Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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Image copyright EPAImage caption The world’s second-most populous country has reported about 182 infections
“We have a simple message to all countries – test, test, test,” World Health Organisation (WHO) head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva earlier this week.
He was alluding to the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 10,000 people and infected nearly 250,000 in at least 159 countries.
“All countries should be able to test all suspected cases, they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded,” he said.
With 182 reported infections and four deaths so far, is India taking this advice seriously? Is the world’s second-most populous country testing enough?
The jury is out on this one. India had tested some 14,175 people in 72 state-run labs as of Thursday evening – one of the lowest testing rates in the world. The reason: the country has limited testing. So, only people who have been in touch with an infected person or those who have travelled to high-risk countries, or health workers managing patients with severe respiratory disease and developing Covid-19 symptoms are eligible for testing.
Why is a densely populated country with more than a billion people testing so little? The official assumption is the disease has still not spread in the community. As early “evidence” health authorities say 826 samples collected from patients suffering from acute respiratory disease from 50 government hospitals across India between 1 and 15 March tested negative for coronavirus. Also, hospitals have not yet reported a spike in admissions of respiratory distress cases.
“It is reassuring that at the moment there is no evidence of community outbreak,” says Balram Bhargava, director of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). He believes Mr Ghebreyesus’s advice is “premature” for India, and it would only “create more fear, more paranoia and more hype”.
Media caption Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan: “India’s going to be the next hot spot for this epidemic”
But experts are not so sure.
Many of them believe India is also testing below scale because it fears that its under-resourced and uneven public health system could be swamped by patients. India could be buying time to stock up on testing kits and add isolation and hospital beds. “I know mass testing is not a solution, but our testing appears to be too limited. We need to quickly expand to restrict community transmission,” K Sujatha Rao, former federal health secretary and author of But Do We Care: India’s Health System, told me.
On the other hand, say virologists, random, on-demand testing will create panic and completely strain the feeble public health infrastructure. Increased and targeted “sentinel screening” of patients suffering from influenza and diagnoses in hospitals across the country can provide a better idea of whether there is community transmission, they say. “We need focused testing. We cannot do a China or Korea because we simply don’t have the capacity,” a senior virologist told me.
In many ways, it is all about India trying to battle a pandemic with limited resources. Experts talk about the country’s success in defeating polio, combating small pox, successfully controlling the spread of HIV/Aids, and more recently H1N1 with rigorous surveillance, sharp identification of vulnerable people, targeted intervention, and an early engagement with the private sector to prevent disease spread.
Yet, coronavirus is one of the deadliest transmissible viruses in recent history. Every day lost in effective response means the looming danger of a surge in infections. India spends a paltry 1.28% of its GDP on health care, and that may begin to bite if there’s a full-blown outbreak. Partial lockdowns in many cities – shutting schools, colleges, businesses and suspending some rail transport – proves that the government fears that community transmission of the virus might have begun.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption The official assumption is the disease has still not spread in the community
Bracing for the inevitable, India is scaling up testing. Officials say existing labs are able to provide results in six hours and each lab has the capacity to test 90 samples a day which can be doubled. Fifty more state labs are expected to begin testing samples by the end of the week, bringing the total number of testing facilities to 122. Authorities claim that together, the labs will be able to test 8,000 samples a day – a significant scaling up. In addition, the government is planning to allow around 50 private labs to start testing, but they will take up to 10 days to procure kits. (Testing at state-run labs is free, and it is unclear whether the private labs will charge.)
Two rapid testing labs, capable of doing 400 tests a day, are expected to be operational by the end of the week. India has also placed orders for a million test kits, and will be possibly asking the WHO for a million more.
“On testing, the government response has been proportionate, taking into account scope, need and capacity,” Henk Bekedam, WHO Representative to India told me. “We recognise that laboratory networks are expanding the scope and testing and they now include patients with severe acute respiratory infection and influenza-like illness detected through the surveillance system. It would also be important to look at ‘atypical pneumonia’ cases. If they are without any distinctive cause, then they need to be considered for testing.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption India could be buying time to stock up on testing kits and add isolation and hospital beds
The weeks and months ahead will show whether these steps have been enough. “We cannot say India has escaped community transmission,” Mr Bhargava says candidly. And if and when there is an explosion of infections and more sick people require hospitalisation, India will face formidable challenges.
India has eight doctors per 10,000 people compared to 41 in Italy and 71 in Korea. It has one state-run hospital for more than 55,000 people. (Private hospitals are out of reach for most people). The country has a poor culture of testing, and most people with flu symptoms do not go to doctors and instead try home remedies or go to pharmacies. There’s a scarcity of isolation beds, trained nursing staff and medics, and ventilators and intensive care beds.
India’s influenza cases peak during the monsoon season, and there is no reason why the coronavirus will not make a second coming, virologists say. “Given the way it is progressing in India, it seems it is about two weeks behind Spain and three weeks behind Italy. But that’s the number of known cases. And without sufficient testing and shutting down large gatherings, the numbers could be a lot worse,” Shruti Rajagopalan, economist and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told me.
India’s traditional neglect of public healthcare will begin to bite if the disease spreads to its teeming small towns and villages. “This is a very unique and real public health challenge,” says Ms Rao. And it’s early days yet.
