The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
ROME, Sep 30 2026 (IPS) - Imagine your morning coffee. You smell the aroma as steam rises from the cup. It wisps and swirls, thins, then disappears. You lift the cup to your mouth. The first pure joy of the day.
That coffee may have begun beneath shade trees in Ethiopia, on a Colombian hillside, in Viet Nam’s highlands or among the coffee farms of Brazil. Long before it reached your cup, someone planted and tended the trees from which it came. Then came the harvest. Ripe cherries were picked with care, and the coffee began a journey that would carry it far from the place where it was grown.
Building a stronger future for coffee therefore begins where coffee itself begins: with productive and resilient farms, open and transparent markets, and greater economic opportunity in producing countries
Few agricultural products connect people across such long distances. Coffee is among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Coffee supports the livelihoods of up to 25 million farmers worldwide, while millions more people participate in the economic activity created along the coffee value chain.
Coffee’s extraordinary global reach has created livelihoods and economic opportunities across continents. It has also connected millions of small producers to a market in which shocks can propagate quickly. Building a stronger future for coffee therefore begins where coffee itself begins: with productive and resilient farms, open and transparent markets, and greater economic opportunity in producing countries.
International Coffee Day is a moment to celebrate what coffee has made possible. It is also a moment to ask what its future will require.
Recent years have shown why. International coffee prices have experienced large fluctuations as weather has affected production in major producing countries and supplies have tightened. Droughts, frosts and excessive rainfall can disrupt harvests, while pests, diseases, rising costs, geopolitical tensions and shipping delays can add further pressure.
That exposure is amplified by the concentration of production in relatively few places. Brazil and Viet Nam together account for nearly half of global coffee production, while five countries supply around 70 percent of global coffee bean exports. With such concentration, a shock in one major producing region can quickly reverberate far beyond it.
Those shocks are transmitted unevenly through coffee value chains, with producers generally more directly exposed to fluctuations in international prices. The answer is not to prevent prices from moving. Markets respond to changes in supply and demand, and prices will inevitably rise and fall. Greater resilience therefore depends on strengthening the capacity of producers and producing countries to adapt and respond when conditions change.
The first priority is production itself. Coffee farming must remain productive and competitive while adapting to changing conditions. More resilient farming systems, innovation and technology, effective management of pests and diseases, and better tools for managing risk can help stabilize production and incomes and boost investment in the future of the crop.
Transparent markets and timely information are essential. Better and timely information on crop conditions, stocks, trade flows and prices reduce uncertainty and help producers, governments and businesses understand changing market conditions and adjust sooner. At a time when disruption in one major producing region can affect markets around the world, international cooperation and greater transparency become even more important.
Stronger production and better markets provide the foundation. But there is also an opportunity to create more economic value from the coffee that producing countries already grow.
The bean’s economic journey is far from finished when it is harvested. Coffee is processed and transported, then may be roasted, packaged, branded, distributed and eventually sold to consumers. Each stage requires investment, expertise and enterprise, while creating opportunities to generate additional economic value.
Much of the coffee produced in low- and middle-income countries is exported in raw form as green beans for processing and distribution elsewhere. Coffee therefore often enters international trade relatively early in its economic journey, leaving opportunities for producing countries to develop more economic activity around the later stages of the value chain.
Where commercially viable, improvements in quality can help producers reach different and potentially higher-value markets. Processing can create additional economic activity, while certification and branding can provide further scope for upgrading within coffee value chains. The opportunities will vary across countries, and investments should focus on areas in which producers and businesses can compete successfully.
Greater resilience in coffee production and greater economic opportunity around what happens after it is produced are complementary ambitions. Productivity, innovation and risk management can strengthen the productive foundation of the sector. Transparent markets can help participants respond to changing conditions. And commercially viable upgrading can broaden the economic opportunities created around the crop.
Realising these opportunities requires cooperation across the coffee value chain. Producers, traders, processors, roasters, retailers and governments perform different roles in moving coffee from the tree to the consumer. International cooperation, market transparency, innovation and investment can strengthen those connections and support a coffee sector that is more productive, competitive, resilient and sustainable.
