Tanzania: Analysts, MP Raise Questions Over Leaked Tanzania Gas Contract

Dar es Salaam/Washington — A leaked contract showing ExxonMobil and Norway's Statoil will pay Tanzania no more than 50 percent of the profits from a natural gas field in the Indian Ocean has stirred a furore in the east African country.

Politicians and citizens had expected their country would get up to 85 percent of the profits from the offshore gas field that has been under exploration since 2000. Now the headlines in The Citizen, Dar es Salaam's biggest daily newspaper, declare: "$1 billion loss: Who's Fooling Tanzanians?"

The controversy has exposed how secret government deals can stir fear and suspicion, especially over a natural resource that the International Monetary Fund estimates could bring $5-6 billion a year into Tanzania's coffers by 2029 - equivalent to half its budget and more than enough money to free the country from dependency on foreign aid.

Tanzania has been promised riches before, and the new row has echoes of previous deals that have left a sour taste.

Two decades ago gold mining was to lift the country into the ranks of middle-income nations. While Tanzania is the third largest exporter of gold, problems of political oversight of contracts and mispricing have led to disappointment over the amount of mining revenue that flows into government coffers.

This feeds into fresh concerns that major international oil companies may be taking advantage of the relative lack of experience of the government agency, the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC), in negotiating highly complex exploration and production deals and suspicions that government officials are taking kick-backs.

The leaked Statoil/ExxonMobil contract started to attract attention when blogger Ben Taylor, who is a consultant with the Tanzania governance think tank Twaweza, scrutinised it earlier this month. He estimated possible losses of $900 million a year compared with a model contract.

The contract states that Tanzania will get a 30 percent share of gas profits after production and developments costs, rising to 50 percent as more gas is produced from the offshore field known as Block 2.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

But the model production sharing agreement (PSA) posted on TPDC's website as an example of the type of contracts the government would agree lists 60 percent of gas profits flowing to Tanzania on a sliding scale up to 85 percent.

An initial review of the contract by oil industry experts indicated that the contract terms, struck in February 2012, does not on the face of it throw up red flags. Offshore projects can be risky and require a high level of upfront costs, so contracts will vary according to the specific conditions.

But Zitto Kabwe, an outspoken member of Tanzania's parliament who heads its committee on public accounts, asked why the leaked contract, negotiated behind closed doors, differs so greatly from the example cited by TPDC.

"Why have a model PSA if terms can vary that much? If the contract remains as it is with Statoil, Tanzania will get just 15 percent of its wealth in natural gas" after production and development costs are deducted, he said by email.

"We will campaign for transparency of contracts and renegotiations of better terms," he told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Statoil said it could not comment on the details of the contract, in accordance with the terms of the agreement.

"However, the contract does consider the totality of taxes, direct government take, local conditions, risks, market access, technical challenges and cost levels," the company said in an emailed response.

OPEN BOOKS

Civil society groups are pressing for open contracts in the extractives industry as a means of heightening government accountability over natural resource wealth and to promote more public discussion over how revenues are invested.

Tanzania has taken a number of steps to be more accountable. It is part of a global initiative to reconcile government accounts on extractives with corporate royalty payments, and it is setting up a sovereign wealth fund to use natural resource revenues for long-term investments. But it does not make public individual contracts.

Isabel Munilla, a senior policy officer on extractive industries at Oxfam America, said such lack of transparency can undermine confidence in government.

"It creates a row for no reason. If you negotiate these with some oversight from the public, you increase trust and get better contracts," she said.

TPDC said that once corporate taxes are added, Tanzania actually will get 61 percent of the profits plus 5 percent royalties. Its director general, Yona Killagane, in a statement issued last week disputed estimates circulating on social media.

"We would like to inform the public that such information is incorrect, misleading and has not been thoroughly researched and analysed, and was disseminated by people with no broad understanding of gas exploration activities," he said.

But the numbers crunched by activists are still raising questions.

Taylor estimated that if production reaches 500 million cubic feet per day, the government could be losing as much as $400 million per year under the Statoil/ExxonMobil deal compared with the model contract and more than twice that if production reaches 1,000 million cubic feet per day.

