There is something hugely hypocritical in the way that American political leaders and media pundits denounce the imprisonment of American citizens abroad, while staying silent about mass incarceration for similar offences in the US. 

Quite rightly, general outrage was expressed when basketball star Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years imprisonment on drug charges in a Russian labour camp earlier this month.

Vice-President Kamala Harris was swift to the moral high ground, demanding that Griner “should be released immediately. POTUS [President Biden] and I, and our entire Administration, are working every day to reunite Brittney …with loved ones.”

Nothing wrong with protests over what looks like a nasty bit of Russian hostage-taking, but not a word about an equally appalling case closer to home. 

This took place in Mississippi where the Supreme Court upheld in June a life sentence without parole for a man called Allen Russel who was convicted of possessing 43.71 grams of marijuana. 

On any given day, 374,000 Americans are in prison or jail for drug offences, often of the most minor kind.

John Ehrlichman, former long-time senior lieutenant of President Nixon, about Republican strategy 50 years ago, explained the rationale.

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about?” Ehrlichman said. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

The Age of Hypocrisies – CounterPunch.org

 Socialists are naturally concerned about whether or not political democracy exists under capitalism. The existence of some political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be by the class structure of capitalism, is central to our case for the peaceful propagation of socialist ideas culminating in the peaceful establishment of socialism by democratic political action based on majority socialist understanding. Freedom of discussion is the ideal, even indispensable, condition for the development of socialist ideas since it is only out of a full and frank discussion of their experiences under capitalism that the working class can come to acquire the majority socialist understanding necessary before capitalism can be replaced by socialism.

In the years since Russia followed Western advice from free marketeers to start privatising the state assets, a small number of people with links to officialdom became phenomenally rich. Having achieved power, Putin has sought to strengthen the Russian state and reassert Kremlin control of its regions and republics, where nepotism, corruption and crime abound. This increased militarisation of society, authoritarianism, and centralising of power, bonding with a tendency to see others as being either state or anti-state—just as in the USSR era when everything was categorised as Soviet or anti-Soviet. Putin’s desire is to return to Stalinist-style oppressive rule.It is because governments compete economically to help their own nation’s businesses (keeping wages, taxes and welfare low, weakening trade unions etc), so they must compete if they are to avoid others obtaining easy commercial advantages through armed intimidation and attack. Putin can also gain some domestic political advantage from nationalistic prestige and pride engendered in the population, but the overriding purpose of military expansion is to assist the possessors of productive assets. Because there are groups of oligarchs all over the world, populations are encouraged to see one another as “us” and “them”, or “the enemy”. The Russian people will continue to suffer from exploitation, poverty, deprivation, early deaths and assorted other troubles—including further dead sailors, soldiers and pilots. 

Ukraine is one of the artificial “nation-States” set up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, containing within its borders not only people whose mother-tongue is Ukrainian but a considerable minority whose first language is Russian.

A mere glance at the map of Europe shows why, for strategic reasons, Ukraine could never hope to pursue an independent foreign policy for any length of time. One end of the country points into central, the other leads into Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was motivated mainly by strategic considerations, the fear that the political changes begun in Maidan 2014 coup would lead to it to increasingly break away from the Russian empire.

In the post-war struggle between East and West to establish spheres of economic and political influence, global networks of alliances have been sealed with aid in the form of arms and supportive technology. The foreign policies of the two major powers have been essentially nothing more than preparations for war. It has continued despite the fall of the Iron Curtain. The barbarism of the war in Ukraine cannot be explained in terms of conflicting ideologies of malevolent leaders and nothing is more fallacious than the idea that increases in knowledge and the progress of what is called civilisation bring with them increased social harmony. The sterility and waste of capitalism are laid bare in its wars — men fall in their millions that shares might rise.

By disempowering all the presidents, the admirals, the generals, the ministers, the tycoons and any other minority who wants ownership and control of resources and people, choosing instead to possess and run these means of living ourselves. No more propertied class. No more leaders. No more us and them.

