— Four chemical conglomerates—Bayer (German), BASF (German), ChemChina (Chinese) and Corteva (U.S.)—control more than 60% of the world’s commercial seeds market.

— Tyson Foods and three other U.S. poultry firms control 60% of the U.S. poultry market. Three global giants—JBS (Brazil), Tyson (U.S.) and Smithfield (China)—control 85% of the U.S. beef market and 71% of the pork market.

— Four multinational grain-trading powers—Cargill, ADM, Bunge and Dreyfus—control 90% of all grain (corn, wheat, rice, etc.) marketed in the world.

— John Deere and Italian conglomerate CNH Industrial control nearly half of the U.S. market for tractors and other farm machinery (even using their monopoly clout to prohibit farmers from repairing their own machines, forcing them to travel to expensive authorized dealers for repairs).

— Multibillion-dollar Wall Street speculators are the nation’s biggest buyers of farmland, jacking up per-acre prices beyond what family farmers (especially young people trying to get into farming) can pay; indeed, the largest owner of U.S. ag land is superrich tech mogul Bill Gates, who holds land in almost 20 states that would amount to a nearly 400-square-mile farm (bigger than four Seattles, the sprawling metropolis where he lives).

Opinion | To Bust Monopoly Power, Start With the Companies Controlling Our Food (commondreams.org)

 Back in July 2020 the Socialist Standard drew attention to the militarisation of many American police forces, turning them into heavily armed and equipped paramilitaries.

Left-wing commentator, Laura Flanders, once again draws attention to this development in an article on the Consortium News website.

But she compares this with the very obvious lack of commitment to “militarise” health-care and extend the medical services provided for veterans to the civilian population. 

The media indulges in many military metaphors in the “war” against Covid but fails to reach the logical conclusion that to defeat the virus enemy means putting the health servoces of America on to a “war-footing” with “military-grade” medical treatments. 

 Equality

There are royal commissions established,

Commons committees of earnest MPs,

 In “the other place” by ponderous degrees

They discuss how to achieve what is wished.

Concerned documentaries on TV,

Radio phone-ins squabble and blare,

The press agree, society’s not fair:

But all are committed to equality.

The days of deference are long since passed:

‘Black lives matter!’ All lives matter! And yet,

For all the rhetoric, all the cant,

By prestige and pomp a person’s still classed.

When a prince passes he’s specially blessed;

Some lives, and deaths, matter more than the rest

D.A.

 Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests. Previous analyses have identified wilderness areas based largely on satellite images and estimated that 20-40% of the Earth’s surface is little affected by humans. However, the scientists behind the new study argue that forests, savannah and tundra can appear intact from above but that, on the ground, vital species are missing. 

These scattered fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara.  Some scientists said the new analysis underestimates the intact areas, because the ranges of animals centuries ago are poorly known and the new maps do not take account of the impacts of the climate crisis, which is changing the ranges of species.

Thousands of abandoned oil wells dot the Permian Basin in west Texas and New Mexico, endangering humans and wildlife. With oil costs plummeting, they’re likely to proliferate. A growing body of research suggests that these sorts of leaks make oil and gas wells significant contributors to climate change – especially if they’re not plugged. Leaking wells also have the potential to poison sources of drinking water.

Oil companies are legally required to “plug” their abandoned wells to prevent exactly these sorts of hazards. Drilling a well involves puncturing through layers of dirt, rock, and water to reach oil and gas deposits. The walls of the well are reinforced with steel casing and cement, but as they age – or if they were improperly drilled – cracks may form in the cement and the casings could corrode. This increases the risk of methane seeping into the air and oil migrating into the surrounding groundwater. For this reason, an operator is supposed to plug a spent well by pouring concrete into the well and also clean up the surrounding area by removing wellheads, tanks, pipes and other unused equipment that could endanger humans or wildlife.

 Texas and New Mexico have already identified about 7,000 abandoned wells.  State officials estimate these will cost $335m to plug. The states define wells as “orphaned” if they don’t have an approved operator on record; additionally, Texas only includes wells that haven’t produced in at least a year. However, a healthy chunk of roughly 100,000 “idled” wells in those states could also eventually end up abandoned.

While officials have argued that oil prices will eventually rise, reviving inactive wells, environmental advocates and energy analysts say that the industry is in a downward spiral that will cause the number of abandoned wells to balloon. The uncertain outlook means that independent estimates of the cleanup costs of Texas’s wells alone have ranged from a conservative $168m to a mind-boggling $117bn.