Coffee already demonstrates what international trade can achieve. A crop grown by millions of farmers, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, reaches consumers across the world and sustains economic activity throughout its journey. The next opportunity not to miss is to strengthen this connection while creating more economic possibilities in the places where coffee is grown.
Tomorrow morning, the journey begins again. Steam will rise from your cup. Somewhere far away, coffee trees will be tended and another harvest prepared.
The journey from crop to cup already connects millions of people around the globe. A stronger future for coffee starts by strengthening the places and communities where that journey begins.
Boubaker Ben-Belhassen is Director of the Markets and Trade Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Excerpt:
Stronger farms and better markets can build a more resilient coffee economy
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2026 (IPS) - The United Nations High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR) on September 25 called for faster and more sustained investment in pandemic preparedness. Speakers emphasized that future outbreaks will require coordinated action across governments, health systems, and communities.
The meeting, held three years after the General Assembly’s first high-level meeting on pandemic preparedness, focused on lessons from COVID-19 and persistent gaps in global health security.
“No country can protect itself alone,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed said, underscoring the need to turn the lessons of COVID-19 into long-term preparedness.
Opening the meeting, Dr. Khalilur Rahman, President of the General Assembly, highlighted three priorities: closing financing gaps, adopting a stronger “One Health” approach, and ensuring equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other essential medical tools.
“All countries need and deserve well-funded community-based systems for detection, surveillance, communication and containment,” Rahman said, calling for predictable and sustainable financing. He also stressed that pandemic preparedness must address the links between human, animal and environmental health, arguing that stronger understanding of these interactions could help prevent outbreaks from reaching human populations. Equitable access to life-saving tools, he said, is both a matter of justice and a critical component of containing outbreaks.
In a press briefing held on the same day, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that global investment in health security has declined since the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, reviving what he described as a cycle of “panic and neglect.”
Although countries and international institutions have established new mechanisms for pandemic preparedness, Tedros said the scale and speed of investment remain insufficient.
The WHO has launched and supported a range of initiatives since the pandemic, including the Pandemic Fund, strengthened pandemic and epidemic intelligence, vaccine and medical countermeasure initiatives, the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme, the WHO BioHub System and the Global Health Emergency Corps.
Countries have also strengthened the international framework governing pandemic response. In 2024, WHO member states adopted amendments to the International Health Regulations, while the WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted the following year.
However, recent outbreaks, including Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have underscored the continuing risk of infectious diseases crossing borders and becoming international threats. Tedros said the possibility of a future respiratory pandemic remains particularly concerning because of the potential scale of its impact.
A key issue still under negotiation is the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system, which is intended to establish arrangements for sharing pathogen materials and information while ensuring that countries providing those resources benefit from vaccines, diagnostics and other products developed from them.
Tedros urged countries to conclude the negotiations. “So today, I leave you with just one request: get PABS done as soon as possible. Please conclude the negotiations as soon as possible,” he said. “We are as strong as our weakest link.”
He also emphasized the importance of investing in countries more vulnerable to pandemics, not as an act of charity, but rather as collective action against the common goal of pandemic prevention. Sustained financing and stronger international cooperation will be central to preventing future outbreaks from becoming global emergencies.
IPS UN Bureau Report
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Sep 30 2026 (IPS) - Fatuma Makame learned to farm seaweed in the shallow water where her parents worked. These days, she grows it farther from shore.
In the shallows, warmer water has left the crop more vulnerable to poor growth and disease. Conditions can be better farther out, but working there requires a boat, equipment, and the skills to handle deeper water. Makame joined Mwani Zanzibar Mamas—a cooperative union that obtained a boat and farming gear. She has since reported larger, more reliable harvests.
The decision she faced is becoming familiar to seaweed farmers along Zanzibar’s coast: move the crop, if they can afford to, or keep planting where it has become harder to grow.
