Vietnam’s mangroves trees threatened by rising tide of deforestation

Clearances could contribute to coastal erosion and prove a missed opportunity to prevent climate change 

Alisa Tang | Guardian Weekly

Standing at the entrance to Lang Co town hall, 69-year-old Mai Truc Lam gestured to the two-story building, the sun-drenched parking lot and two-lane road in front, and described the small coastal community as it once was. 

“We are standing in an area that used to be mangroves,” the weathered fisherman said, and then described the negative impact deforestation has wrought on the area’s sea life. “Now, we do not see some species of fish here anymore.”

A few minutes’ drive away, on a sliver of sand that forms the Lap An Lagoon on the central coast of Vietnam, lies a modest grove of trees – some evergreens that shed a path of soft needles, and where the land meets the sea, Lang Co’s few remaining hectares of mangroves, perched above the water upon their stilted, flying buttress-like roots.

Some of the mangrove trees have torpedo-shaped seeds, which have poked into the ground and given birth to a new generation of delicate seedlings, all too easily trampled upon by oblivious passersby. Yet these remaining mangroves face the threat of being razed entirely to make way for a golf course as part of local economic development plans – part of a global development trend that has seen the clearance of as much as 50% of the world’s mangroves over the past half a century.

Mangroves grow along the ocean coasts of 118 countries – with a quarter of the world’s 40m hectares being in south-east Asia – but with widespread deforestation due to population pressure, expansion of shrimp farms and development, scientists fear mangroves may disappear altogether in as little as 100 years. At their best, mangroves form a vast coastal barrier of trunks and roots against the sea, controlling erosion, protecting communities from storms, and providing an environment for greater fish diversity.

Furthermore, scientists last year unveiled research pointing to mangrove forests as ideal repositories for carbon storage – containing an average of 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare, compared with 300 tonnes per hectare of tropical forest – which could help to fight climate change by keeping carbon locked away on land and out of the atmosphere. The scientists found that most of the carbon in mangrove forests – 49% to 98% – is stored below ground in thick, tidally submerged soil in which decomposition is anaerobic in the absence of oxygen. Yet with mangrove conservation up against economic development, the more obvious path to money wins.

“My sense in Lang Co, and in provinces across Vietnam, is that economic development has become a driving force so dominant that environmental precautions have fallen by the wayside,” said Evan Fox, a coastal planning consultant. “In villages where local governments are searching for ways to bolster their economic output, it is difficult to justify preservation of an area if managers and local people cannot discern its tangible benefit.”

There are laws that protect the forests and mangroves in Vietnam, but enforcement can be lax, rendering such regulations impotent. “My interpretation is that it’s illegal but everything is negotiable in Vietnam and since there is no consequence for breaking the law (at least in the environmental domain), mangroves get cut. Anyway, since there are so many conflicting laws, you can probably legalise what you’ve done by reference to a previous law,” said Jake Brunner, programme co-ordinator for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Vietnam.

Shrimp farms have been one of the big drivers behind mangrove loss. A 2011 analysis of images of Vietnam’s southern Mekong delta – an area that is typically mangroves – found that from 1973 to 2008, more than half of the mangroves were converted into shrimp farms, causing serious erosion. Nonetheless, communities and governments have taken little notice of the protective services that mangroves provide until a disaster of epic proportions strikes – such as the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed some 180,000 people in western Indonesia’s Aceh province.

“In Aceh, after the tsunami, the result wouldn’t have been like this, if we still had mangroves,” said Daniel Murdiyarso, a scientist with the Indonesia-based Centre for International Forestry Research and one of the researchers behind the mangrove carbon-storage findings.

Disaster management and risk reduction are now squarely on the Indonesian government’s radar, but in most countries – and most of the time – the impact of climate change is incremental and therefore unlikely to spur governments and communities to action. When typhoons have hit Vietnam, mangroves have helped to save lives.

“That’s when people noticed that where there were mangroves, people survived,” Brunner said. “Thailand and Indonesia suffered a very high magnitude event, the tsunami, and that sent a very clear message. In Vietnam, there have been higher frequency, but lower magnitude events, so it hasn’t quite had the same impact, and you still see mangroves being lost.”

Initiatives like the Mangroves for the Future (MFF), established after the 2004 tsunami and co-chaired by IUCN and the UN Development Programme, offer grants to communities like Lang Co to protect their mangroves. Since 2008, MFF has implemented about 90 projects in its eight member countries across south and south-east Asia. The $29,000 project in Lang Co – $23,000 from MFF and $6,000 from the grantee organisation, the Centre for Community Research and Development (CCRD), and the local community – is to focus on supporting natural regeneration of existing mangroves, which is less expensive and more effective than planting. According to CCRD, Lang Co had about 100 hectares of mangroves two decades ago, but today only five hectares of poor-quality mangroves remain.

Under the MFF grant, the Lang Co fishing association has been tasked with looking after these mangroves. Local fishermen will be trained in mangrove and aquatic resource management and protection.

Alisa Tang is a Bangkok-based freelance journalist who reports and edits for organisations including the Centre for International Forestry Research, which supported her reporting trip to Vietnam.

(Source: Guardian)

Floating buildings could help Thais tackle the flooding crisis

Residents in central Thailand face an annual battle with flooding caused by rains. Homes that float offer a solution.

Alisa Tang | Guardian Weekly

In monsoon seasons past, villagers in Pa Mok would quietly embark on their annual vertical migration as the Chao Phraya river swelled and spilled over its banks, inundating rice paddies and neighbourhoods of this low-lying community in central Thailand. They moved to the upper level of their homes, which were built on three-metre high stilts.

Then change rolled into town, around 45 years ago in the forms of cars, roads and a bridge across the Chao Phraya that connected the eastern and western halves of Pa Mok. With industrialisation, villagers took on factory jobs, moving further from the intrinsic nature of their riverine community. “Now they park their cars under the house, and they add an extra floor [of living space] under their homes,” said Klanarong Chuaboonmee, 69, the deputy mayor of Pa Mok district in Ang Thong province, 100 km north of Bangkok. “As someone working for the city, I get people asking me, ‘Why don’t you make it so we don’t flood?’”

Pa Mok has suffered floods nearly every year since 1942, as Klanarong recalls. Floodwaters peaked at a record 8.24 metres above sea level last year when Thailand faced its worst flooding in more than half a century. With climate change spurring increasingly erratic rainfall, the floods are set to continue. So village officials are teaming up with an innovative architecture firm to build amphibious homes and structures that will help the community live with floods, rather than build up defences against them.

Chutayaves “Chuta” Sinthuphan – who returned to Thailand in 2006 after 14 years in New York, where he studied at Columbia University and spent years honing his trade – and his architecture firm, Site-Specific, had been on the hunt for a client such as Pa Mok village. In a prescient blog entry from 11 May 2011 – months before the flood crisis – Chuta posed these questions: if the floods get worse every year, will relocation solve the problem? Traditional Thai homes were on stilts, or even on rafts when Bangkok’s network of canals was not yet paved over and the city was still known as the “Venice of the east”, but Thailand today depends on cars, so how can architects design a house that sits on the ground and survives floods?

Site-Specific presented plans for the buoyant Amphibious House, with a prefabricated flotation device underneath. It looks like a normal modern home, but floats in the event of floods. One of the house’s hidden support columns will be anchored to the ground, acting as a rail-like pillar as the house floats up or down.

