Paris:

Halving food waste could cut climate-warming emissions and end undernourishment for 153 million people globally, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the UN’s food agency said in a joint report Tuesday. 

Around a third of food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization — resulting in useless emissions and less available food for those who need it. 

By 2033, the number of calories lost and wasted between produce leaving farms and reaching shops and households could be more than twice the number of calories currently consumed in low-income countries in a year, the report warned. 

Cutting in two the amount of food lost and wasted along the journey from farm to fork “has the potential to reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by four per cent and the number of undernourished people by 153 million by the year 2030,” according to the report.

“This target is a highly ambitious upper bound and would require substantial changes by both consumers and producer side,” they added. 

Agriculture, forestry and other land use account for around one-fifth of global human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. 

UN nations have committed to cutting per capita food waste by 50 percent by 2030 as part of sustainable development goals but there is no global target for reducing food loss along the production supply chain.

Between 2021 and 2023, fruit and vegetables accounted for more than half of the lost and wasted food given their extremely perishable nature and relatively short shelf life, according to the report. 

Cereals followed, accounting for over a quarter of lost and wasted food.  

The FAO estimates that approximately 600 million people will be facing hunger in 2030.

“Measures to reduce food loss and waste could significantly increase food intake worldwide as more food becomes available and prices fall, ensuring greater access to food for low-income populations,” the report said. 

Halving food loss and waste by 2030 could result in increased food intake by 10 per cent for low-income countries, six per cent in lower middle-income nations and four per cent in upper middle-income ones, it added. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Doha, Qatar:

Taliban authorities were told women must be included in public life, UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo said on Monday as she defended a decision to sideline civil society groups at official talks in Doha.

Rights organisations have strongly criticised the controversial UN move to exclude the groups, including women’s rights activists, from the two-day meeting on Afghanistan as the price for the Taliban government’s participation.

“Authorities will not sit across the table with Afghan civil society in this format, but they have heard very clearly the need to include women and civil society in all aspects of public life”, DiCarlo told a Doha news conference.

The UN-hosted meeting began on Sunday and is the third such gathering to be held in Qatar in a little over a year, but the first to include the Taliban authorities who seized power in Afghanistan for a second time in 2021.

The talks were due to discuss increasing engagement with Afghanistan and a more coordinated response to the country, including economic issues and counter-narcotics efforts.

The international community has wrestled with its approach to the Taliban since they returned to power, with no country officially recognising its government.

 ‘Gender apartheid’ 

The group has imposed a strict interpretation of Islam, with women subjected to laws characterised by the UN as “gender apartheid”.

The Taliban refused an invitation to Doha talks in February, insisting on being the only Afghan representatives, to the exclusion of civil society groups. But their condition was accepted in the build-up to this latest round.

The United States said it agreed to participate in Monday’s talks after receiving assurances that the talks would meaningfully discuss human rights.

US point man on Afghanistan Thomas West and Rina Amiri, the US special envoy on the rights of Afghan women and girls, in Doha “made clear that the Afghan economy cannot grow while half the population’s rights are not respected”, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said.

DiCarlo, who chaired the UN talks in the Qatari capital, said she “hopes” that “there’ll be new consideration” of Taliban government policy on women in public life including girls’ education.

The UN and international delegations will have the chance to meet with civil society representatives, including women’s rights groups, following the close of the main meetings.

But Amnesty International chief Agnes Callamard said in a statement ahead of the talks that “caving into the Taliban’s conditions to secure their participation in the talks would risk legitimising their gender-based institutionalised system of oppression”.

The Taliban authorities have repeatedly said the rights of all citizens are guaranteed under Islamic law.

The head of the Taliban delegation, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, told the more than 20 assembled special envoys and UN officials at the opening session that diplomats should “find ways of interaction and understanding rather than confrontation”, despite “natural” differences in policy.

 ‘Engaging constructively’ 

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is keen on engaging constructively with Western nations as well,” Mujahid said.

