2794. How the Other Half Lives in Iran

By Shahram Khosravi, The New York Times, January 14, 2018

A Kurdish koolbar (porter) who carry goods between Kurdistan of Iran and Kurdistan of Iraq on their back.  Kurds are an oppressed nationality in both countries and have been fighting for self-determination for decades. 

The village of Zaras lies in a valley circled by the Zagros Mountains in southwestern Bakhtiari Province of Iran. An hour’s ride from Izeh, the nearest town, Zaras is home to about 60 families, who make a living from farming, pastoral nomadism and working as migrant laborers in Iranian cities.

On a September afternoon in 2014, I sat by the mud wall of a hazelnut garden with Darab, a 50-year-old farmer in Zaras. Darab, a man with a charming face and rough, calloused hands, cultivated potatoes, beans and onions on a plot of land slightly larger than an acre. Yet the harvest wasn’t enough to feed his family — his wife, his six children and his elderly parents. Iran imported grains and potatoes on an enormous scale, and the prices fell each year.

Darab supplemented his meager earnings by digging wells and working for a few months at construction sites in nearby cities. He would make less than the equivalent of about 20 American dollars for 10 hours at a construction site — work that did not offer the safety net of insurance against accidents or ill health.

The village of Zaras has, like the rest of Iran, suffered from drought in the past decade. The land and the harvest have depleted. Darab spoke wistfully about a time when there was enough water for the gardens and the fields in the village. “It gets worse every year,” he said. “Nowadays they pour some water around the trees. It does not reach the roots.” Many hazelnut trees around us were already dead.

On Dec. 31, Izeh, the town near Darab’s village, witnessed one of the more violent protests triggered by economic hardships across Iran. Young men in Izeh took over the city for several hours. Several young men were killed; many were injured. They had

But the first targets of the protesters’ rage were the buildings housing the banks. The drought has forced an increasingly large number of people in the region to seek loans. Unable to pay off their loans, their debt grows, and the bank confiscates what they have left — land, a house or a tractor.

“People’s lives are worthless!” I repeatedly heard Iranians in the villages and the cities make this despairing declaration. Sociologists use the term “precarity” to describe this abandonment, these depriving people of a livable life. “The world has boycotted us,” Darab said. Before the sanctions were imposed on Iran, Darab and other workers would travel to Iran’s Persian Gulf area to work for oil and gas companies. Foreign companies moved out after the sanctions and the jobs dried up.

Almost all young men in Darab’s village moved to cities to join the growing urban precariat, who are exploited as cheap and docile workers in the informal labor market. The absence of opportunity has intensified the migration from the villages to the urban areas, which have been growing five times faster. According to the Iranian Parliament data, the number of Iranians living in slums has increased 17 times since the revolution in 1979 to almost 10 million.

Every year more Iranians are classified as poor. Official sources reported in 2015 that 40 percent of Iranians lived below the poverty line. The unemployment rate among young people — between 20 and 24 years old — rose to 30 percent in 2016. This explains why more than 90 percent of the people arrested during the recent protests were under age 25.

About 11 million Iranians, around 50 percent of the workforce, work in irregular employment, according to Iran’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Almost all young workers I met during my extended fieldwork in the past 15 years have been in irregular employment, rarely paid on time, with little protection from exploitative employers. Between 10 million and 13 million Iranians are entirely excluded from health, work or unemployment insurance.

The Iranian poor do see the vast riches of the Iranian elite. Since the early 2010s Iran has witnessed the growth of a consumerist culture and rising inequality. An increasing number of imported luxury cars have appeared on the roads; buildings whose price per square meter equals three years of a worker’s wage have come up across the cities. Ice cream covered in edible gold — worth a worker’s monthly salary — is on the menus of luxury restaurants.

After the day’s work, I would walk with workers from Darab’s village from the construction sites in wealthy neighborhoods in North Tehran to their modest rented rooms in the poorer South Tehran. As we walked past Porsches and Maseratis parked outside luxury boutiques and restaurants, they would address God satirically and say, “If these people are your creatures, what am I then?”