A new assessment of the world’s oceans gives that local difficulty a wider context. The 10th Copernicus Ocean State Report, released today (September 30), describes an ocean absorbing more heat, rising along coastlines and becoming more acidic. It was produced by Mercator Ocean International through the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service.
“The ocean is transforming before our eyes: warming, rising seas and ecosystem degradation are interconnected signs of significant and long-term change. It is our responsibility to build the permanent capacity to anticipate this transformation,” said Pierre Bahurel, director-general of Mercator Ocean International.
According to the report, the global ocean absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules of heat in 2025 — roughly 40 times the energy the world consumed that year. Global mean sea level rose by an average of 3.8 millimetres a year between 1999 and 2025; the rate was 4.2 millimetres a year from 2012 to 2025. The report also says the ocean became approximately 17 percent more acidic between 1985 and 2025.
Those are global measurements. They do not describe the water at Makame’s farm or explain the result of any one planting season. But Zanzibar’s seaweed farmers have had to contend with warmer water for years.
Across Unguja and Pemba, seaweed provides income for thousands of households, many of them headed or supported by women. Farmers tie seedlings to lines, tend them in the water, then harvest and dry the crop for sale. A poor harvest can leave less money for food, school fees and the next planting.
The Food and Agriculture Organization has documented how warmer water can inhibit seaweed growth and make it more susceptible to disease. Moving farms into deeper, cooler water presents other difficulties: stronger currents can damage the crop, and many farmers cannot swim or lack the equipment to work there safely. Low prices further limit what they can spend on changing their methods.
Tanzanian marine scientist Narriman Jiddawi has documented related problems farther south, on Songo Songo Island. In one study commissioned by the Institute of Marine Sciences, she recorded unusually warm water and signs of disease at shallow farming sites that had been abandoned.
“Farming is failing in many cultivation sites in shallow intertidal areas where it used to grow well,” she said. Their measurements were taken at Songo Songo, not at Makame’s farm in Zanzibar.
The Copernicus report also examines the ocean territories of small island developing states. It finds that all their exclusive economic zones have experienced ocean warming since 1960. About 65% of their combined ocean area has been exposed to accelerating sea-level rise since 1999. Among the Indian Ocean members of that group, the figure is 33%
Zanzibar is part of Tanzania, rather than a separate small island developing state, so those percentages are not figures for the archipelago. The findings nevertheless speak to risks faced by island communities whose incomes and homes depend on the sea.
“Small Island Developing States are experiencing multiple dimensions of ocean change at once. Nearly two-thirds of their ocean territories are exposed to accelerating sea-level rise, while warming seas are increasing pressure on coral reefs, fisheries and coastal communities,” said Karina von Schuckmann, director of the Copernicus Ocean State Report.
“For island states, ocean change is not a distant environmental issue; it is an immediate economic, development and security challenge – and a warning of what many other coastlines will face in the future.”
For fishing families, the condition of coral reefs is one concern. Reefs provide habitat for fish and help reduce the force of waves reaching shore. Severe heat can cause corals to bleach, and repeated episodes can hinder their recovery.
The report finds that about a quarter of threatened coral reefs within the ocean territories of small island developing states experienced accumulated, mortality-level heat stress for at least one month between 1982 and 2025. That is a finding for those states collectively, not an assessment of Zanzibar’s reefs.
There is local evidence of damage. Researchers from the State University of Zanzibar examined reef observations spanning 1992 to 2016. They found severe declines in hard coral cover following the El Niño events of 1998 and 2016, though the extent of change differed substantially between reefs.
Heat is only one of the pressures on them. Pollution and damaging fishing practices can make recovery harder. Reducing those local pressures will not cool the Indian Ocean, but it may improve the prospects for reefs that survive a period of extreme heat.
Rising seas pose a separate challenge to coastal settlements. A World Bank assessment identifies Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania’s coast as vulnerable to erosion, flooding and damage to infrastructure and marine habitats.
For authorities deciding where to protect homes or restrict construction, measurements of tides, storms, reefs and mangroves need to be considered alongside what residents know about places where water already reaches houses and roads.