“Like any sovereign state, we uphold certain religious and cultural values and public aspirations that must be acknowledged,” he added.

Mujahid also pressed to end sanctions, saying Afghans are “being ganged up on”.

The Taliban government spokesman questioned whether ongoing sanctions were “fair practice” after “wars and insecurity for almost half a century as a result of foreign invasions and interference”.

Russia, which has maintained an embassy in Kabul, hinted it could drop its own sanctions, saying the group were the de facto authorities.

“We’ve been saying consistently that you have to recognise this fact and deal with them as such because, whether you like it or not, this movement is running the country now. You cannot simply ignore that,” said Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya.

DiCarlo said the issue of sanctions was “raised” but not discussed in depth.

“It’s a member-state issue whether they’re going to continue certain sanctions or not. The sanctions are on people, not on the country at large,” she said

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The United Nations (UN) political chief who will chair the first meeting between Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and envoys from about 25 countries answered sharp criticism that Afghan women have been excluded, saying on June 26 that women’s rights will be raised at every session.

Undersecretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo stressed to a small group of reporters that the two-day meeting starting on Sunday is an initial engagement aimed at initiating a step-by-step process with the goal of seeing the Taliban “at peace with itself and its neighbours and adhering to international law,” the UN Charter and human rights.

This is the third UN meeting with Afghan envoys in Qatar’s capital, Doha, but the first that the Taliban are attending. They weren’t invited to the first and refused to attend the second. Other attendees include envoys from the European Union, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the United States, Russia, China and several of Afghanistan’s neighbours, DiCarlo said.

The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021 as United States and NATO forces withdrew following two decades of war. No country officially recognises them as Afghanistan’s government, and the UN has said that recognition is almost impossible while bans on female education and employment remain in place and women can’t go out without a male guardian.

When Ms. DiCarlo met with senior Taliban officials in Kabul in May, she said she made clear that the international community is concerned about four things: the lack of an inclusive government, the denial of human rights especially for women and girls, and the need to combat terrorism and the narcotics trade.

“The issue of inclusive governance, women’s rights, human rights writ large, will be a part of every single session,” she said. “This is important, and we will hear it again and again, I’m sure from quite a number of us.”

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International criticised the United Nations for not having Afghan women and civil society representatives at the table with the Taliban.

Ms. DiCarlo described the meeting as a process. “This is not an inter-Afghan dialogue,” she stressed. “I would hope we could get to that someday, but we’re not there.”

The Taliban’s Foreign Ministry on June 26 reiterated the concerns they want to raise — restrictions on Afghanistan’s financial and banking system, development of the private sector and countering drug trafficking. Ms. DiCarlo said they also raised Afghanistan’s vulnerability to climate change.

She said discussions on the first day of the Doha meeting on Sunday will focus on how the world would engage with the Taliban to achieve the objectives of peace and its adherence to international law and human rights.

The assessment calls for a step-by-step process, where each side would respond to actions taken by the other.

On the second day, the participants will discuss the private sector, including getting more women into the workforce through microfinance projects, as well as counter-narcotics efforts, such as alternative livelihoods and support for drug addicts, she said. “Hopefully, it will achieve some progress, but it will be slow,” Ms. DiCarlo said.

She stressed that the meeting isn’t about the Taliban and doesn’t signify any recognition of Afghan’s rulers as the country’s official government. “That’s not in the cards,” she said.

“This is about Afghanistan and the people and their need to feel a part of the international community and have the kinds of support and services and opportunities that others have — and they’re pretty blocked off right now,” Ms. DiCarlo said.

Before the meeting, the UN political chief met with the Afghan diaspora. After the meeting on Tuesday, she said the UN and the envoys will meet with civil society representatives including women, and private sector representatives mainly living in Afghanistan.

Pratik Mathur. File
| Photo Credit: ANI

India has slammed Pakistan for its “baseless and deceitful narratives” as Islamabad’s envoy made references to Kashmir in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA.)