“We wanted to work on a home that would work with the rising sea levels,” the 36-year-old architect said during a field trip in January to Pa Mok and another site in western Kanchanaburi province that has served as part of the floating-house experiment. He and his colleagues were inspired by an amphibious community in southern Thailand, where homes are on stilts, with bamboo floats lashed to the underside of the living space. “We took that idea and tried to create it for a modern lifestyle and using modern technologies,” Chuta said. “We didn’t want it to look too foreign – with these [anchoring] posts. We want it to look like a normal house.”

A few hours drive west of Pa Mok, in the middle of the lake formed by Srinakarin Dam in Kanchanaburi province, the architect team took on their first floating venture. A wealthy advertising executive hired them to build a two-bedroom, one-bathroom floating house, made with reclaimed wood and metal, complete with a two-boat garage.

Completed last November, the 400 sq metre floating house – which primarily consists of outdoor living spaces with prefabricated enclosed spaces for the bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom – has weights anchoring it to the lake floor, but it drifts and turns slightly with the water’s movement. Four solar cells, a wind turbine and back-up generators provide electricity, while water to bathe and wash is pumped up from the lower depths of the lake.

The house weighs 35 tonnes and is held afloat by eight hollow steel cylindrical pontoons that can support up to 300 tonnes. The fundamental lesson from the house on the lake was weight distribution and symmetry.

“On a normal home, you just build it, you don’t have to worry about weight distribution,” Chuta said, noting that floating homes are different. “You can’t just take a plan of a home and then just build it. You have to design it so that the weight distribution works very well, and you have to calculate what the owners will put inside, so you can’t turn a bedroom into a library because books weigh so much. So that’s why the bedrooms are on the two ends – even though people don’t weigh that much, if they move together, it will rock this thing quite a bit.”

Now, Chuta and his team have been given a chance to see if an amphibious house will work, with a $90,000 grant from the National Housing Agency. The money will be used to build a prototype for a possible amphibious community in Ayutthaya, for factory workers of the Rojana Industrial Park, which also flooded last year.

The work on the other projects will help form plans for Pa Mok, where Site-Specific has met with villagers to discuss their needs and has begun to look for grants to bring amphibious structures to their community. There might be some amphibious homes, and, most important, grocery stores to guarantee food and necessities, as well as a village pavilion to serve as a space for aid distribution or for health workers.

Photo courtesy of Site-Specific.

(Source: Guardian)

VIETNAM: From rice to shrimp and ginger, adapting to saltwater intrusion

HANOI, 28 December 2011 (IRIN) - Rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion in Vietnam’s fertile Mekong Delta are forcing farmers and development agencies to rethink how livelihoods can be maintained, using methods such as genetic modification, new crop varieties and simple farming fixes. 

With support from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in March 2011 launched a four-year project to introduce the flood-tolerant SUB1 gene and Saltol, a salt-tolerant gene, to Vietnamese rice varieties. 

Transferring the genetic information - a process known as introgression - is expected to take three years. Because the genes are being introduced to rice currently grown in Vietnam, farmers will not need to learn new farming practices. 

“We are on track. It’s three years, and in the fourth year, we’ll try to disseminate this new variety,” said Reiner Wassmann, a climate change specialist with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). 

The Mekong Delta is the country’s rice basket, and Vietnam is the world’s second largest rice exporter. With soil and crops already being damaged by saltwater intrusion, farmers and development agencies are troubleshooting ways to cope. 

Some rice paddies in Thanh Hoa Province have been converted to shrimp ponds, according to Nguyen Viet Nghi, CARE’s project manager of a community-based mangrove reforestation programme in Thanh Hoa. 

“It was done by farmers themselves, and CARE is planning to support them combine mangroves and shrimp development in their ponds,” said Nghi. 

It is a trend seen across Vietnam: aquaculture has skyrocketed from 641,900 hectares in 2000 to more than 1 million hectares in 2010, and shrimp farming accounts for the bulk of the growth, nearly doubling over the past decade to 645,000 hectares. 

While most aquaculture is in the Mekong Delta, even in Thanh Hoa on the central coast, farming in water grew from 10,600 hectares in 2000 to 13,900 a decade later. 

Vietnam is one of the countries expected to suffer most from the impact of climate change, and unpredictable rain, higher temperatures and more saltwater could mean less water for irrigation of crops such as watermelons. 

Oxfam piloted a small project to help 10 farmers with hardier varieties of watermelons, and taught them simple methods to save water: Draping plastic sheets on the ground around the plants prevents evaporation, so farmers need less freshwater for the crops. To prevent saltwater contamination, farmers built raised beds half a metre above the salinated drainage ditches. 

“We found that out of 10 [farms], nine have huge profits because production is very good,” said Provash Chandra Mondal, humanitarian programme coordinator for Oxfam in Vietnam. Oxfam is now replicating the watermelon project on other small farms, and experimenting with ginger cultivation. 

The only solution… 

Longer droughts and rising sea levels have begun to salinate farmland, and the only solution is to adapt, according to Oxfam. 

“It’s like a slow poisoning, and now it’s increasing, moving up the rivers,” Mondal said. “It has a long-term impact, and there’s no solution. Nobody can stop the saline water, but we just have to adapt.” 

During the 2010 drought, saltwater from the South China Sea contaminated communities 60km inland compared with 30km in years past. 

If sea levels rise by one metre - the low end of climate scientists’ projections of a one- to two-metre rise by 2100 - an estimated 1.7 million hectares would be inundated, or 5.3 percent of Vietnam’s land area. Most of this threatened land (82 percent) is in the Mekong Delta, where millions of people would be displaced. 

By 2030, rising sea levels could cause rice productivity to drop by 9 percent, according to the UN Development Programme.  

“We expect a lot of changes in the hydrology in all parts of the Mekong Delta,” said Wassmann, adding that the highly productive delta is vulnerable to tiny changes in the weather. 

“If you come to the Mekong Delta, you’ll see every square metre of land is used… It is very intensively used, and it is very much dependent on a relatively stable set of parameters. If we change this system there, all of this success from the fine-tuning becomes useless… If this kind of source of rice for the world market is going down, then it will have major repercussions for the rice market as a whole.” 

Photo by David Longstreath.

(Source: irinnews.org)

VIETNAM: Boosting education for ethnic minority children

LAO CHAI, 20 December 2011 (IRIN) - For more than a decade, Nguyen Thi Quyen’s ethnic minority students in Lao Chai village primary school would stare at her blankly, unable to respond to her questions. As the school year wore on, they dropped out to tend farm animals or hawk knick-knacks to the tourists. 

Quyen was teaching in Vietnamese, the language of the majority Kinh, but ethnic minorities in the country’s northern hills speak Mong. 

“Before, when I was teaching all subjects in Vietnamese, the children could understand only about 60 percent of what I was saying,” Quyen told IRIN. “The children did not enjoy school. They did not like to come.” 

With Vietnamese the official language for education, school remains inaccessible for many ethnic minorities, who comprise 13 percent of the population and are among the country’s most impoverished. 

Lagging behind 

The Mong are one of Vietnam’s 53 ethnic minority groups that have fallen behind although the country boasts one of the world’s fastest growing economies, with GDP up by 7.3 percent annually from 1995 to 2005, and per capita income increasing from US$260 in 1995 to $835 in 2007. 

Yet more than half the ethnic minorities live in poverty, versus only 10 percent of Kinh. Ethnic minorities account for 11 million of Vietnam’s 87 million people, but constitute 44.4 percent of the poor. 

“Looking at all the development and positive change that has taken place in Vietnam, minority children are one or several steps behind all the time,” Lotta Sylwander, country representative for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN. 

“Many of them live in hard-to-reach areas. Some of them speak languages that no one else speaks… Ethnic minority children are more likely to live in a poor household than the Kinh majority because their parents are uneducated.” 