Image copyright NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINEImage caption The 1918 flu pandemic is believed to have infected a third of the population worldwide
All interest in living has ceased, Mahatma Gandhi, battling a vile flu in 1918, told a confidante at a retreat in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
The highly infectious Spanish flu had swept through the ashram in Gujarat where 48-year-old Gandhi was living, four years after he had returned from South Africa. He rested, stuck to a liquid diet during “this protracted and first long illness” of his life. When news of his illness spread, a local newspaper wrote: “Gandhi’s life does not belong to him – it belongs to India”.
Outside, the deadly flu, which slunk in through a ship of returning soldiers that docked in Bombay (now Mumbai) in June 1918, ravaged India. The disease, according to health inspector JS Turner, came “like a thief in the night, its onset rapid and insidious”. A second wave of the epidemic began in September in southern India and spread along the coastline.
The influenza killed between 17 and 18 million Indians, more than all the casualties in World War One. India bore a considerable burden of death – it lost 6% of its people. More women – relatively undernourished, cooped up in unhygienic and ill-ventilated dwellings, and nursing the sick – died than men. The pandemic is believed to have infected a third of the world’s population and claimed between 50 and 100 million lives.
Gandhi and his febrile associates at the ashram were lucky to recover. In the parched countryside of northern India, the famous Hindi language writer and poet, Suryakant Tripathi, better known as Nirala, lost his wife and several members of his family to the flu. My family, he wrote, “disappeared in the blink of an eye”. He found the Ganges river “swollen with dead bodies”. Bodies piled up, and there wasn’t enough firewood to cremate them. To make matters worse, a failed monsoon led to a drought and famine-like conditions, leaving people underfed and weak, and pushed them into the cities, stoking the rapid spread of the disease.
Image copyright PRINT COLLECTORImage caption Bombay was one of the worst hit cities by the 1918 pandemic
To be sure, the medical realities are vastly different now. Although there’s still no cure, scientists have mapped the genetic material of the coronavirus, and there’s the promise of anti-viral drugs, and a vaccine. The 1918 flu happened in the pre-antibiotic era, and there was simply not enough medical equipment to provide to the critically ill. Also western medicines weren’t widely accepted in India then and most people relied on indigenous medication.
Yet, there appear to be some striking similarities between the two pandemics, separated by a century. And possibly there are some relevant lessons to learn from the flu, and the bungled response to it.
The outbreak in Bombay, an overcrowded city, was the source of the infection’s spread back then – this something that virologists are fearing now. With more than 20 million people, Bombay is India’s most populous city and Maharashtra, the state where it’s located, has reported the highest number of coronivirus cases in the country.
By early July in 1918, 230 people were dying of the disease every day, up nearly three times from the end of June. “The chief symptoms are high temperature and pains in the back and the complaint lasts three days,” The Times of India reported, adding that “nearly every house in Bombay has some of its inmates down with fever”. Workers stayed away from offices and factories. More Indian adults and children were infected than resident Europeans. The newspapers advised people to not spend time outside and stay at home. “The main remedy,” wrote The Times of India, “is to go to bed and not worry”. People were reminded the disease spread “mainly through human contact by means of infected secretions from the nose and mouths”.
“To avoid an attack one should keep away from all places where there is overcrowding and consequent risk of infection such as fairs, festivals, theatres, schools, public lecture halls, cinemas, entertainment parties, crowded railway carriages etc,” wrote the paper. People were advised to sleep in the open rather than in badly ventilated rooms, have nourishing food and get exercise.
“Above all,” The Times of India added, “do not worry too much about the disease”.
Image copyright PRINT COLLECTOR
Colonial authorities differed over the source of infection. Health official Turner believed that the people on the docked ship had brought the fever to Bombay, but the government insisted that the crew had caught the flu in the city itself. “This had been the characteristic response of the authorities, to attribute any epidemic that they could not control to India and what was invariably termed the ‘insanitary condition’ of Indians,” observed medical historian Mridula Ramanna in her magisterial study of how Bombay coped with the pandemic.
Later a government report bemoaned the state of India’s government and the urgent need to expand and reform it. Newspapers complained that officials remained in the hills during the emergency, and that the government had thrown people “on the hands of providence”. Hospital sweepers in Bombay, according to Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, stayed away from British soldiers recovering from the flu. “The sweepers had memories of the British response to the plague outbreak which killed eight million Indians between 1886 and 1914.”
Image copyright PRINT COLLECTORImage caption The hospitals in Bombay were overwhelmed by patients
“The colonial authorities also paid the price for the long indifference to indigenous health, since they were absolutely unequipped to deal with the disaster,” says Ms Spinney. “Also, there was a shortage of doctors as many were away on the war front.”
Eventually NGOs and volunteers joined the response. They set up dispensaries, removed corpses, arranged cremations, opened small hospitals, treated patients, raised money and ran centres to distribute clothes and medicine. Citizens formed anti-influenza committees. “Never before, perhaps, in the history of India, have the educated and more fortunately placed members of the community, come forward in large numbers to help their poorer brethren in time of distress,” a government report said.
Now, as the country battles another deadly infection, the government has responded swiftly. But, like a century ago, civilians will play a key role in limiting the virus’ spread. And as coronavirus cases climb, this is something India should keep in mind.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India plans to take advantage of low prices for oil from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to top up its strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), two sources familiar with the matter said on Monday.
Global oil prices have fallen around 40% in March as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed demand, while supplies are growing following Moscow’s refusal to back deeper output cuts at a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its OPEC+ allies.