Alongside financial insecurity and drought, Iranians are reeling from intense pollution in the cities. A decade of sanctions has significantly increased the prices of groceries, medicines and fuel. The sanctions also excluded Iranians from the formal international banking system and forced them toward informal cash-based transactions, making them vulnerable to fraud and black market prices. The value of the Iranian toman has fallen by more than half against the dollar since 2012, which affected all other costs inside the country.

President Trump’s anti-Iranian tirades leave no hope for lifting or easing sanctions on Iran. The fear of military attack by Israel or the United States has added to the popular anxieties.

Yet hope for democracy and social justice in modern Iran has been replicated time and again through political struggles, from the constitutional revolution in 1911, the oil nationalization movement in 1950, the revolution in 1979, the green movement in 2009 and the most recent protests led by the poor.

As the images of the protests in Iran appeared on screens worldwide, I thought of my conversation with Darab in his village. We had stared at the distant mountains rising toward a clear, blue sky in silence. “See all these lands that we cannot get one single toman from. We do not have water. Write it,” he had commanded. “And write that those in Tehran have been taking all money for themselves and have forgotten that we also are people.”

Shahram Khosravi, a professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University, is the author of “Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran” and “Young and Defiant in Tehran.”

2085. India Is Caught in a Climate Change Quandary

By Eduardo Porter, The New York Times, November 10, 2015

Spare a thought for poor India.

India is home to 30 percent of the world’s poorest, those living on less than $1.90 a day. Of the 1.3 billion Indians, 304 million do not have access to electricity; 92 million have no access to safe drinking water.

And India is going to be hammered by climate change.

The livelihoods of 600 million Indians are threatened by the expected disruption of the southwest monsoon from July to September, which accounts for 70 percent of India’s rainfall. India’s rivers depend on the health of thousands of Himalayan glaciers at risk of melting because of a warming climate, while 150 million people are at risk from storm surges associated with rising sea levels.

A lot of damage is already inevitable, a consequence of the emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by richer countries. So, many Indians ask, Why must we pay more? On what grounds can India be asked to temper its use of energy to limit its emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide?

“Today, I see the carbon space occupied by the developed world,” Prakash Javadekar, the environment minister, said in an interview with The Associated Press in September. “We are asking the developed world to vacate the carbon space to accommodate us. That carbon space demand is climate justice.”

The successful resolution of this confrontation of priorities does not matter just for India’s sake. The tension between economic development and the imperative to curb greenhouse gas emissions remains the central challenge of the diplomatic effort to muster a coalition of rich and poor countries to combat climate change.

The United Nations expects India’s population to reach 1.5 billion by 2030, bigger than China’s. If over the next 15 years it follows anything like the fossil-fuel-heavy path out of poverty that China took over the last 15, it could blow any chance the world has of preventing a disaster.

A critical question for anyone with a stake in preventing a climatic catastrophe is how to conceive and finance a development path for 1.5 billion Indians that prevents this outcome.

Scientists and environmentalists, executives and government diplomats packing their bags to attend the climate summit meeting in Paris, starting Nov. 30, must keep the challenge in mind.

After so many failed rounds of diplomacy, everyone involved is eager to declare the coming meeting a success. So far, 129 countries accounting for nearly 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions have submitted plans to contribute to the cause.

While the progress is undoubtedly real, the central challenge remains unresolved. Countries are not being asked to make legally binding commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. They will show up, instead, with “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” to the mitigation effort.

Advanced countries will offer absolute cuts in carbon emissions. But the less developed are expected only to reduce their emissions intensity — a measure of the carbon dioxide released to produce a certain amount of economic activity — in a recognition that their energy consumption still has a long way to grow.

The new approach was necessary to achieve any progress. But it required putting the tough questions aside. Nearly as populous as China, yet way behind in terms of economic development, India presents one of the tougher ones.

By most accounts, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions must be brought close to zero by the end of the century, at the latest. This constrains everyone.

For instance, a recent report by the World Bank argues that economies like China and India must totally decarbonize their electricity supply around midcentury and achieve negative emissions from then on, using carbon capture technologies and vastly increased forests, to suck excessive carbon out of the atmosphere.

To put it mildly, that is going to be a challenge.

Jairam Ramesh, who was minister of the environment under the previous prime minister, Manmohan Singh, argues that India must continue to grow at 7.5 to 8 percent a year for the next 15 years.

