In Mexico City, tortillas prices have soared by one-third in the past year. Mexico’s food inflation is hardly alone. Latin America’s sharpest price spike in a generation has left many widely consumed local products suddenly hard to attain, without any relief in sight.

The COVID-19 pandemic and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent fertilizer prices sharply higher, affecting the cost of agricultural products including corn. Global fuel prices jumped, too, making items transported by truck to cities from the countryside costlier. 

Latin America as a whole is suffering from “sudden price spikes for necessities,” the World Bank’s President David Malpass said during an online conference Thursday. He noted that energy, food and fertilizer prices are rising at a pace unseen in many years. Last year, the World Bank estimated that the region’s economy grew 6.9% as it rebounded from the pandemic recession. This year, Malpass said, it’s projected to grow only 2.3%.

“That’s not enough to make progress on poverty reduction or social discontent,” he added.

In Chile, annual inflation was 10.5% in April, the first time in 28 years the index has hit double digits. 

Colombia’s rate reached 9.2%, its highest level in more than two decades.

 In Argentina, whose consumers have coped with double-digit inflation for years, price increases reach 58%, the most in three decades. Last year, the average Argentine consumed less than 50 kilograms of beef for the first time since annual data were first collected in 1958.

Brazil’s inflation has topped 12% — its fastest pace since 2003.  The price of tomatoes, for example, has more than doubled in the past year. Ground coffee has become so expensive that shoplifters have started focusing their sights on it. A daily espresso cost has shot up 33% since January, to 8 reais ($1.60).

It has been decades since the region’s countries simultaneously suffered soaring inflation. A key difference now is that the global economies are much more interconnected, said Alberto Ramos, head of Latin America macroeconomic research at Goldman Sachs. “It will take at least a couple of years of relatively tight monetary policy to deal with this,” Ramos said.

That means belt-tightening and going without some consumer staples, for now, is likely the new norm for the poorest members of society in the notoriously unequal region. More than one-quarter of Latin America’s population lives in poverty — defined as living on less than $5.50 a day — and that’s expected to remain unchanged this year, according to a World Bank study. 

Pricey tortillas: LatAm’s poor struggle to afford staples | AP News

In Mexico City, tortillas prices have soared by one-third in the past year. Mexico’s food inflation is hardly alone. Latin America’s sharpest price spike in a generation has left many widely consumed local products suddenly hard to attain, without any relief in sight.

The COVID-19 pandemic and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent fertilizer prices sharply higher, affecting the cost of agricultural products including corn. Global fuel prices jumped, too, making items transported by truck to cities from the countryside costlier. 

Latin America as a whole is suffering from “sudden price spikes for necessities,” the World Bank’s President David Malpass said during an online conference Thursday. He noted that energy, food and fertilizer prices are rising at a pace unseen in many years. Last year, the World Bank estimated that the region’s economy grew 6.9% as it rebounded from the pandemic recession. This year, Malpass said, it’s projected to grow only 2.3%.

“That’s not enough to make progress on poverty reduction or social discontent,” he added.

In Chile, annual inflation was 10.5% in April, the first time in 28 years the index has hit double digits. 

Colombia’s rate reached 9.2%, its highest level in more than two decades.

 In Argentina, whose consumers have coped with double-digit inflation for years, price increases reach 58%, the most in three decades. Last year, the average Argentine consumed less than 50 kilograms of beef for the first time since annual data were first collected in 1958.

Brazil’s inflation has topped 12% — its fastest pace since 2003.  The price of tomatoes, for example, has more than doubled in the past year. Ground coffee has become so expensive that shoplifters have started focusing their sights on it. A daily espresso cost has shot up 33% since January, to 8 reais ($1.60).

It has been decades since the region’s countries simultaneously suffered soaring inflation. A key difference now is that the global economies are much more interconnected, said Alberto Ramos, head of Latin America macroeconomic research at Goldman Sachs. “It will take at least a couple of years of relatively tight monetary policy to deal with this,” Ramos said.

That means belt-tightening and going without some consumer staples, for now, is likely the new norm for the poorest members of society in the notoriously unequal region. More than one-quarter of Latin America’s population lives in poverty — defined as living on less than $5.50 a day — and that’s expected to remain unchanged this year, according to a World Bank study. 

Pricey tortillas: LatAm’s poor struggle to afford staples | AP News

 Millions of people will starve to death unless Russia allows the export of Ukrainian grain from blockaded ports, foreign ministers from the G7 have said.

The G7 governments said the Russian president was pushing 43 million people towards famine by refusing to allow cereals to leave Ukraine via Black Sea ports.