States have not collected nearly enough money from operators to foot the bill. Though they force oil and gas producers to front substantial cash to cover plugging costs in case their wells are abandoned, these bonds only covered one-sixth of Texas’s cleanup costs in 2015. In New Mexico, these bonds would cover just 18% of plugging costs for all of the state’s orphan wells.

How Texas’s zombie oil wells are creating an environmental disaster zone | Texas | The Guardian

Lucrative pay and share options have created an incentive for oil company executives to resist climate action, according to a study by the Climate Accountability Institute that casts doubt on recent net-zero commitments by BP and Shell. Boardroom rewards also underpin a skewed corporate logic that is slowing the world’s path to decarbonisation, according to the study in the Energy Research and Social Science journal.

As public pressure and scientific evidence strengthened, the big four moved through the gears, the study asserts. “Business as usual” (pretending no problem existed) in the 1980s became “incremental adaptation” (casting doubt on the science as an excuse to move slowly) in the 1990s and early 2000s, and has today turned into “partial diversification” (accepting the science, but moving gradually towards long-term goals). Despite the change in tactics and public rhetoric, the long-term strategy was always the same: securing a social licence to extract oil and gas. All four companies plan to continue extracting fossil fuels after 2050. 

Co-author of the paper, Dario Kenner of the University of Sussex, said Shell’s and BP’s recent announcement of a net-zero goal by 2050, and Exxon’s and Chevron’s endorsement of carbon pricing, should be seen as similar tactics. Kenner said: “When BP, Shell and others talk of net zero, they are trying to stay part of the decision-making process. They want to be in charge of the transition as much as possible so they can slow it down – that is the whole point of trying to convince society to trust them.”

Compensation packages for CEOs, often in excess of $10m (£7.2m), are linked to continued extraction of fossil fuels, exploration of new fields and the promotion of strong market demand through advertising, lobbying and government subsidies, the report says. The setup with executives runs counter to efforts around the world to keep global heating to 1.5-2C (2.7-3.6F) above pre-industrial levels.

Richard Heede,, a co-author of the paper, said:

“We show that executives have personal ownership of tens or hundreds of thousands of shares, which creates an unacknowledged personal desire to explore, extract and sell fossil fuels. That carbon mindset needs to be revised by realigning compensation towards success in lowering absolute emissions.”

The study tracks ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP – four of the biggest “carbon major” oil companies – since 1990. Executives had been told of the threat many years earlier, but instead of working on a transition to cleaner, safer forms of energy, they ramped up production, played down risks and adopted public relations campaigns that misleadingly presented oil companies as part of the solution rather than the source of the problem.

Between 1990 and 2019 the four companies made a combined profit of about $2tn. A minuscule fraction of these funds has been invested in low-carbon energy. ExxonMobil allocated 0.22% of its capital expenditure to low-carbon energy in the eight years until 2018. The share at Chevron was almost identical. Shell managed 1.3% and BP 2.3%. None were aligned with a 1.5C pathway, the report says.

Instead, the overwhelming bulk of the profits was either ploughed back into oil and gas extraction, invested in buying back shares, paid out in dividends to shareholders or used to lobby politicians, undermine climate science and pay for greenwashing advertisements. In the US, lobbying expenditures for the four companies totalled $731m between 1998 and 2019. Their corporate political donations in the US, stretching back to 1990, were worth $59m.

Kenner explained executive fortunes depended on continuing production and sales. The study examines the high levels of boardroom pay that motivate individuals to continue corporate practices that are destabilising the climate. At least seven executives received more than $10m in 2018, the most recent year covered by the study. Shell’s CEO, Ben van Beurden, was the top earner with $23,069,040. Stock options make up a growing share of that compensation, which the study authors say encourages executives to use profits for share buybacks rather than investment in renewable energy.

Heede said, “This paper shines a light on incentives in corporations that may not align with their public commitments to get to net zero by 2050.” 

The paper concludes that oil and gas companies are ill-structured for decarbonisation at the speed and scale demanded by climate science. 

The authors said Shell, and to a lesser degree BP, had increased low-carbon investments, but its measures were still insufficient to meet the 1.5C target without significant emissions overshoot. The US firms, they said, were much further behind in responding to the risks. 

“Our study clearly shows why it is time to stop spending so much time being distracted by what these companies promise,” Kenner said. 

Oil firm bosses’ pay ‘incentivises them to undermine climate action’ | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

 One justification frequently used by the pharmaceutical industry is that patents and intellectual ownership is required to recoup the money invested in the early R and D stage of the development of a drug.