To power this growth, India’s electricity consumption — which accounts for over half its greenhouse gas emissions — would rise 6 to 7 percent a year. Even under the most ambitious goals for nuclear power and renewable energy, more than half of this power is expected to come from coal, the dirtiest fuel. “By 2030 India’s coal consumption could triple or quadruple,” Mr. Ramesh told me.

India has come up with a mitigation contribution plan for the Paris meeting. It aims to get 40 percent of its electricity from nonfossil fuels by 2030 and to reduce its emissions intensity by 33 to 35 percent from 2005 to 2030. It also offers to vastly increase its forest cover.

The plan, however, pointedly notes that India’s energy consumption amounts to only 0.6 metric tons of oil equivalent per person, about a third of the world average. It explains that “no country in the world” has ever achieved the development level of today’s advanced nations without consuming at least four tons.

“India has a lot to do to provide a dignified life to its population and meet their rightful aspirations,” it states.

Some analysts say there is a way to thread the needle. Development can be decoupled from carbon emissions, the World Bank insists.

Moreover, economists at the World Bank argued in a separate report released last Sunday that emissions reduction policies could be structured to benefit the poor in the next 15 years — for instance by using revenue from carbon taxes to pay for social insurance.

“The goals are extremely ambitious; only a minority of scenarios get us there,” said Stephane Hallegatte, who led the study. “But they are achievable.”

Under the right set of policies, the World Bank projects, even the most disruptive climate change would add only three million people to India’s extreme poor in 2030. Bad choices, by contrast, would add 42 million to that number.

Some in India seem convinced by the logic. “Our traditional defensive stance has simply not been in the enlightened national interest,” Mr. Ramesh argued in an address last year to the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore.

“India must view the era of the green economy not as a threat to its developmental plans,” he said. “Instead, it must be viewed as an opportunity to build and demonstrate technological capability to the world.”

And yet, there is still a significant risk that India will say no to the West’s climate change agenda. “It plays hugely well domestically,” Mr. Ramesh told me. “One should never discount that possibility.”

1897. Unicef Report Describes Grim Prospect for 500 Million Children

By Rick Gladstone, The New York Times, June 22, 2015

Unicef warned Monday of what it described as grim trend lines for the world’s poorest children over the next 15 years, saying in a new report that many millions face preventable deaths, diseases, stunted growth and illiteracy.

The forecasts in the report by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, suggested that despite reductions of poverty and other deprivations in underdeveloped countries since 2000, as seen in improved national averages, those statistics had obscured a worsening trend among the poorest segments of their populations and may have impeded overall progress.

The report was described by Unicef officials as its “final report card” on whether children had been helped by the so-called Millennium Development Goals, a group of benchmarks established by the United Nations in 2000 for measuring progress in reducing poverty, hunger, child mortality, gender inequality, illiteracy and environmental degradation by the end of 2015. These goals are to be superseded by the Sustainable Development Goals, a group of benchmarks for measuring further advances by the end of 2030, which will be a major theme at the General Assembly annual meeting in September.

While the Millennium Development Goals contributed to “tremendous progress for children,” the report said, they also may have indirectly caused the opposite, by inadvertently encouraging nations to measure progress through national averages.

“In the rush to make that progress, many focused on the easiest-to-reach children and communities, not those in greatest need,” Anthony Lake, the Unicef executive director, said in the introduction to the report. “In doing so, national progress may actually have been slowed.”

Mr. Lake told a dial-in telephone news conference on Monday before the report’s public release that the progress from the Millennium Development Goals had been “very uneven,” and that “if current trends continue, we will fail children.”

The report showed, for example, that accounting for population growth, 68 million children under the age of 5 will die of mostly preventable causes by 2030 if current trends in child mortality continue, and 119 million children under 5 will suffer stunted development.

It further showed that under current trends, a half billion people — more than the population of the United States — will be practicing open defecation in 2030, posing serious health risks.

At current rates of progress, it said, girls from the poorest households in sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve universal lower-secondary school education until 2111, almost a century from now.

Mr. Lake said in the report that improvements in the way data is collected and used should be exploited to determine precisely “who the most vulnerable and excluded children are and where they can be found.”

Measuring progress in achieving the 2030 goals, he said, should be done “not only by statistical averages, but also by the degree to which the most disadvantaged children benefit.”