While many parts of the world endure heatwaves and drought, Pakistan’s monsoon rains have brought deadly floods.

Almost a thousand dead including children, over 3.1 million people displaced, 710,000 livestock drowned and thousands of kilometres of roads and many bridges destroyed. 

It isthe worst floods in a decade which have destroyed homes, crops, livelihoods and infrastructure and leaving millions vulnerable. Pakistan is experiencing abnormal monsoon rainfall nearly ten times higher than usual, resulting in uncontrollable urban and flash floods, landslides, across the country.

Chairman of Pakistan Red Crescent, Abrar ul Haq said, “The situation is worsening by the day. These torrential floods have severely restricted transportation and mobility… and damage to vehicles, infrastructure and connectivity are further making our emergency relief works almost impossible. Most of those affected are also immobile or marooned making us hard to reach them…” He added, “We fear the worst is yet to come as these kinds of waters could mean the risk of water-borne diseases are looming over the heads of our people.”

 As gold prices have surged so have rates of killings, extortion and violent land invasions in Peru. Criminal gangs have taken advantage of lax law enforcement, unemployment and rising poverty. Where they need land they steal it. In 2019, the authorities  launched a clampdown on illegal mining, Operation Mercury. The goal was to raze La Pampa, home to about 25,000 people, from the map. It did get results. Deforestation caused by illegal mining dropped by 92%. But a lack of strategy and political will has undone the advances, according to Karina Garay, a former environmental prosecutor in the 2019 taskforce.\

“We advanced one step with Mercury, now we’ve gone back two steps,” she says. “There have always been mafias here. Now that the illegal miners have returned, so have the criminals.”

There are more than 46,000 people mining in Madre De Dios, according to a recent report, far more than the 2020 report by Peru’s mines ministry, which estimated there were about 50,000 in the entire country.

‘They attacked with machetes’: murder, mafias and illegal mining in Peru’s gold fields | Global development | The Guardian

 In the United States those who have committed crimes and have been punished by being put into prison, emerge after their period of sentence to further retribution. 

All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time spent in jail. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. 

“Pay-to-stay” laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s. As prison populations swiftly rose, policymakers questioned how to pay for the cost. So, instead of raising taxes, the solution was to shift the cost burden from the state and the taxpayers onto the incarcerated, themselves.

Laws vary from state to state. To collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison, said Dan Barrett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. That included things like insurance settlements, inheritances and lottery winnings, and even money awarded to inmates in lawsuits over alleged abuse by prison guards. 

In Connecticut, onve released, an ex-prisoner will face a debt of $249 for each day behind bars. 

At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt | AP News

Modern capitalist production is no longer carried on in tens of thousands of small businesses employing three or four workers. Where such enterprises continue to exist, their influence and effect on economic life are negligible. Their place has been taken, by huge corporations employing tens or even hundreds of thousands of workers at one time across the world.

The idea that monopolies can be eliminated and replaced by free-market competition among numerous small-scale independent producers, is an idle dream which can never become a living reality. Multinational monopolies are not the creation of “evil men” which can be undone by “good men.” It is an inevitable and inescapable product of capitalist development. The capitalist class itself has become largely divorced from production.

 They have become shareholders, owners of stocks and bonds with the actual work of management and superintendence, which is necessary and valuable in any society, is no longer done by the capitalist or owner of industry. It is performed by hired executives. They are simply highly skilled workers in the profession of organising production, albeit often rewarded in share options and sharing in the profits and dividends.

Capitalist production means the accumulation of capital and production for the market. Capitalism is a world system. It has created a world market. It has brought the entire world under its complete domination. But capitalism is divided into a number of more or less independent national powers. It is among them that the struggle for world control goes on fiercely. It is a struggle frightful in its consequences. The economic competition among the various nation-states is exceedingly sharp. It becomes sharper when the capitalists of every country seek new markets abroad or protect existing spheres of influence from encroachment by other nations. No capitalist class can possibly rest content with the markets it already has. Capital accumulation is always the goal for investors.