Through the Agriculture and Fisheries Development Programme, seaweed farmers in Unguja and Pemba have received training in planting, handling and processing. Improved drying racks and solar dryers help keep harvested seaweed away from sand and rain, reducing losses after it comes ashore.
Other farmers are exploring additional sources of income. FAO has trained seaweed farmers on Zanzibar’s east coast in sea cucumber cultivation. That work requires suitable sites, equipment and buyers and will not suit every household.
Financial protection is being explored as well. The United Nations Development Programme, Zanzibar’s disaster management authorities and the Ministry of Blue Economy and Fisheries are developing a climate-risk insurance proposal for seaweed farmers in Unguja and Pemba. It remains a proposal. Its usefulness will depend on which losses it covers, what farmers must pay, and how quickly they can settle a claim.
For Makame, the cooperative’s boat and gear made it possible to try farming farther offshore. Other farmers still work the shallows. Whether they can follow her depends on access to equipment, training and a way to bear the risk if a new method fails.
The Copernicus report tracks changes across decades. On Zanzibar’s coast, a farmer must decide where to put her next lines of seaweed.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Excerpt:
While the 10th Copernicus Ocean State Report documents the ocean's transformation with increased heat, rising sea levels and its acidity – Zanibar's seaweed farmers feel its impact with every crop.
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 30 2026 (IPS) - At the 18th BRICS Summit, held on 12 and 13 September in New Delhi, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought together presidents Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran, along with Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, representing the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Around the table sat longstanding rivals such as India and China and, in the case of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, states on opposite sides of an ongoing war. That the summit produced a joint declaration every member could sign was a modest multilateralist success.
The summit took place against a fast-changing backdrop. With the USA under Donald Trump an unreliable partner and often a hostile power bent on bullying others into submission, numerous states are seeking new alliances as a counterweight. BRICS, whose 11 members account for 49 per cent of the world’s population and 28 per cent of the global economy, could become a more significant forum as a result. But what is on offer is a profoundly old-fashioned, state-centric form of multilateralism, in which the people in whose name states claim to act have little say.
A hollow declaration
At the summit, Xi called for international rules to be ‘written by all countries’, even though he leads a one-party state where increasingly only he writes the rules. Putin urges greater representation for Africa, Asia and Latin America at the UN Security Council, while routinely wielding his veto to stop the council acting on his war in Ukraine.
The New Delhi Declaration’s silences speak loudest. It is explicit on Palestine, calling on Israel to end its war on Gaza and backing a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. But on the war in Iran, it only urges ‘maximum restraint’ without naming the warring parties, reflecting the fact that Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sat around the same table. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not mentioned at all, a regression from past declarations and a troubling sign that Putin has no interest in ending the fighting. The text condemns ‘indiscriminate rising tariffs’ and ‘unilateral sanctions’ without naming the USA, sparing the blushes of members such as India, which is reportedly finalising a trade deal with Washington. The declaration preserves consensus at the expense of resolve.
Closed civic space, open defiance
Most BRICS governments have no fear of being held domestically accountable for the compromises they have made. Civic space is closed in seven of BRICS’ 11 states and obstructed or repressed in the rest. Russia jails and exiles opposition voices and has made protest almost impossible. China subjects its people to mass surveillance and crushes any expression that departs from ruling-party lines. Iran violently suppresses protest movements, including through the death penalty. Saudi Arabia and the UAE recognise no legitimate role for independent civil society. Host and self-styled mediator India has seen Modi’s government erode press freedom, restrict civil society funding and stoke hostility towards religious minorities.
Domestic repression translates directly into a closed international forum. After 18 summits, BRICS still has no treaty, no published membership criteria, no permanent secretariat, no budget and no mechanism for civil society to hold its members to account. This is no accident. It leaves powerful leaders free to pursue their interests, and it means civil society has less influence in BRICS than in comparable blocs such as the G20, and much less than in UN processes.