Leading OPEC producers Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi have said they will increase output while cutting prices, giving big consumers the chance to fill up at discounted prices.
“It is an opportune time for us and for them (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Saudi Aramco) to finalize the deals and fill the SPRs…If there is any delay, we might fill the SPRs on our own,” said an official familiar with the matter, asking not to be named.
A second source, who also requested anonymity, said the oil ministry has written to the finance ministry to release about 48-to-50 billion rupees ($673.7 million) to buy oil in 8-9 very large crude carriers for filling the storage.
Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL) and India’s oil and finance ministry had no immediate comment, while ADNOC and Saudi Aramco declined to comment.
India, the world’s third biggest oil importer and consumer, imports about 80% of its oil needs and has built strategic storage at three locations in southern India to store up to 36.87 million barrels of oil or about 5 million tonnes to protect against supply disruption.
ISPRL, a company charged with building of strategic storage, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the UAE’s national oil company ADNOC for the lease of half of its 2.5 million tonnes Padur facility.
Last year it signed an MoU with Saudi Aramco for the lease of a quarter of Padur SPR.
The leases allow the national oil companies to store their oil, some of which will cater for India’s strategic needs, while they can sell the rest to Indian refiners.
Padur has four compartments that hold about 4.6 million barrels each. The ISPRL has received 1 VLCC with Arab Mix to fill one compartment and will get a second VLCC in April, a third source said.
The ISPRL has already leased half of the 1.5 million tonnes capacity in Mangalore storage to ADNOC, which has stored about 5.5 million barrels of Das oil in the cavern, while ISPRL has retained the remainder.
“This is the right time to fill the SPRs before prices start moving up,” a third source said.
India has also filled its 1.03 million tonnes Vizag facility with Basra oil from another OPEC producer Iraq.
While India is primarily taking advantage of low prices as a consumer nation, U.S. President Donald Trump aimed to help U.S. energy producers struggling to cope with the price fall by announcing he would take advantage of low prices to fill up the nation’s emergency reserve.
Image copyright EPAImage caption India has stopped exports of masks to make sure there are ample domestic supplies
A 68-year-old woman from Delhi has been confirmed as the second Indian to die from the coronavirus.
The woman, who had underlying health conditions, is thought to have been infected by her son who travelled to Switzerland and Italy last month.
India’s first fatality from the virus was confirmed on Thursday.
The 76-year-old man, from the southern state of Karnataka, died after returning from a month-long visit to Saudi Arabia on 29 February.
People who came in contact with the man are being traced and quarantined, the state’s health minister said. India has 82 confirmed cases of the virus, the health ministry says.
The Delhi woman’s son was “initially asymptomatic but developed a fever and cough after one day”, a government statement said. The family were then screened and the mother and son admitted to hospital.
The 76-year-old Karnataka man was screened at the airport on his return but showed no symptoms at the time. After he developed difficulties last week, he was taken to hospital. He died on Tuesday but it was not reported until Thursday.
India’s Supreme Court has said it will only hear urgent cases from Monday, and has restricted the number of people who can enter a courtroom.
Karnataka has banned all gatherings including weddings, sports events and conferences for a week as the country attempts to slow the spread of the virus.
Malls, movie theatres, pubs and night clubs have also been shut.
“The government will decide on further action after a week following a review,” the state’s chief minister BS Yediyurappa announced on Friday.
But he said that government offices would continue to function as normal.
India has taken a number of steps to halt the spread of Covid-19:
All visas, barring a select few categories, have been suspended for a month
Visa-free travel afforded to overseas citizens of the country has been suspended until 15 April and even those allowed in could be subject to 14 days of quarantine
Schools, colleges and movie theatres in the capital, Delhi, have been shut until 31 March
The Indian Premier League (IPL), featuring nearly 60 foreign players and scheduled to begin on 29 March, has been postponed to 15 April
Two one-day cricket matches between India and South Africa will be played behind closed doors
India’s health ministry says it was among the first countries in the world to prepare for an outbreak of the respiratory illness, and denied allegations that it was slow in testing suspected cases.
“Our surveillance system is strong and we are able to quickly identify any symptomatic patients,” RR Gangakhedkar from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) told reporters on Thursday.
However, there are concerns about whether the country will be fully equipped to prevent and treat an outbreak.
It would be near impossible for India to force its citizens into mass quarantine and hospitalise people in numbers like China, says the BBC’s Soutik Biswas.
Our correspondent says there are also concerns about the country’s poor healthcare data. India has a shoddy record in even recording deaths and disease – only 77% of deaths are registered, and doctors are more likely to get the cause of death wrong than right, according to a study the Toronto-based Centre for Global Research. There is patchy data for flu-related deaths.
BANGKOK (Reuters) – Thailand will temporarily suspend issuing visas on arrival to visitors from 19 countries and territories, including China, to contain the spread of the coronavirus, its interior minister said on Wednesday.
The suspensions were the latest measures imposed in the tourism-reliant Southeast Asian country, which has reported 59 cases of the virus and one death so far. Globally, over 113,000 people have been infected in over 100 countries.
“People from any country who want to come will need to apply for a visa with our embassies,” Minister of Interior Anupong Paochinda told reporters.
“Thai embassies everywhere will ensure that no sick people will travel to Thailand.”
