Month: May 2022

Key Messages

• As the harvest is fully established across much of Lesotho, households are accessing food from own production. Most poor household income is below average due to low payment power by the better-off due to high inflation and lower income from labor in South Africa coupled with a below-average 2022 harvest. Stressed (IPC Phase 2) outcomes are still expected through at least September as household income remains below average, limiting the purchase of other non-food needs.
• The harvest is expected to peak between June and July. Most poor households access own-produced food while accessing income from harvesting labor, land preparation, and planting for winter production. Although a below-average 2022 harvest is expected, households will likely continue consuming food from own production through August/September.
• Maize meal prices were stable between March and April and about 15 percent higher than the five-year average. Wheat flour prices were stable month on month while nearly 39 percent higher than average. Price pressures are expected to persist amid high global prices for fuel, fertilizer, energy products, and high shipping costs. In March, annual inflation was stable at 7.2 percent compared to 7.5 percent in February. In March, the month-on-month inflation rate accelerated to 0.8 percent from 0.3 registered in February, mainly driven by price increases in electricity, gas, transportation, and food.
• Below-average income is expected for poor households through September. Households are expected to start accessing income from crop sales as the harvest peaks between June and July. However, income from crop sales is likely to be below average due to the expected below-average harvest. Poor households are also anticipated to access some income from agricultural labor, mainly from land preparation as preparation for the next production season begins in August and September. Throughout the projection period, poor households are expected to access income from self-employment activities as well as gardening. However, due to reduced purchasing power amidst increasing global prices for fuel, fertilizer, and high shipping costs, income from these activities is expected to be below average.

Source: Famine Early Warning System Network

Shanghai authorities say they will take some major steps Wednesday toward reopening China’s largest city after a two-month COVID-19 lockdown that has throttled the national economy and largely bottled up millions of people in their homes.

Full bus and subway service will be restored as will basic rail connections with the rest of China, Vice Mayor Zong Ming said Tuesday at a daily news conference on the city’s outbreak.

“The epidemic has been effectively controlled,” she said, adding that the city will start the process of fully restoring work and life on Wednesday.

Schools will partially reopen on a voluntary basis for students and shopping malls, supermarkets, convenience stores and drug stores will continue to reopen gradually with no more than 75% of their total capacity. Cinemas and gyms will remain closed.

Officials, who set June 1 as the target date for reopening earlier in May, appear ready to accelerate what has been a gradual easing in recent days. A few malls and markets have reopened, and some residents have been given passes allowing them out for a few hours at a time. In online chat groups, some expressed excitement about the prospect of being able to move about freely in the city for the first time since the end of March, while others remained cautious given the slow pace and stop-and-go nature of opening up so far.

Workers were taking down some of the barriers that had been erected along sidewalks during the lockdown. A few people walked or biked on the still mostly empty streets. One man was getting his hair cut on the sidewalk, as a worker or volunteer in full protective clothing looked on.

More than half a million people in the city of 25 million won’t be allowed out Wednesday — 190,000 who are still in lockdown areas and another 450,000 who are in control zones because of recent cases.

Shanghai recorded 29 new cases on Monday, continuing a steady decline from more than 20,000 a day in April. Li Qiang, the top official from China’s ruling Communist Party in Shanghai, at a meeting Monday was quoted as saying that the city had made major achievements in fighting the outbreak through continuous struggle.

The success came at a price. Authorities imposed a suffocating citywide lockdown under China’s “zero-COVID” strategy that aims to snuff out any outbreak with mass testing and isolation at centralized facilities of anyone who is infected.

However, the latest economic data showed that Chinese manufacturing activity started to rebound in May as the government rolled back some containment measures.

Schools will reopen for the final two years of high school and the third year of middle school, but students can decide whether to attend in person. Other grades and kindergarten remain closed.

Outdoor tourist sites will start reopening Wednesday, with indoor sites set to follow in late June, the Shanghai tourism authority said. Group tours from other provinces will be allowed again when the city has eliminated all high- and medium-risk pandemic zones.

Beijing, the nation’s capital, further eased restrictions Tuesday in some districts. The city imposed limited lockdowns, but nothing near a citywide level, in a much smaller outbreak that appears to be on the wane. Beijing recorded 18 new cases on Monday.

Source: Voice of America

In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 spread throughout the world in ways not fully understood, the United States faced a critical shortage of protective masks.

Dozens of manufacturing startups attempted to meet the demand for what was then a confusing array of grades and types — N95, KN95, full-face respirators.

Now, after a short respite from many COVID-19 precautions, the U.S. is weeks into a new surge in cases that may foreshadow a greater one this fall, and those same small companies that make masks are hurting.

John Bielamowicz is a co-founder of United States Mask. The Fort Worth, Texas, company is among those struggling.

Bielamowicz launched his mask-making mission after reading social media posts about medical professionals not having N95 masks in the pandemic’s terrifying early months. It was caregivers like them who had helped his family in 2016, when his son Matthew was born missing 80% of his diaphragm on the left side.