According to UNICEF, three out of five ethnic minority children complete primary school, against more than four out of five Kinh. 

Mother tongue-based education 

In 2008, Quyen’s primary school began teaching its youngest students in Mong, as part of a UNICEF-supported government initiative to boost academic performance. 

The programme has been implemented for Jrai ethnic minorities in central Gia Lai province, Khmer in southern Tra Vinh, and Mong in northern Lao Cai, where Lao Chai village is located. 

Children begin school in their native language and in grade three, start learning in Vietnamese as well. By grade five, they are bilingual, according to research by UNICEF and the government. 

“Now that I teach in the local language, the students can understand 100 percent. Now they’ll stand up and answer any question,” said Quyen, who has spent 16 years teaching in Lao Chai, located in a valley below the popular tourist town of Sapa.

The UNICEF and government study shows that mother tongue-educated ethnic minority students scored higher than those who learned in Vietnamese when tested for listening comprehension (17 out of a possible 20 points for mother tongue, versus 12 for non-mother tongue), following instructions (16 versus 12), and arranging pictures based on stories (13 compared with eight). 

“Since I started teaching in the Mong language, the children are much happier, and they really enjoy school. A lot of children come to school now, and some children from different communities even come here to learn,” Quyen said. 

Teaching challenge 

One challenge, however, is finding qualified teachers. 

“It was difficult to start the bilingual education programme because of the need to have good bilingual teachers,” said Truong Kim Minh, director of the Lao Cai Department of Education and Training. 

“At that time, we had only a limited number of teachers coming from those ethnic minority groups. In the beginning, we chose good people in the community to become teachers’ assistants.” 

Teachers who do not come from ethnic communities are increasingly required to learn the local language of the region where they will teach. 

The province now trains 100 ethnic minority teachers each year for pre-school and primary school, which will help expand the bilingual education programme, Minh said. 

Meanwhile, as children played on the Lao Chai school grounds one Saturday afternoon, Quyen interrupted a student, eight-year-old Mang, during a game of marbles to ask him to read a sign written in Mong on a pillar at the school entrance. 

Looking up at the colourful sign, Mang slowly pronounced one word at a time: “Dear friends, let’s come to school.” 

(Source: irinnews.org)

American sentenced to prison for Thai royal insult

By ALISA TANG and VEE INTARAKRATUG | AP

BANGKOK (AP) — A court in Thailand sentenced a U.S. citizen to two and a half years in prison Thursday for defaming the country’s royal family by translating excerpts of a locally banned biography of the king and posting them online.

The verdict is the latest so-called lese majeste punishment handed down in the Southeast Asian kingdom, which has come under increasing pressure at home and abroad to reform harsh legislation that critics say is an affront to freedom of expression.

The 55-year-old Thai-born American, Joe Gordon, stood calmly with his ankles shackled in an orange prison uniform as the sentence was read out at a Bangkok criminal court.

Judge Tawan Rodcharoen said the punishment, initially set at five years, was reduced because Gordon pleaded guilty in October.

The sentence was relatively light compared to other recent cases. In November, 61-year-old Amphon Tangnoppakul was sentenced to 20 years in jail for sending four text messages deemed offensive to the crown.

Gordon posted links the to banned biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej several years ago while living in the U.S. state of Colorado, and his case has raised questions about the applicability of Thai law to acts committed by foreigners outside Thailand.

Speaking after the verdict, Gordon said, “I am an American citizen, and what happened was in America.”

He also said he had no expectation of being let off easy. “This is just the system in Thailand,” he said. Speaking later in Thai, he added: “In Thailand, they put people in prison even if they don’t have proof.”

Gordon had lived in the U.S. for about 30 years. He was detained in late May during a visit to his native country to seek treatment for arthritis and high blood pressure. After being repeatedly denied bail, he pleaded guilty in October in hopes of obtaining a lenient sentence.

Thailand’s lese majeste laws are the harshest in the world. They mandate that people found guilty of defaming the monarchy — including the king, the queen and the heir to the throne — face three to 15 years behind bars. The nation’s 2007 Computer Crimes Act also contains provisions that have enabled prosecutors to increase lese majeste sentences.

The U.S. Embassy’s consul general, Elizabeth Pratt, told reporters in Bangkok after the ruling that Washington considered Gordon’s punishment “severe because he has been sentenced for his right to freedom of expression.”

Opponents of the laws say that while the royal family should be protected from defamation, lese majeste laws have often been abused to punish political rivals. That is especially true since the nation suffered a 2006 military coup.

Asked if he would stay in Thailand after serving his time, Gordon said: “I would like to stay and see some positive Thailand. I want to see the real, amazing Thailand, not the messy Thailand.”

Many had hoped that the administration of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, which has some prominent supporters who have been accused of lese majeste, would reform the laws. The issue remains highly sensitive, however, and Yingluck’s government has been as aggressive in pursuing the cases as its predecessors.

Last weekend, New York-based Human Rights Watch urged authorities to amend the laws, saying the penalties being meted out were “shocking.”

The rise of the Internet in recent years has given Thai authorities many more targets to pursue. Last month, Information Minister Anudith Nakornthap said Facebook users who “share” or “like” content that insults the Thai monarchy are committing a crime. Anudith said Thai authorities asked Facebook to remove 86,000 pages between August and November because of alleged lese majeste content.

Gordon, a former car salesman, is accused of having translated excerpts from the unauthorized biography “The King Never Smiles,” published by Yale University Press, into the Thai language and publishing them in a blog. He also provided links to the translation to other two Web forums, prosecutors say.

In the banned book, author Paul M. Handley retraces the king’s life, alleging that he has been a major stumbling block to the progress of democracy in Thailand as he consolidated royal power over his long reign.

Bhumibol, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, is profoundly revered in Thailand and is widely seen as a stabilizing force. He was feted Monday on his 84th birthday, during which he called on his countrymen to unite in response to the worst floods in more than half a century.

The king is frail and has stayed at a Bangkok hospital for more than two years.

___

Associated Press writer Todd Pitman contributed to this report.

Photo by Apichart Weerawong | Associated Press

(Source: Yahoo!)

THAILAND-MYANMAR: Slow pace of registering migrants

MAE SOT, 5 December 2011 (IRIN) - For decades, children of Burmese refugees and migrants in Thailand could not obtain an official birth certificate, vital to access healthcare and education. Even though legislation entitling them to a formal identity has been in place since 2008, registering and coaxing forth the undocumented has been “painstaking”, according to community groups. 

“Birth registration is the basic fundamental right of any human being. If you don’t have birth registration, you lose all your rights,” said Naing Min, project director for the community-based organization, Committee for Protection and Promotion of Child Rights (CPPCR), at Thailand’s border with Myanmar in Mae Sot. 

With no proof of identity or age, those without birth certificates are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and trafficking. When they grew older, their troubles are compounded: unable to get any form of identification, they cannot open a bank account or apply for a formal job. 

Following the amendment in 2008 to Thailand’s Civil Registration Act of 1991, all children born in the country are entitled to birth registration and government-issued birth certificates, regardless of their parents’ legal status. 

In Burmese refugee camps, more systematic birth registration - coordinated by camp and government authorities with assistance from NGOs and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) - began in September 2010, but only a fraction has been documented. 

The law has taken time to be implemented, in part because of the slow pace of assigning and training government staff. It has also been a challenge to register Burmese who cannot provide any proof of identity whatsoever - not registered at birth, they have been unable to get any identity papers later in life. 