 At the Ukraine Accountability Conference in The Hague last month the international criminal court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, urged world leaders: “In all situations across the world where international crimes are committed, we should feel the same urgency for action and for cooperation.”

A few days ago the head of the World Health Authority, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has suggested that racism is partly to blame for the lack of international interest in the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray state.

Social justice must be for all – not just for whites.

The ICC has only targeted “anti-western” African leaders while brutal UK- and US-backed leaders in Africa continue to kill and maim with impunity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, has been fuelling some of the world’s bloodiest and nastiest killings. The slaughter and the raping, looting and displacement has not stopped.

In 2003, at the UN general assembly, the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, called for the creation of an international criminal tribunal for the DRC to hold perpetrators to account. The appeal, echoed by Congolese civil society groups, was ignored, with the UK, US and a host of western governments looking the other way while giving Kagame guns and money to operate as he pleased.  So far it has targeted only “low hanging fruit” including Thomas Lubanga, the ICC’s first ever conviction in March 2012, then Germain Katanga and Bosco Ntaganda. What then is the ICC’s purpose in Africa if it cannot investigate a president over “aiding and abetting” some of these crimes?

By 2008, when UN investigators arrived in the DRC to look into crimes committed before 2002 – when the ICC has no mandate – more than 5.4 million Congolese people had died in the 10 years since a rebel group called Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) was formed to loot the Congolese minerals.

In 2010, the UN published a 550-page report calling for the creation of a Congo tribunal to try 617 international allegations involving, among others, troops under President Kagame’s command in the DRC. That recommendation was ignored.

There are 5.6 million Congolese people internally displaced across the country. Another 27 million people, including 3.4 million children, are “acutely food insecure”. A 2011 US study estimated that 48 women were raped every hour. In 2017, UN investigators discovered 80 mass graves in the diamond-rich Kasai province. In 2019, the UN unearthed another 50 mass graves in Bandundu.

Where the victims of war are white, the ICC has already opened its own probe, its chief prosecutor has visited frontlines and sent its largest-ever field deployment and an international Ukraine war crimes tribunal to put Vladimir Putin in the dock is already in the pipeline.

Why then are the US and UK refusing to back the creation of an international criminal tribunal for DRC?

Justice should be colour blind. So why is it served for Ukraine but not the Congolese? | Vava Tampa | The Guardian

 The world’s top four grain traders, which have dominated the global grain market for decades – have seen record or near-record profits or sales.  The record bonanza amid soaring food prices around the world, raising concerns of profiteering and speculation in global food markets that could put staples beyond the reach of the poorest.

Food prices have surged more than 20% this year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. About 345 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme, compared with 135 million before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Olivier De Schutter, a co-chair of IPES-Food (the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems) and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said: 

“The fact that global commodity giants are making record profits at a time when hunger is rising is clearly unjust, and is a terrible indictment of our food systems. What’s even worse, these companies could have done more to prevent the hunger crisis in the first place.” Four companies – the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, known collectively as ABCD – control an estimated 70-90% of the global grain trade. “Global grain markets are even more concentrated than energy markets and even less transparent, so there is a huge risk of profiteering,” said De Schutter.

He said this year’s food price surge happened despite what are thought to be abundant global grain reserves, but there was insufficient transparency from the companies to show how much grain they hold and no way to force them to release stocks in a timely way. “We need to be looking at the grain giants and asking what they could have done to avert the crisis, and what they could be doing now,” De Schutter said.

Cargill reported a 23% increase in revenues to a record $165bn (£140bn) for the year ended 31 May, while Archer-Daniels-Midland made the highest profits in its history during the second quarter of the year. Sales at Bunge surged by 17% year on year in the second quarter, though its profits were affected by previously incurred charges. Louis Dreyfus reported profits for 2021 up by more than 80% on the previous year, as revenues rose by nearly a quarter to $1.62bn.

