniently purchase political capital for Russia’s war in Ukraine and expand its influence over the African continent, an arena where Russia has been increasingly active in recent years.
Hard Numbers: Greece’s wildfire tragedy, Pakistan’s cable car nightmare, Japan’s radioactive water, Sudan’s hungry children
18: The Greek fire service said Tuesday that 18 bodies, possibly of migrants, were found in an area of the Dadia forest along the Turkish border that’s been hit by wildfires. Local media have reported the findings of eight additional bodies – if confirmed, this would bring the total to 26. Large swaths of southern Europe are fighting wildfires and on alert due to extreme heat and high winds.
900: Their nightmare has ended. Eight people – two teachers and six schoolchildren – have been saved after being trapped in a cable car stuck 900 feet in the air amid the mountains of Pakistan’s Battagram region. A military helicopter and zip line were used in the rescues after a cable snapped, leaving the car dangling over a ravine. Many Pakistani children living in remote areas rely on dilapidated cable cars to get to school.
1.34 million: Japan is set to unleash radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant that has accumulated since the facility was hit by a tsunami in 2011, causing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The move will see the 1.34 million tons of water filtered, diluted, and then released into the Pacific over 30 years. Tokyo insists this is important for decommissioning the plant, where the radioactive water has been stored in tanks for more than a decade, but the plan has caused uproar in neighboring countries worried about contamination.
500: Hunger has claimed the lives of 500 Sudanese children since fighting erupted in April, according to Save the Children. Clashes between warring military factions have forced the human rights group to shutter many of its nutrition centers in the country. While a million people have fled to neighboring countries, 31,000 children in Sudan are stuck without access to aid or medical care.
Untangling the global water crisis
Access to clean and drinkable water is a significant challenge all over the world. UN-Water Chair Gilbert Houngbo joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to shed light on the complexity of the issue, which he says is “a combination of bad governance and lack of resources.”
He stresses that water needs to become "everyone's business," and investment in water-related infrastructure is key. Houngbo points out that agriculture is responsible for “75% of water use,” so making it “climate-friendly” is a necessary step.
The situation in Yemen, where there is virtually no water access, highlights the challenges faced in addressing the problem. Houngbo notes that a multi-pronged approach that involves investment in infrastructure and technology is key – especially in areas like desalination. He acknowledges that desalination is expensive, and official development cooperation can play a role in addressing the issue.
Watch the GZERO World episode: The uncomfortable truth about water scarcity
With a little Kelp from our friends!
Kelp! It's slimy, it's tangly, it's ... delicious! And experts say this nearly magical sea plant can help tackle two big global challenges: climate change and hunger. To learn more, GZERO Reports headed out to an oyster farm in Long Island to meet Michael Doall, associate director of shellfish research at Stony Brook University. Doall, dubbed the "Johnny Appleseed of Sugar Kelp," explains how the bounty of the sea can help address some of the problems we are creating on land.
This clip is part of an upcoming episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer. Check local US television listings to watch, or find the episode on GZERO's YouTube channel.
Food emergency: what to do when people are hungry now
On global issues, the international community must walk and chew gum at the same time. It needs to learn to deal with simultaneous crises that play off each other, says UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens.
That's why we dropped the ball on hunger.
Now the needs are huge and growing. We haven't seen a lot of images of starvation yet, but they are coming, Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
"We have to be able to rise to this challenge, and see it as something that's in both our interest," she says, adding that “we have done heroic things before on the humanitarian front — it's not like we're not collectively capable."
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
"We're in this together" — UN Foundation chief
Global development has been going backwards since even before the pandemic, and there's no end in sight.
Extreme poverty is now rising again, and fraught politics at every level is making it harder to fight inequality around the world.
But it's not an irreversible trend, UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
“The challenge of our times," she says, is "to re-galvanize that spirit of 'we're in it together' — [that] we have more in common than we have that divides us.“