Backlog 

“The law in the Civil Registration Act, as amended in 2008, is retroactive. It went back for all children born in Thailand, so with Myanmar refugees in the camps, you could be dealing with 25 years of birth registrations,”,” said James Lynch, Thailand’s representative for UNHCR. 

About 1,600 people - mostly newborns - have been registered in nine refugee camps along the border housing an estimated 150,000 people, including some 60,000 unregistered refugees, according to the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, an umbrella group of organizations providing services for migrants and refugees. 

The next group to register is children born to Burmese refugees between 2008 and September 2010, and then further back to 1984 when the first major waves of refugees, fleeing violence in Myanmar, poured into Thailand. 

“I’m not sure of exact numbers [left to be registered], but if you go back 25 years, it’s a painstaking task, but an important one,” Lynch said. 

Each year, about 5 percent of children born in Thailand - about 40,000 babies primarily from poor families, ethnic minorities or migrants - are not registered at birth, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). 

Catch-22 

“The issue with the unregistered camp population is that they could report to the district office, but they fear if they’re not registered and they go to report, they might be deported, so they may be reluctant,” Lynch said. 

Unregistered Burmese refugees cannot get birth certificates for their children through camp authorities and face the same problem as migrants. 

“They have to go to the district office, but practically, this is difficult because they have no permission to leave the camp, and if they do leave the camp, then they can be arrested and deported, so it is a Catch-22 classic ,” said Joel Harding, senior protection officer for the NGO International Rescue Committee. 

It is a problem UNHCR and other agencies are working with the government to fix, but providing birth registration for even registered Burmese refugees - there are about 100,000 - is taking time. 

A better future 

When Ma Lay, 27, gave birth in August 2011 to her third son at Mae Tao Clinic, a health centre for Burmese refugees and migrants in Thailand, she immediately registered him. Her two older sons, six and four, were born in Myanmar, and like her and her husband, have no papers. 

“For the two boys, there have been no problems yet, but for me and especially my husband, sometimes on our way to work, we run into the police and get arrested,” said Ma Lay. “It makes me feel better if my baby is delivered and registered here, for my baby’s future.” 

Some 200 babies born each month at Mae Tao Clinic are registered on site. 

CPPCR now encourages people to get Thai civil birth registration, yet still continues unofficial registrations for those who do not in the hopes such documentation will help them access education and health services as well as claim land and inheritance if they return to Myanmar. 

“Some are afraid to go to the office or to ask for a recommendation letter from the village chief, because they are here illegally. They don’t know their rights,” Naing Min said. 

Over the past eight years, CPPCR has unofficially registered 180,000 children. 

“When there was no system to recognize the children born in Thailand, we collected the information, so that when there is true democracy [in Myanmar], we can make claims for their [Burmese] citizenship,” Naing Min said. 

Photo by David Longstreath

Thailand cleans up, but some areas remain flooded

 By ALISA TANG | Associated Press

BANGKOK (AP) — As Thailand’s floodwaters continue their slow journey to the sea, large swaths of the country have drained and dried, leaving behind a stinky, thick grime on everything touched by the nation’s worst deluge in more than a half century.

In many areas, people are returning to their houses armed with cleaning brushes, rubber gloves and masks to endure the sewer-like stench. But others whose homes are still inundated complain they’ve been forgotten, especially by residents of the capital who escaped the flooding.

Nicha Rakpanichmanee, a 28-year-old graduate student, invited a group of friends to help clean her town house on Bangkok’s northern edge.

“I didn’t expect it to be like this … the smell!” she said.

Room by room, the cleaning team sprinkled disinfectant powder on everything covered by the thick filthy film, which spread 30 inches (80 centimeters) high during the three weeks Nicha’s neighborhood was inundated. Other parts of Thailand were covered by more than 6 feet (2 meters) of water for two months.

Just down the street, her neighbors were not as lucky.

“We haven’t even started cleaning yet. We’re just throwing things out. We’ve been throwing stuff out for three days now,” said Yai Kupatanorrat, 50, who sells women’s clothes at the popular Chatuchak weekend market.

He threw out several bags and boxes of new clothes that he had stored at his home, as well as cabinets and other furniture.

More than a fifth of the country’s 64 million people have been affected by the flooding, which began in late July, and more than 600 have died. Fifteen provinces remain flooded.

The World Bank estimates the damage at $45 billion and recovery and reconstruction needs at $25 billion. The National Social and Economic Development Board has slashed Thailand’s economic growth forecast to 1.5 percent from 3.5 to 4 percent.

Several industrial estates in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani provinces were severely flooded, bringing the country’s key automotive and computer parts industries close to a halt. Authorities in Ayutthaya say four industrial parks there have been cleaned up, while another is still under 20 inches (50 centimeters) of water. In Pathum Thani, two industrial estates remain flooded.

Much of the government’s effort to fight the floods has focused on protecting the capital, which has remained largely dry thanks to hundreds of pumps and dikes built of sandbags. Across the dikes, residents outside the metropolitan area complain they were sacrificed and now are forgotten.

“When I talk to people who aren’t affected, they say, ‘Oh, no one’s talking about the floods anymore,’ but my house has been flooded for nearly two months,” said Chalanthorn Reaud, 32, a cultural officer for the Alliance Francaise of Bangkok.

The 300 homes in her housing estate in Nonthaburi province, next to Bangkok, are still flooded with more than 30 inches (80 centimeters) of water.

Sirinuch Jungtamdeerungkajorn, a 35-year-old pastry chef who also lives in the capital’s still-flooded outskirts, is staying with her parents in a rented condominium in Bangkok’s central business district.

The main road that leads to her neighborhood is dry, but on her street the water is still 20 inches (50 centimeters) deep.

“People who don’t live here think it’s not flooded anymore,” she said. “But it’s going to be some time before my life will return to normal.”

___

Associated Press writer Vee Intarakratug contributed to this report.

(Source: chron.com)

Thailand says Facebook comments and shares could be prosecuted at insults to monarchy

By VEE INTARAKRATUG

BANGKOK — Facebook users who “share” or “like” content that insults the Thai monarchy are committing a crime, Minister of Information and Communication Technology Anudith Nakornthap said Tuesday.

The warning is the latest threat to freedom of expression in Thailand, where authorities have increasingly targeted websites that they claim threaten national security, especially those criticizing the monarchy.

Insulting a monarch is a crime known as lese majeste, and Thailand’s laws against it are the most severe in the world. Even repeating the details of an alleged offense – such as on social media sites like Facebook – is illegal under the lese majeste law and the related Computer Crimes Act, “which says that spreading illegal content – either directly or indirectly – is a crime,” Anudith said.

He said anyone who is accused could be prosecuted – even foreigners using the Internet outside Thailand.

“If a foreigner abroad clicks ‘share’ or clicks ‘like,’ then the Thai law has no jurisdiction over that, but if there is a lawsuit filed and that person then comes into Thailand, then that person will be prosecuted,” Anudith told The Associated Press.

Lese majeste arrests and convictions in Thailand spike during times of instability, when the law is used by political rivals to harass opponents. The current crackdown also reflects growing concern over the king’s health and the future of an institution that has long united the country.

Statistics obtained by The Associated Press from the Office of the Attorney General show 36 lese majeste cases were sent for prosecution in 2010, compared to 18 in 2005 and just one in 2000.

Last Wednesday, Thailand’s criminal court sentenced Amphon Tangnoppakul, a 61-year-old grandfather, to 20 years in prison for sending mobile phone text messages to a personal secretary of then-Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva that were deemed offensive to the queen.

