Iraq says it will offer new oil and gas exploration rights as it looks to boost energy revenues to fund its war against the Islamic State group and shore up its finances amid low oil prices.

Oil Minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi said late Tuesday that his ministry plans to put nine border exploration blocks up for bidding by international energy companies. Five are shared with Iran, three with Kuwait and one is in the Persian Gulf.

He did not provide a timetable.

Iraq has the world’s fourth largest oil reserves. This year, it added 10 billion barrels, bringing its total reserves up to 153.1 billion. Low oil prices have taken a heavy toll, as some 95 percent of the country’s revenues come from the energy sector.

 
…

When Janet Yellen delivers her testimony on the Federal Reserve’s semiannual report to Congress on Wednesday, investors may listen as much for clues to her own future – and the Fed’s – as they will to what she says about interest rate policy.

The Fed chair is likely to repeat a message she has been sending about rates: That further gradual increases will follow the three rate hikes the Fed has made since December. She is expected to say that even though inflation has slowed further below the Fed’s target level, the job market appears healthy enough to justify slightly higher borrowing costs.

But lawmakers may prod Yellen about her own plans and about the potential reshaping of the Fed itself resulting from a forthcoming influx of new board members selected by President Donald Trump. During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump was critical of the central bank for its low-rate policies, which he said were helping Democrats, and for its efforts to enact tougher regulations on banks in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

On Monday, the administration announced that it had chosen Randal Quarles, a Treasury Department official under two Republican presidents, to serve as vice chairman for supervision, the Fed’s top bank regulatory post.

Including the post Quarles would fill, the Fed has three vacancies on the seven-member board. Trump has yet to announce his other choices, though at least one person –  Marvin Goodfriend, an economist, a former staffer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University – is considered a leading candidate for one of the spots.  All of Trump’s nominations will require Senate approval.

Yellen so far has deflected questions about whether she would accept a second four-term term as chairman if Trump asked her to remain after her term ends in February. But lawmakers may try to glean some insight into her own wishes and about how the Fed could potentially change under the influence of Trump’s nominees.

On Wednesday, Yellen will address the House Financial Services Committee and on Thursday the Senate Banking Committee. She will be testifying on the Fed’s Monetary Policy Report, with one wrinkle this time: For the first time, the Fed released the report five days before Yellen’s testimony. In the past, the two had occurred the same day.

The central bank explained the change by saying Fed officials wanted to give lawmakers more time to review the semiannual monetary report before Yellen addressed questions about it.

The report said the Fed “expects that the ongoing strength of the economy will warrant gradual increases in the federal funds rate,” referring to its benchmark short-term rate.

The Fed had slashed that rate to a record low near zero in December 2008 to combat the worst economic downturn since the 1930s – and kept it there for seven years until nudging it up modestly in December 2015. It then left the rate unchanged for another year until raising it again in December of last year, followed by increases in March and June this year. Even so, the rate remains in a still-low range between 1 percent and 1.25 percent.

The Fed’s report noted that officials had affirmed at their June meeting that they foresee a total of three rate increases in 2017, if the economy performs as they expect. If so, that would mean one additional increase before year’s end. The Fed also expects to raise rates three times in 2018 if economic conditions evolve as they expect.

This week, Yellen will surely face questions about sticking to that pace, given that while job growth has been solid, inflation has slowed this year rather than edging closer to the Fed’s 2 percent target.

In a speech Tuesday, Lael Brainard, a Fed board member who has often argued for a go-slow approach to rate hikes, said she wanted to “monitor inflation developments carefully and to move cautiously on further increases” in the Fed’s key rate.

Brainard suggested that she would support a move soon to begin paring the Fed’s $4.5 trillion balance sheet, which swelled to five times its previous size after the Fed bought Treasury and mortgage bonds to hold down long-term borrowing rates in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

At its June meeting, the Fed signaled that it could begin shrinking its balance sheet later this year, a step that could put gradual upward pressure on longer-term rates for such items as home mortgages.
…

Japanese car parts company Takata on Tuesday recalled another 2.7 million air bags that it previously thought were safe.

The recall affects certain Ford, Mazda and Nissan cars from the 2005 through 2012 model years.