Bielamowicz and his business partner ​David Baillargeon put their commercial real estate business on hold to start the mask company.

“This was our way of paying it back … for the gift that they gave us for sending us home with our son,” Bielamowicz told VOA Mandarin in a virtual interview. “It was a debt that I never thought that I’d be able to pay back.”

The partners began reading and experimenting in February 2020, and by late October of that year, their N95 masks carried a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health certification. At its peak in early 2021, the company produced millions of N95 masks a month and employed close to 50 people.

“For me and my family, this was a mission, and we were going to do it or fail trying,” Bielamowicz said. “And we didn’t fail. We did it.”

Masks and jobs

The American Mask Manufacturers Association (AMMA) represents small companies that started making masks during the pandemic.

“During the pandemic, we created just over 8,000 new manufacturing jobs. And this was at a time where most businesses were laying people off or furloughing people,” Lloyd Armbrust, president of the association, told VOA in a virtual interview.

But attitudes toward mask wearing have varied widely across the U.S. since 2020, and on April 18, a federal judge in Florida voided the national mask mandate covering airplanes and other public transportation. This came a day before the Biden administration said it would no longer enforce a U.S. mask mandate.

Armbrust American, Armbrust’s mask company in Pflugerville, Texas, staggered from the twin blows.

“That day, we saw our online sales be cut at half or even more,” said Armbrust, who added that he and other mask-makers had already been competing with cheap masks from China before the one-two punch.

China and masks

According to research published last year by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank, 72% of the masks and respirators imported by the U.S. in 2019 came from China.

When the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was first identified in humans in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, U.S. imports of protective masks from China plunged.

When China resumed exporting government-subsidized masks in 2020, it attempted to create “a monopoly within the PPE (personal protective equipment) market,” the AMMA charged, and manufacturers such as Armbrust American found themselves in difficulty.

“Our raw material costs me about $0.015 per mask,” Armbrust said. “And yet China can deliver it to the United States for less than $0.01. They say that they’re more efficient, but how is that possible when the cost of their finished products is cheaper than I buy the raw materials for? It’s just not possible. The answer is, the Chinese government is subsidizing it because they don’t want to lose this business.”

In response to VOA Mandarin questions about China’s mask exports to the U.S., Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said, “I would like to point out that as a market economy, China has earnestly fulfilled its WTO (World Trade Organization) commitments and abides by multilateral economic and trade rules. Chinese merchandise is cheap and good because of the good supply chain, sufficient competition and economies of scale, not non-market behavior.”

“I can be very competitive, but I can’t be competitive against the whole government. … In 2021, we laid off about 70% of our staff,” Armbrust said.

Bielamowicz’s United States Mask laid off people as well.

“It was the worst day of my career,” he said.

An uncertain future

Nationwide, the AMMA, which peaked with almost 30 members in 2021, now includes fewer than 10 enterprises still producing masks.

Facing masks’ uncertain future, Armbrust American shifted to producing home air filters.

Bielamowicz has been traveling to Washington to lobby the federal government.

“We’re asking for free competition,” Bielamowicz said. “We know the free market works.”

That said, Armbrust hopes the government can subsidize small companies that make masks, as it does farmers, to preserve production capability so that when the next pandemic hits, small producers can jump back into mask making.

“If I could just have a base,” Armbrust said, “… where I could mothball these machines and … I could afford to pay the rent for the space instead of actually shutting it down and scrapping the machines, that would be another solution.”

Source: Voice of America

Shanghai said on Sunday “unreasonable” curbs on businesses will be removed from June 1 as it looks to lift its COVID-19 lockdown, while Beijing reopened parts of its public transport as well as some malls and other venues as infections stabilized.

The Chinese commercial hub of 25 million people aims to essentially end from Wednesday a two-month lockdown that has severely damaged the economy and seen many residents lose income, struggle to source food and to cope with the isolation.

The painful coronavirus curbs in major Chinese cities run counter to trends seen in the rest of the world, which has largely tried to return to normal life even as infections spread.

Shanghai, China’s most populous city, will end many conditions for businesses to resume work from June 1. The city also launched measures to support its economy, including reducing some taxes on car purchases, accelerating issuance of local government bonds, and speeding up approvals of real estate projects.

Shanghai will ask banks to renew loans to small and medium firms worth a total of $15 billion this year.

“We will fully support and organize the resumption of work and production of enterprises in various industries and fields,” vice mayor Wu Qing told reporters, adding that “unreasonable” COVID restrictions on businesses would be lifted.

Wu did not give details of which restrictions would be cancelled.

Shanghai in April started publishing “white lists” of important manufacturers in the auto industry, life sciences, chemicals and semiconductors allowed to resume operations.

But many of the priority companies had suppliers who were unable to reopen and so they still faced logistical bottlenecks.