On Dec. 8, the court will deliver the sentence of Joe Gordon, a Thai-born American who has been held since May for translating excerpts of a locally banned biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and posting them online. Gordon pleaded guilty to the alleged crimes committed years ago while living in the U.S. state of Colorado. The case has raised concerns about the reach of Thai law and how it is applied to both Thai nationals and foreign visitors.

On her own Facebook page, Mallika Boonmeetrakool, deputy spokeswoman for the Democrats, pointed to YouTube and Facebook, in particular, for “bad outbreaks” of offensive content in recent months, and pressed the Thai government to ask the U.S. government and service providers to block such content.

Meanwhile, the opposition Democrat party claims the government is not doing enough to protect the monarchy from being tarnished.

“We should talk to the various Web operators, and if they don’t cooperate, we should force them to and ban them,” Mallika told AP. “The royal institution is the institution of our nation… There should be freedom of expression, but it has to follow the rules because we have laws that cannot be violated.”

Critics worry that recent admonitions may be misinterpreted and that Web users may not know they are committing crimes.

“You have to understand that once you click ‘like’ on your wall, it will show up in your friends’ feeds that you clicked ‘like.’ It can be considered as indirectly publishing that page,” said Chiranuch Premchaiporn, executive director of independent news website Prachatai.com who faces 20 years in prison herself for failing to remove allegedly offensive online reader comments quickly enough.

The drumbeat of warnings has caused many to reconsider what they say online.

“I actually decided to stop being so openly critical or openly vocal on the issue, even on my personal Facebook page,” said a law student and social activist, who became particularly nervous when online vigilante groups began scouring Facebook pages for lese majeste material and sending screen grabs to authorities. She spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that authorities would come after her.

___

Associated Press writer Alisa Tang contributed to this report.

(Written/edited by Alisa)

(Source: The Huffington Post)

Receding floods reveal crocs lurking in Bangkok

By ALISA TANG | Associated Press

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Murky floodwaters are receding from Bangkok’s inundated outskirts to revealsome scary swamp dwellers who moved in while flooded residents were moving out — including crocodiles and some of the world’s most poisonous snakes.

Special teams from the Thai Fishery Department have responded to numerous reports of reptilian menaces, like the 3-foot-long (meter-long) croc that Anchalee Wannawet saw sitting next to the outhouse one morning, its toothy jaw wide open.

“I ran away, and it ran into there,” the 23-year-old said, pointing toward the reedy swamp behind the construction site where she works in Bangkok’s northern Sai Mai district. “I haven’t dared to go the bathroom since. I’m peeing in a can.”

Thailand has long been a center for the breeding, exporting and trafficking of exotic animals, especially crocodiles. Farmed both legally and illegally, crocs are popular because of the value they fetch for their meat, bones and especially their skins, used to make luxury bags and accessories.

This year’s record monsoon rains, which prompted Thailand’s worst flooding in a half century and killed more than 600 people, also swamped some of the country’s estimated 3,000 crocodile farms. Many of the reptiles escaped — though probably not as many as residents think they are seeing around the city.

“We get a lot of reports at the Fishery Department, but only about 5 to 10 percent of them turn out to be true,” said Praphan Lipayakun, a fishery department official, adding that many false reports end up being large monitor lizards, which are generally shy and harmless.

“We even get reports of people being bitten, but when we follow up, we can’t get in touch with the supposed patient, or when contacted, the doctor that treated the wound says that it in no way resembled a crocodile bite.”

Still, officials and volunteer veterinarians have confirmed many flood-affected animals on the loose or in distress — and not only reptiles.

A team of volunteer veterinarians rescued scores of animals — from deer and Capuchin monkeys to lions, tigers and bears — from the yards and homes of Thailand’s rich.

“Most of the ones we found in the Bangkok area are privately owned, and a lot of them are for fun or for pleasure — like a farm or some exotic species in the house,” said Nantarika Chansue, president of the Zoo and Wildlife Veterinary Society of Thailand and a member of the team of volunteers.

“Some of the owners left home already and left the animals in the cage as the water rose. Some of them have illegal animals and are afraid of being prosecuted, so they are afraid to tell us and just leave them there.”

Some of the rescued animals had had to be treated for respiratory diseases from inhaling disease-infested floodwaters, Nantarika said.

Calls about snakes have spiked from the usual two per day to about 10, said Sompob Sridaranop, a snake rescue expert from the Thai Marine Department. Most residents report pythons — but occasionally the calls are about highly venomous cobras and pit vipers, he said.

“A lot of snakes are coming out now because they, too, are flooded. Their homes are usually under houses, or in pipes, but they can’t sleep in the water, so they are escaping,” he said.

In Nakhon Sawan province, north of Bangkok, Anan Dirath said his family found about 10 nonpoisonous snakes in the house since the waters receded, while his neighbors found cobras, which they caught and sold for their meat.

In Bangkok’s Sai Mai district, not far from where Anchalee spotted the crocodile, a large zoo called Safari World was flooded, endangering primates, giraffes, dolphins and other exotic animals in captivity. At the height of the flooding, zoo official Litti Kewkacha said staff were piling up earth, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to stay higher than the flood levels.

Crocodile farms were not so successful at keeping their wards safe in captivity.

Since the floods began in July, the Fishery Department’s crocodile teams have captured 10 that have escaped and found their way into residential areas in Bangkok and suburbs just to the north. Some have been easy catches: Residents had closed them into fenced yards.

Then there are those like the one Anchalee saw, lurking in areas that are boxed in, but large, and with plenty of vegetation for cover. That one proved a special challenge for the crocodile chasers.

“These are its footprints. It’s around here,” Praphan said under a mid-afternoon sun.

As the team toured the area’s perimeter by boat, 42-year-old crocodile zoo performer and volunteer Chalaew Busamrong concurred that the trapped animal must be a crocodile.

“It has been floating around here a long time,” Chalaew said. “It can’t find its way out. If it were a monitor lizard, it would have found its way out by now.”

The team decided that the area was too wide and wild to try to close in on the beast, so they baited their giant-sized hooks with raw chicken carcasses. It’s a tactic with an often-inconclusive result, because if local residents find a trapped crocodile, they’re likely to grab it and sell it.

“We’ve left bait before in other areas, but because crocodiles are so valuable, we’re never sure if they are captured or not,” Praphan said.

As they attached the wires to nearby trees in the swamp and prepared to head home, they heard a heavy movement in the reeds. The team stiffened, fell quiet, and backed away, hoping the crocodile might move forward.

Suspecting the crocodile might be hungry enough to take the bait, Chalaew decided to stay the night.

Nearby, construction workers slept uneasily, but there were no sounds of frantic splashing, as had been hoped. As the sun rose, the chicken carcasses remained untouched.

One week later, the area remained flooded. Neighbors told Anchalee that they shot and killed two crocodiles a few streets away.

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what they say,” she said by phone. “We haven’t seen it since, and the chicken has all fallen off into the water. We only hear the dogs howling.”

___

Associated Press writer Pailin Wedel contributed to this report.

(Source: Yahoo!)

Trafficked Vietnamese workers exploited in China

THANH BINH, 22 November 2011 (IRIN) - Growing numbers of Vietnamese labourers are being trafficked to factories and plantations in China where they are exploited, according to the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP). 

When a woman visited Phan Quoc Suu and Phan Van Lin’s farming village near the Chinese border with offers of well-paid work in China, the two young men suspected little. 

“She was Chinese, but came from the same ethnic group as us, and she said that if we went with her, we would get high salaries,” said Suu and Lin, who were 16 and 18, respectively, when they and three other young men from their village left in 2007. 