Takata’s air bags are inflated by a chemical — ammonium nitrate — in emergency situations, but it can deteriorate in conditions of high humidity and heat. The company added a desiccant to stop the chemical inflators from degrading and thought they had then been made safe.

However, tests by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board showed that Takata air bags were still subject to inflating without warning, expanding with great force and sending metal parts flying. Previous problems with Takata air bags have killed at least 17 people and injured more than 180.

Takata, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, has already recalled 42 million cars to replace the defective inflators, the largest automobile-related recall in U.S. history. But the latest recall raised doubts about the safety of other Takata inflators. The company has agreed to recall all original equipment inflators without a drying agent in phases by the end of 2018. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave Takata until the end of 2019 to prove that inflators with the drying agents are safe, or they must be recalled as well.

U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said federal regulators have to act faster to determine whether all Takata air bag inflators are safe.

“We certainly can’t afford to wait until the December 2019 deadline. … If even more are found to be defective, it will take us from being the biggest recall ever to something that could become mind-boggling,” Nelson said.
…

How do you explain the European Central Bank’s capital key in 140 characters? Or the U.S. Federal Reserve’s dot plot?

Difficult. But International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde wants the world’s policymakers to try.

At a conference in Croatia on Tuesday, Lagarde said convoluted fiscal and monetary policy proposals use terminology “hardly anybody understands” and often lose the public’s attention.

“We are in an era where some political leaders communicate almost exclusively using 140 characters,” Lagarde said, referring to the Twitter limit. “We too in the financial community… need to have in the back of our mind those 140 characters.”

Financial policymakers, and central bankers in particular, can be famously opaque, steering sophisticated investors by the mere dropping of a word. But this is a world far removed from ordinary people.

“Smart communication, funny communication, alternative, not fake communication, around what you are about to do is, in my view, critically important,” she said.

“Because that battle is going to be lost or won depending on how early you prepare and how efficiently you communicate in simple, easy to understand terms, with funny to ready, funny to listen to, media supported tools.”

She argued the lack of clarity risked getting the policy message hijacked, creating a self-defeating cycle.

So how about: Central banks want to stop pouring #money into improving world economy, but low inflation, hungry markets mean they can’t SAD As for the ECB’S capital key, the bank responded on Twitter:

“Ok: each EU national central bank owns part of ECB. How much?=capital key. Based on population and economy @Reuters”
…

Thailand’s Cabinet on Tuesday approved construction of the first phase of a $5.5-billion railway project to link the industrial eastern seaboard with southern China through landlocked Laos, as part of a regional infrastructure drive by Beijing.

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who heads the Thai ruling junta, made use of an executive order last month to pave the way for the project, which has been beset by delays, including negotiations on loan terms.

The first phase encompasses six railway stations on a 250-km (155-mile) high-speed line linking the Thai capital of Bangkok and the northeastern province of Nakorn Ratchasima.

“This project is part of the development of a regional transport network, in particular China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative that will link Europe, Asia and Southeast Asia together,” Korbsak Pootrakool, vice-minister at the Prime Minister’s Office, told reporters.

The link forms part of Beijing’s regional infrastructure drive to connect Chinese cities with Southeast Asia, including Thailand’s industrial zones and its eastern deep sea port.

Some analysts see the project as a centerpiece of China-Thailand relations which appear to have deepened following a 2014 coup by the Thai army.

Thailand’s government has said Thai firms will be responsible for construction while China will be responsible for the railway technology, signal systems and technical training.

“The project will use Thai materials but Chinese technology will be used in the construction,” Prayuth said.

“We will send people to learn this so that we can operate the rail system ourselves in the future.”
…

On the day they were freed from slavery, the fishermen hugged, high-fived and sprinted through a stinging rain to line up so they wouldn’t be left behind. But even as they learned they were going home, some wept at the thought of returning empty-handed and becoming one more mouth to feed.

Two years have passed since an Associated Press investigation spurred that dramatic rescue, leading to the release of more than 2,000 men trapped on remote Indonesian islands. The euphoria they first felt during reunions with relatives has long faded. Occasional stories of happiness and opportunity have surfaced, but the men’s fight to start over has largely been narrated by shame and struggle.

Some of them are lucky to find odd jobs paying pennies an hour in cramped slums and rural villages in Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Others must travel far from home for back-breaking labor.