“Earlier in the day, one delegation misused this forum to spread baseless and deceitful narratives, which is not a surprise,” Minister in India’s Permanent Mission to the UN Pratik Mathur said on June 25.

“I will not dignify these remarks with any response, just to save the valuable time of this august body,” he said. Mr. Mathur was delivering India’s statement at the UN General Assembly debate on the Annual Report of the United Nations Security Council.

His retort came after Pakistan’s UN envoy Munir Akram made references to Kashmir in his remarks from the General Assembly podium during the debate.

Pakistan regularly raises the issue of Jammu and Kashmir at various UN platforms, irrespective of the subject matter being discussed or the theme of the forum and fails to get any support or traction.

India has previously rejected Pakistan’s attempts to raise the Kashmir issue at international forums, asserting that the “Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the Union Territory of Ladakh have been, are and will always remain integral and inalienable parts of India.”

Geneva:

Israeli forces may have repeatedly violated the laws of war and failed to distinguish between civilians and fighters in the Gaza conflict, the UN human rights office said on Wednesday.

Separately, the head of a UN inquiry accused the Israeli military of carrying out an “extermination” of Palestinians.

In a report on six deadly Israeli attacks, the UN human rights office (OHCHR) said Israeli forces “may have systematically violated the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack”.

“The requirement to select means and methods of warfare that avoid or at the very least minimise to every extent civilian harm appears to have been consistently violated in Israel’s bombing campaign,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said.

Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva characterised the analysis as “factually, legally, and methodologically flawed”. “Since the OHCHR has, at best, a partial factual picture, any attempt to reach legal conclusions is inherently flawed,” it said.

In a separate meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the head of a UN Commission of Inquiry, Navi Pillay, said perpetrators of abuses in the conflict must be brought to account.

She repeated findings from a report published last week that both Hamas militants and Israel have committed war crimes but said that Israel alone was responsible for the most serious abuses under international law known as “crimes against humanity”.

She said the scale of Palestinian civilian losses amounted to “extermination”.

“We found that the immense numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza and widespread destruction of civilian objects and infrastructure were the inevitable result of an intentional strategy to cause maximum damage,” Pillay, a former UN rights chief and South African judge, told the meeting.

Israel, which does not typically cooperate with the inquiry and alleges an anti-Israel bias, chose the mother of a hostage to speak on its behalf and criticised the report on the grounds that it did not give due attention to hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.

“We can do better for them. The hostages need us,” Meirav Gonen, the mother of 23-year-old hostage Romi Gonen, said in a tearful appeal.

Heavy Weaponry

Israel’s air and ground offensive has killed more than 37,400 people in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory, according to health authorities there.

Israel launched its assault after Hamas fighters stormed across the border into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 people hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

The UN rights office report details six incidents that took place between Oct. 7 and Dec. 2, in which it was able to assess the kinds of weapons, the means and the methods used in these attacks.

“We felt that it was important to get this report out now, especially because in the case of some of these attacks, some eight months have passed, and we are yet to see credible and transparent investigations,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN human rights office.

She added that in the absence of transparent investigations, there would be “a need for international action in this regard”.

Pillay also condemned Israel’s military methods in Gaza, saying the use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas “constitutes an intentional and direct attack on the civilian population”.

Commissioner Chris Sidoti later told reporters that its findings, which are being shared with the International Criminal Court, showed that Israel was “one of the most criminal armies in the world.”

He said the inquiry, which aims to investigate the treatment of hostages, as well as that of thousands of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails, had so far been hindered by Israel.

“Far from having cooperation, what we have encountered is obstruction,” he said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

“Thousands of journalists have fled their home countries in recent years to escape political repression, save their lives and escape conflict – but in exile they are often vulnerable to physical, digital and legal threats,” a U.N. investigator said on May 22.

Irene Khan said in a report to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that the number of journalists in exile has increased as the space for independent and critical media has been “shrinking in democratic countries where authoritarian trends are gaining ground.”

Today, she said, free, independent and diverse media supporting democracy and holding the powerful to account are either absent or severely constrained in over a third of the world’s nations, where more than two-thirds of the global population lives.