At least 97% of the funding for the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has been identified as coming from taxpayers or charitable trusts, according to the first attempt to reconstruct who paid for the decades of research that led to the lifesaving formulation. Less than 2% of the identified funding came from private industry, the researchers said.

Using two different methods of inquiry, researchers were able to identify the source of hundreds of millions of pounds of research grants from the year 2000 onwards for published work on what would eventually become the novel technology that underpins the jab, as well as funding for the final product.

The overwhelming majority of the money, especially in the early stages of the research, came from UK government departments, British and American scientific institutes, the European commission and charities including the Wellcome Trust.

“Our study shows that quite the opposite is true: public investment and international collaboration gave us the Covid-19 vaccines,” the team of researchers, from the advocacy group Universities Allied for Essential Medicines UK, said.  “We need to stop perpetuating the narrative in which the private sector and profit are the sole drivers of innovation, and recognise that the life-saving ChAdOx vaccine technology was developed with near total governmental and charitable funding.”

Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine research ‘was 97% publicly funded’ | Medical research | The Guardian

An investigation  by the Guardian and the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern University reveals the scale of America’s food insecurity crisis during Covid-19. Food insecurity has been at the highest level since annual records began in the mid-1990s. But, the pandemic did not create America’s hunger divide.

 The week before Christmas, about 81 million Americans experienced food insecurity, meaning that one in four people in the so-called richest country in the world did not have reliable access to sufficient nutritious food needed for a healthy active life.

It found  racial inequalities in access to adequate nutrition that threatens the long-term prospects of a generation of Black and brown children. Black families in the US have gone hungry at two to three times the rate of white families over the course of the pandemic. 

“Food insecurity and poverty are absolutely racialized, so it’s horrifying, but not surprising, that Black and brown people have suffered disproportionately,” said Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare, a  food justice organization.

Kyle Moore, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race and ethnicity, explained, “In periods of general economic growth, racial disparities in a wide range of poverty indicators have remained constant, suggesting a lack of political will over decades to tackle the root causes. Black and brown households have been hardest hit in every economic crisis, and taken the longest to recover.”

The report found:

1. Hunger – defined as not having enough to eat sometimes or often during the previous week – has been reported between 19% and 29% of Black households with children over the course of the pandemic. This compares with 7% to 14% of white American families.

2. Latino families have experienced the second highest rates of hunger, ranging from 16% to 25% nationally.

3, Racial disparities varied across states: Black families in Texas reported hunger at four times the rate of white families in some weeks, as did Latinos in New York.

4. As many as 43% of Black households with children have been food insecure during the course of the pandemic – the highest rate nationally for any community since records began. Despite a substantial fall last month, about one in three Black and Latino families are still food insecure.

5. Between 17% and 26% of white American families experienced food insecurity over the past year – illustrating the extent to which hardship spread into previously economically resilient communities.

6, Since Christmas, food insecurity has fallen by 35% among white families, compared to 26% of Black families, 21% of Asian Americans and 15% for Latinos.

The rate of hunger for families with children has been on average 61% (41% to 83%) higher than for adult-only households. This is particularly troubling as inadequate nutrition can damage children’s emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing, and the consequences can last a lifetime. Children who live in food insecure households are likely to get sick more often, recover from illness more slowly, and end up in the emergency room more frequently. Insufficient nutritious food impedes learning, and is linked to higher levels of asthma and depression.

“Covid has amplified existing disparities in education, food insecurity, unstable housing and health outcomes for a whole generation of children,” said Dr Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University. “Children have borne the brunt of the lack of action to contain Covid-19 and the failure to prioritize schools.” 

One in eight Americans has reduced food spending to pay for healthcare, with Black Americans twice as likely to be unable to afford quality healthcare compared to white Americans.

The US safety net for families with children  has always been less generous and less funded compared with other rich countries.

 “When the pandemic struck and so many jobs were lost, there were big holes in the safety net, especially for those who couldn’t access unemployment insurance because of their migration status or because they left work ‘voluntarily’ to care for children when schools closed,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, IPR director.

“The prevalence of hunger in the US is a political choice,” said Molly Anderson, professor of food studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. “Inequalities are down to political decisions.” 

Aid was often delayed by bipartisanship or bureaucracy, it was mostly temporary, and far from universal, with some vulnerable communities such as undocumented migrants and cash-in-hand workers excluded almost entirely. Millions of struggling Americans lost federal unemployment benefits between August and January as lawmakers bickered over how much people deserved. Even if economic and food assistance reached struggling families none of the short term federal fixes came close to mitigating existing racial inequalities that had left Americans of color less able to weather unexpected economic storms.