Some suffer night terrors and trauma from the years or even decades of physical and mental abuse they endured on boats run by Thai captains. Others have fought their demons with drugs and alcohol.

At least one Cambodian tried to hang himself. Another Thai fisherman went back to work on a different boat at home, only to have his arm ripped off by a net. He says he was offered about $3 and a few packets of instant noodles as compensation.

The men left their impoverished homes years ago full of hope and headed to neighboring Thailand, promising to send money back from good-paying jobs. Instead, they were tricked, sold or even kidnapped and put onto boats that became floating prisons.

They then were trafficked thousands of miles away to the isolated Indonesian island village of Benjina, where the AP first found hundreds of captive fishermen, including some locked in a cage simply because they asked to go home. They were beaten and routinely forced to work up to 22 hours a day. The unluckiest ones ended up in the sea or buried in a company graveyard under fake names – their bodies will likely never be recovered.

The AP story prompted the Indonesian government to initiate a rescue. It also traced fish tainted by forced labor back to the supply chains of many major U.S. companies and pet food brands, including Wal-Mart, Sysco, Kroger, Fancy Feast and Iams.

“What happened in Benjina has opened everybody’s eyes,” says Indonesian fishing minister Susi Pudjiastuti, who oversaw the rescue and is pushing for improved human rights at sea globally.

Despite all the suffering following their homecomings, there are stories of inspiration.

Some of the men borrowed money, enrolled in trade school or found decent work, saving what little they could. Others are opening small businesses, or have married and started families.

A few have gone to court to challenge their former captains, receiving a small portion of the pay they were owed. In rare instances, some even helped send their traffickers to jail.

Many say time has helped soften the pain, but most remain angry about the money and years lost to Benjina. Still, they are thankful to be home, living as free men.

They are slaves no more.

Sick and unemployed

MON STATE, Myanmar – Myint Naing sits outside the flimsy thatch shack he shares with five other family members. He stares silently at a computer alongside his mother and sister, watching flickering images of their extraordinary reunion two years ago.

The memories are still raw of Myint collapsing into his wailing mother’s arms on the same dusty road just feet away from where they sit now in southern Myanmar. That day was tinged with both joy and sorrow for all the time lost – ending 22 years of separation after Myint was taken to Indonesia and nearly beaten to death by a captain who refused to let him go home.

His mother blots her eyes and briefly looks away from the screen. Myint’s younger sister sees herself embracing her brother and screaming, “We don’t need money! We just need family!”

She never realized just how much those words would be tested every day in the harsh reality of poverty.

Myint, now 42, desperately wants to work, but he’s simply not able. He tried doing construction and other manual labor, but the muscles on the right side of his body were weakened by a stroke-like attack in Indonesia. He can’t even steady a smartphone with one hand long enough to take a selfie.

He dreams of opening a little snack shop to contribute to the family’s income, but there is no money to start it.

“Half of my body is suffering, and it’s very challenging for me to get a job anywhere,” he says, as his nieces dance around him on a rickety porch. “I don’t really know how to keep going like this.”

He’s also stressed. He and his sister moved out of their mother’s house soon after he returned, partially because Myint didn’t get along with his new stepfather, who is about his age.

His sister, Mawli Than, and her husband together earn less than $5.50 a day to feed three children and three adults. But she has kept her promise to love and care for him no matter what.

She wishes she could afford to get Myint the long-term medical care he needs. Her voice cracks when she talks about not being able to give him a proper ceremony before he left to study as a Buddhist novice, a custom that every devout Burmese male tries to fulfill.

“I feel really sad and guilty that I wasn’t able to do that,” she says, sobbing, as he listens quietly in the doorway. “My brother is like a father to me.”

Myint’s freshly shaved head reveals two large scars he received during his years in Indonesia. One is from a motorbike helmet, the other from an iron rod – both blows from angry fishing captains.

He eventually escaped his captors and lived in the jungle for years, farming vegetables with help from sympathetic local families.

He insists life is better now that he is home. But his mind often drifts to the past. If his former Thai captains would just pay him what he’s owed for all the time he worked on the boats, he could buy his own house and help his sister instead of making her life harder.

“I’m very angry at them. I can’t even find words,” he says. “If I ever saw them again, I might kill them.”