An NGO analysis suggests some food companies may be increasing their margins too.  Archers-Daniels-Midland increased its profit margin to 4.46% in the first quarter of this year, up from 3.65% in the same quarter in 2021, and Cargill’s margin increased from 2.5% last year to 3.2% this year.

Sandra Martinsone, a policy manager at Bond, a network of international development charities, said, “[The big agrifood companies] are clearly capitalising on the reduced supply and increased demand, further exacerbated by commodity trading,” she said. “When supply is significantly lower than demand, it gives space for price increase. But this is also exacerbated by speculative stock markets, since wheat and other commodities are traded on stock markets and therefore prices fluctuate.”

Alex Maitland, a senior adviser at Oxfam, said: “There are fears that speculation could be a driver in food price rises. Anything that causes hunger and starvation is immoral.”

Natalie Bennett, a UK Green party peer, explained, “…the handful of companies, with significant cross-ownership from hedge funds, that from seeds to supermarkets are major contributors to the inflation that’s driving the cost of living crisis to new heights.” 

Vicki Hird, the head of sustainable farming at the UK food coalition Sustain, pointed out,  “While farmers, consumers and food workers are suffering in the face of spiralling food and fuel prices, those sitting in the middle of the food chain – a small number of huge, dominant grain traders – are raking in vast profits.”

Despite rising input prices in the form of energy and fertiliser, all four of the ABCD companies profits look secure.

De Schutter said: “Ultimately, we need to break up the monopolies that have a stranglehold on the food chain. A handful of companies control global seed and fertiliser markets, animal genetics, the global grain trade, and food retail. They are making huge profits at the cost of farmers, consumers and the environment.”

Record profits for grain firms amid food crisis prompt calls for windfall tax | Food | The Guardian

Between February 24 and August 10, at least 942 children were killed or injured in Ukraine – an average of five children every day — with 356 children losing their lives and 586 wounded, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

The UN has said that the total number of casualties is likely to be much higher than those currently verified and the exact ages of all child casualties are not all known.

 Most of the verified child casualties were due to the use of explosive weapons in populated, urban areas.

Children in parts of the country are growing up on the frontlines of brutal warfare as urban areas are used as battlefields, leading to deaths and life-changing injuries, and destroying infrastructure needed to guarantee access to life-saving food and water.

Millions of children from Ukraine have fled their homes, with an estimated 3.1 million children living as refugees in neighbouring countries. About 3 million children are believed to be internally displaced inside Ukraine.

Save the Children’s Country Director in Ukraine, Sonia Khush, explained,  “Although children in Ukraine have nothing to do with the causes of the war, they are the ones most affected by it. They are growing up to the sound of bombs and shelling, and to the sight of their homes being destroyed, their schools damaged and their friends and family members being killed or injured.” Khush continued: “Children need more than humanitarian aid, they need hope: hope that this war will end; hope that they can return home; and hope for a bright future. Without meaningful support and an immediate cessation of hostilities, Ukraine will not only become a graveyard for even more children but also for children’s hopes and dreams.”

Save the Children is calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities as the only way to protect children from violence and other violations of their rights. The aid agency condemns attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, and the use of ballistic missiles and other inaccurate explosive weapons, which are causing civilian casualties, and violate international humanitarian law.

At least 16% of children killed in six months of war in Ukraine aged under 5 – Ukraine | ReliefWeb

 At one time, the plight of the Rohingya was headline news but now there is scarcely a mention in the media of the problems that they still face.

