Foreign News
Pacific Islands leaders to meet as region faces ‘polycrisis’ of threats
The last time UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres held a summit with the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum, he made international news as he stood thigh-deep, dressed in a suit and tie, in the sea off the coast of Tuvalu.
“Our Sinking Planet”, read the headline on the cover of TIME magazine, as Guterres looked mournfully into the camera, warning of the existential threat facing the Pacific countries due to climate change.
Five years on, as the UN chief returns to the region for the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting, the annual gathering of the region’s main political and economic grouping, there’s a growing sense of urgency as existential threats intensify on several fronts.
In June, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka described the Pacific region as facing a “polycrisis”, saying climate change, human security, transnational drug trafficking, and geopolitical competition were reinforcing and exacerbating one another.
Pacific leaders will be expected to take action on these long-running issues at next week’s Leaders Meeting, as well as acute issues like the ongoing crisis in French overseas territory New Caledonia, when more than 1,000 international dignitaries descend on Nuku’alofa, Tonga’s tiny capital of 23,000, from August 26-30.
In April, Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni cautioned against inaction at the upcoming meeting, announcing that its theme would be “Build Better Now”. He also called for “tangible results and outcomes”, as well as for leaders to “move beyond policy deliberation to implementation”.
Sandra Tarte, an academic at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji who specialises in regional politics, said there were “a lot of ambitious things on the agenda” at the meeting.
“There’s a greater urgency around climate change, we also have a much deeper concern with the potential for escalating tensions between the US, China and other powers. Economically, countries are still recovering from COVID. There’s international drug trafficking too,” she told Al Jazeera.
If the region is to survive, it really needs something to drive their collective agenda and identity,” she added
That something, Pacific leaders wager, is the far-reaching 2050 Strategy for a Blue Pacific Continent
Endorsed by PIF members in 2022, the document, which tackles seven themes – including justice and equality, climate change, economic development, and geopolitical and security trends – has been touted as a master plan for the region. But it has also been questioned over its broad nature.
“It’s seen as the Pacific’s priorities that they want the rest of the world to recognise and engage with the region on,” Tarte said. “But, obviously, there are dangers with strategies like this that they become a bit of everything, and in the end mean nothing.”
With Prime Minister Sovaleni’s comments setting the tone, PIF leaders will be aiming to make tangible progress on implementing the Pacific 2050 strategy when they meet in Tonga.
The group’s 18 member states, mostly low-lying islands and atolls, sometimes just a few feet above sea level, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Predicted rises in water levels are set to leave much of the region uninhabitable by the middle of this century.
Among their most ambitious mitigation efforts is the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which aims to provide financial support to communities often overlooked by international donors. The “Pacific-owned and led” financial institution is scheduled to commence operations in 2025 and will help communities become more resilient to climate change and natural disasters.
The leaders will probably endorse an earlier recommendation to host the facility in Tonga at next week’s meeting, but raising the funding for the facility remains a major hurdle.
Pacific nations aim to raise $500m for the PRF by 2026 but have so far only secured $116m – $100m of which has been pledged by Australia, with the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey committing a total of $16m.
Guterres’s presence at PIF could help boost the fundraising campaign, according to Kerryn Baker, a research fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University.
“It’s a new approach to climate finance. It’s a Pacific-led approach, but it has been hampered by the fact that it hasn’t got the external funding it needs. The presence of Guterres will be important in drawing attention to that gap between ambition and capacity at the moment,” she told Al Jazeera.
Meg Keen, a senior fellow in the Pacific Islands programme at the Lowy Institute, also described Guterres’s attendance as “significant” in terms of drawing attention to the PRF on the international stage, saying “he has leverage”.
“The Pacific island countries have consistently said climate change is their biggest security issue. They’re now saying they want the PRF up and running,” Keen told Al Jazeera. “If you’ve got the UN secretary-general backing you up, that does build pressure for countries to put their money behind climate action.”
Also high on the summit agenda is drug trafficking. For decades, the vast and porous Pacific Islands have served as a stop on transnational narcotics smuggling routes from Asia and the Americas, the world’s largest producers of methamphetamine and cocaine, to Australia and New Zealand, the world’s highest-paying markets.
But excess supply and the development over time of lower-grade, cheaper drugs have fuelled local consumption. Countries such as Fiji have been especially badly hit, but it is an issue affecting the whole region, according to Keen.
“It’s on everybody’s mind, every country we go to is worried about drug trafficking. Police forces are really struggling to manage it,” she said.