Civil society mobilised regardless. Three weeks before the summit, over 200 delegates from farmers’ organisations, people’s movements, trade unions, women’s organisations and other civil society groups gathered in New Delhi for the People’s BRICS Summit. Its resolution denounced BRICS states for reproducing extractivist, inequitable development models, and insisted that cooperation between global south states be judged by the dignity and rights it delivers to people and communities, not by the freedom it grants states and capital. It called for debt restructuring, a publicly accountable energy transition, food sovereignty, universal social security, women’s political representation and an end to the persecution of civil society activists, and for BRICS to take a clear stand against military intervention, occupation and genocide. BRICS governments chose not to listen.
Ambition without accountability
BRICS’ biggest ambition, on display in the New Delhi Declaration, is to reshape international finance. Development of payment systems independent of the US dollar would chip away at the USA’s unique ability to sustain its power by printing more dollars, despite mountainous debt, to meet unceasing demand. But it would also let repressive states such as Iran and Russia sell oil and gas more easily, funding their repression while blunting international sanctions.
This ambition comes with no commitment to accountability. The bloc has no channel through which the people most affected by its decisions can make their voices heard, and no human rights conditions are attached to its initiatives.
None of the emerging responses to the rapidly changing international order promises to be more democratic than the current system. So far, neither BRICS nor any of the other alternatives now taking shape has matched its growing ambition with greater accountability.
Samuel King is a researcher at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, working on ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition, a Horizon Europe-funded project. Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.
For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org
NEW YORK, Sep 30 2026 (IPS) - Years ago, standing in a small farmer’s field in Haiti, I began to suspect that we had agriculture backward. The development world saw a man in need of rescue. I saw a farmer who might help rescue the rest of us.
That distinction matters. Over the next 25 years, humanity will need to grow much more food on a planet with degraded soils, shrinking biodiversity and a destabilizing climate. The usual instinct is to seek a technical fix. I want to suggest another source of help: a moral idea rooted in religion.
I am not a theologian. I am a development worker. In 2010, Haitian agronomist Timote Georges and I co-founded the Smallholder Farmers Alliance. We now work with about 10,000 farmers throughout Haiti who grow more food while rebuilding degraded land. Our “tree currency” rewards them for planting and caring for trees with credits they can exchange for seeds, tools and training.
Hugh Locke
Roughly 475 million smallholder farms, each under five acres, already produce about 30% of the world’s food despite limited access to finance, markets or technical support. In my new book, Whole Earth Farming, I argue that if even half of these families received support to adopt regenerative methods, they could produce the additional food humanity will need through 2050 on 12% of the world’s arable land, with a climate benefit comparable to offsetting the aviation industry’s annual emissions.
The Green Revolution averted famine, but its gains often came with degraded soils, diminished biodiversity and polluted water. Regenerative farming aims not merely to limit damage but to restore soil, rebuild biodiversity, improve farmers’ wellbeing and deliver a net climate benefit.
That is the language investors expect. Yet a case study more than a century old anticipated this approach, and its foundation was not market logic but morality.
From 1901 to 1921, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, one of the central figures of the Baha’i Faith, directed a farming settlement called ‘Adasiyyih in the Jordan Valley. Long before the term “regenerative agriculture” existed, the community used crop rotation, agroforestry, water conservation and integrated livestock management to make the land productive without exhausting it. Just as important was the framework behind those techniques: the belief that the earth is one country and humanity one interdependent family, expressed through consultation, equality and a rejection of extraction for its own sake. Farming at ‘Adasiyyih was not simply commodity production. It was a way to build community.
Regenerative agriculture does not require religious belief. Many successful regenerative farmers are secular, and the science stands on its own. But ‘Adasiyyih addressed, on a limited scale, a coordination problem that still hinders the movement: how can independent farmers, financiers, governments and companies be persuaded to treat soil health, water and biodiversity as a shared obligation?
‘Adasiyyih began with a moral premise rather than a technical formula. That premise is worth borrowing, whether one calls it stewardship or enlightened self-interest. Farmers, buyers and governments must act as though what happens to one plot of land is everyone’s concern, because increasingly it is. For generations we have asked how much the earth can give us. We should also ask what we owe in return.