Nearly all of the approximately 730,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar in the second half of 2017 remain in sprawling refugee camps in southern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. The total number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh – including both those displaced by the 2017 atrocities and the several hundred thousand who sought refuge earlier – is close to one million. To date, not a single refugee has returned to Rakhine State through the formal repatriation mechanism that Myanmar and Bangladesh set up in 2017.  The Myanmar government showed no sign of addressing refugees’ concerns on key points, such as citizenship, security and livelihoods, failing to provide proper information on even the most basic questions, such as where the refugees — many of whom came from villages that the military razed to the ground after the 2017 exodus — would be sent after arriving at transit camps on the Myanmar side of the border. Myanmar shows little inclination to do more than pay lip service to repatriation efforts.

Living conditions for the refugees are poor and worsening. Most live in Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp in the world. They have few job opportunities and little access to formal education, while crime and violence, including killings of Rohingya community leaders, are on the rise. Factions within the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which launched attacks in Rakhine State in 2016 and 2017 that the Myanmar military used to justify its crackdown on the Muslim minority, have been fighting with rival groups for control of the camps. 

This development was foreseeable: for a country that still has high levels of poverty and unemployment, hosting over a million refugees is clearly an enormous challenge, particularly for the communities hosting them in Cox’s Bazar. 

Bangladesh is also making life more difficult for the refugees. It has progressively placed greater restrictions on their movement, including by fencing off the camps, and closed some private schools and businesses that were being run inside. There has also been little progress on delivering formal education using the Myanmar curriculum, something that many refugees say they want and Crisis Group has advocated for. 

For the estimated 600,000 Rohingya still in Myanmar, nearly all of whom live in Rakhine State, the situation remains bleak. The military regime has tightened restrictions on movement in some areas — and the country’s economic collapse over the past eighteen months has further worsened their plight. Around 120,000 live in displacement camps that were set up following an outbreak of communal violence in 2012. They are almost entirely dependent on international aid. The remaining Rohingya are also often caught between the military and the Arakan Army — sometimes having to pay taxes to both sides or wrestle with duplicative administrative requirements. Many would likely be caught in the crossfire if war were to resume. Not surprisingly, some are trying to leave the country through risky and expensive overland journeys, mainly to Malaysia. 

The coup also appears to have triggered something of a shift in the way at least some within the broader Myanmar population view the Rohingya. The vast majority among the country’s Burman majority population had accepted the military’s claims that its 2017 operations against the Muslim minority were a legitimate response to a terrorist attack, in part because the immensely popular Aung San Suu Kyi had also propagated this narrative. After the coup, though, many experienced or witnessed for the first time the military’s capacity for inflicting extreme violence on civilians, something that had until then been largely confined to ethnic minority regions. The junta’s brutality against Burman communities appears to have prompted some to reassess the events of 2017, concluding that the military did indeed commit atrocities against the Rohingya.

The National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel administration formed by ousted lawmakers and operating mostly from abroad, has also adopted a policy toward the Rohingya that guarantees their right to citizenship and commits to ending other discriminatory policies against them. Although these promises have not been tested, because the NUG is not in control of the state, they are nevertheless notable given that the NUG is largely an offshoot of Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, which did little to dismantle repressive policies against the Rohingya when it was in power.

Q&A: Five years on, Rohingya refugees face dire conditions and a long road ahead – Bangladesh | ReliefWeb

 Ominous warnings keep coming non-stop: some of the world’s developing nations are heading towards mass hunger. 

The World Food Programme (WFP) warned last week that as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night while the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million — since 2019. A total of 50 million people in 45 countries are teetering on the edge of famine. The WFP says it requires $22.2 billion to reach 152 million people in 2022. However, with the global economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap between needs and funding is bigger than ever before.

What seems like a cruel paradox is that the US Department of Agriculture estimates that a staggering $161 billion worth of food is dumped yearly into landfills in the United States. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said last November food waste in the United States is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply.

“Wasted food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills and represents nourishment that could have helped feed families in need. Additionally, water, energy, and labor used to produce wasted food could have been employed for other purposes’, said the FDA.

