By Ifeanyi Nsofor and Esther Ngumbi
SILVER SPRING, Maryland / URBANA, Illinois, USA, Feb 15 2024 – Recently, a group of non-profit organizations launched the Inaugural Souper Bowl of Caring – a nationwide movement to address hunger-related challenges. It was an opportunity for VIP guests to engage and lend their support to end food insecurity as part of the Super Bowl. The goal is to encourage every viewer of the Super Bowl to contribute $1 or one can of soup.

Initiatives such as the one launched by NGOs are important since they tackle a pressing challenge: ending food insecurity in the US.

Urban agriculture leads to efficient utilization of unused urban spaces such as empty parking lots, rooftops, and vacant plots of land. Such spaces can be used to grow a range of crops, including tomatoes, potatoes, lettuces, carrots, herbs, and even edible flowers

Currently, over 10% of Americans are food insecure. But while donations can help in the short-term, they need to be accompanied with other long-term solutions. Among the long-term solutions that Super Bowl 2024 VIPs, investors, companies that spent $7 million for 30-second spots of commercial time, and viewers can do is to invest in and support urban agriculture and urban farmers.

Why are urban farms worthy of this attention?

Urban agriculture is a sustainable way of growing food and local economies and meeting food security needs for urban dwellers. On the global level, 15% – 20% of the world’s food supply is sourced from urban areas. Urban farming is growing across many U.S. cities too – from Chicago to Urbana to Kansas to Washington DC to Minneapolis to Atlanta to New York to Los Angeles to Las Vegas where the 2024 Super Bowl championship is taking place.

Urban agriculture leads to efficient utilization of unused urban spaces such as empty parking lots, rooftops, and vacant plots of land. Such spaces can be used to grow a range of crops, including tomatoes, potatoes, lettuces, carrots, herbs, and even edible flowers.  Growing crops within urban centers makes them close to markets and it becomes easy for urban farm produce to be transported to markets. It is also seamless for urban residents to walk to urban farms and buy directly from the source. The proximity of foods to markets considerably contributes to fewer emissions and helps mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Urban agriculture can bring about several social, cultural and community benefits. For example, urban farms can serve as a community space, where different events including workshops, training, farm to dinner, you pick, and weddings happen.

They can help create food secure and resilient urban communities and serve as lifelines for urban dwelling citizens when the food supply chain is disrupted by weather events, pandemics such as covid19, cyber security attacks or plant diseases and pests outbreaks.

In the United States, urban farms can build up the workforce. By venturing into urban farming, communities build their local economies and provide job opportunities for people living in those communities. City Councils can support the creation of urban food hubs.

An example is the University of the District of Columbia food hubs located in food desert neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. Food hubs comprise of food production, food preparation, food distribution, and waste and water recovery. These processes contribute to increasing the workforce in cities and overall economic growth.

Of course, urban farming cannot beat rural agriculture, nor take its place. But it offers an important way for people living in urban areas to gain access to local, fresh and culturally relevant foods.

Further, urban farming comes with its challenges. Soils in urban regions are particularly contaminated with heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, and copper. For example, Chicago’s soil lead concentrations are high.

Therefore, it is imperative to pay attention to the land’s history, especially soil history. Furthermore, a new study found that food from urban agriculture has a carbon footprint six times larger than conventionally grown produce. To mitigate this, urban agriculture practitioners can cultivate crops that are typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted, in addition to making changes in site design and management.

Ultimately, there are economic, environmental, and social benefits that accrue from urban farming. The Super Bowl, with its huge viewership, could be an important platform to support urban farmers.

In preparation for the 2025 Super Bowl, Americans should consider contributing to the ‘Super Bowl of Caring’. Moving forward, it would be great to see urban farms take the center stage at the Super Bowl.

By William Webb
MAE SOT, Thailand, Feb 15 2024 – The news travelled like wildfire. In the teashops, bars, and market stalls that make Thailand’s border town of Mae Sot feel far more Burmese than Thai, the feared rumours circulating at the weekend were suddenly confirmed.

Military conscription would be imposed on young men and women for two to five years, regime-controlled broadcasters in Myanmar announced on the Saturday night airwaves. Details were sparse.

Panic scrolling through social media suddenly replaced conversation in one popular Mae Sot hangout run by a Burmese activist-entrepreneur for his clientele of exiles, fugitives, and migrants. Pool players stopped mid-break. “What the ***!” exclaimed the member of a rock band. 