Regenerative agriculture is at a fragile moment. By my estimate, some 15 million farms and ranches worldwide now use regenerative practices, and some 25 million acres, mostly in the United States, are certified under third-party standards, though almost none of that land is farmed by smallholders. The movement is growing faster than the systems meant to support it. Farmers can face lower yields and higher costs during the transition, there is no consensus on how to measure results, and financing, training and market rewards lag well behind farmers’ interest. A shared obligation is what can turn these isolated successes into lasting change.
This is not a case for religious agricultural policy, which would be unworkable in a pluralistic world. Smallholders are not waiting for a new theology. They need capital, training and markets. But the case for providing that support may rest more persuasively on the old idea of shared stewardship than on another spreadsheet of carbon calculations.
The next great agricultural transformation may begin not on the world’s largest farms but on hundreds of millions of its smallest. Given the means, smallholders may help determine whether the next 25 years of food production heal the planet or finish degrading it.
Hugh Locke is president of the Impact Farming Foundation and author of Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation (George Ronald Publisher, 2026).
IPS UN Bureau
NEW YORK, Sep 29 2026 (IPS) - “Artificial intelligence (AI) must be shaped by humanity, with humanity, and for all humanity… Life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. Killer robots must have no place in our future.”
With those words, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres opened the high-level debate of the 81st session of the General Assembly (UNGA 81). He also warned: “Women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion and abuse… Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds.”
Both technological transformation and the erosion of women’s rights were placed before the world, yet the political response to each was markedly different.
Opening speeches focused heavily on technology. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that a few powers could decide the planet’s future through AI and urged states to build independent, open-source models; UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for global cooperation on transparency and ethics; China’s Vice President Han Zheng stressed a people-centered approach to narrowing the digital divide; and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for the UN to lead AI rule-setting through equal participation.
U.S. President Donald Trump focused on U.S. technological leadership. He declared that the United States was outcompeting the world and called for a change in terminology: “From this point forward, all U.S. documents—and hopefully the world—will use the more accurate term super rather than artificial. So, it’s super intelligence.”
Shihana Mohamed
The question is unavoidable: why has the international system shown such urgency in governing emerging technologies while allowing the erosion of women’s rights to remain a secondary concern?
Twin Transformations
The 81st session convened under the theme, “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.” That theme highlights two defining transformations: the rapid expansion of generative AI and the growing political backlash against the rights of women and girls.
The United Nations treats both as critical to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, yet world leaders are not giving them equal political weight. AI is being elevated as an urgent global governance challenge, while gender equality is increasingly treated as a goal that can wait.
That is a dangerous disconnect.
AI is already reshaping economies, labour markets and public life. It will influence who gets opportunities, whose work is automated, and whose voices are represented in the systems that increasingly influence daily life.
Declining Gender Momentum
AI has ascended to the top tier of global political concerns. Leaders are focused on governance, innovation, digital sovereignty, security, and technological competition.
Meanwhile, the momentum on gender equality is moving in the opposite direction. UN Women and UN DESA report that one in three institutional mechanisms for gender equality has lost institutional power over the past two years. Around one in four have seen their operating budgets cut, while nearly one in ten have lost control of their budgets altogether.
Globally, progress on women’s political and executive participation is reversing. At the current rate of progress, the report projects that global gender equality could be achieved only by 2197, far beyond the UN’s 2030 target.
There is a basic leadership question that Member States have yet to answer: Why has no woman ever been selected as Secretary-General of the United Nations?
The problem is not a shortage of promises but the widening gap between rhetoric and political action.
The Funding Disparity
The resource gap makes that contrast tangible.
Global venture-capital investment in AI firms reached $258.7 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of total global VC investment, according to the OECD. Philanthropic investment is also growing, including the Gates Foundation’s September 2026 commitment to spend at least $1 billion over two years on equitable access to AI and AI-enabled solutions.
Funding for women’s rights is contracting.
Funding for gender equality fell 13% between 2023 and 2024, while funding for women’s rights organizations declined by 28% over the same period.