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, told reporters: “We need to make sure that these cereals are sent to the world. If not, millions of people will be facing famine.”

Before the war, Ukraine and Russia accounted for a third of global wheat and barley exports. Since Russia’s  invasion, Ukraine’s ports have been blocked and civilian infrastructure and grain silos destroyed.

Adding to the problem, India, the world’s second largest producer of wheat, has banned all exports with immediate effect after a heatwave affected the crop. In addition, India’s vast stocks of wheat, a buffer against famine, an extensive food welfare programme that usually feeds more than 80 million people, have been strained by distribution of free grain during the pandemic to about 800 million people, 

The rise in global prices for wheat was threatening the food security of India and neighbouring and vulnerable countries. A key aim is to control rising domestic prices. Global wheat prices have increased by more than 40% since the beginning of the year.

India had set a goal of exporting 10m tonnes of the grain in 2022-23, looking to capitalise on global shortage of wheat supplies from the war and find new markets for its wheat in Europe, Africa and Asia. Much of that would have gone to other developing countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

India bans all wheat exports over food security risk | India | The Guardian

 The International Labour Organization estimates more than 160 million children are in child labour globally.

UNICEF says approximately 12 percent of children aged 5 to 14 years are involved in child labour – at the cost of their childhood, education, and future.

Of the 160 million child labourers worldwide, more than half are in sub-Saharan Africa, and 53 million are not in school – amounting to 28 % aged five to 11 and another 35 % aged 12 to 14

 According to the 2011 census, at least 720,000 of Venezuela’s 28 million inhabitants are indigenous, belonging to some 40 native peoples, and close to half a million live in rural indigenous areas, mainly in border regions.

Although the largest indigenous group (60 percent) is the Wayúu, an Arawak-speaking people who live on the Colombian-Venezuelan Guajira peninsula in the north, most of the native peoples are in the south of the country. Some groups have thousands of members but others only a few hundred, and their languages and ancestral knowledge are at risk of dying out.

The voracious search for gold in southern Venezuela, practiced by thousands of illegal miners under the protection of various armed groups, represents the greatest threat today to the lives of indigenous peoples, their habitat and their cultures, according to their organizations and human rights defenders. 

In this part of the Amazon jungle, “mining, violence, habitat destruction, death from disease and forced migration make up a context that indigenous people are calling a silent genocide,” researcher Aimé Tillet, who has worked in the area for many years, told IPS.

At the other end of the country, along the northwest border with Colombia, indigenous people are fighting for their territories, which has led to clashes and deaths in their attempts to recover ancestral lands, while they are often reduced to destitution.

There are common features of life in border regions that are home to indigenous peoples, such as neglect by the government, which fails to fulfill its duties in health, education, security, provision of food, fuel and transportation, supplies, communications and consultations with native peoples regarding the use of their land and resources.

The government foments mining activity and in 2016 decreed the “Orinoco Mining Arc” on the right bank of the Orinoco river – an area of 111,844 square kilometers, larger than Bulgaria, Cuba or Portugal. In parallel, it established an armed forces company, Camimpeg, to spearhead the mining of gold, diamonds, coltan and other conventional and rare minerals, in which the country is rich.

The local press has reported on the involvement of military and police units in the region in incidents related to mining activity that have sparked protests by indigenous people and human rights activists, ranging from deaths of native people in altercations to massacres in which “unknown groups” have killed dozens of people. Artisanal and illegal mining, in hundreds of deforested areas and along rivers contaminated with mercury used to extract gold from ore, are often controlled by criminal gangs that call themselves “syndicates” and that traffic in gold and supplies, as well as in people who work in the mines, who are often subjected to forced labor.

According to human rights groups, for some years now another danger has been Colombian guerrillas, particularly the National Liberation Army (ELN), which is involved in mining and other illegal activities in the southern state of Amazonas, as well as dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which laid down its arms under a 2016 peace deal. In the Sierra de Perijá mountains, home to three native peoples and part of the northern border between Colombia and Venezuela, the ELN has made inroads into indigenous communities, setting up camps, collecting “vacunas” – taxes or protection payment – from cattle ranchers, overseeing cattle smuggling and recruiting young people as guerrilla fighters.

In the “currutelas” or mining villages, young men and boys work extracting gold-rich sands, while women are employed to cook, sweep, wash and clean the camps, and are exploited sexually.

This situation, seen in the hundreds of mining camps in Amazonas and the southeastern state of Bolívar, which covers some 238,000 square kilometers, is aggravated in the case of indigenous peoples, lawyer Eduardo Trujillo, director of the Andrés Bello Catholic University’s Human Rights Center, which is conducting several studies in the area, told IPS.

