By Christopher Marc Lilyblad
MINDELO, Cabo Verde, Jan 26 2023 – On 20 January, the world’s best sailors arrived in Mindelo, Cabo Verde, completing the initial leg of the 2023 edition of The Ocean Race. Coinciding with this stop was the launch of Cabo Verde’s first blue bond at the Ocean Summit, an event jointly organized by The Ocean Race and the Government of Cabo Verde on the sidelines of the grueling round-the-world race. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was in attendance as this year’s keynote speaker.

The bond was launched on Cabo Verde’s Blu-X sustainable finance platform, a regional platform for listing and trading sustainable and inclusive financial instruments.

The issuance will raise domestic, regional, and global investment in Cabo Verde’s rising ocean economy while divesting capital from industries responsible for sea-level rise, pollution, and other transgressions against ocean rights.

In brief, the winds of sustainable finance are filling the sails of a local blue economy heeling towards global Ocean Rights.

Consistent with its blue seal, up to US$1 million in proceeds (minimum US$500,000) will supply affordable loans to microentrepreneurs and startups in coastal communities, emphasizing financial inclusion to ensure widespread access to the new value generated from the growing blue economy.

The remaining US$1.5 million foresees structural investments in small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the maritime and fisheries sectors.

Notably, this is the first initial public offering, or IPO, listed on the Blu-X sustainable finance platform. This means anyone, anywhere with access to the digital Blu-X platform can invest via their computer or phone, including foreign investors and members of Cabo Verde’s sizable diaspora.

Furthermore, this marks the first private issuance that does not rely on a public guarantee but is solely backed by market demand. With a ‘greenshoe’ (or ‘blue aquasocks’, rather?) option of an additional US$ 1 million triggered if demand for bond subscriptions exceeds the initial US$2.5 million, the blue bond could ultimately generate US$3.5 million in private and market-driven finance for a sustainable blue economy.

In a race against time during the UN’s Ocean Decade, this initial blue bond listing offers a potentially game-changing test case for Cabo Verde’s blue finance ambitions.

The strategic partnership between the Cabo Verde Stock Exchange (Bolsa de Valores de Cabo Verde – BVC) and UNDP under Cabo Verde’s integrated national financing framework (INFF) has already led to four sustainable bond issuances totaling USD32.5 million.

Building on this momentum, the blue bond’s proceeds are exclusively destined for sustainable marine- and ocean-based projects generating returns for the economy, society, and environment – the triple bottom line.

With funding from the UN’s Joint SDG Fund and UNDP’s strategic and technical support, the Blu-X team at the BVC guided the Cabo-Verdean International Investment Bank through the process of issuing the bond framework, following an external review process that ensures adherence to blue principles.

What actually ‘counts as’ blue has recently been established through a new blue bond regulation in November 2022, enacted under the authority of Cabo Verde’s capital market regulatory agency.

The regulation draws on the Atlantic Technical University’s blue taxonomy, derived from a scientific study of existing blue economy activities and the potential of Cabo Verde’s shores.

The first of its kind in Africa, the regulation reflects the country’s pioneering role in defining blue finance norms, standards, and principles, which closely aligns with the Ocean Race’s Sustainability Charter and corresponding calls for a Universal Declaration of Ocean Rights anchored at the United Nations.

By hoisting the blue flag, Cabo Verde is again signaling its emergence as a global front-runner. Indeed, since the first blue bond issuance by Seychelles in 2018, these financial instruments have mostly been treated as a subsidiary category of green bonds in financial markets. However, what was once seen as a ‘shade of green’ is now emerging as a primary colour of its own.

Building on this initial proof of concept, the proliferation of blue bonds has the potential to transform financing for Cabo Verde’s strategic sustainable development agenda: Ambition 2030.

In a tourism-dependent economy vulnerable to external shocks, the growth of sustainable finance and the blue economy will accelerate socio-economic decentralization and sectorial diversification, from fisheries and maritime transport to nautical sports and ocean-based technology.

As a small island developing state that is “99 percent ocean,” this stands to benefit the local communities that depend on marine environments and maritime spaces for their livelihoods.