Profits made by the neo-colonial exploitation of developing and undeveloped countries are extraordinarily high. Foreign workers are employed and are made to toil incredibly long hours at incredibly low wages. In many cases, of sweat-shops, are outright slaves. Secondly, they are a rich source of raw materials which may be obtained cheaply with little concern for the workers and the environment. These resources are obtained from the indigenous ruling class rulers by corruption and bribery, and if necessary simply seized and kept by force.  Wealth is sucked out of these vulnerable countries, depriving them of any independence regardless of the blood spilt in various national liberation struggles.

 Once the world is divided, and there were no more defenceless nations and peoples that can be controlled, occupied, dominated and exploited, the bigger stronger nations can only expand their share of the world market by cutting the share of some other power. And as the iron law of capitalism is that you must expand or stagnate and die, the stage becomes set for military conflicts. For a period, it is possible to confine the rivalries to mere economic warfare and trade wars. But the point is reached where, such economic pressure for one side, is not enough, or sufficiently menacing. The economic struggle turns into a military confrontation. That is the origin of modern wars. The cause of wars are fto caputure lucrative areas of capital investment and trade expansion. Working people fight them, die  and get maimed in them. The capitalist always wins them.

Naturally if the plain and simple truth about the reason for wars were told it would be impossible to recruit or garner support for them. That is why the capitalist media keep filling the heads of the people with propaganda and poisonous ideas so that they are willing to kill and be killed. Patriotism and nationalism are imbued into the minds of every citizen from birth. Foreigners are depicted as possible and potential foes who must be defended against. Social spending must be cut for the welfare services to ensure adequate budgets are directed towards acquiring weaponry from the armament industries.

 Capitalism is not production for use. All the statesmen, all the industrialists, all the bankers, all the politicians and economists of capitalism, are unable to make capitalism serve the needs of the people. For capitalism, war functions excellently.  Money flows like water. There are undreamed-of profits. 

Capitalism stands self-condemned. Its usefulness of the past is now long gone. If it is allowed to continue, the world will only plunge deeper into suffering and destruction.

 “It pains me to be the bearer of bad news, when millions of people in the region have already suffered the longest drought in 40 years. Sadly, our models show with a high degree of confidence that we are entering the 5th consecutive failed rainy season in the Horn of Africa. In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, we are on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” said Dr. Guleid Artan, Director of the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), which is WMO’s regional climate centre for East Africa.

The forecast for October to December issued at the Greater Horn of Africa Seasonal Climate Outlook Forum shows high chances of drier than average conditions across most parts of the region. In particular, the drought affected areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are expected to receive significantly below normal rainfall totals through until the end of the year.

The October to December season contributes up to 70% of the annual total rainfall in the equatorial parts of the Greater Horn of Africa, particularly in eastern Kenya. The rainfall deficits are likely to extend to parts of Eritrea, most of Uganda and also Tanzania.

Greater Horn of Africa faces 5th failed rainy season – Ethiopia | ReliefWeb

While drought in the developed world means hose-pipe bans for the developing and undeveloped world, it is a matter of life and death.

 Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization says 54 million Americans are going hungry today. 

Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) cites 140 million poor and “low-wealth” people in America today, which is 42 percent of the U.S. population. 

The poverty rate is 14.4% as of Feb. 2022.

In America today, 1 in 6 kids are in families below the poverty line. 

The child poverty rate in January 2022 was 17%. Some 3.4 million children live in poverty in America as of February 2022.

Some 14.4 % of America’s population or around 46 million Americans live in poverty today.

 6 in 10 Americans don’t have $500 in their savings account. Some 69% of Americans have less than $1000 in their savings account

 Inflation has surged to the fastest in the last 40 years.