“Under the control of armed groups, dynamics of violence are generated, with confrontations and deaths, and conditions of modern-day slavery, where omission translates into acquiescence on the part of the Venezuelan State,” Trujillo added.

In particular, indigenous women recruited to work in the camps “are caught up in a dynamic of violence: their work is not voluntary, sometimes they are not paid, and they are subjected to risks to their health and lives,” he said.

Mining in Venezuela contributes to the figures of the International Labor Organization (ILO), according to which more than 40 million people around the world are victims of modern-day slavery, 152 million are victims of child labor and 25 million are forced laborers.

The environmental organization Provita reports that 380,000 hectares have been deforested south of the Orinoco in the last 20 years, while the area dedicated to mining increased from 18,500 to 55,000 hectares between 2000 and 2020.

Riverbanks and headwaters have been especially affected, many in areas theoretically protected as national parks. Tillet stressed that, in addition to the environmental damage they suffer, these are areas of limited resources for subsistence, for which indigenous communities and miners are now competing.

“Because they depend on mining for an income, indigenous people are forced to abandon their traditional activities of planting, fishing and hunting, their diet deteriorates, malnutrition and diseases such as malaria increase, and they are forced to say goodbye to their land, to move and migrate,” said Tillet. The researcher said that health services, which are the responsibility of the State, have practically disappeared, and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic, while education has collapsed as teachers move away and migrate, with the result that “children who should be in school now work in exploitative conditions in the mines.”

The Yanomami and Ye’kuana organizations said they were victims of selective killings, contamination of water with mercury, contagion from diseases and, in short, “a silent cultural genocide.”

Mining Destroys the Lives of Indigenous People in Venezuela | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

KPMG will pay one of the largest fines in UK audit history, after former staff forged documents and misled the regulator over audits for companies including the collapsed outsourcer Carillion. The FRC is separately investigating KPMG and former Carillion directors over the audit, and preparation of Carillion’s 2016 accounts.

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) – which regulates accountants – confirmed the £14.4m settlement at a London tribunal hearing on Thursday, and said KPMG would also face a “severe reprimand” over the “extremely serious” misconduct related to employees’ false representations to the watchdog.

The tribunal upheld allegations by the FRC that KPMG and former staff created false meeting minutes and retroactively edited spreadsheets, before sharing those documents with the FRC.

KPMG’s total fine would have been worth £20m – the largest fine on record, ahead of the £15m fine issued to Deloitte in 2020 over its historic audits of the software company Autonomy – but the figure was reduced to £14.4m to reflect the accounting firm’s willingness to admit guilt.

“The misconduct found in this case is extremely serious,” Ellison told the tribunal. “It cuts at the very heart of the protection of the public interest in the respondents’ regulator, the FRC. It was misconduct deliberately aimed at deceiving AQR inspectors appointed by the FRC.”

The tribunal, which began in January, will consider over the coming weeks the penalties for individual KPMG staff, including one of its partners, Peter Meehan. The FRC recommended on Thursday that the 60-year-old be banned from the accounting and auditing sector for 15 years and face a fine of at least £400,000. The regulator also believes that three other KPMG staff – Alistair Wright, Richard Kitchen, and Adam Bennett – should each be excluded from the sector for 12 years and face a £100,000 fine. Pratik Paw, who was a more junior member of the team at the time of the misconduct, could face a four-year exclusion and a £50,000 fine.

 Tesco’s  chief executive Ken Murphy’s pay package included a £3.21m bonus, while the finance director, Imran Nawaz, earned a £1.24m bonus – taking his total to £5.4m for the year, including a £3.5m “golden hello” relating to bonuses he lost out on in leaving his former employer, Tate & Lyle.

TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “A Tesco customer assistant would have to work for 267 years to get what the Tesco boss was paid for just one year. “

Murphy’s and Nawaz’s pay is dwarfed by the total of £10.5m paid out to Tesco’s former finance director Alan Stewart in the past year, including £8.58m from cashing in share awards related to historic performance by the business that matured on his exit on top of £1.95m in pay. Former chief executive Dave Lewis also continues to benefit from his time at Tesco, with £1.89m from a deferred bonus and share award paid out last summer.

Tesco criticised as chief pockets £4.75m amid soaring prices | Tesco | The Guardian

 Volume 1 of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report said approximately 19 Federal Indian boarding schools accounted for more than 500 deaths. The number of recorded deaths is expected to rise as the department continues investigating 

From 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 federal schools across 37 states or then territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii.