Mixed Results for Yellow Cassava's Vitamin A Trial

Wageningen — Eating yellow cassava bred to be richer in beta-carotene increased the level of vitamin A in children's blood by only a small amount, according to new results.

But some experts, including the scientist leading the trial, say there is potential for growing yellow cassava in Africa and parts of Asia to correct vitamin A deficiency - which leads to blindness and death in many thousands of children.

Elise Talsma conducted the randomised trial involving 342 children in rural Kenya as part of her PhD at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and plans to submit the results to a peer-reviewed journal.

She measured both beta-carotene, a molecule that the body can turn into vitamin A, and vitamin A itself in blood samples of children who consumed 350 grams of cooked yellow cassava a day for four months, in 2012. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of the children had vitamin A deficiency, which is defined as having a vitamin A blood level lower than 0.7 micromoles per litre.

Yellow cassava increased beta-carotene concentration in children's blood by five times compared with a control group who ate traditional white cassava.

But the vitamin A concentrations improved on average only by 0.04 micromoles per litre - not enough to significantly reduce the number of children with vitamin A deficiency.

Despite the limited result, Talsma believes the effect is likely to increase when larger volumes are consumed for a longer period, and with better varieties that are currently being bred to double the current concentration of beta-carotene.

She says biofortification is needed to complement other approaches such as supplementation and fortification of food, which are not reaching enough people. In the district she worked in, existing supplementation reached only 31 per cent of children, according to a paper published this year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health.

And Talsma found through laboratory tests that seven out of eight bottles of different brands of cooking oil bought in Kenya that claimed to be fortified with vitamin A did not contain any more vitamin A than conventional cooking oil.

Talsma previously reported that the majority of children and their caretakers in her survey in three Kenyan primary schools prefer the sweeter yellow cassava to white cassava, in a study she led that was published in PLOS One.

'Major step' for proof of concept

Erick Boy, nutrition manager at the HarvestPlus programme, a joint venture between the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), welcomes the results.

"The efficacy of biofortified cassava has been proved for the first time," he says. "Demonstrating a biologically important effect under strictly controlled conditions, as in this trial, is a major step towards proof of concept for biofortification of cassava with beta-carotene as a potential public nutrition alternative."

Richard Sayre, who leads a group at the New Mexico Consortium that has researched high beta-carotene transgenic cassava, says the results are promising and consistent with previous studies on transgenic cassava.

But Marianne van Dorp, a food and nutrition specialist at the Wageningen University and Research centre, is more critical.

"It is good that the real potential of biofortification in terms of impact on human nutritional situation is assessed," she says. "This research shows that the effect is modest, and that other complementary interventions are needed, such as supplementation, fortification and dietary diversification, especially if micronutrient deficiencies are deep."

Last-Minute Unesco Lobbying Brings SDG Science Success

By Yojana Sharma

Last-minute lobbying by UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is said to have helped reinstate some of science and research commitments into the draft of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) released this month (19 July).

The SDGs will replace the eight Millennium Development Goals after 2015. They are being drafted by an Open Working Group (OWG) of UN ambassadors.

The draft of the SDG 'outcome document' includes a goal of encouraging public and private research and development spending. This goal had been in the zero draft issued on 2 June, but was removed from a later version.

Two week-long sets of negotiations in June and July ended on 19 July after a 30-hour, overnight session. These culminated in 17 goals and 169 targets - down from 212 targets proposed in the zero draft - along with a stronger section on how to implement them.

Commitments to increase the ratio of R&D workers by 2030 and boosting R&D spending were reinstated but in a slightly watered-down form without a specific target for the latter.

Farooq Ullah, executive director of Stakeholder Forum, a civil society group that aims to advance sustainable development, says the language is weaker than it was in the zero draft.

"At this stage, it's important to get things in. That is partly why delegates were willing to compromise to get it in, even in watered down form," he says.

Ullah says the scientific community had been seeking to include more references to cross-cutting and integrated science and research throughout the document. Yet, he adds, some targets remain vague.