Visa on Arrival (VoA) will be suspended for nationals of all 19 countries and territories previously eligible, including Bulgaria, Bhutan, China, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Fiji, Georgia, India, Kazakhstan, Malta, Mexico, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, and Vanuatu, according to a list provided to reporters by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
However, Russian passport holders will not be affected by the suspension of the visa on arrival from Russia, as they can still travel to Thailand and stay for 30 days under a visa waiver agreement, an official at the ministry told Reuters.
Visa exemptions will be cancelled for South Korea, Italy and Hong Kong, Anupong said.
“These measures will solve the problem of foreigners arriving from risky zones,” he said.
Anupong said he would start the process immediately but it was not immediately clear when they will be effective.
Chatree Atchananant, director-general of the foreign ministry’s Consular Affairs Department, said visa applicants will need to present medical certificates and insurance as part of the screening at Thai embassies.
Last week, Thailand designated South Korea, China, Macao, Hong Kong, Italy and Iran as “dangerous communicable disease areas.”
Thai authorities urged people arriving from the six places to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Matriarchal and matrilineal communities centred around women have existed for centuries in China, India and Indonesia
But a recent influx of tourism, technology and mainstream patriarchal ideas is rapidly changing their way of life
Khasi women leave their village of Nongtraw in India’s northeastern Meghalaya state to collect herbs from the fields. Photo: AFP
While women’s rights may have become a major topic of discussion around the world in recent years, there are female-centric communities that for centuries have distinguished themselves by carving out their own feminist traditions in places such as China, India
and Indonesia.
But many of these matriarchal and matrilineal societies are now struggling to survive, amid threats posed by the modern world such as mass tourism, technology and the infiltration of ideas from mainstream patriarchal society.
In China, for instance, there is a small Mosuo tribe known as the “kingdom of women”.
“Key to the Mosuo culture is their matrilineal family structure, with a basic building block of only members sharing the same female bloodline making up the family … Any male bloodline is not taken into account,” says Choo Waihong, a former Singaporean corporate lawyer who has researched the community for the past decade.
Lugu Lake in China’s Yunnan province is home to the Mosuo tribe. Photo: hemis.fr
At the top of the hierarchy is the grandmother, who is the head of the household. “Her daughters run the home and look after all the children of the female siblings … The sons and grandsons are expected in their supporting role to shoulder the manual tasks required to maintain the farmstead,” Choo says.
Researchers say that there are about 30,000 to 40,000 Mosuo people – most of whom live in the far eastern foothills of the Himalayas in Yunnan, southwest China. This unique community has come together in a series of villages dotted around a mountain and Lugu Lake, while growing numbers have moved out to work in larger towns and cities elsewhere in the country.
According to Choo, author of the book The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains, the most distinctive facet of this community that sets it apart from mainstream society is the absence of formal marriage arrangements between men and women. Instead, they have “walking marriages”, where the man goes to the woman’s home, spends the night with her and then leaves the following morning.
The Kingdom of Women: China’s ‘lost tribe’ of matriarchs, the Mosuo
15 Mar 2017
The couple can choose to have a temporary or even a permanent arrangement as partners, but they are not bound by marriage ties. If they have children, the baby belongs to the woman’s household. “In fact, the man is not considered part of the matrilineal family and his ties to the baby do not determine the social place of the baby,” the researcher says.
Such a society, where women are not subjected to men and sexual freedom is an intrinsic part of their culture, is so radically different from mainstream patriarchal family structures that the Mosuo tribe has been examined and studied over time. More recently, its unique features have also become an eye-catching selling point for the local tourism industry.
TOURISM INDUSTRY
The Mosuo tribe used to live off the land by farming, herding and hunting. But many families now rely on tourism after the tribe’s culture and Lugu Lake became more popular and widely known.
“Tour buses on fancy freeways and planes arriving at a new airport bring more and more tourists daily to turn the whole area into a busy travel playground,” Choo says. “Every household around the lake is involved one way or another with the hotel, restaurant and tour guide industries.”
While the tourism industry has brought money and better food for most families as well more access to educational opportunities for their children, it is also posing a serious threat to their culture and traditional ways of life.
“The greatest challenge for the tribe is their rapid transition from living a rudimentary subsistence farming way of life right into a burgeoning modern middle-class existence within a short span of 20 or so years,” Choo says.
Mosuo people pictured at a wedding ceremony with an all-meat feast in 2013. Photo: Shutterstock
The Mosuo are now being bombarded not only by mainstream traditional Chinese values, but also by new economic values connected to money and the digital economy. “That is a lot to take in for people who had no writing to support their oral language … and only had primary schools for their children not so long ago,” she says.
Older Mosuo are now being pushed to learn Mandarin in order to keep up with the younger generations.
At the same time, the researcher says, “their long-held cultural beliefs and principles are evolving as the young generation gets exposed to the outside world and start to question the old ways of doing things.”
How life is changing for Thailand’s Karen tribe
17 Mar 2017
Walking marriages are not as common, with more youngsters getting married and forming nuclear families. “Large matrilineal families which were the norm are now breaking up into smaller nuclear families. All this dilutes the traditional matrilineal Mosuo family structure,” Choo says.
“The central place of the female in old Mosuo society is slowly being affected, as the male Mosuo are beginning to entertain some patriarchal outlook in the face of outside cultural influences.”
China may have radically reinvented itself in recent decades, but the changes to the Mosuo tribe have been nearly as dramatic. “The world of the Mosuo when I first ventured into their midst 12 years ago is a distant past as I look [today in 2020] at how they have changed,” Choo says.