The U.N. independent investigator on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression said most journalists and some independent media outlets have left their countries so they can report and investigate freely “without fear or favour.”

But Ms. Khan, a Bangladeshi lawyer who previously served as secretary general of Amnesty International, said exiled journalists often find themselves in precarious positions, facing threats against them and their families from their home countries without assured legal status or adequate support to continue working in their country of refuge.

Myanmar journalist gets a 20-year sentence for reporting on cyclone’s aftermath, news site says

“Fearing for their own safety or that of their families back home and struggling to survive financially and overcome the many challenges of living in a foreign country, many journalists eventually abandon their profession,” she said. “Exile thus becomes yet another way to silence critical voices – another form of press censorship.”

Ms. Khan, whose mandate comes from the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, said there are international legal protections for journalists in exile who range from full-time professional reporters to bloggers publishing on the internet and elsewhere. “The problem is “the failure of states to respect their obligations under international law,” she said.

In recent years, Ms. said, hundreds of journalists have fled from Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Turkey and Ukraine. In addition, smaller numbers have fled from a range of other countries including Burundi, Guatemala, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan, “to name just a few,” she said.

Ms. Khan said there is no data on human rights violations committed by countries outside their borders. “But there is anecdotal evidence including victims’ testimony, scholarly research and the experience of civil society organisations suggesting that “a high prevalence” of such “transnational repression” targets exiled journalists and media outlets,” she said.

Ms. Khan said “the butchering of exiled Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul was an outrageous, audacious act of transnational repression.” Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who entered the consulate on October 2, 2018, to get documents for his impending marriage, never emerged and his remains have never been found.

Ms. Khan also pointed to Turkey’s extraterritorial abductions and forcible return of at least 100 Turkish nationals, including journalists, from many countries, and Iran’s targeting of exiled Iranian journalists and media outlets as well as Iranian and Iranian-origin journalists and media staffers working for the BBC Persian-language service.

In February 2020, she said, prominent Iranian exiled journalist Rana Rahimpour received death threats against herself, her husband, her children and her elderly parents.

Ms. Khan said the world witnessed a blatant example of forced abduction when Belarus authorities used a false bomb threat in violation of international law to divert a commercial airliner as exiled media worker Raman Pratasevich was travelling to the country’s main airport in May 2021. He was arrested, convicted, sentenced to eight years in prison and later pardoned.

As for digital transnational repression, the U.N. special rapporteur said attempts to intimidate and silence journalists and their sources and promote self-censorship online have increased over the past decade.

Ms. Khan said common practices include “recruiting armies of trolls and bots to amplify vicious personal attacks on individual journalists to discredit them and their reporting, blocking exiled news sites or jamming broadcasts, and targeted digital surveillance.” “Online attacks including death threats, rape threats and smear campaigns have skyrocketed in the past 10 years,” she said.

“Digital surveillance also surged over the past decade as spyware enables authorities to access journalists’ phones and other devices without their knowledge,” Ms. Khan said. In early 2022, journalists from El Salvador fled to Costa Rica, Mexico and elsewhere after civil society investigations reported the use of Pegasus spyware on their devices.

She said exiled journalists often face two major legal threats from their home countries: “investigation, prosecution and punishment in absentia, and the pursuit of their extradition on trumped up criminal charges.”

Hong Kong’s recently adopted National Security Law, augmented by the Safeguarding National Security Ordnance, “criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism and ‘collusion with foreign organizations’ in sweeping terms and with extraterritorial reach,” she said. It has been used extensively against independent journalists in Hong Kong and has hampered the work of journalists in exile and forced many to self-censor.

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Ms. Khan said, it adopted draconian laws punishing anyone discrediting the armed forces or disseminating false information about the military operation. This has led independent media to self-censor, shut down or leave the country. “Russian courts have issued sentences in absentia against several exiled journalists,” she said.