“I recognized her face, but I did not know her personally,” Lin said. “But we thought that since she came to the village so many times and she has relatives here, we could trust her.” 

She had promised each about US$200 every month - more than a quarter of the average annual salary for Vietnamese in 2007 - but when they arrived at a brick factory in the mountains of China’s Guangdong province more than 900km away, they realized they had been deceived. 

To avoid the beatings other workers suffered, Suu and Lin toiled each day from 5am to 7:30pm. 

After two months, they had still not been paid. In the third month, Lin complained to the employer and was paid $80. He took the money and fled back home. Only in the sixth month did Suu manage with co-workers to pool enough cash to escape. He arrived at the border crossing to Vietnam empty-handed. 

“When we heard people say this was a bad place and we were deceived, we were scared, but we did not know how to get away. We didn’t have any money,” Suu and Lin said. 

“We continued to obey the guards and the employers, so we weren’t beaten. The others who did not obey were beaten,” Lin said. “We decided to stay until we got money and then find a way to escape.” 

Cheated and exploited 

Following a 2008 law that requires better pay and benefits for nationals, Chinese factories are increasingly turning to foreign workers whom they can pay substantially less, according to a UNIAP report due to be published in December. 

Some of these Vietnamese workers may receive contracts, travel papers, and even plane tickets and job training, only to be exploited and abused. Because Vietnamese law only recently recognized such labour abuses as trafficking, statistics on the numbers exploited are scarce. 

Some 850,000 legal migrants leave their homes in Vietnam to work abroad each year, according to the government. 

“A number of these migrants are trafficked by bad companies. They have their passports confiscated, they have their contracts violated. They are forced to do jobs different from what they agreed prior to departure. They have to work much longer hours,” said Nguyen Ngoc Anh, UNIAP project coordinator in Vietnam. 

By international standards, human trafficking is defined as “the recruitment, transport, receipt and harbouring of people for the purpose of exploiting them sexually or for labour”. 

Vietnam is not a signatory to the 2000 UN anti-trafficking protocol that defines how deception can turn a voluntary migrant into a trafficking victim. 

“Once they end up in another country, instead of being a machine operator, they have to produce bricks. Instead of $10 a day, they get $2 a day. Instead of 9 to 5, it’s 7am to 10pm. That’s when trafficking occurs,” Ngoc Anh said. 

Focus on men 

Until recently, Vietnamese law focused on women and children trafficked for sex and did not recognize men as victims of sexual violence or address labour exploitation, for either gender, according to UNIAP. In 2009, the penal code was amended from “trafficking in women and children” to address “trafficking in persons”. 

From January, a new anti-trafficking law will be enforced, protecting male and female survivors of all types of trafficking. 

According to Ngoc Anh, it is crucial that the government target human traffickers and employers, who at present escape unscathed. 

“For employers who exploit workers, you can’t do much. They [individuals and companies] may get some administrative fine, but that’s it. They’re not even criminally prosecuted,” she said. “If we can fix the law to make it in line with international standards, it will address a number of issues. More traffickers will be prosecuted, and more victims provided with assistance.” 

Meanwhile, authorities are trying to increase awareness about human trafficking in border areas and other locations with vulnerable populations, said Nguyen Van Thai, head of the drugs and crime control office for the Lao Cai Province border military guard command near the Chinese border. 

“The less people know about human trafficking, the more risks they face. If people know that there are a lot of tricks waiting for them in China, then they might not go,” he said. 

at/pt/mw 

(Source: irinnews.org)

Reviving gum and resin production key to livelihoods and conservation in Ethiopia’s dry forests

A revival in the production of gums and resins such as frankincense and myrrh could help conserve forests and boost livelihoods in Ethiopia’s impoverished drylands, according to a new study published by the Center for International Forestry Research.

Such gums and resins come from trees that are adapted to extremely dry climates, and would provide a sustainable forest-based industry in areas where worsening droughts, population growth and over-harvesting of timber are driving land degradation and desertification.

“Forest products such as gums and resins are important sources of cash income. They are the most important export commodities from the forestry sector,” said Habtemariam Kassa, co-author of the study, “Opportunities and challenges for sustainable production and marketing of gums and resins in Ethiopia.”

Dry forests are the largest vegetation resources in Ethiopia, where more than half of the landmass – some 560,000 to 615,000 square km – is arid or semi-arid.

While home to only 12 to 15 percent of the country’s 80 million people, the drylands have a growing population, due in part to government resettlement programs to assist vulnerable households in the degraded highlands.

While drylands residents were once nomadic livestock farmers, with population growth, urban centers have mushroomed, and as a result, overgrazing and deforestation for construction, energy and household income supplement.

Compounding the problem, climate change and erratic rainfall are making agricultural production virtually impossible and driving desertification across Ethiopia’s drylands.

In recent years, many dryland communities suffer increasingly from poverty and food insecurity, and food aid has become common.

While there is a misconception that there is a paucity of resources in the drylands, Kassa suggests that the population need only turn to dry forest trees – such as Acacia, Commiphora, Boswellia and Sterculia – which yield gums and resins that Ethiopians have collected, used and traded since antiquity.

Thus far, however, gum and resin trees have been neglected because policy makers and researchers know little about the potential of these resources. Strategies focus solely on agricultural expansion, but there is no clearly defined policy on dryland development.

“It is only recently that research on these forests, trees and products began. Thus policy options and technical/managerial recommendations how best to manage dry forests to sustainably produce gums and resins are difficult to come by,” Kassa said.

He stressed a need to support more research and to inform decision makers about balancing conservation and development in dry forest areas.

Sustainable production of gums and resins can help fight desertification and promote biodiversity and conservation, while also providing an income and offering a source of food for livestock, as well as humans during periods of famine.

Furthermore, he writes, global demand for these products – the best known of which include gum arabic, frankincense, myrrh, opoponax and gum karaya – is growing, so improved access to the global market could encourage farmers to sustainably manage dry forests.

Ethiopia’s exports have increased in recent years from 1,648 tonnes in 1999-2000 to more than 5,000 in 2009-10, he said.

“But still, the production level remains much lower than its estimated potential. This indicates that Ethiopia has not yet managed to benefit fully from this resource, due to a range of production, marketing and institutional shortcomings.”

Attempts to raise seedlings to produce gums and resins at the farm level have not started. While there have been attempts by some companies, survival rates have been extremely low.

“The species have not yet been domesticated, and production at own farm level is almost non-existent. To produce marketable volumes you need more trees.”

“Opportunities and challenges for sustainable production and marketing of gums and resins in Ethiopia” is part of CIFOR’s ongoing research, supported by the Austrian Development Agency, to expand knowledge about conservation and development in dry forest areas and to better inform national and regional partners.

(Source: blog.cifor.org)

MYANMAR-THAILAND: Refugees cope with brain drain

MAE SOT, 24 October 2011 (IRIN) - When third-country resettlement for Burmese refugees living in Thailand started in 2005, all 50 teachers at the Tham Hin refugee camp’s school had to be replaced.

There are numerous other examples of refugees in the 10 camps along the Thai-Burmese border being trained up to serve in schools or medical facilities, only to leave for third countries without warning.

Mae Tao Clinic, which serves refugees and internally displaced persons, has lost 200 staff members to resettlement, while the International Rescue Committee (IRC) lost 400 - 80 percent of its camp-based staff, many of them health workers; some with 10 years of work experience.

Today, among the nearly 150,000 residents still living in the camps, the sentiment is bittersweet: On the one hand, 72,000 Burmese refugees who had suffered decades of stateless limbo finally have a home; on the other, resettlement has caused an enormous vacuum in the ethnic Karen refugee community, which has long taken pride in managing, teaching and providing care for its own.