PATRIARCHY IN DISGUISE
There are dozens of female-centric communities scattered around the world. The Garo and Khasi tribes, which are also traditionally matrilineal societies, can be found mostly in India.
In a Khasi family, the youngest daughter inherits the ancestral property, while in the Garo community, women also inherit property, but don’t necessarily have to be the youngest daughter of the family.
Caroline Marak, former head of the Garo Department at the North Eastern Hill University in India, says that the Garo are female-oriented, but not female-dominated. Women “have no part in the field of administration decision-making”, she wrote in an academic paper.
In recent years, the husbands of Garo women who are property owners have had a greater say over land deals, such as with government. “We are now trying to reclaim our rights from the males,” says Sume Sangma, secretary of the Garo Mothers Union NGO. “Women in the community are self-reliant and we are fighting for their real power.”
Khasi women wash leaves for cooking in the village of Nongtraw in India’s north-eastern Meghalaya state. Photo: AFP
Tiplut Nongbri, from the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research at the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, also says women don’t have much authority in Garo and Khasi societies. “Patriarchy is in disguise in both the communities. The societies are matrilineal only as far as descent, residence and inheritance of property are concerned,” she says. “Women are not allowed to take part in politics.”
RG Lyngdoh, former home minister of Meghalaya – the hilly state in north-eastern India where both communities are based – says inward migration and the presence of Christian missionaries in the state have affected traditional lifestyles. “The old practices of equity between males and females have eroded,” Lyngdoh says.
“This has led to a perception of inadequacy among the males, [creating] discord within the family, which found expression in many negative ways, such as domestic violence and abandonment of wives, which never existed within the Khasi community.”
Gertrude Lamare, a member of the Khasi-Jaintia community now pursuing her PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that “with families becoming more nuclear, women do have a huge role in the decision-making process”.
A Khasi woman walks in the rain with children past a paddy field along the Assam-Meghalaya state border in India. Photo: AP
Researchers have estimated that there are 1 million Garo in India and
, and 1.7 million Khasi in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills.
Some of them have become increasingly wary of outsiders preying on their natural resources, which are dwindling, thanks to deforestation and climate change.
Another challenge these communities are facing has to do with the growing trend of mixed marriages. “In recent years, children of a Khasi or Garo mother and non-tribal father [have] not [been] welcomed. The males in the family want their women to marry within the tribal community,” researcher Nongbri says, noting that younger generations are going through an identity crisis.
STILL PROUD
The world’s largest known matrilineal society today is believed to be in Indonesia: the Minangkabau, also known as Minang. Their community of about 8 million is scattered around the world, but most are in Indonesia’s West Sumatra province. While traditionally animist, they were later influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism, and most have since embraced Islam.
But much like the others, their community is also changing.
Nursyirwan Effendi, dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Andalas University, says that many of those who remain in villages and rural areas still hold tight to the tribe’s values.
“Women are central in the distribution of assets, such as rice fields, gardens and [houses], from their ancestors,” he says.
Dancers pose during the 2018 Minangkabau art and culture festival in Batusangkar, West Sumatra. Photo: AFP
Traditionally, Minangkabau women play an essential role in their children’s education and hold inheritance rights, while men are expected to take jobs elsewhere and occupy political and religious positions. When they do get married, the man moves to the woman’s house.
But Nursyirwan, who is of Minangkabau descent, notes that many have left for bigger cities, where they do not closely follow the community’s traditions.
An example of this is Afrianto Sikumbang, a 53-year-old businessman who was born to Minangkabau parents in West Sumatra province but now lives in the capital, Jakarta. Although he married a Minangkabau woman, he says they “don’t really apply” the tribe’s values in their daily life.
Sonya Anggraini, 35, who also works in the capital, has got used to city life, but remains proud of her ancestral roots and hopes that Minangkabau culture will persist for years to come.
“I am a member of my mother’s family, not of my father’s,” she says. ■
SHANGHAI/SEOUL (Reuters) – Asia reported hundreds of new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, including a U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea, as the United States warned of an inevitable pandemic and outbreaks in Italy and Iran spread to other countries.
World stocks tumbled for the fifth day on fears of prolonged disruption to global supply chains, while safe-haven gold rose back toward seven-year highs and U.S. bond yields held near record lows.
Stock markets globally have wiped out $3.3 trillion of value in the past four trading sessions, as measured by the MSCI all-country index.
The disease is believed to have originated in a market selling wildlife in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year and has infected about 80,000 people and killed more than 2,700, the vast majority in China.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged Americans to prepare, saying that while the immediate risk there was low the global situation suggested a pandemic was likely.
“It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when and how many people will be infected,” the CDC’s principal deputy director, Anne Schuchat, said on Tuesday.
World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, however, advised against referring to a pandemic.
“We should not be too eager to declare a pandemic without a careful and clear-minded analysis of the facts,” Tedros said in remarks to Geneva-based diplomats.
“Using the word pandemic carelessly has no tangible benefit, but it does have significant risk in terms of amplifying unnecessary and unjustified fear and stigma, and paralyzing systems. It may also signal that we can no longer contain the virus, which is not true.”
‘DON’T WAIT’
The United States has reported 57 cases of the virus. U.S. President Donald Trump, back in Washington after a visit to India, said on Twitter that he would meet U.S. officials for a briefing on the coronavirus on Wednesday.