Myanmar’s junta has been at war with much of the country since staging a coup three years ago, but still, it has come as a serious shock that for the first time in modern history, the military will impose on young people the choice of two uniforms—army or prison.

Analysts—Burmese and foreign—interpreted the developments in various ways. For some, it was a clear sign that the military was losing this patchwork civil war and could not sustain itself. For decades, it had thrived on recruiting youngsters from poor areas of the Bamar-majority heartlands of Sagaing and Magwe. But now those same arid regions are hotbeds of resistance against the regime, its forces stretched across the length and breadth of almost the entire country, depending mostly on air power to bomb civilian areas into submission.

A Burmese woman wearing thanaka to protect her face from the sun walks through a market in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. The stall is selling the wood bark that is ground into the cosmetic paste so popular in Myanmar. Credit: William Webb/IPS

“An act of desperation,” Igor Blazevic said of the junta’s move, which follows sizeable territorial losses and a meltdown of its forces in northern Shan State late last year. Blazevic, a Myanmar expert at the Prague Civil Society Centre, predicted on Facebook that the measure would backfire because the regime was too “weakened and broken” to be able to administer recruitment on a large scale.

But on Monday night, more news was breaking that indicated the junta had got its ducks in a row—airports were suddenly requiring military authorisation stamped on tickets for even internal domestic flights. According to unconfirmed reports, some junta-controlled border posts were closing or imposing similar restrictions, and young men had been picked up on the streets of the commercial capital Yangon.

“It’s another way of terrorising the population,” was the view of one young Burmese who did not want to be named for obvious reasons.

In the Myanmar capital, Nay Pyi Taw, junta spokesperson Zaw Min Tun simply said conscription was essential because of the “situation”.

“The duty to safeguard and defend the nation extends beyond just the soldiers but to all citizens. So I want to tell everyone to proudly follow this people’s military service law,” he intoned.

No way, retorted May, a young refugee whose dream of becoming a doctor was shattered by the 2021 coup and the arrest of her father.

She said compulsory military service would simply drive more young people to join the People’s Defence Forces of the resistance— despite the heavy losses they are incurring and the military’s barbaric treatment of prisoners subjected to torture, summary executions, and, most recently, strung up and torched.

May slipped across the nearby border into Mae Sot with her family after spending two years as a refugee in a camp run by a section of the Karen National Liberation Army fighting what is known as the world’s longest-running civil war dating back to 1949.

“I cannot go back to Myanmar,” she said. At 19 years old, she fits the age range of 18 to 27 for single women to be conscripted. For men, it is 18 to 35 years, rising to 45 for specialists like doctors and IT workers who quit their state sector posts in droves after the coup, joining the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) of non-violent resistance.

On Sunday night in Mae Sot, large crowds of this latest wave of the Myanmar diaspora gathered for an outdoor CDM fund-raising concert, featuring dancing and music performed by several of the country’s ethnic minorities, including Karen and Chin. The concert was sponsored by an online bank set up by the resistance. Stalls sold knick-knacks and garments, and beer and hot food were swiftly ferried about by teams of neatly dressed waiters.

May and her entrepreneurial family had their properties and businesses seized and sealed by the military near Mandalay and are now rebuilding their lives, running a small restaurant among the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Burmese living in and around Mae Sot, setting up businesses, social services, and accommodation safe from predatory Thai officials and regime spies.

May remains determined to study medicine somewhere somehow, representative of a young, capable, and innovative generation of Burmese plugged into a digital world while moving in and out of the shadows of war.

Bo Kyi, a veteran activist and former prisoner who co-founded the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners in Mae Sot 24 years ago, saw the military’s conscription order as a “huge challenge” for young people, especially those who had tried to keep out of politics and war. It would become very hard to leave the country legally now, he said.

“Millions will suffer and Burma will lose its human resources,” he said.

William Webb is a travel writer who started out in Asia nearly 50 years ago

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By SWAN
BRUSSELS, Feb 15 2024 – Judging from the audience reactions at a screening of Bob Marley: One Love in Brussels, the music may touch international viewers, but the memories and some of the “insider” comments belong to Jamaicans and those closely connected with the country.

It was clear from discussions after the premiere that attendees who had lived in Jamaica understood the context of the songs, and got certain jokes, while others felt adrift, even as they appreciated the world-famous tracks such as No Woman, No Cry and, yes, One Love. This may account for some of the less-than-positive reviews that have started to emerge.

“The film was surprisingly authentic,” said Stefanie Gilbert-Roberts, a Jamaican communications and culture professional who resides in Belgium. “But perhaps so authentic that it might seem out of this world for those not connected to the culture.”

