About: http://data.cimple.eu/news-article/9e72e05b2a3027da6952923baf12ea543ccdc790836107800a49d2a0     Goto   Sponge   NotDistinct   Permalink

An Entity of Type : schema:NewsArticle, within Data Space : data.cimple.eu associated with source document(s)

AttributesValues
rdf:type
schema:articleBody
  • Turkmenistan's authoritarian government is failing to deal with serious food shortages and spiralling prices, exacerbated by the coronavirus, two rights groups said on Wednesday. US-based Human Rights Watch monitor and the Turkmenistan Initiative for Human Rights said "shortages of subsidised food, accelerating since 2016, have worsened, with people waiting hours in line to try to buy more affordable food products". In many cases queuers are "turned away empty-handed," the groups said. State propaganda in tightly-controlled Turkmenistan regularly reminds citizens that they are living in the "era of might and happiness". Official statistics show the economy growing by more than six percent per year since 2015, despite the 2014 crash in prices for global hydrocarbons, which make up the vast majority of Turkmenistan's exports. While President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has acknowledged the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the global economy, the gas-rich republic is one of the few countries in the world not to declare a single case of the disease. A WHO mission that visited the secretive state in July advised the country to adopt measures including contact tracing "as if COVID-19 were already circulating" and expressed concern over reports of pneumonia outbreaks there. The two rights groups noted in their statement that food shortages predate the pandemic but have grown worse "in part due to the border closure with Iran", which accounts for 80 percent of the food Turkmenistan imports. Rising prices and the fall in real incomes mean that families are spending well over half -- and in some cases all -- of their income on food, according to interviews carried out by Human Rights Watch. The groups said government efforts to solve the problem -- including through the creation of a commission to support food producers -- have been undermined by inflation and state suppression of information about the shortages. "Police break up (food queues) outside shops and force shoppers to wait by back doors, away from the street, where they would be visible," the statement said. Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic, is one of the world's most authoritarian states, tolerating no free press or political opposition. Current leader Berdymukhamedov, 63, is hailed as the country's "protector" in state media and was in 2015 honoured with a golden statue of his likeness on horseback in the capital Ashgabat. cr/jbr/jxb
schema:headline
  • Turkmenistan failing to tackle food shortages, say NGOs
schema:mentions
schema:author
schema:datePublished
http://data.cimple...sPoliticalLeaning
http://data.cimple...logy#hasSentiment
http://data.cimple...readability_score
http://data.cimple...tology#hasEmotion
Faceted Search & Find service v1.16.115 as of Oct 09 2023


Alternative Linked Data Documents: ODE     Content Formats:   [cxml] [csv]     RDF   [text] [turtle] [ld+json] [rdf+json] [rdf+xml]     ODATA   [atom+xml] [odata+json]     Microdata   [microdata+json] [html]    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3238 as of Jul 16 2024, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-musl), Single-Server Edition (126 GB total memory, 3 GB memory in use)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2025 OpenLink Software