Blue economy impact investing poignantly illustrates why marine environments and biodiversity should be preserved not only as ends in themselves but also as catalysts for value creation.

As more and more people subscribe to the idea that protecting ocean resources is vital for maintaining and growing economies, we will see an upsurge in innovative businesses, initiatives and transactions that advance marine conservation.

The growth of blue entrepreneurship and investment paves the way for greater collaboration spurring collective action capable of avoiding a tragedy of the ocean commons.

In other words, by reshaping economic incentive structures along these lines and leveraging their effects in local coastal communities, sustainable finance enhances cognizance of global ocean sustainability principles and incentivizes corresponding human action.

The Ocean Race Cabo Verde presented by Blu-X marks a growing interest in Cabo Verde’s emerging blue standard. Inspired by these blue finance bearings, perhaps others will soon chart a similar course, with the prospect of collectively raising an entire fleet racing towards the UN Ocean Decade finish.

Christopher Marc Lilyblad is Head of Strategy and Policy Unit, a.i. UNDP Cabo Verde; Development Economist & Head of Strategy and Economic Cluster, a.i. UNDP Guinea-Bissau

Source: UNDP

IPS UN Bureau

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By Mehru Jaffer
GOA, INDIA, Jan 26 2023 – When countless supporters of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, arrive in Srinagar on January 30 to hoist the Indian flag, they would have walked 3,570 kilometres over 150 days.

The Congress Party organised the Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY), a long march to counter what it calls the divisive politics of the ruling party. The exercise was to revive the idea of India as a country united in all its diversity. The BJY is led by senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, 52, who met countless citizens on the way at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not held a single press conference in the last nine years that he has been in power.

Founder and editor of The Citizen Seema Mustafa told the IPS Rahul Gandhi gained by leading the BJY.

“He has emerged as a leader of substance with courage and honesty and compassion on display. What the Congress Party has gained will only be known once Congressmen can take it all forward. Other gains and losses will come after that, but for now, the BJY has indeed cut through the prevailing atmosphere of fear and hate,” said Mustafa.

The BJY will culminate in the Himalayan region of Kashmir on January 30 but will it receive the same kind of welcome as it has in the rest of the country, is the question. For nearly half a century, the people of Kashmir have complained of Delhi’s stepmotherly attitude towards them.

Spymaster and former head of India’s Intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), AS Dulat, had a personal invitation to join the BJY. He walked for one hour with Rahul Gandhi, but Dulat did not say whether they talked about the troubled province of Kashmir.

Dulat’s latest book, A Life in the Shadows, is about Kashmir, a place he loves passionately. He was first posted to Kashmir in the late 1980s. As a former Prime Minister’s advisor on Kashmir, he understands the Kashmiri psyche and empathises with the problems in the province. Because he is seen as a problem solver and well-wisher of all the people suffering in Kashmir, including separatists, militants, and Pakistanis, he is called Mr Kashmir.

In the book, he implies that the problem of militancy is no longer about joining Pakistan or seeking independence but resistance to the harsh majoritarian policies of muscular power tactics used against the people of Kashmir by the present government in Delhi.

Rahul Gandhi greets well-wishers during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, which started in September 2022 and is due to be completed by January 30, 2023. Source: BJY/Twitter

Dulat told the media that participating in the BJY was a wonderful experience. Gandhi wrote in a letter inviting Dulat to join the march, “We listen to anyone who wants to be heard. We offer no judgment or opinion. We walk to unite every Indian regardless of their gender, caste or religion because we know they are equal citizens. We walk to fight hatred and fear.”

Dulat commented: “I think what this young man is doing is certainly something exceptional… incredible.”’ He doesn’t think that anyone will ever do it again, and nobody is going to walk so many kilometres again.

However, his walk has had its critics – with the Defence Minister Rajnath Singh accusing Gandhi of tarnishing the image of India by creating the impression that only hatred prevails in the country.

The BJY was started last September on the southern tip of the Indian peninsula in Kanyakumari, and it has marched non-stop through 12 provinces. During the march, Gandhi spent time with scores of citizens from different walks of life. After walking about 25 kilometres daily in two shifts, the Congress workers slept in makeshift accommodations at night.