According to David Griggs, the director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University in Australia, who attended the June talks, research and innovation "was being seen as a means of implementation, not as a goal", during the earlier part of the negotiations.

Key science clauses were dropped as delegates concentrated on other areas of the document, including poverty, equality, energy and food, says Griggs.

The science community managed to pull the situation back from the brink when UNESCO's New York office organised a 'ministerial breakfast' on 15 July on the margins of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development meeting in New York, to press home the importance of SDGs backed by science and research.

"UNESCO used the opportunity to highlight the issue of science," says one delegate.

"Science and research got a second chance."

In June, the "many delegations [within the working group] were looking at specific goals and concentrating on that, but when they stepped back and looked at the document as a whole they realised something was missing", says Felix Dodds, a fellow at the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, United States, and a close observer of the drafting process.

There was no opposition among delegations to reinstating science, says Dodds.

Science and research is included elsewhere in the document, which now also includes a commitment to help developing countries "strengthen their scientific and technological capacities to move towards more sustainable patterns of consumption and production".

It also commits to: boosting international cooperation on science and technology, technology transfer and knowledge sharing; getting the UN Technology Bank up and running by 2017; and enhancing capacity building support to developing countries on development data and statistical capacity.

"In the area of science and research, there are more mentions than in the previous [zero draft] text," says Dodds. "But the next phase will be a big challenge."

The outcome document has now been handed over to the UN General Assembly for discussion and adoption.

"We have to be realistic," says Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the climate adaptation projects at Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. "This is now going to go into the maelstrom of a more political process."

Sudanese Woman Spared Death Sentence Flown to Italy

Photo: Lapo Pistelli/Facebook

Italian vice-minister of foreign affairs Lapo Pistelli has posted a photo of himself with Meriam Ibrahim and her children. Ibrahim had been arrested for converting from Islam before marrying her husband. The photo was taken a few minutes before they arrived in Rome from Sudan.

 A Sudanese woman who was spared a death sentence for converting from Islam to Christianity, and then barred from leaving Sudan, was due to arrive in Italy on Thursday, an Italian government official said.

Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, was on a plane accompanied by Italy's vice minister of foreign affairs, Lapo Pistelli, according to the official who asked not to be named.

"Mariam, the young Christian woman held in Khartoum after being condemned to death for apostasy, should be arriving in Italy on a government flight," the official said in a text message, without specifying when the flight had left.

In late June, Ibrahim was arrested as she tried to board a plane for the United States. Sudanese police accused her of traveling with a forged passport.

Three days after that arrest, she was released and immediately sought refuge in the U.S. embassy with her husband - a South Sudanese-born U.S. citizen - and their two children. The family had stayed there nearly a month.

Ibrahim's mother was a Christian and her father a Muslim. Under Sudanese law, she is a Muslim even though she was brought up as a Christian after her father abandoned the family.

Sudan 'apostasy' woman Meriam Yahia Ibrahim meets Pope

A Sudanese woman who fled to Italy after being spared a death sentence for renouncing Islam has met the Pope.

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag flew to Rome with her family after more than a month in the US embassy in Khartoum.

There was global condemnation when she was sentenced to hang for apostasy by a Sudanese court.

Mrs Ibrahim's father is Muslim so according to Sudan's version of Islamic law she is also Muslim and cannot convert.

She was raised by her Christian mother and says she has never been Muslim.

Welcoming her at the airport, Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said: "Today is a day of celebration."

Mrs Ibrahim met Pope Francis at his Santa Marta residence at the Vatican soon after her arrival.

"The Pope thanked her for her witness to faith," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi was quoted as saying.

The meeting, which lasted around half an hour, was intended to show "closeness and solidarity for all those who suffer for their faith," he added.

'Mission accomplished'

The BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome says there was no prior indication of Italy's involvement in the case.

Lapo Pistelli, Italy's vice-minister for foreign affairs, accompanied her on the flight from Khartoum and posted a photo of himself with Mrs Ibrahim and her children on his Facebook account as they were about to land in Rome.