“The Pacific is a transit place because it’s easy to move the drugs through. But it’s more than that now, because youth and local people are suffering from drug addiction. There’s an overflow from this drug trade and it takes a lot of collaboration. That’s where the Pacific Policing Initiative [PPI] could come in,” Keen added.
The PPI is a proposed Australian initiative to provide training and capacity-building to the Pacific island police forces. Its flagship programme would be the creation of a large training facility in Brisbane for Pacific officers who could then be deployed to regional crime hotspots.
Canberra has characterised the deal as a Pacific island-led operation set up in response to local needs in the face of rising crime. Its unofficial goal, analysts say, is to shore up Australia’s role as a key security partner at a time when Beijing is also developing bilateral law enforcement partnerships, with Chinese police training teams working in countries including the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.
Canberra will be hoping that Pacific leaders will give their political endorsement of the PPI, which carries a hefty price tag of more than 400 million Australian dollars (about $270m), at the Leader’s Meeting. But with concerns that it is covering the same ground as existing agreements, Tarte believes the PPI is “very much for show”.
“There’ll be some buy-in [at the Leaders Meeting], but I also know there’s a lot of tension about it as well,” Tarte said. “The criticism has been that it’s been developed without much consultation with the region, it may not be what the region needs, and it’s duplicating efforts already under way.”
Tarte said the PPI is “another example” of one of the Pacific’s major international partners “pushing something which is going to hugely suck up resources and may not have much benefit on the ground”.
“These projects are often driven by the wrong reasons. It’s about access, it’s about influence and it’s about control,” she said.
The Pacific region, long a place where major foreign powers have vied for influence, has only grown in strategic importance in recent years. Beijing has increased its engagement with Pacific island countries over the past decade, much to the chagrin of traditional security allies the US and Australia, who fear a Chinese military presence in the region.
Lamenting the Pacific’s growing role as a geostrategic arena, warning that the “chances of miscalculation are high” as a multitude of competing interests collide, Fiji’s Prime Minister Rabuka has announced his Oceans of Peace concept.
“An Ocean of Peace must reflect the Pacific way … Humility, quiet leadership, reconciliation and communication,” he said of his initiative. “Whoever enters the Pacific region will be compelled to tone down and tune in to the ways of the Pacific.”
Currently more aspirational idea than a solid plan, Rabuka has said he will bring his proposal for discussion at the summit with the hope it will eventually be adopted by Pacific countries. Baker of the Australian National University said the idea “seems to be getting quite significant traction”, but leaders will want “more clarity around what it means in practice”.
“If there’s any progress on developing this idea, it’ll have to come with specifics about what an Ocean of Peace might mean for the region, what issues are encompassed within that,” she said.
Fiji’s Oceans of Peace concept also speaks to a longstanding, but growing, desire among Pacific nations to escape a lens often imposed on the region, as merely a battleground for the great powers and assert some agency.
Keen said that Pacific leaders have raised concerns that an over-emphasis on geopolitics, particularly from outside parties, is “trumping development priorities”.
“In these forums, it has to be about Pacific Island development first, not about geopolitics,” she said. “They don’t want their region to be just a battlezone.”
One area in which the malign influence of external powers and the struggle for Pacific voices to be heard is still being acutely felt is the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, which has been a full member of the PIF since 2016.
Tensions there erupted in May over Paris’s plan to give the vote to more recent arrivals in a move Indigenous people fear will dilute their influence. The months of violence have resulted in deaths and billions of Euros in damage.
Keen says it is a regional security issue high on the agenda at next week’s meeting, but there are limits to what can actually be done. “They can express their concerns, but they can’t force action”, she says, as France claims it as a sovereign issue.
Pacific leaders won’t be silenced on it, they can really push that they have these concerns about colonisation and the desire for decolonisation sovereignty,” she said. “They want to know that the Pacific people will have a voice.”
(Aljazeera)
Iranian forces have said they struck down two fighter jets belonging to the United States military, one over the southwest part of the country and another around the Strait of Hormuz.
A spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said on Friday that air defences completely destroyed one F-15 jet. Later in the day, the Iranian military said it targeted an A-10 US aircraft that crashed into the Gulf.
The New York Times had cited unidentified officials as saying that the A10’s pilot was safe after the crash.
But the fate of at least one pilot from the downed F-15 crew is unknown. Several US media outlets reported that one crew member of the jet was located and rescued by US forces, but the other remains missing.
