New Internationalist

DINYAR GODREJ for the New Internationalist Co-operative newint.org A river brims with tales. Take our cover star, barefoot and beaming, as she rows her boat on the Mekong in Vietnam’s delta region. Is her life still in sync with the river or is she now among the masses of people leaving the area? The delta marks the end of the Mekong’s journey to the sea, and there is a worrying new normal here, with flow levels reaching all-time lows. Eleven dams in China, at the top of the river, have all but eliminated the wet season flood pulse – and there’s the impact of climate change as well. Rice yields have plummeted, as have fish catches. There is saltwater intrusion as the land dries up. Things are increasingly difficult. More hydropower dams are…

Busani Bafana is an award-winning Zimbabwean journalist and communication specialist who writes on climate change, human rights, agriculture, and food security issues. Katie Dancey-Downs is a British journalist who covers human rights and the environment, writing for Huffpost, i news and Resurgence among others. She is assistant editor at Index on Censorship. Anand Tumurtogoo, a freelance journalist based in Mongolia, covers environmental issues, human rights and politics. He has written for ProPublica, Foreign Policy and Reuters, among others. Stephanie Boyd is a Canadian filmmaker and journalist based in Peru since 1997, and currently working with Kukama communities on a film about the struggle to protect the Marañón River.…

How do we get there? I opened the latest issue, with its teasing headline How we stop Big Oil (NI 537), with a sense of trepidation and weariness. I feared it would follow a format I’ve seen many times before. I would be told, in great detail, about the sins of the oil companies. There would be some mention of various policies that might help clip their claws, followed by a brief rousing exhortation to ‘grassroots movements’. And so it came to pass. This is not a reflection on the authors’ skills or intentions, but I have had enough. I have been on this planet over half a century, politically conscious for over three decades and I rarely see any reflection by those working for a better world on why ‘we’ are…

Eleven years have passed since I moved to Buenos Aires from Esquina, my home-town, in order to study cinema. Most young adults in Argentina need to make the move to bigger cities if they want to go to college. Even though the quality of our public education is exceptional, the fact that universities are poorly distributed geographically is a problem. The investment that a shift of location requires can be hard on families. My parents tightened their belts to help me pay for groceries and rent. It was hardly enough money to get by, with no room for any extras. So, I began looking out for a part-time job that would work with my class schedule. For a while, I sent out my resumé everywhere. But no one would accept…

Absent parents Rohingya Muslims, fleeing from military brutality in Myanmar, have been arriving in India in large numbers since 2008. An estimated 7,000 have ended up around the city of Jammu, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir, where they live in makeshift shelters made of recyclable materials such as tarpaulin sheets, bamboo sticks and cardboard. During the rainy season, water rushes through the roofs. In the past few years, Jammu has witnessed many protests by rightwing organizations, demanding the deportation of Rohingya refugees who have been labelled a ‘security threat’ to the region. In the year 2021, the Jammu and Kashmir union territory’s government detained around 155 Myanmar nationals for not having valid documents. They were sent to a holding centre, leaving families without fathers and in some cases without mothers too. Ali…

P&O Ferries unceremoniously dismissed 800 UK-based seafarers in March 2022. The new crew of the European Causeway ferry were among the workers hired to replace them – on far cheaper pay rates to their predecessors. P&O says the new Larne-Cairnryan crews are paid the UK minimum wage. But on routes which sail outside British waters, it can pay a far lower hourly rate – $2.27 (according to the RMT) or a still paltry $6.86 (according to P&O) – because the company has ‘flagged out’ its vessels to Cyprus. So far P&O has faced little in the way of legal consequences. By offering seafarers enhanced redundancy terms, it has averted employment tribunal claims. Trade unions RMT and Nautilus International are nonetheless seeking remedy. In May RMT national secretary Darren Procter, brandishing a…