54 Billion for Ukraine While in the U.S. Millions Suffer in Poverty (informationclearinghouse.info)

“Being a wage slave, even with the best conditions, is no life at all” 

At the next election, the working class will decide which party’s appearance is the most appealing and we shall have a Labour or a Conservative government and capitalism will stay with us. Some voters think that only certain politicians make a mess of things; in fact, the whole of the capitalist system is a mess. It is working-class ignorance and apathy which keep that mess there; and, ironically, it is the working class who pay the price of their folly.

Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The ruling class have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is a ruler, then no one is a ruler. The more power everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us. This is why so much politics goes into ensuring that votes have as little effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure everything stays the same no matter what the public wants. In a system where money is power, the ruling class naturally needs to suppress the wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.

Imagine if working people started having as much influence over the direction human civilisation as the oligarchs and plutocrats. Imagine if everybody could work less and relax more, and start discovering what’s really going on in the world. Our capitalist world is perpetually at war, social injustice is rampant, and human and animal suffering is too commonly accepted or overlooked. Capitalist greed drives this malevolence. Capitalist greed with its insatiable appetite for profit creates chaos.  Socialism affirms our compassion and shared humanity, replacing violence with harmony. The world’s predicament is not one that can be resolved via piecemeal legislation. In the end, it’s either profit over people or people over profit – and, if the latter arrangement is ever to be obtained, it requires nothing less than a comprehensive overthrow of capitalist society.

The worker is the source of all wealth. Who has raised all the food? The worker. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich? The worker. Who manufactures all the products? The worker. Yet workers remain poor and destitute, while those who do not work are wealthy. 

One of the first goals of a socialist world would be to put all of these important economic resources under the common ownership and collective control of the people. By doing so, the majority of the population would decide what the priorities of production and distribution should be. Technology could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city and every region in the world to determine the needs and availability of resources for every community, a way that would let the system know how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day). The system would then balance out all the claims and society would immediately know where there were excesses and where there are shortages can alter production accordingly. It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms to food processors, warehouses to supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers.  

Somewhere a supermarket manager is scanning barcodes and tomorrow a supply truck will turn up with whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is in general incredibly efficient. However, in today’s world the process today is carried out only if they believe it will make money and a profit. That’s the limitation to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation couldn’t be run instead to meet human needs. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to transporting it to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and logistics to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. Under capitalism, shareholders reap the rewards of the impoverished, exploited workers.

With socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labour and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries.

Along with its inability to distribute things equitably, capitalism generates a huge amount of waste.

First is the mountain of things that are thrown out because they aren’t sold. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of wastage happens at the farm and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually extra work to keep people starving—food producers and sellers have to put extra time into organising to dump or remove unsold produce, rather than simply allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus they wasted all the labour producing it in the first place only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. 

Second is the huge amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or with short lifespans so that people come back and buy them over and over again.  It’s such a waste of labour and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to drive wages lower and just produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products.

Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the staff associated with them: things like the legal profession or sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that to the investment in marketing: that in the United States alone will reach US$4.7 trillion in 2025. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, expended by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart.

Socialism would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to:

First, what do we all need?

Second, what do we want?

Third, how many resources do we have?

Fourth, what are our priorities?

A huge amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions of:

“How do I make people want to buy this product? How can I generate a profit?” 

Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour and energy that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to produce so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. 

Socialism would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is.  But take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. Socialism, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Getting to a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to get past capitalism. But once we are there, it will be quite easy to use existing technologies and processes to run the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. 

Adapted from here

What Would Be Different About a Socialist Economy? | Portside

 In 2009, ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) published a report titled Who Will Feed Us? in which they cite the statistic that small-scale farmers feed 70 percent of the world (that is, they produce 70 percent of the food that actually goes to feeding people, vs. crops that are diverted for biofuels, animal feed, or other non-food uses). This distinction is important—they aren’t claiming that smallholder farmers produce 70 percent of net calories, but 70 percent of the food that ends up being consumed by people.