“Other refugee camps are administered by host governments, UNHCR [the UN Refugee Agency] or other NGOs. We have the opportunity to govern our own people,” said George (who goes by one name only), secretary of the Karen Refugee Committee (KRC), which oversees seven camps along the 1,800km border.

“When resettlement started, because of the brain drain, we have had difficulties with the health sector, education sector and camp management sector. Most of the young people who have capacity or skills left their camps for resettlement. The rest are unskilled and old people.

“We are now facing problems because in the KRC committee, we have a lot of elderly people, like me. I’m now 60. If I were born in your country, I would retire or resign. We need to balance the young and the old on our committee.”

Adaptation strategies

According to the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 9,000 refugees will be resettled this year, and another 10,000 in 2012. Most end up in the USA, Australia and Canada. Camp-based and international organizations, meanwhile, are learning to cope with the loss.

“For the first two-three years, we were playing catch up, because people would be gone, and we were losing institutional knowledge,” said Sally Thompson, deputy executive director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), an umbrella group of NGOs working along the border.

“That has now slowed down. Gradually others have been trained to take their places, and so programmes have been able to adapt.”

The KRC’s education arm - including 1,500 teachers for 36,000 kindergarten to grade 12 students - launched a one-month teacher training crash course and changed its policy to allow those who complete middle school to teach grades one to six. 

The Karen Student Network Group - young community organizers - flattened its hierarchy, allowing lower-ranking members to make decisions so that when its 30-year-old president, Poe Shan, left for Canada in September, others could more easily step into his shoes. 

IRC, whose mandate is to assist refugees, expected their health workers to be among the first to leave, and prepared well in advance by ramping up its 18-month medical training programme. However, many staff these days require more on-the-job mentoring and coaching. 

“One of the biggest challenges is having a brand new workforce made up primarily of well-meaning, well-intentioned, but very young and new health services staff,” said Christine Petrie, IRC’s deputy director of programmes. “It’s more labour intensive for us. They’re young and experienced, having gone through training, but they need lots of support.” 

Trainees commit to staying… temporarily 

Eh Thwa, the training manager and volunteer coordinator for Mae Tao Clinic, spent two years training a man who resettled in the UK, and a year with a woman who moved to the USA. Another man whom she trained for a few months failed to show up for work one day. 

“He resettled, but I don’t know to what country. He didn’t tell me. I only heard after he left already. A boy in his dormitory told me,” she said. “This is very frustrating.” 

Those who enrol in Mae Tao Clinic’s training programmes now have to work at the clinic for a minimum of two years. A guarantor who co-signs the enrolment forms has to pay a 5,000 baht (US$165) fee if the trainee leaves, though Eh Thwa acknowledges that losing staff to resettlement is ultimately good. 

“People who live here do not have ID cards. They are not recognized by Thailand or Burma. We cannot say, ‘work here at Mae Tao Clinic, do not leave’. Maybe one day their children will finish university and can come back and serve the community.” 

Photo by David Longstreath

(Source: irinnews.org)

Improving maternal and child care in eastern Myanmar

MAE SOT, 17 October 2011 (IRIN) - In conflict-afflicted eastern Myanmar, until recently obstetric care was often crude, unsterile and dangerous for both mother and child, health experts say. 

When labour pains began, traditional birth attendants routinely pushed the woman’s stomach, sometimes injuring or killing the baby; others used sharp slivers of bamboo, which had been cleaned with charcoal, to cut the umbilical cord, leading to deadly infections. 

“Services were very limited. Maternal deaths, pregnancy-related issues like anaemia and infant mortality, were very high,” Nay Htoo, programme director for the Burma Medical Association, a Mae Sot-headquartered community-based organization (CBO), told IRIN. 

In parts of eastern Myanmar, the infant mortality rate is 73 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 14 in neighbouring Thailand. 

At the same time, the maternal mortality rate is 721 per 100,000 live births, three times the country’s national rate of 240. In neighbouring Thailand, that figure stands at 48. 

With high levels of conflict, forced labour and human rights abuses, such health indicators are particularly dire, but ignorance and dangerous traditional practices are also at fault. 

Training 

To address these problems, in 2005 several CBOs, the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University, and the Global Health Access Program launched the Mobile Obstetric Medics (MOM) project - dramatically boosting access to care. 

The MOM project brought community-based maternal and child health workers from Myanmar’s Shan, Mon, Karen and Karenni states - unstable regions where ethnic militia and Burmese troops for decades have waged war - to Thailand for training in ante-and postnatal care, sterile deliveries, treatment for complications, as well as family planning services. 

These maternal and child health workers would then pass on their new knowledge and skills to village health workers and traditional birth attendants, making sure that if complications arose, this triumvirate would cooperate and coordinate to provide care. 

In the year after the MOM project began, only 5.1 percent of deliveries were attended by a skilled provider, according to research published in 2010. 

By 2008, births attended by health providers trained to deliver emergency obstetric care had increased to 48.7 percent. 

“The MOM project was a huge success,” Luke Mullany, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the 2010 paper, said. 

“Our collaboration and the work of our implementing partners produced a three-tiered network of community-based providers who were able to provide elements of basic emergency obstetric care at high coverage,” Mullany explained. 

Dangerous practices 

Integer, a former maternal and child health worker in Karen state’s Kler Lwee Htoo District, who like many Burmese goes by just one name, said some traditional birth attendants kept long nails in case of difficult deliveries, to fatally puncture a baby’s head, releasing tissue to shrink the head, allowing the baby to be delivered. 

“Before, they didn’t know sterile methods or even the stages of delivery and when to begin the delivery,” said Integer, now reproductive health programme coordinator for the Karen Department of Health and Welfare, a CBO involved in the MOM project.

“After training, they got that knowledge, and they also learned about high-risk pregnancies. When they see a high-risk pregnancy, they can send the patient to the nearest clinic for further examination.” 

The maternal child health worker travels around her area to train, supervise and assist the traditional birth attendant twice a year. 

Older birth attendants 

Each year, about 25 health workers illegally cross the border into Thailand for a MOM project refresher course with the Burma Medical Association. 

One challenge, say Nay Htoo, is passing on these lessons to older traditional birth attendants. 

“Some still lack the skills to follow the protocol, step by step, especially the very old traditional birth attendants. Most are illiterate, so you have to use symbols to train them,” Nay Htoo said. 

“The traditional birth attendant is a stakeholder in the community. If they don’t trust you, they will not join the programme, and you cannot implement the programme successfully. To change people’s ideas, especially the older people, is not easy.” 

Health workers in the MOM project are given traditional birth attendant kits that include gloves, scissors, gauze, cotton as well as dietary supplements and medicines. 

Because of ongoing tensions between ethnic groups and the Burmese government, ethnic Burmese CBOs try to improve care in their home country from Thailand. 

“Even though we are based in Thailand, our services are in Burma, particularly in IDP [internally displaced persons] communities. We want to be based in Burma to provide our services to the communities effectively; however, the time does not permit us to be based there yet,” Nay Htoo said. 

“Every time we bring people back and forth for training and project re-supplying purposes it’s very difficult, but we know how to deal with local authorities in Burma and Thailand.” 

Photo courtesy of the Karen Department of Health and Welfare

(Source: irinnews.org)

Children team up with adults to prepare for disaster

By Plan International team

When annual monsoons swell Asia’s rivers and waterlog the earth, 14-year-old Atik worries.