Happy on land

PREK TATIENG, Cambodia – A gas-powered pump growls on Sriev Kry’s back as he walks barefoot, spraying a stream of pesticide on pink lotus blossoms that will soon be ready for harvest.

The work is hard and unforgiving. He doesn’t wear a mask or other protective gear, and there aren’t any trees in the surrounding rice paddy to shield him from the blistering sun. But this is Cambodian soil, and it belongs to him. It’s a freedom he says he never really understood until being trafficked and enslaved in Benjina.

The wiry rice farmer never wanted to be a fisherman because the ocean’s roiling waves had always sent him running to the side of the boat to vomit. So when a cousin asked if he was interested in leaving his rural Cambodian village to find higher-paying work in Thailand, he refused until he was promised a factory job or something else on land.

Unlike most migrant workers who cross the border illegally, Sriev Kry and two of his cousins waited to receive passports before leaving in 2014.

They were immediately taken to a boat and ordered to get on board after receiving $880 advances. They were told they wouldn’t be at sea long. But it was all a lie.

Just as their trawler reached the Malaysian border, Sriev Kry says he woke up to learn a Burmese fisherman was missing. They didn’t stop to search for him, and no calls were made for help. Instead, Sriev Kry says the Thai owner told the workers that “life on the boat doesn’t matter. No one cares about missing people.”

He says the men then watched as the crew member’s passport was tossed into the sea, destroying the only record of his existence.

“The other workers just saw that life is very cheap,” Sriev Kry recalls. “It is cheaper than the bodies of dogs.”

He tried not to cause problems and worked nonstop on the boat, sorting mountains of fish. He saw other crew beaten or scalded by water tossed on them when they were too sick to work.

“It’s like a slave’s life. It’s even worse than a slave. Slaves can sometimes complain or challenge the owner,” he says. “If we refused, if we complained, the Thai owner always asked: ‘You want to live? You want to have a life? Or do you want to die?'”

Sriev Kry was only able to contact his wife a few times from Benjina. He told her he wasn’t sure he’d ever make it back home to the emerald green rice paddies and lotus fields they tended together.

Two of their four children were studying in the capital, Phnom Penh, with one already in university. The baby was just a year old, and the family was struggling to survive because Sriev Kry never sent the money he was promised. But his wife, Khan Srin, encouraged him to hold on. To focus on staying alive.

When he was finally rescued, Sriev Kry was done being silent: He volunteered to testify against his captain. He saw it as his duty to speak out to prevent others from facing the same fate. He is still waiting for his day in court.

Today, at 44, he earns about $10 a day farming the field that rings a one-room shack perched on stilts overlooking the few acres of land he owns. He sleeps here sometimes, away from his nearby village, to stand watch over his crops. He also sells mangoes from his beat-up motorbike just across the border in Vietnam and harvests catfish from a lake – the only fishing he says he will ever do again.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to pay his debts and feed his family. His captain in Benjina swore more earnings would be sent, but Sriev Kry says nothing ever came.

He remains angry and is still haunted by the image of the dead crewman’s passport being thrown into the sea. But he’s happy to be home and vows he’ll never leave his family again.

“I was just rescued from hell,” he says, shaking his head. “Why would I go back to hell again?”

Still a fisherman

YANGON, Myanmar – Phyo Kyaw’s father wept when he heard his son was returning to Thailand to board another fishing boat. But there was nothing he could do.

After the 31-year-old was rescued from Benjina, he worked a few months on the gritty outskirts of Yangon driving a bus and a motorbike taxi, but the money wasn’t good and his bike soon was stolen.

Several of Phyo’s friends from Benjina already had gone back to Thailand to find better-paying work, and they encouraged him to get a passport and join them on another fishing boat. They had heard good stories about the company, and they all had legal working documents this time. They were convinced their papers would protect them from exploitation.

Phyo left Myanmar without telling his father. He went to the same port town where he was initially trafficked and got on a trawler with 13 other Burmese men.

After being beaten and spending more than two years on Benjina with no pay, he was scared of being trafficked again but decided to take a chance. As he prepared to leave, he met other fishermen who had just docked – they had been at sea for three years without touching land.

“I don’t think it’s fair, but it’s my choice to go,” Phyo says. “My father is the only financial provider here for the moment so at least if I go to Thailand, I can bring some money back.”