They assert, based on available data, that 50 percent of global crop production for human consumption can be attributed to small-scale farms under 5 hectares (this is relatively uncontroversial in the research). Then, they added in food resulting from practices like hunting and gathering, fishing, pastoralism, as well as small-scale urban and peri-urban food production, which accounted for an additional 20 percent of food consumed. These forms of food production are mostly informal—and chronically undervalued—so it’s difficult to ascertain exact figures, but they are nonetheless important ways that people feed themselves around the world.

Two papers, published by Vincent Ricciardi et al. (2018) and Sarah Lowder et al. (2021), both claim that small-scale farmers account for just 30 percent of global food production—quite a jump down from 70 percent. This has led to a slew of headlines implying that these findings prove that small-scale agriculture is inefficient and incapable of feeding the world and that we should invest in industrialised methods instead. 

The studies were full of methodological errors and assumptions that warrant further scrutiny.

They measured crop production for small-scale vs. industrial farms, completely neglecting how much of that food is going to feed people. The reality is that industrial farms divert a significant percentage of crops to biofuels, animal feed, and other non-food uses. Even calories grown for animal feed, which could be argued to still be contributing to food security, are highly inefficient; nonprofits GRAIN and IATP estimate that for every 100 calories fed to animals, only 17 to 30 end up in the meat that humans consume. Measuring production alone doesn’t tell us much about food security.

Their dataset included only 55 countries (or two-fifths of the global population). Over half of these countries are European, where small-scale farming is, indeed, more marginal. The researchers ignore large swaths of Africa, South East Asia, and other regions where small-scale farmers account for a significant percentage of food production. And yet they make sweeping claims about global peasant food production.  It’s nonsensical to rely on a dataset that erases the vast majority of countries where small-scale farmers exist, neglect to include the majority of food production methods they employ, and then make claims about their ability to feed the world.

Ricciardi’s team referenced another study in 2016 that uses a dataset that includes far more Majority World countries. They found that if they applied their methodology to this dataset, they would reach the conclusion that 76 percent of food calories are produced by farms under five hectares, which is significantly higher than even ETC.

Lowder et al.’s paper made the assumption that land and production have a correlative relationship; if large farms make up 80 percent of the agricultural land, then large farms must make up 80 percent of food production. But the reality is that not all farms are equally productive. Small farms tend to outproduce larger ones per hectare. Lowder’s paper assumes that since small farmers only occupy a small portion of land, they must also only produce a small portion of the food. But that’s the whole point — while small farmers do occupy a small portion of the land, they (a) produce more than large-scale farms per hectare, and (b) devote more of their food to people, rather than non-food uses. They’re also able to produce food using significantly fewer resources and without industrial agriculture’s huge environmental and social externalities. Second, for many large farms (more so than smaller farms), a significant percentage of produced calories are diverted to biofuels, animal feed, and other uses. Again, Ricciardi et al. found that farms under 2 hectares devote a greater proportion of their production to food, while farms over 1,000 hectares have the greatest proportion of post-harvest loss. Simply measuring production doesn’t tell us very much about food security. And yet, production remains the dominant metric.

Both papers also define a “small farm” as a farm under 2 hectares, when the FAO itself has stated that creating a standard cutoff for farm size is unwise because what is considered “small” varies from country to country.

These two papers have led to when you search “how much of the world’s food do smallholder farmers produce,” these are the results that come up, based on research that is, at best, deeply flawed. Their assumptions make their research basically useless for determining which agricultural path we should pursue, taking all externalities and environmental impacts into account. The implications of these papers justifying industrial agriculture are dangerous. We cannot measure success on production alone. We must begin widening the metrics to include biodiversity, environmental impact, and equity.

The debate places the onus unfairly on peasant and small-scale farmers to prove they can produce enough food to feed the world (even though we have ample country-level data showing that small-scale farms outproduce large-scale farms). We must ask, then, why the onus is not placed on industrial agriculture to justify why the percentage of the calories they deliver to people is so low; why there is so much waste; why so many calories are inefficiently allocated while using such vast amounts of land and resources.