"Mission accomplished," he wrote.

A senior Sudanese official told Reuters news agency that the government in Khartoum had approved her departure in advance.

Mrs Ibrahim's lawyer Mohamed Mostafa Nour told BBC Focus on Africa that she travelled on a Sudanese passport she received at the last minute.

"She is unhappy to leave Sudan. She loves Sudan very much. It's the country she was born and grew up in," he said.

Mrs Ibrahim travelled with her husband Daniel Wani

"But her life is in danger so she feels she has to leave. Just two days ago a group called Hamza made a statement that they would kill her and everyone who helps her," he added.

Mrs Ibrahim's husband, Daniel Wani, also a Christian, is from South Sudan and has US nationality.

Their daughter Maya was born in prison in May, shortly after Mrs Ibrahim was sentenced to hang for apostasy - renouncing one's faith.

Under intense international pressure, her conviction was quashed and she was freed in June.

She was given South Sudanese travel documents but was arrested at Khartoum airport, with Sudanese officials saying the travel documents were fake.

These new charges meant she was not allowed to leave the country but she was released into the custody of the US embassy in Khartoum.

Last week, her father's family filed a lawsuit trying to have her marriage annulled, on the basis that a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a non-Muslim.

EFF Members Storm Gauteng Legislature

Economic Freedom Fighters' members stormed into the Gauteng legislature during their march in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

The party members had marched to the legislature to protest against the removal of their MPLs during a sitting on July 1.

On arrival at the legislature, they pushed through a human chain of police officers in front of the building and stormed inside.

Other members who were prevented from getting in when the door was shut and locked continued to sing struggle songs in front of the legislature where police struggled to maintain order.

Those who got in were removed, except for the party's provincial leaders and its leader Julius Malema. They were in a meeting in the building around noon on Tuesday.

Each Side of Sudan's Border, Hunger and Suffering Worsen As Conflicts Rage

With war raging in separate conflicts on both sides the Sudan-South Sudan border, civilians have nowhere to run and hunger is approaching famine levels, the United Nations said.

South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011, following a peace deal that ended decades of civil war between north and south. But the new nation became embroiled in its own internal conflict in December 2013. Meanwhile, fighting has intensified between the government and rebels in Sudan's southern states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Hungry civilians caught in the crossfire on both sides are struggling to find places of refuge where humanitarians can deliver emergency aid.

"We are seeing significant inter-connections between the humanitarian situations between the two countries," Valerie Amos said after briefing the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.

"The conflict in South Sudan has effectively blocked off traditional areas of refuge across the border. It has also disrupted the cross-border movement of goods and services coming into South Kordofan and Blue Nile."

DENIED ACCESS

The wars in Sudan's South Kordofan and Blue Nile states date back to the 1983-2005 civil war when rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army - North (SPLM - N) fought on the side of the southern rebels of the SPLM against Khartoum.

When South Sudan was given independence and the SPLM formed a government in Juba, the SPLM-N remained part of Sudan. They took up arms against Khartoum again in 2011. Human rights groups have accused the Sudanese military of carrying out indiscriminate air bombardments against civilians in rebel-held areas such as the Nuba Mountains.

The U.N. estimates that 170,000 people have been displaced in within SPLM-N areas in the first half of 2014.

Hunger is at the level of 'emergency' - phase four out of five on a sliding scale where five equals famine - in rebel-controlled areas of South Kordofan, Amos said. This means that there is "very high malnutrition or excess mortality", according to the Famine Early warning Systems Network.

Intensive bombing campaigns have prevented people from farming. Instead, they hide in mountainous caves for safety.

In June, a clinic run by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in South Kordofan was bombed, in violation of international humanitarian law.

Khartoum has denied humanitarian access to hundreds of thousands of people in rebel held areas since the war resumed three years ago.

In Sudan, humanitarian agencies require permits from multiple government agencies to travel. These can take weeks to obtain.

Sometimes they are not granted at all, particularly to areas of conflict where the government says it cannot guarantee the safety of aid workers.