Many industry executives also complained about onerous COVID curbs, as they needed to find sleeping quarters for staff trying to isolate and to implement rigorous disinfection. Most businesses in the city are still shut.

All “white lists” would be abolished, Wu said.

Earlier on Sunday, city government spokeswoman Yin Xin said Shanghai would ease testing requirements from Wednesday for people who want to enter public areas, to encourage a return to work.

“The current epidemic situation in the city continues to stabilize and improve,” Yin said, adding Shanghai’s strategy was “pivoting towards normalized prevention and control.”

People entering public venues or taking public transport would need to show a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours, up from 48 hours previously.

Bus services within the Pudong New Area, home to Shanghai’s largest airport and the main financial district, would fully resume by Monday, officials said.

Plaza 66, a mall in central Shanghai that hosts Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands, reopened on Sunday.

Authorities have been slowly relaxing curbs, with a focus on getting manufacturing going again.

More people have been allowed to leave their homes and more businesses can reopen, though many residents remain largely confined to housing compounds, and most shops are only open for delivery service.

Private cars are not allowed out without approval, and most of the city’s public transport is shut. Authorities have yet to announced detailed plans for how the lockdown will be lifted.

Gyms and libraries

In the capital Beijing, libraries, museums, theatres and gyms were allowed to reopen on Sunday, though with limits on numbers of people, in districts that have seen no community COVID-19 cases for seven consecutive days.

The districts of Fangshan and Shunyi will end work-from-home rules, while public transport will largely resume in the two districts as well as in Chaoyang, the city’s largest. Still, restaurant dining is banned throughout the city.

Shanghai reported just over 100 new COVID cases on Sunday, while Beijing recorded 21, both in line with a falling trend nationwide.

China’s economy has shown signs of recovery this month following an April slump but activity is weaker than last year and many analysts expect a second-quarter contraction.

The strength and sustainability of any recovery will depend largely on COVID, with the highly transmissible Omicron variant proving hard to wipe out, and prone to comebacks.

Investors have worried about the lack of a roadmap for exiting the zero-COVID strategy of ending all outbreaks at just about any cost, a signature policy of President Xi Jinping. He is expected to secure an unprecedented third leadership term at a congress of the ruling Communist Party in the autumn.

Markets expect more support for the economy.

“We expect policies to ease further on the fiscal front to boost demand, given downward pressures on growth and the uncertainty of the recovery pace,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Friday note.

Source: Voice of America

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other top officials discussed revising stringent anti-epidemic restrictions during a meeting Sunday, state media reported, as they maintained a widely disputed claim that the country’s first COVID-19 outbreak is slowing.

The discussion at the North’s Politburo meeting suggests it will soon relax a set of draconian curbs imposed after its admission of the omicron outbreak this month out of concern about its food and economic situations.

Kim and other Politburo members “made a positive evaluation of the pandemic situation being controlled and improved across the country,” the official Korean Central News Agency said.

They also “examined the issue of effectively and quickly coordinating and enforcing the anti-epidemic regulations and guidelines given the current stable anti-epidemic situation,” KCNA said.

On Sunday, North Korea reported 89,500 more patients with fever symptoms, taking the country’s total to 3.4 million. It didn’t say whether there were additional deaths. The country’s latest death toll reported Friday was 69, setting its mortality rate at 0.002%, an extremely low count that no other country, including advanced economies, has reported in the fight against COVID-19.

Many outside experts say North Korea is clearly understating its fatality rate to prevent any political damage to Kim at home. They say North Korea should have suffered many more deaths because its 26 million people are largely unvaccinated against COVID-19 and it lacks the capacity to treat patients with critical conditions. Others suspect North Korea might have exaggerated its earlier fever cases to try to strengthen its internal control of its population.

Since its May 12 admission of the omicron outbreak, North Korea has only been announcing the number of patients with feverish symptoms daily, but not those with COVID-19, apparently because of a shortage of test kits to confirm coronavirus cases in large numbers.

But many outside health experts view most of the reported fever cases as COVID-19, saying North Korean authorities would know how to distinguish the symptoms from fevers caused by other prevalent infectious diseases.

The outbreak has forced North Korea to impose a nationwide lockdown, isolate all work and residential units from one another and ban region-to-region movements. The country still allows key agricultural, construction and other industrial activities, but the toughened restrictions have triggered worries about its food insecurity and a fragile economy already hit hard by border shutdowns because of the pandemic.

Some observers say North Korea will likely soon declare victory over COVID-19 and credit it to Kim’s leadership.

Yang Un-chul, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea, said the North’s recently elevated restrictions must be dealing a serious blow to its coal, agricultural and other labor-intensive industrial sectors. But he said those difficulties won’t likely rise to a level that threatens Kim’s grip on power, as the COVID-19 outbreak and strengthened curbs have given him a chance to boost his control over the population.

Source: Voice of America