Talking to IPS, a professor at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Zoya Hasan, agreed that the march had succeeded.

“If crowds are any indicator, the BJY got an enthusiastic response in all the states it traversed. This shows that there is still space in the country for inclusive politics,” Hasan said.

Many see the march as altering the country’s mood. It has brought hope into the lives of citizens who have been feeling increasingly fearful of their future and security. Largely ignored by (mainly pro-government) mainstream media, the BJY has been streaming live on social media. Watching supporters walk thousands of miles and meet hundreds of thousands of people of all faiths mingling, embracing, shaking hands and making friends has reinforced positive ideas of bonhomie and togetherness amongst citizens.

Ever since the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the mood in the nation has been grim. Apart from tackling the never-ending scourge of poverty, the country has had to deal with repeated incidents of public violence.

The BJP has been criticised for being communitarian, and commentators say this, at best, ignores and, at worst, encourages violence by citizens against each other and divides Indian society by religious affiliation.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, in an interview, Sen had told Le Monde, the French daily newspaper, that the Indian government is one of the most appalling in the world because it is communitarian in the narrowest sense of the term. It harms India by attacking Muslims and propagating the idea that Hindus form the nation.

Many consider the BJY march a success as a political protest against the alleged divisive politics of the right-wing ruling party in power.

“I joined the march and walked with Rahul Gandhi not because I am a fan of the Congress Party but because I thought the young man (Rahul Gandhi) has stood up for the right values at the right time, and I support similar values,” filmmaker Saeed Mirza said at the launch of his latest book I Know The Psychology of Rats in Goa recently.

“I believe every Indian who wants love and inclusiveness should be participating in the yatra beyond political identity. Although it is a predominately Congress-organised event, it is not exclusively a Congress event. So every Indian has been welcomed with open arms, and that is how it should be. If political pettiness comes in the way, it will be a self-defeating attitude,” said Tushar Gandhi, who joined the march last November. Tushar is Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson, and Rahul Gandhi is the great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India.

The Congress Party says the objective of the BJY is to fight against the politics of fear, bigotry and prejudice and the economics of livelihood destruction, increasing unemployment and growing inequalities.

“What the yatra has achieved is way beyond what the sceptics anticipated. They have been proved wrong, and I include myself in the category. A suffocated nation was waiting for some such happening,” wrote journalist Saeed Naqvi.

Hasan adds that the BJY has refurbished the Congress’s credentials as a party of national unity and social cohesion, upholding the values of secularism, the welfare of the masses and their constitutionally granted rights. This marks an important wedge in a hyper-nationalist narrative of the ruling party’s politics.

Hasan said the impact of the BJY was that the ruling party wasn’t setting the narrative but was forced to react to the Congress Party. While only time will tell whether the march will bring electoral gains to the Congress Party in the general elections to be held in 2024, Hasan says:

“It is the necessary first step in building a politics of change.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Paul Virgo
ROME, Jan 26 2023 – In a wiser world, the term ‘treating someone like dirt’ would be a good thing. After all, 15 of the 18 nutrients essential to plants are supplied by soils and around 95% of the food we eat comes directly or indirectly from them, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

So dirt is actually a precious resource that deserves to be treated with respect, care and perhaps even a little love.

Unfortunately, humanity has been treating soil ‘like dirt’ in the traditional sense of the term, abusing it with pollution, unsustainable industrial agricultural practices and the overexploitation of natural resources.

The result is that about one third of the world’s soils are degraded, the FAO says. At this rate, 90% of all soils are set to be degraded by 2050.

“When we talk about soil health, we then get to human health,” Carolina Olivera, an agronomist with the FAO’s Global Soil Partnership (GSP),” told IPS.

The quality of the food is also decreasing. Food now has more macronutrients and less micronutrients, which means we do not have enough elements to synthesize vitamins, to synthesize other metabolisms that are very important for our organism

“We are here now with high levels of soil degradation because of many factors, some natural. You can have soil erosion because there is a steep slope and water is circulating and taking all the sediments. But, above all, you can also have bad soil management, intensive practices, bad livestock practices with too many animals per hectare, and monocropping, so no rotation.”