Professor Dr David McCoy, Research Lead at United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH), described the heartbreaking image of food being dumped in landfills while famine and food insecurity grows, must also be juxtaposed with the ecological harms caused by the dominant modes of food production which in turn will only further deepen the crisis of widespread food insecurity.

“The need for radical and wholesale transformation to the way we produce, distribute and consume food has been recognized for years. However, powerful actors – most notably private financial institutions and the giant oligopolist corporations who make vast profits from the agriculture and food sectors – have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their resistance to change must be overcome if we are to avoid a further worsening of the hunger and ecological crises.” 

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, stated that according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global food production and stocks are at historic high levels in 2022, with only a slight contraction compared to 2021.

“Skyrocketing food prices seen this year are rather due to speculation and profiteering than the war in Ukraine. It is outrageous that WFP has been forced to expand its food relief operations around the world due to speculation, while also having to raise more funds as the costs of providing food relief has increased everywhere”, he said.

Mousseau pointed out that WFP’s costs increased by $136 million in West Africa alone due to high food and fuel prices, whereas at the same time, the largest food corporations announced record profits totaling billions. Louis Dreyfus and Bunge Ltd had respectively 82.5% and 15% jump in profits so far this year. Cargill had a 23% jump in its revenue. Profits of a handful of food corporations that dominate the global markets already exceed $10 billion this year – the equivalent of half of the $22 billion that WFP is seeking to address the food needs of 345 million people in 82 countries.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that it is important that all governments and the private sector cooperate to bring them to market. Without fertilizer in 2022, he said, there may not be enough food in 2023.

Getting more food and fertilizer out of Ukraine and Russia is critical to further calm commodity markets and lower prices for consumers

Danielle Nierenberg, President and Founder, Food Tank said the amount of food that is wasted in the world is a huge environmental problem–if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’ve done a good job over the last decade of creating awareness around food waste, but we haven’t done enough to actually convince policymakers to take concrete action…” 

Millions Go Hungry– While Billions Worth of Food Go into Landfills | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

The SOYMB blog does not hold any confidence that governments will place people’s priorities before business profits.

 Chief executives of the UK’s 100 biggest companies have seen their pay jump by 39% to an average of £3.4m,  compared with £2.5m in 2020 during the height of the coronavirus pandemic when many bosses took a voluntary pay cut as they placed millions of employees on furlough. CEO pay has also surpassed the £3.25m median recorded in 2019, before the pandemic according to research by the High Pay Centre thinktank and the Trades Union Congress.

The jump in executive pay means that the average UK CEO now collects 109 times that paid to the average British worker, up from 79 times in 2020.

The data also shows that FTSE 100 CEOs’ annual bonuses jumped to £1.4m compared with £828,000 in 2020. Nine in 10 of the bosses received a bonus.

In total, the FTSE 100 firms spent more than £720m on pay awarded to 224 top executives. 

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said the growing disparity between pay at the top and that paid to workers is fuelling the cost of living crisis. 

“Workers deserve a fair share of the wealth they create. But right now, CEO pay is soaring while working people experience the biggest real wage falls in 20 years, she said. “These unbalanced pay policies have seen the gap widen between workers and bosses this year, adding to the cost of living crisis.”

Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, said: “Very high executive pay is a big part of the cost of living problem. If large employers are paying millions more to already very wealthy executives, that makes it harder to fund pay increases for low and middle income workers.”

The highest paid FTSE 100 CEO, according to the research, was Sebastien De Montessus of Endeavour, which operates goldmines in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Senegal. He was paid £16.9m. The second-highest paid boss was Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca, who was paid £13.9m.

Average pay for FTSE 100 chiefs jumps by 39% to £3.4m | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian

Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (IWCA) in 1978to protect American Nativ e children from forced removal from their families, tribes, and culture and preserve tribal sovereignty.