This is not merely a funding problem; it reflects what the international community considers urgent.
The world is mobilizing enormous capital to build the technologies that will define the future while reducing resources for the organizations working to ensure that women have an equal place in it.
Women Left Behind in the AI Economy
The gender gap is already visible inside the AI economy.
UN Women’s 2026 Gender Snapshot reports that women account for around 22% of AI professionals globally and fewer than 14% of senior leadership positions, based on an analysis of nearly 1.6 million AI professionals.
Women are around 20% less likely than men to use generative AI tools. The result is a persistent gap in both the development and adoption of AI—and a fundamental question about whose perspectives are shaping the future of work.
The International Labour Organization finds that female-dominated occupations are almost twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male-dominated occupations—29% compared with 16%. Women’s concentration in clerical, administrative, and business-support roles, where many tasks are routine and codifiable, contributes significantly to this disparity.
AI is intensifying digital violence against women in public life. UN Women reports increasing use of AI-generated deepfakes, manipulated images and coordinated online harassment against women in public-facing roles. Such abuse can intimidate women and undermine their participation in public life.
UN Women estimates that 90–95% of online deepfakes are non-consensual pornographic images, with around 90% depicting women.
This is where the two crises converge. The same technology being celebrated as transformative is also being used to threaten women’s economic security, public participation, and personal safety.
Immediate Mandates for AI and Gender Equality
More than three decades after the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action set a global framework for gender equality, the world remains far from its commitments.
The General Assembly must move beyond another cycle of declarations and voluntary targets and act where technology, funding and gender rights now intersect.
• Enforce Financial Reciprocity via a Global Tech Solidarity Fund: The General Assembly should establish a mechanism requiring a fixed share of global digital-transformation investment to support grassroots women’s organizations, and strengthen their technical capacity, infrastructure and advocacy.• Establish an International Enforcement Mechanism with the Urgency Applied to AI: The UN should address the erosion of women’s rights with the same urgency applied to emerging technological threats. The General Assembly should establish a global monitoring mechanism empowered to impose diplomatic and financial consequences on states that roll back women’s legal protections.
• Criminalize Technology-Facilitated Abuse and Mandate Safety-by-Design: The General Assembly should advance a binding international treaty classifying AI-generated deepfakes weaponized against women in public life as violations of international human rights law. Technology companies should be required to address algorithmic bias and security failures that endanger women’s participation in public life.
If world leaders truly intend to “manage transformation” and “restore trust,” they cannot continue treating women’s empowerment as a secondary issue.
The willingness to govern the digital frontier must extend to protecting the women who live and work within it.
Otherwise, the “super intelligence” that leaders celebrate will not simply become an engine of economic growth. It could also become a powerful tool for reinforcing the structural exclusion of half the human race.
Shihana Mohamed is the President of Asia Global Forum (www.AsiaGlobalForum.org) and a US Public Voices Fellow on advancing the rights of women and girls. She is the founder of the UN Asia Network for Diversity & Inclusion (www.UN-ANDI.org) and a dedicated human rights activist and a strong advocate for gender equality and the advancement of women.
IPS UN Bureau
YAOUNDE, Cameroon, Sep 29 2026 (IPS) - Agricultural, land, forestry, environmental and trade policies in the Congo Basin remain compartmentalised at country levels, leaving proven agroecological models trapped at pilot stages due to a lack of advisory services, organic inputs, market outlets and sustainable financing.
In a declaration made following the Second Congo Basin Convening on Agroecology held in Yaounde, Cameroon, in August 2026, experts and activists, as well as government representatives, observed that the Congo Basin does not end at the borders of its six countries.
“The trade corridors, timber and charcoal markets, mining, energy and infrastructure investment, transhumance and pastoral movement, displacement and refugee flows, and shared river systems mean that the decisions of neighbouring states and regional bodies can protect the basin or degrade it, and that coherence between them is a condition of success,” reads part of the Yaounde Declaration 2026.