“…the federal Indian boarding school system deployed systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies in an attempt to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children through education, including but not limited to renaming Indian children from Indian to English names; cutting the hair of Indian children; discouraging or preventing the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages, religions and cultural practices; and organizing Indian and Native Hawaiian children into units to perform military drills…”

The report found boarding school rules were often enforced through “corporal punishment like solitary confinement, flogging, withholding food, whipping, slapping and cuffing.”

Preston S. McBride, an Indian boarding school historian and a Comanche descendent. McBride has found more than 1,000 student deaths at the four former boarding schools he has studied, and estimates the overall number of deaths could be as high as 40,000.

“Basically every school had a cemetery,” he said. “There are deaths at or deaths because of virtually every single boarding school.”

Those deaths were the result of everything from illness to abuse, McBride said, based on his review of historical records. Getting to the true number would take a significant amount of time and research, McBride said. “I think we have a long way to go.”

Hundreds Of Native American Children Died In U.S. Government-run Abusive Schools| Countercurrents

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott in a joint statement with the National Border Patrol Council protested about feeding migrant children in U.S. custody amid a national shortage of infant formula.

Carl Takei, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU. commented “Gov. Abbott and NBPC are literally demanding that the government lock babies in cages and then starve them of the sustenance they need to survive,” I just can’t come up with the words to describe how despicable and inhumane this is.” He continued “I’m especially blown away by the explicit contrast this statement sets up between ‘our children’ (who are vulnerable, precious, and deserve survival) vs. the not-our-children who deserve to starve in our baby jails.” 

Texas Gov. Abbott’s Solution to Formula Shortage? Let Migrant Babies Starve (commondreams.org)

A new report out this week from the groups Beyond Plastics and The Last Beach Cleanup found that plastic recycling rates have actually fallen in the US since the emergence of “advanced recycling” in 2018, from its highest ever point of 9% to less than 6% today, compared with a 66% recycling rate for paper.

“They’re finally kind of admitting that recycling hasn’t worked,” Beyond Plastics president Judith Enck said of groups like ACC and its members that have been lobbying against environmental protections. “And it doesn’t work by design. It’s not like they’re surprised by this. They knew all along it wouldn’t work.”

 A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline showed how companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow and Dupont were aware of the inefficacy of plastic recycling, yet they still strategized marketing campaigns that told a different story to the public.

In April, California attorney general Rob Bonta launched an investigation into ExxonMobil for its role in exacerbating the global plastic pollution crisis. Bonta says his investigation started with ExxonMobil because they’ve been a leader, in the plastics industry and in the messaging around recycling. A report out last year from the Mindaroo Foundation found that just 100 companies produce 90% of the world’s plastic pollution. It pinpointed ExxonMobil as the top producer in the world of single-use plastic. The International Energy Agency has  predicted that plastic production, which is forecasted to double by 2040, will be the biggest growth market for the oil industry over the next decade.

ExxonMobil said it is “focused on solutions” like building the first “commercial-scale advanced recycling technology” and that “meritless allegations like these distract from the important collaborative work that is under way”. But like regular old recycling, “advanced recycling” has so far shown little to no results.

Also known as pyrolysis or chemical recycling, the process entails using various chemical processes to turn plastic into other materials. The most common approach is warming plastic at very high heat to turn it into a low-grade fossil fuel, which can then be used either as fuel or as a feedstock for more plastic. The technology is still in its infancy, but early studies have found that like earlier versions of plastic recycling, the “ advanced” method is expensive, and that it’s difficult to collect and effectively recycle a wide variety of plastics. It also delivers few environmental benefits, not just because it’s used to create either fuel or more plastic, but also because the process itself is emissions intensive. One study commissioned by plastic manufacturers themselves found that advanced recycling generated more greenhouse gases than either landfilling plastic or burning it.

Bonta says he’d love to see advanced recycling work, but right now it’s just “words on paper”. A 2021 Reuters investigation found several examples of failed advanced recycling programs, noting that out of 30 projects operating around the world, all were either still operating on a modest scale or had shut down, and more than half were years behind schedule on previously announced commercial plans. A report from the Natural Resources Defense Council published in March noted that even when it “works” advanced recycling is not an environmentally friendly solution.

The American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a trade group for the chemical industry, has been pushing advanced recycling since China shut its borders to used plastic in 2018. The group has also been lobbying state governments to exempt their recycling process from various environmental regulations – 18 states have laws on the books that either side-step certain government oversight or designate advanced recycling facilities as eligible for subsidies. It’s part of a strategy former Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy called “getting ahead of government intervention”.

Exxon doubles down on ‘advanced recycling’ claims that yield few results | Plastics | The Guardian