US President Donald Trump told NBC News on Friday that the downing of the jet will not affect the prospect of talks with Tehran. “No, not at all. No, it’s war. We’re in war,” he said.
State media outlets in Iran showed photos of the wreckage of the F-15 jet and what appears to be an ejection seat with an attached parachute.
After the jet was downed, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf mocked Trump’s repeated claims of victory in the war.
“After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’” Ghalibaf wrote in a social media post.
There was no immediate comment on the incident from the Pentagon and US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of Asia.
[Aljazeera]
United States President Donald Trump has announced that Pam Bondi is out as US attorney general, in his second major cabinet-level shake-up in less than a month.
Trump confirmed the decision in a post on Truth Social on Thursday, after a slate of media reports suggested he was considering removing Bondi from the top law enforcement role. Several cited his discontent over Bondi’s handling of investigative files related to financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will temporarily replace Bondi in an interim capacity, he said.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote.
The US president also praised Bondi for leading the Department of Justice during a period when violent crime decreased in the US, part of a wider downward trend in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump did not mention his reasoning for the decision, instead writing, “We love Pam.” He added that she would be “transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector”.
In a statement, Bondi said she would be transitioning the office to Blanche over the next month, adding she was moving to “an important private sector role I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration”.
“I remain eternally grateful for the trust that President Trump placed in me to Make America Safe Again,” she said.
Bondi’s dismissal comes shortly after Trump abruptly fired Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversaw the agency amid a mass deportation campaign that led to the killing of two US citizens.
[Aljazeera]
The ants are flying in Kenya at the moment
During this rainy season, swarms can be seen leaving the thousands of anthills in and around Gilgil, a quiet agricultural town in Kenya’s Rift Valley that has emerged as the centre of a booming illegal trade.
The mating ritual sees winged males leave the nest to impregnate queens, who also take flight at this time. This makes it the perfect time to chase down queen ants to sell on to smugglers who are at the heart of a growing global black market, that taps into the pet craze for keeping ants in transparent enclosures designed to observe the insects as they busily build a colony.
It is the giant African harvester ant queens, which are large and coloured red, that are most prized by international ant collectors – one can fetch up to £170 ($220) on the black market, which tends to operate online.
A single fertilised queen is able to create a whole colony and can live for decades – and can be easily posted as scanners do not tend to detect organic material.
“At first, I did not even know it was illegal,” a man, who asked not to be named, told the BBC about how he had once acted as a broker, linking foreign buyers with local collection networks.
Also known as Messor cephalotes, these ants are native to East Africa and known for their distinctive seed-gathering behaviour making them popular with ant collectors.
“A friend told me a foreigner was paying good money for queen ants – the big red ones which are easily seen around here,” the former broker said.
“You look for the mounds near open fields, usually early morning before the heat. The foreigners never came to the fields themselves – they would wait in town, in a guest house or a car, and we would bring the ants to them packed in small tubes or syringes they supplied us with.”
The scale of the illicit trade in Kenya became apparent last year when 5,000 giant harvester ant queens – mainly collected around Gilgil – were found alive at a guest house in Naivasha, a nearby lakeside town popular with tourists.
The suspects – from Belgium, Vietnam and Kenya – had packed the test tubes and syringes with moist cotton wool, which would enable each ant to survive for two months, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).
The plan was to take them to Europe and Asia and put them up for sale.
This trade in ants has caught scientists and the authorities by surprise.
The East African nation is more accustomed to high-profile wildlife crimes involving elephant tusks and rhino horns.
UK based retailer Ants RbUs described the giant African harvester ant as “many peoples dream species” – though the queens are currently out of stock, with the site explaining that it is very hard for retailers to source them.
“Even I, as an entomologist, have been surprised at the extent of the apparent trade,” Dino Martins, a biologist based in Kenya, where there are around 600 kinds of ants, told the BBC.
However, he can understand the fascination with East Africa’s harvester, with colonies created by a “foundress queen”, who can grow up to 25mm (0.98 inches) and who produces eggs throughout her life.
“They are one of the most enigmatic species of ants – they form large colonies, engage in interesting behaviours and are easy to keep. They are not aggressive.”
During the swarming he says the queens mate with several males.
“Then that is it for the males – their job is done… most are eaten by predators or die,” the entomologist says, going on to explain how the queen then scurries away to dig a small burrow and begin laying eggs to start her empire.
Her workers and soldier ants, those that protect the nest, are all female and will eventually number in the hundreds of thousands.