Dr Bruce Aylward, head of a joint WHO-Chinese mission on the outbreak, told reporters on his return to Geneva that countries’ preparations should not wait.
“Think the virus is going to show up tomorrow. If you don’t think that way, you’re not going to be ready,” he said. “This a rapidly escalating epidemic in different places that we have got to tackle super-fast to prevent a pandemic.”
Aylward said China’s “extraordinary mobilization” showed how an aggressive public health policy could curb its spread.
The WHO says the outbreak peaked in China around Feb. 2, after authorities isolated Hubei province and imposed other containment measures.
China’s National Health Commission reported another 406 new infections on Wednesday, down from 508 a day earlier and bringing the total number of confirmed cases in mainland China to 78,064. Its death toll rose by 52 to 2,715.
The WHO said only 10 new cases were reported in China on Tuesday outside Hubei.
South Korea, which with 1,261 cases has the most outside China, reported 284 new ones including a U.S. soldier, as authorities readied an ambitious plan to test more than 200,000 members of a church at the center of the outbreak.
Of the new cases, 134 were from Daegu city, where the virus is believed to have been passed among members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The U.S. military said a 23-year-old soldier based in Camp Carroll, about 20 km (12 miles) from Daegu, had been infected and was in self-quarantine at home.
OLYMPIC WORRIES
In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for sports and cultural events to be scrapped or curtailed for two weeks to stem the virus as concern mounted for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Japan’s professional baseball teams would play matches without spectators until March 15 due to virus concerns, Kyodo news agency reported.
Japan has nearly 170 virus cases, besides the 691 linked to a cruise ship that was quarantined of its coast this month. Six people have died in Japan, including four from the ship.
There have been nearly 50 deaths outside China, including 11 in Italy and 19 in Iran, the most outside China, according to a Reuters tally.
Iran’s deputy health minister – seen mopping his brow at a televised news conference – was among its 139 coronavirus infections. Cases linked to Iran have been reported across the region.
Kuwait said six new coronavirus cases, all linked to travel to Iran, took its tally to 18, while Bahrain said its infections had risen to 26 after three new ones on a flight from Iran.
The United Arab Emirates, which has reported 13 coronavirus cases, is prepared for “worst case scenarios” as it spreads in the Middle East, a government official said.
In Europe, Italy has become a front line in the global outbreak with 322 cases. Italians or people who had recently visited the country, have tested positive in Algeria, Austria, Croatia, Romania, Spain and Switzerland.
Two hotels, one in Austria and one in Spain’s Canary Islands, were also locked down after cases emerged linked to Italy. Spain also reported its first three cases on the mainland.
Seven people have been killed in Delhi in protests against India’s controversial new citizenship law, as US President Donald Trump made his first official visit to the country.
Violence has erupted again in parts of north-east Delhi, which saw deadly clashes between supporters and opponents of the law on Monday night.
Two journalists have been attacked and BBC reporters in the area say mobs are throwing stones and shouting slogans.
There are fears of further clashes.
Mobs in parts of north-east Delhi are throwing stones at each other, and the situation remains tense, according to BBC correspondents.
Gokulpuri, in #Delhi today. The BBC saw mobs of people with sticks and stones chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’. Parts of Delhi are witnessing the worst violence and rioting India’s capital has seen in decades. Seven confirmed dead. #DelhiViolence
A policeman and six civilians have died in Delhi’s deadliest violence since the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) – which critics say is anti-Muslim – was passed last year.
Around 150 people, including 48 policemen, are reportedly injured.
Image copyright AFP
“There are around 200 people, some are holding the Indian flag in their hands, others are holding saffron flags, generally associated with right-wing Hindu groups. They are chanting Jai Shri Ram [hail Lord Ram],” BBC Hindi reporter Faisal Mohammed said.
The crowd was also shouting “shoot the traitors”, our reporter added.
Correspondents say the timing of the unrest is an embarrassment to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he hosts the US president and the violence has taken the spotlight away from Mr Trump’s visit.
Where is the violence?
It broke out in three Muslim-majority areas in north-east Delhi on Sunday and has continued since.
The violence in the area has seen protesters firmly split along religious lines, BBC reporters at the scene say.
Both sides have blamed each other for starting the clashes.
Image copyright REUTERSImage caption The violence in the Muslim-majority areas in north-east Delhi began on Sunday
The violence has been linked to a BJP leader, Kapil Mishra, who had threatened a group of protesters staging a sit-in against the CAA over the weekend, telling them that they would be forcibly evicted once Donald Trump had left India.
The clashes spilled into Monday and police fired tear gas shells and led baton charges to disperse the stone-throwing crowds. TV footage showed flames and smoke billowing from buildings.
Eyewitnesses said they saw charred vehicles and streets full of stones in areas like Jaffrabad and Chand Bagh on Tuesday morning. Police were allowing people to enter only after checking their identity cards. Some Metro stations have also been shut.
Who are the dead and injured?
Six civilians and one policeman have been killed in the violence so far.
“One of the seriously injured is a senior police officer. He has now been moved to another hospital for specialised treatment,” an official said.
Two journalists belonging to the NDTV news channel were badly beaten while they were out reporting on Tuesday morning.
Shahid Alvi, an auto rickshaw driver, died because of a bullet injury he suffered during the protest. His brother Rashid told BBC Hindi that Shahid was married just a month ago.