“When it rains heavily for four hours, it seems that soil in some parts of this village will shift and cause a landslide,” she said from Dowan village in Indonesia’s Central Java province.

Such fears are well founded: Torrential storms have triggered one to four floods and landslides each year near her home, and in 2008, claimed 80 lives and destroyed or damaged 11,000 homes.

Climate change is causing temperature extremes and natural disasters that lash out more frequently and with greater fury, and the hardest hit are Asia’s developing countries – where growing populations endure poverty, poor health and lack of education, while depending on water and land for their food and livelihoods.

Children, who make up about half the population in nations at risk, are among the most vulnerable, yet are often viewed as powerless victims and excluded from prevention, planning and recovery.

However, Plan International’s work in Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines shows that children’s involvement provides a boost of energy to local governments, while also giving children a sense of control over situations in which they might otherwise feel helpless.

“The Philippines, like other countries, is very adult-driven, and most children are left behind. In Plan’s areas, we ensure the disaster risk reduction council includes children’s participation,” said Baltz Tribunalo, Plan’s programme advisor for child-centred disaster risk reduction in the Philippines. “In most areas, children are raising lots of concerns that adults do not see.”

Youth spur communities, committees to act

Bangladesh suffers more from climate change than anywhere else in the world, yet local administrative bodies tasked with disaster management often lack the knowledge and capacity to prepare for disasters.

“The Bangladesh government has standing orders for disaster management, but it is very much centralised. The standing order is not operationalised at the local level,” said Imamul Azam Shahi, who works on child-centred disaster risk reduction for Plan Bangladesh. “People don’t have much idea about what needs to be done before, during and after disasters.”

So Plan Bangladesh in 2007 piloted a project to get children, aged 10 to 17, involved with Union Disaster Management Committees (UDMC) in Hatibandha sub-district in the north, and replicated the project in 2009 in southern Barguna district. Child-led disaster risk reduction groups were established and drew maps to analyse hazards and vulnerabilities.

The children convinced their families and neighbours to prepare for floods and cyclones by tying a store of dry foods to the rafters along with an emergency piggy bank for purchases in the event of crop failure, and raising the plinths of their homes.

They raised community awareness through drama and music performances, and presented to the UDMCs their community risk assessment and preparedness and response plans, which prioritised the needs of children and people with disabilities.

“In the beginning, the UDMC members did not accept us, but day by day, as we demonstrated our potential, our relationship has gotten better, and now we play a proactive role in the UDMC,” 16-year-old Mahfuza, president of the local children’s group, said by phone from Barguna. “After children’s representatives participated in the UDMC, the UDMC meetings have now been regularised,” added 16-year-old Opu, the group’s secretary.

Since these children proved their valuable contribution in these two pilot projects, Plan has called for the formal participation of children in all UDMCs across the country.

Children confident to speak up, participate

In Indonesia, Atik and the Plan-supported children’s council presented their hazard mapfindings to the Dowan village disaster preparedness team.

“In the beginning we were a bit shy and afraid to share our opinions because we didn’t want to make any mistakes,” said Atik, the deputy chief of the children’s council. “We thought that if we made mistakes, the adults would be angry at us or would tease us.”

The adults not only listened, but also enlisted the children as partners in drafting the village disaster contingency plan.

“Children’s opinions, feedback and concerns were respected by adults and included in the final contingency plan,” said Atik, who presented the document in her district and to Plan International’s board during a visit in September 2011. And instead of being mere helpless victims, the children now have active roles in the event of disaster.

Atik will support children at the education post and collect clothes for affected people. Iman Yasak, 17, also on the children’s council, will coordinate with the school principal, teachers and village leaders to ensure children have access to education in a postemergency setting.

The remaining challenge is to mitigate or prevent the natural disasters afflicting Dowan. “The children brought awareness of how to make our environment safe, how we as human beings should respect nature. It made us adults and village leaders consider the development of a village decree on forest conservation and deforestation,” said Sujad, Dowan’s village head.

The decree is still being drafted, but many hope it will herald a safer future. “We need to find a solution to ensure that landslides will no longer occur in my village, so that during the rainy season, I can sleep and study in peace,” Iman said.

(Source: trust.org)

THAILAND: Neonatal care for refugees by refugees

MAE SOT, 15 September 2011 (IRIN) - Just as staff at the maternity clinic in the Mae La refugee camp began learning about special care for newborns, a baby was born six weeks premature, weighing 1.3kg. 

The medics and nurses - all ethnic Karen refugees from Myanmar - were anxious about treating the tiny boy. Resigned to his fate, the family decided to take him home for his last hours or days. The staff agreed. 

Then Claudia Turner, a British research paediatrician working in the camp, convinced them to let the clinic staff help the baby live. After a month-and-a-half in the special care baby unit (SCBU), he went home, healthy. 

“The staff suddenly realized they could do it. It boosted confidence. That feels like a pivotal moment for us here,” Turner said in the office at the cluster of bamboo and thatch huts housing the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU) maternity clinic. “Babies do die, but not all babies have to die, and we do our best.” 

Turner has been training Karen refugee medics and nurses in neonatal care since 2007, when she set up the clinic’s SCBU in Mae La, the largest camp, housing 45,000 of the estimated 145,000 refugees living in nine camps along the Thai-Burmese border. 

“Forty percent of neonatal deaths happen within the first 24 hours after delivery,” said Hervé Isambert, senior regional health coordinator with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Bangkok. “This can be prevented by providing appropriate care within the first hours of life.” 

The care can be as simple as cleaning the baby, providing skin to skin contact to prevent hypothermia and encouraging the mother to breastfeed within the first hour if possible, he said. 

While UNHCR does not provide healthcare in the camps, NGOs working in maternal care mostly refer severe neonatal cases to nearby hospitals, but the SMRU unit in Mae La is staffed with 10 medics and 15 nurses trained to deal with difficult cases. 

Neonatal deaths - within the first 28 days of life - have been halved in two years in Mae La. According to data, this is a model camp in terms of maternal health. 

“Before that, there was no specific care or training for staff to look after very small babies,” Turner said, noting that to reduce infant mortality, a key focus must be on newborns. 

“These are quite complicated cases. They [the medics] are operating on a level equivalent to doctor in the UK. It amazes me what they do,” Turner said. “They’re running it… they do all the work.” 

Of the 10 million children who die each year globally, four million succumb in the first 28 days mostly to prematurity, infections and birth complication-related asphyxia. The first week is the hardest: three million die in those first seven days. 

SMRU handles about 1,500 births each year. The neonatal unit cared for 279 babies in 2010. 

In 2007-2008, the early years of SCBU, the neonatal mortality rate was 26 per 1,000 live births, according to SMRU statistics. By 2009-2010, that figure had dropped to 12 per 1,000 live births. 

According to the UN Children’s Fund, neonatal mortality nationwide in Myanmar in 2009 was 33 deaths per 1,000; in Thailand, it was eight per 1,000.  

Caring for newborns in western countries is expensive - costing upwards of US$1,000 a day, and for premature babies in a refugee camp many believed it would be too difficult and too expensive. But a month of SMRU care totals about $165. Other NGOs afford local hospital bills through health programming grants and negotiating costs. 

“People don’t believe it is possible - that’s what I hope to disprove. I’ve disproved it here, but I haven’t proved that it can be used in any setting,” Turner said. “Even without spending all that money, you can make an impact.” 

Waves of ethnic Karen refugees and labour migrants have poured into Thailand since the 1980s. Many came to escape fighting between the Burmese government and ethnic minority groups, while others are in Thailand because of greater economic opportunities. 

Photo by David Longstreath

(Source: irinnews.org)