“In several countries as well, agricultural, land, trade, environmental, and fiscal policies are not sufficiently aligned,” noted Mohamed Abakar, Head of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition at the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS).
“Some policies for example, continue to favour use and sometimes offer subsidies on conventional inputs without offering comparable support for bio-fertilisers, bio-pesticides, indigenous seeds, or ecosystem services,” he observed.
He called on countries within the basin to adopt a regional framework for agroecology and organic farming and integrate it into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the Regional Agricultural Investment Plan (RAIP).
“Our ambition is not merely to change the way we produce; it is to build sustainable agrifood systems in the Central Africa region, capable of sustainably feeding populations, boosting rural incomes, creating decent jobs, and preserving the Congo Basin,” said Abakar.
The region, in particular the Congo Basin, hosts the largest continuous tract of forest in Africa that regulates the global climate. But according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), industrial agriculture in different states has been cited as one of major threats to these forests, apart from extractive industries and infrastructure development.
According to the recent World Bank report titled the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem Accounts report and Policy Recommendations, forests in the region store over 90.9 billion tonnes of carbon, ten times the annual global carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector, making the basin one of the planet’s most critical natural carbon sinks.
Yet, the entire ecosystem is under direct threat. Forest loss nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020 compared to the previous decade, driven by shifting agriculture, infrastructure, and mounting land pressures.
During the convening in Yaounde, the delegates affirmed that adopting ecological farming models can sustain farmer incomes, protect biodiversity, and lead to food sovereignty while conserving the forests and the entire ecosystem.
Through the Yaounde Declaration, the delegates called upon Member States and the African Union Commission to write ‘agroecology’ by name in the domestication of CAADP so that National and Regional Agriculture and Food Systems Investment Plans carry explicit agroecology objectives, indicators and budget lines, with at least 30 per cent of allocations across the sectors that shape food systems dedicated to agroecology.
The Kampala Declaration of the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) speaks to achieving sustainable agrifood systems transformation but fails to explicitly recognise agroecology.
“We urge technical and funding partners, including the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, Central African Forest Initiative, the Blue Fund for the Congo Basin and the African Development Bank, to open simplified direct-access windows so that at least 20 per cent of climate, biodiversity and conservation finance flowing into the basin reaches farmer organisations, women, youth, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and to fund multi-year core support rather than short projects,” said Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator at the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).
“We are also asking Regional Economic Communities to adopt a regional agroecology framework within the Common Agricultural Policy of Central Africa and the COMIFAC Convergence Plan, and to establish a standing channel with the EAC, SADC and COMESA on the trans-boundary drivers of deforestation, including timber and charcoal trade, mining and infrastructure corridors, transhumance and displacement,” he said.
Abakar told IPS that ECCAS is progressively integrating agroecology into a broader vision for the sustainable, resilient, and competitive transformation of agrifood systems, both across Central Africa in general and within the Congo Basin in particular.
“This approach is grounded, first and foremost, in the revised ECCAS Treaty,” he said. “Article 63 of the revised Treaty commits member states to harmonising their agricultural policies, improving food production in terms of both quantity and quality, sharing research findings, developing joint training programs, and enhancing the ability of rural populations to master the technical and economic environment.”
At country levels, Ghada Kames Kill, a a Member of Parliament from South Sudan, told IPS that the country is in the process of enacting a law that will safeguard indigenous seeds, among other agroecological practices.
“Most of the seeds grown in South Sudan are imported, and in many times the quality is compromised.
With the right policies, our communities should be able to produce their own seeds that are adopted to their environment,” she said. In Cameroon, Law No. 2025/013, promulgated by President Paul Biya on December 17, 2025, establishes a national legal framework to regulate, promote, and develop sustainable agriculture that respects the environment, human health, and biodiversity.
The Central African Republic has developed the National Multi-Stakeholder Food Systems Platform that promotes local production of biofertilisers and soil restoration models, while the Democratic Republic of Congo has a dedicated agroecology service and national strategy.
For the Congo Basin, the solution lies in harmonised regional policies rather than in isolated, short-lived national projects.
IPS UN Bureau Report