In 2019, at the end of a period of historical economic expansion, unemployment for Black Americans was double that for white Americans, while the poverty rate for Black children was triple. Black and Latino workers are significantly more likely to earn the minimum wage or less than white workers. When the pandemic struck, the average Black family had $1,500 in emergency savings, whereas a typical white family had more than five times that amount. Only 10% of Latino families had enough savings to cover six months of expenses, compared with 36% of white families.

The past year has been particularly tough for children from low-income households, who are disproportionately Black, brown and Indigenous. Before the pandemic, more than 20 million children got free school lunches; just over half of those also received for free breakfast. “The biggest challenge has been getting food to hungry kids out of school,” said Regi Young, chief strategy officer at the Houston food bank.

 ” The truth is, we’re never going to foodbank our way out of hunger,” said Stuart Haniff, CEO of the RGV Food Bank.

America’s year of hunger: how children and people of color suffered most | Food | The Guardian

 The climate emergency and the greenhouse gas emissions have unleashed heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and other extreme weather.

Another problem is that the overheated atmosphere has in turn overheated the oceans, assuring a future sea level rise. As oceans heat up the water rises in part because warm water expands but also because the warmer waters have initiated major melt of polar ice sheets. There are various projections, mostly bleak. 

Sea level rise is accelerating at a dangerous pace. In 1900, global sea levels were rising 0.6 millimeters a year. After 1930, as ocean warming and water expansion kicked in, the rate of sea level rise doubled and doubled again, reaching 3.1mm a year by 1990. Since then, as ever-warmer oceans have driven polar ice melt, the rate of sea level rise has quickened further. Today, oceans are rising 6 mm a year (over two inches a decade), and this pace will continue to dramatically accelerate. Two inches a decade may seem a trifle but remember: we are just at the beginning of this acceleration. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected in 2017 that global mean sea level could rise five to 8.2ft by 2100. Four years later, it’s clear that 8ft is in fact a moderate projection. And regional influences – subsidence, changing ocean currents, and redistribution of Earth’s mass as ice melts – will cause some local sea level rise to be 20-70% higher than global.

A global mean sea level rise  could be two feet of sea level rise by 2040, three feet by 2050 under worse case scenarios. Sea level rise of that extent will transform human societies the world over. South Florida, residents will lose access to fresh water. Sewage treatment plants will fail, large areas will persistently flood, and Miami Beach and other barrier islands will be largely abandoned. In China, India, Egypt and other countries with major river deltas, two to three feet of sea level rise will force the evacuation of tens of millions of people and the loss of vast agricultural lands. It would flood much of New York and Washington DC, Shanghai and Bangkok, Lagos, Alexandria and countless other coastal cities underwater. Sea walls and levees protections will be in deep trouble.

Sea levels are going to rise by at least 20ft. We can do something about it | Climate change | The Guardian

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA), has released a report highlighting the inability of women control their own bodies and be free from violence or coercion.

Nearly half of the world’s women, in 57 countries, are denied the right to say yes or no to sex with their partner, use contraception or seek healthcare.

Twenty countries still allow rapists to marry their victims to avoid criminal prosecution.

Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of UNFPA, said such laws were “deeply wrong” and were “a way of subjugating women. The denial of rights cannot be shielded in law. ‘Marry your rapist’ laws shift the burden of guilt on to the victim and try to sanitise a situation which is criminal.” She explains, “The fact that nearly half of women still cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have sex, use contraception or seek healthcare should outrage us all,” said Kanem. “In essence, hundreds of millions of women and girls do not own their own bodies. Their lives are governed by others.”

43 countries have no legislation criminalising marital rape.

Dima Dabbous, director of Equality Now’s Middle East and Africa region, whose research is cited in the UNFPA report, said the laws reflected a culture “that does not think women should have bodily autonomy and that they are the property of the family. It’s a tribal and antiquated approach to sexuality and honour mixed together”.

More than 30 countries restrict women’s freedom outside the home.

“The denial of bodily autonomy is a violation of women and girls’ fundamental human rights that reinforces inequalities and perpetuates violence arising from gender discrimination,” said Kanem. “It is nothing less than an annihilation of the spirit, and it must stop.”

‘Marry your rapist’ laws in 20 countries still allow perpetrators to escape justice | Women’s rights and gender equality | The Guardian