"The government has not allowed any humanitarian assistance to be taken over the front lines from government held areas into non-government held (SPLM-N controlled) areas in South Kordofan," Damian Rance, Khartoum spokesman for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told Thomson Reuters Foundation in an email.

"Government permission has also not been granted for any cross-border aid to travel from South Sudan into SPLM-N controlled areas either."

In the past, there have been reports that non-governmental organisations have been illicitly transporting aid into these areas from South Sudan. This traffic has been disrupted since war broke out in South Sudan.

In addition, no polio vaccinations have been carried out in rebel territory as part of a Sudan-wide campaign for children under five.

"Although Sudan was recently declared polio free, cases of polio have begun to re-appear throughout eastern Africa and the risk of the virus resurfacing in Sudan is high," said Rance.

HUNGRY HOSTS

The World Food Programme (WFP) provides food to government-controlled areas, such as South Kordofan's state capital, Kadugli.

"These are the vulnerable people. Some of them have fled SPLM-N-held areas. We are trying to reach at least 150,000 of them," WFP's spokeswoman in Khartoum, Amor Almagro told Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

These hungry communities are now playing host to some 83,000 South Sudanese who have fled northwards to escape fighting in their home country, Amos said.

White Nile is another Sudanese border state, sited between South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

The situation in South Sudan has become so bad in recent months that more than 2,000 Sudanese refugees have returned home to Blue Nile State in search of food.

In South Sudan's camps, malnutrition rates among some 200,000 Sudanese refugees have risen because fighting is blocking food deliveries from the capital, Juba. Hungry children have resorted to eating flying ants.

Ironically, Sudan is now helping to feed its former enemy.

On July 8, the two governments signed a deal allowing WFP to transport food from Sudan to South Sudan's Upper Nile, Unity and Jonglei states.

Agencies have warned that famine could break out in these areas, which have oil reserves and have been worst affected by the war. Four million South Sudanese, more than a third of its population, are facing emergency levels of food security.

Africa: Money Fails to Flow Into Seed Treaty's Benefits Fund

A shortfall in funding is threatening the future of an international treaty on sharing benefits from plant genetic resources, known as the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA).

The treaty was established in 2005 to improve access to genetic resources of 64 key crops for food and agriculture, and to equitably share the commercial benefits arising from their use.

But the 131 countries that have ratified the ITPGRFA are not meeting the target set out in the 2009-2014 strategic plan for implementing the benefit-sharing fund, and the money expected from the private sector has also not arrived.

The goal was to get US$116 million into the fund by the end of 2014, but so far just US$21.5m has materialised.

The working group set up to explore innovative ways to secure funding for the treaty met in May in Switzerland, but there was no new agreement on how to plug the gap. Instead participants agreed to study further approaches and present these at a meeting at the end of the year.

The fund was to have been financed largely by governments' contributions - up to 85 per cent of the costs - with the rest coming from companies using seeds.

But only eight governments (Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain and Switzerland, plus the European Commission) have contributed, according to a background document for the May meeting. Some major agricultural countries, such as the United States, China and Argentina are yet to ratify the treaty. The expected industry contributions also failed to appear.

"There are no indications that the situation is likely to change substantially by the end of the current strategic plan period, that is, by December 2014," the document adds.

For many participants in the first meeting, this low contribution reflects a lack of confidence in the treaty.

The US$21.5m raised includes a Norwegian contribution of US$648,178 between 2009 and 2014, derived from an initiative that provides 0.1 per cent of the value of seed sales in the country. Norway's government estimates that if all developed countries followed its example, some US$200 million would be collected over ten years.

Edward Hammond, a research associate with the Third World Network, a global forum of international organisations and individuals, who participated in the meeting as civil society observer, tells SciDev.Net that the imperative is to fix the provisions for sharing of benefits first.

He warns that if benefit-sharing does not occur, the principles of the treaty are not being honored, and it will fall into irrelevance.

Hammond says there are other pressing issues, with private industry pushing to expand the number of plants encompassed by the treaty for their own benefit.