Phyo didn’t know where his boat was going or how long he would be gone. He also had no idea if he was fishing legally or poaching, a common but dangerous practice that can land an entire crew in a foreign jail.

The days were still long but, this time, he got a few more hours of sleep – four or five a night – and he wasn’t beaten.

After six months at sea, the trawler returned to Thailand. Phyo should have made nearly $1,600 for the trip, but was left with just $350 after deductions for fees, food and supplies.

He could have earned nearly double that amount driving the motorbike taxi back home. Still, he’s thinking about going out to sea again with another group of Benjina guys.

His father, an electrical engineer, can only shake his head with disappointment.

“As parents, you are always worried about your children,” Aye Kyaw, 67, says inside the family’s small, sweltering apartment.

But Phyo just shrugs. Fishing is what he knows.

“If I can get a better job here, I won’t go,” he says. “But if I don’t have anything, I will go on a fishing boat.”

Forgiveness as a monk

SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand – Wrapped in flowing saffron robes with a shaved head, Prasert Jakkawaro speaks calmly and softly as he looks back on his lost life.

He spent eight years fishing the Arafura Sea’s rich waters off Benjina. If he was lucky, his boat docked twice a year. He worked around the clock, but says he was never paid what was promised.

The memories still cut like razor blades, but he does not show it. His voice remains steady, his fingers laced loosely across his lap. The rage that once sent him searching for solace at the bottom of a bottle has died. He now finds comfort praying in a monastery as a Buddhist monk and helping others who have lost their way.

“I feel that I have to give forgiveness and kindness back,” he says, his robe concealing tattoos from his former life. “I have another chance. There’s no point in dwelling on the past. The anger will only follow me in this life and into the next.”

Finding peace wasn’t easy: He was first forced to confront all of the evil he saw.

Even though the captains were Thai like him, he says he was treated just as badly as his fellow fishermen from Myanmar and Cambodia. They rarely had vegetables or meat to eat – just fish and rice for every meal, and even that wasn’t guaranteed. Those who got sick were forced to work anyway, and he saw one crew member die due to a lack of medical attention. Sleep was a luxury.

“If you don’t get up, the metal rod will be used to bang on your door and beat on your legs,” says Prasert, 53. “The rule is that if you can eat, then you have to work.”

When he asked to go home after just one year on his trawler, he was told he first had to find a replacement, an impossible request on a remote island with hundreds of other enslaved men just as desperate to leave.

Once, after coming ashore, Prasert asked his captain for more money. As punishment, he says he was tossed into a tiny, muggy cell with about 20 other men.

The security guards then used the imprisoned fishermen for a twisted form of entertainment – forcing them to beat each other up.

“You would get hit so hard that you could see the handprints on your face,” Prasert says.

Over the years, he lost hope and rage festered inside him. He talked about attacking the captain, but the other fishermen always managed to calm him down.

After he was finally rescued and returned home to Thailand, he received a settlement of about $2,250 from the boat owner. It was far short of the nearly $9,000 he says he was owed, but he knows most of the other men received nothing.

The anger continued to swell, and he wallowed in alcohol and slept anywhere he could find, including on a bathroom floor. Staff at the local nonprofit Labor Rights Protection Network, which has long assisted trafficked fishermen, pushed him to seek help.

With encouragement from his sister, Prasert spent three months studying at a Buddhist temple.

Slowly, the hatred began to melt.

“When I attend ceremonies, people really look at me as if I can shine a light on their life, and it makes me feel that I am useful again,” he says. “I feel like I can have real happiness at last.”

* Information for this story came from interviews with nearly 15 former fishermen in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand along with nonprofits in Cambodia and Thailand.

 
…

Tanzanian President John Magufuli said on Monday he has signed into law new mining bills which require the government to own at least a 16 percent stake in mining projects.

The laws, which also increase royalties tax on gold and other minerals, were passed by parliament last week despite opposition from the mining industry body.

Magufuli reiterated on Monday that no new mining licenses would be issued until Tanzania “puts things in order” and that the government would review all existing mining licenses with foreign investors.

“We must benefit from our God-given minerals and that is why we must safeguard our natural resource wealth to ensure we do not end up with empty mining pits,” Magufuli told a rally in his home village in Chato district, northwestern Tanzania.

The president has sent shock-waves through the mining community with a series of actions since his election in 2015, which he says are aimed at distributing revenue to the Tanzanian people.