“He was shot in the stomach and died while we were taking him to the hospital,” he said.
Another victim has been identified as Rahul Solanki.
His brother, Rohit Solanki, told BBC Hindi that he died after being shot as he tried to escape from a mob.
“He had gone out to buy groceries when he was suddenly surrounded. He was shot at point blank range. We tried taking him to four hospitals but we were turned away,” he said.
What are officials doing?
Delhi’s freshly re-elected Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, called on the federal government to restore law and order.
“There are not enough police on the streets [in the affected areas]. Local police are saying they are not getting orders from above to control the situation, and they are not able to take action,” he told reporters.
The capital’s police force reports directly to Mr Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government.
Home Minister Amit Shah, who is in-charge of Delhi’s police forces, is holding a meeting with Mr Kejriwal to discuss the situation.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption The police and protesters fought pitched battles on the streets of Delhi
What is the citizenship act about?
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) grants amnesty to non-Muslim immigrants from three nearby Muslim-majority countries.
The new law has raised fears that India’s secular status is at risk.
Critics say it discriminates against Muslims. But the government says the protests are unnecessary as it only seeks to give amnesty to persecuted minorities.
Protests so far have been largely led by Muslim women and men, but a lot of Hindus have also joined them.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that India will buy $3 billion worth of military equipment, including attack helicopters, as the two countries deepen defence and commercial ties in an attempt to balance the weight of China in the region.
India and the United States were also making progress on a big trade deal, Trump said. Negotiators from the two sides have wrangled for months to narrow differences on farm goods, medical devices, digital trade and new tariffs.
Trump was accorded a massive reception in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state on Monday, with more than 100,000 people filling into a cricket stadium for a “Namaste Trump” rally.
On Tuesday, Trump sat down for one-on-one talks with Modi followed by delegation-level meetings to try and move forward on issues that have divided them, mainly the festering trade dispute.
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After those meetings, Trump said his visit had been productive with the conclusion of deals to buy helicopters for the Indian military. India is buying 24 SeaHawk helicopters from Lockheed Martin equipped with Hellfire missiles worth $2.6 billion and also plans a follow-on order for six Apache helicopters.
India is modernising its military to narrow the gap with China and has increasingly turned to the United States over traditional supplier, Russia.
Trump said the two countries were also making progress on a trade deal, which had been an area of growing friction between them.
“Our teams have made tremendous progress on a comprehensive trade agreement and I’m optimistic we can reach a deal that will be of great importance to both countries,” said Trump in remarks made alongside Modi.
The two countries had initially planned to produce a “mini deal”, but that proved elusive.
Instead both sides are now aiming for a bigger package, including possibly a free trade agreement.
Trump said he also discussed with Modi, whom he called his “dear friend”, the importance of a secure 5G telecoms network in India, ahead of a planned airwaves auction by the country.
The United States has banned Huawei, arguing the use of its kit creates the potential for espionage by China – a claim denied by Huawei and Beijing – but India, where telecoms companies have long used network gear from the Chinese firm, is yet to make a call.
Trump described Monday’s rally in Ahmedabad and again praised Modi and spoke of the size of the crowd, claiming there were “thousands of people outside trying to get in..
“I would even imagine they were there more for you than for me, I would hope so,” he told Modi. “The people love you…every time I mentioned your name, they would cheer.”
In New Delhi, Trump was given a formal state welcome on Tuesday at the red sandstone presidential palace with a 21-cannon gun salute and a red coated honour guard on horseback on a smoggy day.
HUG GETS TIGHTER
India is one of the few big countries in the world where Trump’s personal approval rating is above 50% and Trump’s trip has got wall-to-wall coverage with commentators saying he had hit all the right notes on his first official visit to the world’s biggest democracy.
They were also effusive in their praise for Modi for pulling off a spectacular reception for Trump.
“Modi-Trump hug gets tighter,” ran a headline in the Times of India.
But in a sign of the underlying political tensions in India, violent protests broke out in Delhi on Monday over a new citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslims and is a further attempt to undermine the secular foundations of India’s democracy. They say the law is part of a pattern of divisiveness being followed by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
At least 7 people were killed and about 150 injured in the clashes that took place in another part of the capital, away from the centre of the city where Modi is hosting Trump.
In his speech on Monday, Trump extolled India’s rise as a stable and prosperous democracy as one of the achievements of the century. “You have done it as a tolerant country. And you have done it as a great, free country,” he said.
Delhi has also been struggling with high air pollution and on Tuesday the air quality was moderately poor at 193 on a government index that measures pollution up to a scale of 500. The WHO considers anything above 60 as unhealthy.
An insect-killing fungus has been turned into a mass-produced biopesticide that will face its biggest challenge in East Africa
Current swarm has put 13m people at risk of famine and this will be the first large-scale test of its effectiveness
Young locusts in Somalia, where the fungus will be used to try to kill them. Photo: AP
Chinese factories are producing thousands of tonnes of a “green zombie fungus” to help fight the swarms of locusts in East Africa.
Metarhizium is a genus of fungi with nearly 50 species – some genetically modified – that is used as a biological insecticide because its roots drill through the insects’ hard exoskeleton and gradually poisons them.
In China it was named lu jiang jun, which means green zombie fungus, because it gradually turns its victims in a green mossy lump.
