Switzerland today
Greetings from Lausanne!
All eyes were on Brussels, Tokyo, Bern (for a Covid-19 update) and Texas today. Instead of sunning himself on a beach somewhere, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis was in the Belgian capital meeting EU officials. Swiss athletes were nervously preparing to travel to Japan. Meanwhile, billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos blasted into space.
From our news desk: Rising Covid-19 numbers and a Swiss-EU meeting in Brussels
Cassis held informal talks with EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell and EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn in Brussels today. This was the first high-level meeting between the two sides since the Swiss government announced in May that it had ditched a draft 2018 treaty cementing ties with its biggest trading partner. The foreign ministry refuses to talk about new negotiations. Cassis said the aim of the meeting was to “create a political dialogue with the EU”, to explain the Swiss position and to maintain close contact. After pulling the plug on the “institutional framework” deal, there are fears that Switzerland will pay the price in lost exports, higher costs and diminished attractiveness as a business and research centre.
Uh-oh. “The number of Covid cases is increasing sharply again,” declared Patrick Mathys, head of the Crisis Management and International Cooperation Section at the Federal Office of Public Health, today. This week the limit of 1,000 new daily infections could be surpassed, he said. The growth is due to the highly infectious Delta variant affecting unvaccinated people, mainly the younger demographic aged 10-29. “We could experience another wave in Switzerland that is higher than last autumn,” said Samia Hurst, vice-president of the National COVID-19 Science Task Force. The good news, said Mathys, is that hospitalisations are at a relatively low level.
Water levels continue to drop in Swiss lakes and rivers. But experts have warned that it might take several weeks before the water recedes to normal levels. And storms could return to southern Switzerland this weekend, says MeteoSchweiz. Andreas Zischg, an expert on extreme weather from the University of Bern, says Switzerland has made progress in flood damage prevention, but the risk of high water levels remains real. About 19,000 buildings, including 8,500 residential homes for 60,000 people, would be affected by floods, he told Swiss public radio, SRF, today.
What’s trending in Switzerland: Olympic fever is building.
Swiss Olympic believes Swiss athletes could win around a dozen medals at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics that are set to begin on Friday. At the 2016 Summer Games in Rio they took home seven. There are high expectations, in particular for equestrian events, fencing, cycling and rowing.
Ski mountaineering fans will be happy today. Their sport has been included in the programme for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy’ (Milan and Cortina D’Ampezzo) following approval by the International Olympic Committee. Ski mountaineering was trialled at the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games. Swiss athletes regularly excel in competitions like the biannual World Championships of Ski Mountaineering.
Space is the place for billionaires right now. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, may have been beaten to the edge of space by rival Richard Branson. But the Amazon CEO made history today when he blasted off on the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew. They returned safely to Earth. Swiss bank UBS estimates the space tourism market will reach $3 billion annually in a decade. Another billionaire tech mogul, Elon Musk, plans to send an all-civilian crew on an even more ambitious flight in September: a several-day orbital mission on his Crew Dragon capsule.
Deep dive: Has a new price premium on cocoa really helped struggling African farmers?
Ivory Coast in West Africa produces almost half of the world’s cocoa that ends up in Swiss chocolate and other products, earning $3.5 billion (CHF3.2 billion) a year. But very little of the money filters down to cocoa farmers who make just $0.78 per day, well below the living wage. The authorities and cocoa boards in Ivory Coast and neighbouring Ghana decided it was time to do something about this. In 2019 they introduced a premium payment for cocoa that aims to increase the farmers’ share of the profits and buffer them from volatile prices. The new policy came into force during the 2020/2021 cocoa harvest season. But, as Anand Chandrasekhar writes, things haven’t gone to plan.
In the beginning, Ivorian cocoa farmers got more money thanks to the introduction of the so-called Living Income Differential (LID) – an extra $400 per ton premium – for cocoa exported to places like Switzerland. But some big international buyers have been trying to get around the additional payment. The Covid-19 pandemic and global drop in demand for cocoa beans has also had a huge dampening effect. The price for cocoa beans has now fallen even lower than the pre-LID level.
“If the human right to a living income cannot be recognised, then how will all other human rights of cocoa farming families be met in a sustainable way?” bemoans Jon Walker, senior adviser on cocoa at Fairtrade.
Word from the street: Can you imagine swimming alongside an oil tanker?
It’s something that people in the Swiss city of Basel do all the time on the River Rhine (see photo above). Urban swimming is also big in Bern, Zurich and Geneva. Check out the latest episode of The Swiss Connection podcast to hear about Renata von Tscharner, a passionate Swiss open water swimmer, who’s been trying to export the concept abroad.
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