Bob Marley: One Love, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and coming nearly 43 years after the iconic singer’s death, focuses on the Seventies and on two concerts that Marley and his band performed in Kingston, the Jamaican capital. Both events took place amid surging political violence on the island and were aimed at unifying the population. But before the first concert, gunmen stormed Marley’s home and shot him, his wife Rita, and his manager Don Taylor – an assault that shocked Jamaicans and international fans.

The film depicts the attack quickly, without dwelling on what must have been deep trauma for Marley’s family. Watching it, one can’t help but wonder at the effects on those who have now gone on to co-produce this movie: his widow Rita, their children Ziggy and Cedella, and the other family members involved such as Stephen.

Bob and Rita performed with their wounds at the Smile Jamaica concert in December 1976, and then left the island: he eventually for London, and she with the children to the United States.

The film shows Marley’s time in England, which is perhaps the least interesting part of the story – as viewers don’t really get an idea of how he dealt again with life away from “home” (he had lived in London before, in the early Seventies, signing to Chris Blackwell’s Island label). Instead, we’re given scenes of him jogging, playing football with his bandmates, joking with record executives, and getting inspiration for the title of the album Exodus, a global hit after its release in 1977.

Marley’s “relationships” are also not dwelt upon, as a viewer remarked after the screening. The most well-known of these, with Cindy Breakspeare (Miss World 1976 and mother of Damian Marley), is shown fleetingly in a scene where she watches him perform in a studio. Breakspeare is named in the credits as a consultant to the film.

Following his self-imposed exile in England, Marley would return triumphantly to Kingston to play the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, when he brought Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, leaders of the opposing political parties, together on stage to clasp hands.

It was a message again to Jamaicans to unite. By the time of the next general election in the country, in 1980, more than 800 people had been killed, and citizens were leaving the island in droves, taking their grief with them.

In the film, Rita (played by British actress Lashana Lynch) refers to one of the most shocking incidents during this period, when attackers set fire to a charitable institution, with residents inside burned alive.

For those who experienced these turbulent years, the film brings the memories crashing back, of both the horrific incidents and the music. Marley recorded his island’s troubles in song after song: Johnny Was, Concrete Jungle, Rat Race, Ambush in the Night, Them Belly Full (But We Hungry) and others.

In addition, there were the more playful tunes such as Roots, Rock, Reggae (with the opening lyrics “Play I some music”), and then the love songs, which the film highlights as well: Turn Your Lights Down Low being among them.

In the movie, Marley is seen playing this on the guitar to Rita, and it is then that one realizes that the whole biopic might actually be a love song to her, formulated by her children.

As portrayed by Lynch, Rita is a force, an artist in her own right, who needs to be both a backing singer for Bob and a parent to their children (as well as to his “outside” ones) – a situation she angrily describes in one argument scene. Lynch’s performance is perhaps the most memorable, and the writers could have given her greater scope by including more of Rita’s story.

Playing Marley, British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir works hard to capture the intensity and charisma of the singer, and he gives a credible performance. But the script needed more substance for a complete portrayal. Not shown, for instance, is Marley’s stance on relationships.

At an early interview in Kingston, he was once asked about these views, and his response was: if a woman loved him, she would love his other women. When questioned whether this might be acceptable were the situation reversed, he replied: She don’t do that. Still, he adopted the two children Rita had with other partners.

So, yes, artists are complex people, and certain aspects of his life might have been depicted, alongside the far-reaching and undeniable impact in addressing injustice, inequality, and marginalisation. This is a minor criticism, however. The film is worth watching – for the man, the music, the memories… and the question of how far the world still has to go in solving major ills.

At the screening in Belgium, co-organized by Paramount Pictures, Sony Brussels and the Jamaican Embassy, Marley’s importance was summed up by Ambassador Symone Betton Nayo, who gave a short speech before the film began.

“His ability to connect with people through his music, transcending cultural and geographical boundaries, has made him a symbol of unity, strength and hope,” Betton Nayo said. “He was not only a prolific writer of music, and a talented performer, but an inspiring messenger. Many of his anthemic compositions such as One Love, Get Up, Stand Up, Redemption Song remain relevant as we reflect on current global realities.”

With “Reggae Month” being celebrated in February, the film’s release is timely, paying tribute to an iconic Jamaican artist whose music lives on, with the call for peace, love, hope, and justice, Betton Nayo added. – AM/SWAN