The new mining laws, which were fast-tracked through parliament, raise royalties tax for gold, copper, silver and platinum exports to six percent from four percent.

They also give the government the right to tear up and renegotiate contracts for natural resources like gas or minerals, and remove the right to international arbitration.

“I would like to thank parliament for making the legislative changes. I signed the bills into law the same day Parliament concluded its session on July 5,” Magufuli said.

Passage of the new legislation also followed months of  wrangling between the government and the country’s biggest gold miner, London-listed Acacia Mining Plc, over mining contracts after Magufuli decided in March to ban exports of gold and copper concentrates to push for the construction of a domestic mineral smelter.

Magufuli said on Monday that talks between Tanzania and Barrick Gold Corp., Acacia’s majority owner, would begin in two days to try to resolve allegations of tax evasion against Acacia.

Tanzania accused Acacia of tax evasion in 2016 in a case that is ongoing.

Acacia, which denies all allegations, said on July 4 it was seeking an adjudicator to resolve its dispute with the Tanzanian government.

Tanzania is also pushing for the mandatory listing of mining companies on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange (DSE) by August as part of measures aimed at increasing transparency and spreading wealth from the country’s natural resources.

Other major foreign-owned mining companies in Tanzania include AngloGold Ashanti and Petra Diamonds.
…

Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk on Sunday tweeted pictures of the first Model 3 sedan to roll off the assembly line.

Tesla board member Ira Ehrenpreis was the first to put down a $1,000 deposit on the Model 3 and gifted the car to Musk for his 46th birthday, Musk said in a tweet.

Musk has high hopes for the $35,000 Model 3, aimed at the mass market, and expects the rollout to help the company deliver five times its current annual sales volume.

Tesla’s shares have taken a beating in the last few weeks, as investors have become increasingly concerned that demand for the company’s existing Model S sedan is weakening.

Musk said in May that some “confused” Tesla buyers considered the new Model 3 as an upgrade to the Model S, hurting orders for the older car.

Registrations for Tesla’s vehicles in California, its largest market, fell 24 percent in April from a year ago, according to data from research firm IHS Markit.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that new registrations of Tesla cars fell to zero in Hong Kong after authorities slashed a tax break for electric vehicles in April.

Last week, Musk said production of the Model 3 would increase exponentially — from 100 cars in August, more than 1,500 in September to 20,000 Model 3 cars per month in December.
…

Severe food crises are growing in Kenya and Somalia, as the Horn of Africa continues to receive below-normal rainfall, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

The hunger-tracking group says 2.9 million people in Kenya and 3.2 million in Somalia are experiencing Phase 3 or higher on the network’s five-tier warning scale, with Phase 3 being the crisis stage and Phase 5 being a full-fledged famine.

The numbers represent a jump of 800,000 in Kenya and 300,000 in Somalia since FEWSNET’s last estimates, released in June.

The  need is urgent

Peter Thomas, FEWS NET decision support advisor, says Phase 3 indicates that households are in need of urgent humanitarian aid.

“This means that households are unable to meet their basic food needs for survival and facing gaps in their basic food needs,” he told VOA’s Horn of Africa Service.

Thomas says the new estimates were compiled just after the March to May rainy season, which FEWS NET said was “very poor” across southern Somalia and northern Kenya.  Some parts of Kenya received just 25 percent of the normal rainfall.

The rain was more plentiful across nearby Ethiopia, except in the south, where drought conditions continue and millions across the Somali and Oromia regions remain in need of assistance.

Somalia a concern

Aid agencies like the U.N. World Food Program have helped many Horn residents hold off starvation.  But Thomas warns that in Somalia, the situation could change.  In the past, militant group al-Shabab has periodically banned aid agencies from helping people in towns under the group’s control.

“In the worst case scenario, if the humanitarian assistance is cut off and access to humanitarian need by local communities are restricted, famine could be possible,” he said.

The last declared famine in Somalia, in 2011, killed an estimated 260,000 people.

On Saturday, the Trump Administration announced more than $630 million in aid to Somalia and three other countries where conflict has led to or contributed to widespread hunger; South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen.

 
…

For a farmer in Brazil’s Amazon, Manoel Freire Camurca was doing pretty well for himself until a local power broker burned down his house and took the surrounding fields he had poured his life into.