There are now dozens of factories across the country dedicated to producing its spores and despite the curbs introduced to stop the spread of Covid-19, many of them have resumed operations and are shipping thousands of tonnes to Africa.
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These factories are set up in a similar way to breweries, growing the spores on rice which is kept in carefully controlled conditions to ensure the correct temperature and humidity.
Each plant can produce thousands of tonnes of fungi powder per year, each gram of which contains tens of billions of spores.
“I am sending off a truckload right now. Our stock is running out,” said the marketing manager of a production plant in Jiangxi province. “Some customers need it urgently. They need it to kill the locusts.”
The need is particularly pressing in East Africa at the moment, where abnormally high levels of rainfall during the dry season allowed hundreds of billions of locusts to hatch in recent months.
So far the swarms have devastated crops in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda and are moving on to neighbouring countries.
Up to 13 million people face the risk of famine in East Africa. Photo: AFP
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned the situation could be the “worst in decades” and the resulting famine may affect 13 million people and cause international food prices to soar.
Last week, Science magazine reported that the Somalian government, working with the FAO, was preparing to a metarhizium species that only kills locusts and grasshoppers in what it described as the largest ever use of biopesticides against the insects.
Scientists do not believe that the fungus will be enough to solve the problem – monitoring the outbreak and targeting their breeding grounds will be more important in the long-run – but if it proves effective it could be an important weapon to target future outbreaks.
It will take time to gauge the effectiveness, partly because each fungus will take several days to take effect and partly because of the sheer scale of the challenge; a single swarm in Kenya was estimated to contain between 100 billion and 200 billion locusts.
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The locusts have also swept eastward into the Middle East, travelling up to 150km (90 miles) a day, and are moving closer to China now that they have now reached some of its neighbours, including India and Pakistan.
At present China’s agriculture ministry believes some locusts may follow the monsoon into the country but “the chances of them causing damage is very small”.
Most scientists agree the swarms will not have lasting effect on food production but say developing countries can tap into China’s cutting-edge anti-locust technology.
Radar stations have been set up all the way along China’s western and southern borders to detect possible clouds of locusts, while unmanned devices lure the insects into traps to collect data about their species population and size.
A locust being eaten inside out by the metarhizium fungi. Photo: Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Maryland
The data is streamed to the ministry’s programme command, which is responsible for the planning and coordination of the national efforts to prevent an outbreak.
The scientists also said that planes loaded with biological and chemical sprays were standing by.
Today, most locust outbreaks happen in developing countries that do not have advanced monitoring networks and some of them are unable to produce pesticides on a mass scale, according to Li Hu, an associate professor with the China Agricultural University in Beijing.
The Chinese locust treatment technologies were highly advanced, and usually cheaper than competing solutions from the West, he said.
Chinese researchers are now working with colleagues in other countries to help them solve the problem.
One disadvantage of the Chinese research is that it is mostly focused on local species, or the East Asia migratory locust. The desert locusts currently swarming East Africa have different genes and behaviour, and Li warned that some methods that work in China might not work elsewhere.
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There were some sightings of the species reported in Yunnan and Tibet in the past, but they did not build up to large colonies, Professor Kang Le, lead scientist of the locust research programme with the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told China Science Daily last week.
The vast west China region of Xinjiang, which shares a border with eight countries, is currently too cold for a locust migration, but once temperatures start to rise in the spring it could see locusts swarming across the border with Afghanistan.
Shi Wangpeng, a senior government locust expert, told China Business Network on Sunday that China should be on high alert because many Afghan farms had already been affected.
“These areas share a long border with us, there are almost no barriers,” he was quoted as saying by the Shanghai-based magazine.
China has a long and bitter history of locust swarms, with more than 840 being recorded in the official records over the past 2,700 years.
One famine, in the year 628 was so devastating that even the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong was reported to have run short of food and resorted to eating the insects to survive.
China has a long and bitter history of locust swarms. Photo: AFP
This, in turn, means that China’s rulers have long been looking for innovative ways to solve the problem
In the past farmers tried remedies such as building huge fires, burying the insects in ditches or trying to kill them with sticks.
In one campaign organised by prime minister Yao Chong in 715, the farms collected 9 million sacks of dead locusts and managed to save a significant proportion of their crops, according to historic text.
In more recent times more sophisticated technologies have been deployed to tackle the menace.
Some researchers have spent decades chasing locust colonies and studying their individual and collective behaviour everywhere from coastal areas to inland deserts, and in 2014 Chinese scientists released the world’s most comprehensive genetic map of locusts.
Researchers have also developed chemical agents that can disorient swarms of locusts and disperse them.
Chinese scientists first became interested in the green zombie’s potential in the 1980s after discovering that South Pacific islanders had been using them to kill insects on coconut trees.
Research by US scientists confirmed its effectiveness in the 1990s and the Chinese started importing the fungus from the United States and Britain.
Their experiments led to the development of newer and deadlier strains and mass production started in the past decade.
Other fungi or bacteria can be used to fight locusts, and some laboratories are working with agricultural technology companies to modify their genes to turn them into more deadly or precise killers.
One genetically engineered species of microsporidia, another type of insect-killing fungus, for instance, can generate three times as many as the spores to those produced by nature species, according to a document from the China Association of Agricultural Science Societies last year.
While it remains to be seen whether the current swarms will reach China, these treatments have been effective in the past and there has not been a locust outbreak in China for a decade.
Image copyright EPA
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
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