"The treaty's benefit-sharing fund must operate to benefit small farmers conserving diversity, and not be influenced by seed industry interests. Seed companies cannot reasonably expect to get more seeds out of the system before they start paying for benefit-sharing," Hammond adds.

The treaty's co-chairs did not respond to requests for a comment on this article.

Africa: Aids 2014 - People Living With HIV Lead the Response to Discrimination

When Malawian Martha Dzuwa was diagnosed with HIV, people in her community labelled her "a dead fellow walking".

For Dzuwa, just like thousands of others living with HIV, stigma remains one of the biggest barriers to living a healthy and productive life. On Sunday (20 July), the largest global conference on AIDS gets under way in Melbourne, Australia - bringing together around 14,000 people to discuss the epidemic.

One of the objectives of the conference is to encourage debate around a post-2015 development agenda for HIV, including the cross-cutting issues of gender-based violence, sexual health rights, and stigma and discrimination.

Dzuwa won't be at the conference, but those who are would do good to bear her story in mind if they want to get serious about achieving an AIDS-free generation.

Stigma and discrimination

"Just like many other people living with HIV, I was denied a number of social amenities," says Dzuwa, a widow with three children and two grandchildren, from Chibwana village in Nkhotakota district. "People said we should not benefit from the services because we were already dead."

Dzuwa, 51, has since turned her life around by getting involved with Kavuula village support loan group, and makes enough money from farming to support herself and her family. It is one of ten such schemes established by Liwaladzi HIV Support Organization (LIHASO), and is funded by the Southern Africa AIDS Trust.

Through the project, known as 'banking on veranda', Dzuwa received financial training and is the treasurer of her village group: her home has become the village bank.

Women's empowerment

In Dzuwa's village the group has 40 members, of whom 26 are people living with HIV. Under Dwuza's leadership the group raised 1.35 million Kwacha (US$ 3,430) last year. This created a high demand from women seeking economic empowerment.

"One of my children is pursuing a course in accounting at Skyway College in Lilongwe. I am able to pay the tuition fees without hassles," says Dzuwa, who grows sugar cane, groundnut and maize.

She believes the changes in her community are sustainable, even if funding is phased out, thanks to improved financial knowledge and the growth in small businesses.

Gender and reproductive health

Another benefit of the project is a reduction in violence against women and children. According to Phillimon Banda, programme manager for LIHASO, the organisation was previously registering ten such cases a month, which has dropped to an average of three. With the success of the project, in most families both the man and woman are now self-sufficient, which reduces family disputes.

According to Banda, lack of knowledge on sexual and reproductive health and rights is another issue. Women find it difficult to raise sexual health issues in the presence of men and can only access sexual health services when a man authorises it.

"The project has contributed to addressing these problems. The perception of women who carry condoms as prostitutes is now diminishing," said Banda.

Fighting stigma saves lives

As well as being treasurer of the village support loan group, Dzuwa is also an HIV peer educator. She provides information on preventing HIV infection and shares her own experience of positive living.

With Dzuwa spearheading the way, the community developed a unique initiative to fight stigma. She describes how people in Nkhotakota district faced discrimination for receiving a nutritional food popularly known as chiponde, or peanut. People gossiped that only those who were living with HIV received the food.

Dzuwa said: "The majority of people were reluctant to receive peanut for fear of being labelled as 'dead fellow walking'. We had to face this head on because stigma and discrimination kills. Luckily, it worked and the situation is no longer the same: no one is being discriminated against for receiving peanuts. People have realised it is a nutritional food for everyone."

LIHASO is now able to use the peanut food supplement to help protect the health of people living with HIV. Banda says: "We enrolled 36 people who were critically ill and gave them nutritional support [peanut]. Twenty-five people were treated and restored to good health and so we are using the same people to advocate for peanut. Now people do appreciate that it is a health food."

The vision of the community programme committee for the AIDS 2014 conference is the greater involvement and meaningful engagement of people living with HIV. As Dzuwa's story highlights, their involvement, locally and globally, is vital for an effective and sustainable response to HIV.