Camurca’s eviction eight months ago happened as officials were finalizing his claim to 500 hectares of land in southwestern Amazonas state where he had spent nearly three decades growing corn, sugar and beans.

“I lost everything,” 61-year-old Camurca told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, wiping away tears. “I went into town and when I came back everything was burned and destroyed.”

Half a dozen other small farmers in his village suffered the same fate after a large rancher said he was the rightful owner of the land.

Camurca’s story highlights an increasingly violent environment in parts of rural Brazil which government officials say is fueled by unclear property title deeds, local corruption and a system where competing state agencies work on land regularization.

‘Death in the Countryside’

At least 36 people died in land conflicts in the first five months of this year, according to the Brazil-based Pastoral Land Commission watchdog.

One government official said 2017 had so far been the most violent year for land fights this century.

“Land conflicts in the Amazon have gotten worse,” said Ronaldo Santos, an official with the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), a government body responsible for managing and demarcating rural land.

“Big farm operators have the power to dispense injustice,” Santos told the Thomson Reuters Foundation following a public meeting with hundreds of angry farmers embroiled in land conflicts in Amazonas in northwestern Brazil.  “We have assassinations and death in the countryside.”

Conflicting Titles

Recent violence has led officials from different government agencies and privately owned land registration agents known as cartorios to trade blame over who is responsible for the conflicts.

Across Brazil, land must be registered by cartorios. They maintain property records and transfer deeds in specific regions. There is no single, centralized system for checking who owns what nationwide.

Inherited from Portuguese colonialists, the cartorio system is confusing and widely abused by wealthy land owners, government officials told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

They said unclear property ownership makes it easier for large ranchers to displace small farmers like Camurca.

“The cartorios hold the biggest responsibility for legalizing grilagem [land grabs],” said Miguel Emile, a senior official with Terra Legal, a government program for regularizing small farmers’ land titles in the Amazon.

There are an estimated 5 million landless families in Brazil, according to a 2016 Canadian study. Government officials say they are working to speed-up property allocations for the rural poor who often live on land they do not formally own.

But even lands demarcated and distributed by government officials from INCRA and Terra Legal must be registered at private cartorios to be fully legal, Emile said.

Small farmers often cannot afford cartorio services, he said, and the system itself faces widespread abuse.

Wealthy ranchers can bribe cartorios to register someone else’s land, Emile told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A common scam involves elites legally buying a small piece of property and then having a cartorio register a far larger surrounding area in their name, he said.

As a result of this type of fraud in Para, a neighboring Amazon state, four times more land has been privately registered than the state’s total area, said Jeremy Campbell, an expert on land rights in Brazil at Roger Williams University in the United States.

Trading Blame

Cartorios, however, say they are not responsible for most of the problem, blaming government agencies for weak Amazon property rights and the resulting violence.

“Grilagem is not done by cartorios,” said one cartorio in Amazonas who spoke on condition of anonymity.

His office, which is responsible for maintaining local land records, is full of yellowed, time-worn books of property deeds, along with some digitized documents.

Corruption in government agencies, including INCRA, is a major driver of land scams, the cartorio said, as property owners can bribe officials to hand them swaths of state land.

The government is moving to geocode new property registrations so the land is digitally registered through satellite maps but this process has been slow, he added.

Proving Ownership

Forced evictions in Camurca’s village of Bom Lugar in Boca do Acre municipality exemplify the problems with Brazil’s rural property system.

INCRA had provided Camurca with a certification of possession, known locally as a “posse title.” But the farmer said he couldn’t register this as a formal title with a cartorio as the process of property demarcation had not been finalized.

This meant that despite a government agency granting Camurca rights to the land where he had lived since 1988 he still did not formally own it.

The rancher who Camurca says was behind the burning of his house could not be reached for comment.

The federal prosecutor for Amazonas state said he was investigating house burnings and displacement across Boca do Acre.

Amazonas senior security official, Sergio Fontes, said the violence affecting Camurca and thousands of others across Brazil’s largest state was due to poor management by officials.

“INCRA should resolve the farmers’ disputes with ranchers before distributing lands, otherwise all these problems happen,” Fontes told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “[Officials] have to take responsibility for who was placed there.”

Travel support for this story was provided by the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ).
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