It just seems implausible to those who accept capitalism that small-scale farming really can be more productive per-hectare than large, industrial farms. But most of the world does not get their food from industrial sources. Some believe that they should. But the industrial system’s efficacy is far from proven, especially when loss, waste, and non-food uses are taken into account. In fact, the evidence points squarely in the opposite direction. As the climate crisis deepens, we are collectively waking up to the immense harms of the industrial system — environmental degradation, corporate consolidation and exploitation.

Can small-scale farmers feed the world? (substack.com)

This blog will not weary of exposing the preventable suffering of our African fellow workers and it will not tire of explaining that world socialism is the only permanent answer to the recurring problems of poverty and hunger in Africa.

Across the Horn of Africa, at least 36.1 million people have now been affected by the drought which began in October 2020, including 24.1 million in Ethiopia, 7.8 million in Somalia and 4.2 million in Kenya. This represents a significant increase from July 2022 (when an estimated 19.4 million people were affected).

At least 20.5 million people are already waking each day to high levels of acute food insecurity and rising malnutrition across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, and this figure could increase to between 23 and 26 million by September 2022, according to the Food Security and Nutrition Working Group (FSNWG). In Somalia, 7.1 million people are now acutely food insecure—including over 213,000 people in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5)—and eight areas of the country are at risk of famine between now and September 2022, with Bay and Bakool regions of particular concern. About 9.9 million people in Ethiopia and some 3.5 million people in Kenya are severely food insecure due to the drought.

 Across the three countries, malnutrition rates are alarming: about 4.6 million children are acutely malnourished, including about 1.3 million who are severely acutely malnourished. In Ethiopia, nearly 2.2 million children under age 5 are acutely malnourished, including nearly 705,000 who are severely malnourished. In Kenya, about 942,500 children aged 6-59 months are affected by acute malnutrition and need treatment, including 229,000 severely malnourished, and in Somalia, an estimated 1.5 million children under age 5 face acute malnutrition, including 386,400 who are likely to be severely malnourished, according to IPC.

More than 16.2 million people cannot access enough water for drinking, cooking and cleaning across the Horn of Africa, including 8.2 million in Ethiopia, 3.9 million in Somalia and 4.1 million in Kenya, according to UNICEF. Many water points have dried up or diminished in quality, heightening the risk of water-borne diseases and increasing the risk of skin and eye infections as families are forced to ration their water use and prioritize drinking and cooking over hygiene. Existing water deficits have been exacerbated by very high temperatures, which are forecast to continue until at least September 2022. In some of the worst affected areas in Somalia, water prices have spiked by up to 72 per cent since November 2021. Women and girls are having to walk longer distances to access water—in many instances up to double or triple the distances they would have to walk during a regular dry season—exacerbating their potential exposure to gender-based violence and dehydration. Water shortages are also impacting infection prevention and control in health facilities and schools. In Ethiopia and Kenya, there are already reports of an increase in pregnant women being exposed to infections—the worst of which have resulted in death—following deliveries both at home and at health facilities due to the limited availability of water.

Over 8.9 million livestock—which pastoralist families rely upon for sustenance and livelihoods—have died across the region, including 3.5 million in Ethiopia, 2.4 million in Kenya and over 3 million in Somalia.

Food prices are spiking in many drought-affected areas, due to a combination of macro-economic challenges, below-average harvests and rising prices for food and fuel on international markets, including as a result of the war in Ukraine. In Somalia, staple food prices in drought-hit areas have surpassed the levels recorded during the 2017 drought and the 2011 famine, according to WFP’s price monitoring. In Ethiopia, the cost of the local food basket increased by more than 33 per cent between January and June 2022, according to WFP. Soaring prices are leaving families unable to afford even basic items and forcing them to sell their hard-earned properties and assets in exchange for food and other lifesaving items. There are also repercussions for food for refugee programmes, which are already impacted by reduced rations due to lack of funding support.

Horn of Africa Drought: Regional Humanitarian Overview & Call to Action | Revised 24 August 2022 – Ethiopia | ReliefWeb