Ms. Khan called for countries hosting exiled journalists to provide them with visas and work permits.

“Exiled journalists also need better protection from physical and online attacks, long-term support from civil society and press freedom groups, and “they need companies to ensure that the technologies that are essential to practice journalism are not disrupted or weaponized against them,” she said.

The vast amount of rubble including unexploded ordnance left by Israel’s devastating war in the Gaza Strip could take about 14 years to remove, a United Nations official said on Friday.

Israel’s military campaign against Gaza’s ruling Palestinian Islamist group Hamas has reduced much of the narrow, coastal territory of 2.3 million people to a wasteland with most civilians homeless, hungry and at risk of disease.

Pehr Lodhammar, senior officer at the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), told a briefing in Geneva that the war had left an estimated 37 million tons of debris in the widely urbanised, densely populated territory.

He said that although it was impossible to determine the exact number of unexploded ordnance found in Gaza, it was projected that it could take 14 years under certain conditions to clear debris, including rubble from destroyed buildings.

“We know that typically there’s a failure rate of at least 10% of land service ammunition that is being fired and fails to function,” he said. “We’re talking about 14 years of work with 100 trucks.”

Hamas ignited the war with a shock incursion into southern Israel in which militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies. Hamas is believed to still be holding 129 hostages out of the 253 it took on Oct. 7.

At least 34,305 Palestinians have been killed and 77,293 wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

United Nations:

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Thursday warned that Tehran would make Israel “regret” any attack on his country in response to the Islamic republic’s weekend barrage of missiles and drones.

Tehran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel over the weekend came in the wake of a deadly attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, widely blamed on Israel. Nearly all of the projectiles were intercepted before reaching their targets.

“Iran’s legitimate defense and countermeasures have been concluded. Therefore, the terrorist Israeli regime must be compelled to stop any further military adventurism against our interests,” the minister told the UN Security Council during a meeting on the Middle East.

“In case of any use of force by the Israeli regime, and violating our sovereignty, the Islamic Republic of Iran will not hesitate a bit to assert its inherent rights, to give a decisive and proper response to it, to make the regime regret its actions.”

Israeli officials have not said when or where they would retaliate, but the country’s military chief has vowed a response.

Amir-Abdollahian called Iran’s actions “limited and proportionate,” adding that until recently, Tehran had shown “considerable restraint.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Geneva, Switzerland:

The situation in war-ravaged Gaza is so desperate that teenagers are now saying they hope to be swiftly killed to escape the “nightmare”, a spokesman for the UN children’s agency said Tuesday.

“The unspeakable is regularly said in Gaza,” said James Elder, spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva via video message from Rafah in southern Gaza, he said the agency had on Monday held a meeting with adolescents.

Several said they were “so desperate for this nightmare to end that they hoped to be killed”, he said.

The war began with Hamas’s October 7 attacks, which resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Hamas operatives also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes around 130 are still held in Gaza, including 33 presumed dead.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 32,333 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry.

The UN has warned that Gaza is facing a looming famine, spurring increasingly urgent appeals for Israel to open up more border crossings and to stop hampering the movement of aid through the Palestinians territory.

The Israelis “have a right to control. They inspect every single gram, litre, kilo of whatever goes into Gaza,” Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency, told reporters.

“But they cannot say that once it’s inside, we leave it with you. They must create this enabling environment that allows us to move it around.”

“We need to dispel this notion that their obligation with getting aid in somehow stops with getting a few trucks, a fraction of what is needed, across the border,” he said.

“That is not correct.”

Elder meanwhile pointed out that the Israelis had denied a quarter of the 40 mission requests to the north since the beginning of the month.

“Now there is an existing old crossing point that could be used in the north 10 minutes from where those people are putting their hands to their mouth pleading for food,” he said, referring to the Erez Crossing.

“10 minutes. Open that and we could turn this humanitarian crisis around in a matter of days. But it remains closed.”

“Let’s be clear, life-saving aid is being obstructed, lives are being lost, dignity is being denied.”
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)