“Nests can live for over 50 years, perhaps even up to 70 years. I personally know of nests near Nairobi that are at least 40 years old as I’ve been visiting them for that long,” said Martins.
This means the queens live that long too – because as soon as she dies, the colony collapses and any surviving workers will look for another nest.
Kenyans who have had to deal with ants raiding their crops or invading their houses know this well – and to get rid of a colony someone is sent in to locate the queen, often hidden deep in one of the tunnels or chambers of an ant mound.
The former broker said ants could also be harvested by gently disturbing the mound and collecting them as they tried to escape.
“It was only when I saw the arrests on the news that I realised what I had been part of – and I immediately quit,” he said.
Those arrested were convicted on charges of biopiracy and ordered to pay fines or serve 12 months in jail – they opted to pay the $7,700 fee and the foreign nationals left the country.
Two weeks ago, a Chinese national – the alleged mastermind behind last year’s ring and who is said to have escaped using a different passport, was arrested at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyata International Airport with another 2,000 queen ants packed in test tubes and tissue rolls.
For Zhengyang Wang, who was part of a team of researchers who published a report on the ant trade in 2023 focusing on China, this is a worry and could “wreak havoc” with local ecosystems.
“Initially, we were very excited when we learnt that many people have taken up keeping ants,” Wang, assistant professor at Sichuan University, told the BBC.
“A colony of pet ants are often kept in a formicarium, which is basically a transparent plastic box so that keepers can observe colonies at work, digging tunnels, collecting food, and guarding their queen. I’d say it’s quite charming and… can be a good way of educating people about insects and their behaviour.
“But then we realised, wait, isn’t keeping invasive species incredibly dangerous?”
Monitoring online sales – of more than 58,000 colonies – in China over six months, the researchers found that more than a quarter of the traded species were not native to China – despite it being illegal to import them.
“If the trade volume of invasive ants continues to grow, it’s only a matter of time before a few escape from their formicaria and become established in the wild,” said Wang.
The study he worked on, published in the journal Biological Conservation, explained what could happen in the case of giant African harvester, one of the most traded species in China: “For example, Messor cephalotes, an East African native, is among the largest seed harvesters in the world and could potentially disrupt predominantly grain-based agriculture in south-eastern China.”
The environmental consequences are also a concern in Kenya.
“Harvester ants are both keystone species and ecosystem engineers. They harvest seeds of grasses, and other plants and in so doing also help to disperse the seeds,” said Martins, adding that the insects “create a more healthy and dynamic grassland”.
Mukonyi Watai, a senior scientist at Kenya’s Wildlife Research and Training Institute, shares these fears.
“Unsustainable harvesting – particularly the removal of queen ants – can lead to colony collapse, disrupting ecosystems and threatening biodiversity,” he told the BBC.
It is possible to collect ants legally in Kenya – in line with various international treaties – with a special permit, which would require the buyer to sign a benefit-sharing agreement with the local community involved to split any profits.
But, according to the KWS, so far none have been applied for – with the paperwork also requiring details of how many ants are being collected and their destination.
formicarium allows collectors to see the workings of an ant colony (BBC)Some conservationists are now calling for greater trade protections for all ant species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), the global wildlife trade treaty.
“The reality is that no ant species is currently listed under Cites,” Sérgio Henriques, a researcher into the global ant trade, told the BBC.
“Without international treaties monitoring these movements, the scale of the trade remains largely invisible to policy makers and the global community,” he said.
But for the KWS the real problem is more immediate – how to monitor and clamp down on “under-reported” insect trafficking, with the agency suggesting better surveillance equipment at airports and others border points would be a good start.
Martins agrees: “It is likely only a fraction of the actual ants being traded that are being detected, so one can only guess at the scale for now.”
Journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo argues that Kenya is overlooking a significant global revenue opportunity.
“The ants are not finite items like gold or diamonds. They are biological assets that can be bred and farmed, and their production can be scaled up to thousand a day. Yet we treat them like stolen artefacts,” he recently wrote in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.
In fact, Kenya’s cabinet did approve policy guidelines last year aimed at commercialising the wildlife economy, including the ant trade.
“The guidelines seek to promote sustainable use trade of wild species such as ants to generate jobs, wealth and community livelihoods across all the counties,” said Watai.
With careful monitoring in place, it could be that future farmers around Gilgil will have special formicaria on their land expanding the yields from their fields and orchards – full of vegetables and fruits – to include lucrative queen ants.
But the debate over the dangers of exporting ants to hobby collectors in different parts of the world is yet to be settled.
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