“If we have monocropping, soils will not be in good health because the same crop is always extracting the same nutrients, so some nutrients will be missing. It’s the same as with human diets. If we always eat sugar, we will have too much sugar and not enough vitamins. Biodiversity is very important for everything, starting with soils and right the way up to our diets”.

The loss of soil fertility means that land is now less productive and many cereals, vegetables and fruits are not as rich in vitamins and nutrients as they were 70 years ago.

“This nutrient imbalance in soil will affect crops, it will affect plants and it will affect humans and all nutrition,” Olivera explained. It will affect it with decreasing yields. Yields are decreasing every day. Farmers are increasing the quantity of fertilizers they use and they don’t understand why yields are still decreasing.

“The quality of the food is also decreasing. Food now has more macronutrients and less micronutrients, which means we do not have enough elements to synthesize vitamins, to synthesize other metabolisms that are very important for our organism.

“So you have hidden hunger, where you have enough calories but you don’t have enough minerals or the adequate specific minerals that you need to have good nutrition and good health. The result is that we have some immunity diseases and other kinds of diseases developing.

“So it’s a long chain, from the soil to the nutrients, and to the quality of nutrition humans can have in the end”.

The climate crisis is making things worse, with higher temperatures sucking moisture out of the soil to make it less fertile and harder to handle. In a chemical analysis, you can have all the elements in the soil, so you don’t understand why there is a problem,” Olivera said.

“But then, when you start looking at the soil in detail, you can see, for example, that the soil is compacted, like concrete. So the chemical elements are there. But it’s like concrete, so the roots cannot penetrate and the roots cannot grow. So this is soil health.

Another consequence of the climate crisis, more frequent extreme weather events, is bad for soil health too, with severe droughts often being followed by storms and floods that wash away sediments, The FAO is taking action at many levels to combat the problem.

If we have monocropping, soils will not be in good health because the same crop is always extracting the same nutrients, so some nutrients will be missing. Credit: Paul Virgo/IPS

The GSP, for example, has developed digital mapping systems that illustrate soil conditions so countries and national institutions can boost their capacities and make informed decisions to manage soil degradation.

It has also produced guidelines to help national governments adopt policies for soil management and for the sustainable use of fertilizers. The UN agency is also rolling up its sleeves to help smallholder farmers in the Global South, who are among the blameless victims of the climate crisis, to cope with the impact global heating is having on their soils.

Its initiatives on this front include the ‘soil doctors’ farmer-to-farmer training programme. “This means we train a farmer and that farmer trains the whole community – with their own language,” Olivera said.

“We provide them with posters with drawings so the farmer is able to explain to other farmers. We also provide them with some very simple exercises, such as digging a hole in the soil to see the texture and see the smell of the soil and see why one smell is good and another is bad. And we show them to feel it, as they do every day, but also providing them with the scientific knowledge to support them in their everyday work.

“For example, when you have soil that is not breathing because of too much water, it smells like rotting food. In that case, we can do some drainage, we can establish some practices, dig some terraces. So we learn with them. We see from the environment what we can do, what materials we have access to, see if we can circulate the water better by digging canals. And together we also select the practices that they can teach to other farmers”.

The FAO does not need to pay the farmers to pass on the knowledge, as being a soil doctor brings its own rewards.

“We provide them with visibility within their communities. We call the soil doctors champion farmers because they are the farmers who are always trying new things. They are the ones who are worried about their community and are willing to learn a lot. They are happy when they learn. We provide them with knowledge and with kits to do some testing in the field.

Another important incentive for them is that they become part of a community of soil doctors around the world. “They can exchange experiences with each other. You can have a soil doctor in Bolivia exchanging with one in the Philippines because, for example, they both grow cocoa. So belonging to a network is important for them too as they sometimes feel very isolated in their field.

“I recently went to Bangladesh to give farmers soil-doctor certificates and they were so proud. They said the soil is ours and it is what we are going to leave to our children. We need to make decisions about our soils ourselves and we have the capacity to do so”.