It addressed the nationwide problem of state child welfare agencies taking Native children from their families and placing them in non-Native homes, in an attempt to force Native children to assimilate and adopt white cultural norms. Before ICWA, public and private agencies were removing 25 to 35 percent of Native American/Alaska Native children from their homes, and 85 percent of those children were placed in non-Native households.

Beginning in the early 1800s, the architects of the Federal Indian Boarding School Program designed the program to erase the Indigenous identities of Native people. The government snatched children as young as four years old from their families and sent them to militarized boarding school institutions designed to destroy their Native identities and culture, often hundreds of miles away from their tribal homelands. Any markers of their Indigeneity — language, clothing, traditional hairstyles, and even their names — were prohibited in these institutions. Indian boarding schools were places where Native youth were stripped of their culture: many children died at these schools from outright neglect, malnutrition, untreated illness, and as a result of physical violence carried out against them.

In 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Indian Adoption Project. The project’s explicit goal was to assimilate Native children into white culture through adoption and the intentional destruction of Indigenous family units and tribal communities. During this era and continuing today, practices rooted in ethnocentric stereotypes operating under the guise of “child protection” resulted in the baseless separation of thousands of Native children from their families and homelands.

This November, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Brackeen v. Haaland, a case that challenges the constitutionality of ICWA. If the Supreme Court rules ICWA unconstitutional, it could have far-reaching consequences for Native children, families and tribes while simultaneously putting the existence of tribes in jeopardy. Brackeen v. Haaland is the largest threat to Native children, families, and tribes before the Supreme Court in our lifetimes. If ICWA is overturned, states would once again be allowed to tear Native children from their families, tribes, and culture while simultaneously threatening tribes’ very existence. The legal arguments made by the plaintiffs challenging ICWA in Brackeen undermine key tenets of federal Indian law, and threaten many other laws upholding tribal sovereignty. The outcome of Brackeen v. Haaland could put centuries-long legal precedent upholding tribal sovereignty — including tribes’ right and ability to preserve their unique cultural identities, raise their own children and govern themselves — in jeopardy.

Native Families’ Right to Stay Together is at Stake at the Supreme Court | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)

 Bangladesh is one of the world’s largest tea producers, exporting tea to more than 20 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Nearly 150,000 people work at more than 200 Bangladeshi tea plantations, mostly located in the Sylhet region in northern Bangladesh.

But tea pickers, most of whom are female, work long hours and earn some of the lowest wages in the country. Most tea workers are low-caste Hindus, the descendants of labourers brought to the plantations by colonial-era British planters in the 19th century. They say little has changed for tea workers over the generations. Tea garden workers are among the lowest paid in the country.

Researchers say tea workers – who live in some of the country’s remotest areas – have been systematically exploited by the industry for decades. The United Nations says they are one of the most marginalised groups in the country, with limited access to basic facilities and education.

“Tea workers are like modern-day slaves,” said Philip Gain, director of the Society for Environment and Human Development research group. “The plantation owners have hijacked the minimum wage authorities and kept the wages some of the lowest in the world.”

The tea workers have been holding a strike for nearly two weeks to demand raise in daily wages amid rising inflation. They say the current daily wage – 120 taka (about $1.25) – was barely enough to buy food, let alone other necessities such as health and education. The workers’ union is demanding a 150 percent (300 taka or $3.15 a day) rise in their daily wages. 

“No tea worker will pluck tea leaves or work in the leaf processing plants as long as the authority doesn’t pay heed to our demands,” said Sitaram Bin, a committee member of the Bangladesh Tea Workers’ Union.

“Nowadays, we can’t even afford coarse rice for our family with this amount,” Anjana Bhuyian, a tea plucker, explained. “A wage of one day can’t buy a litre of edible oil. How can we then even think about our nutrition, medication, or children’s education?”

Thousands hit the streets after fuel prices were hiked by more than 50 percent two weeks ago.  Protesters blocked the Sylhet-Dhaka highway as they escalated the strike.

Luchee Kandu and her husband work on a plantation. 

“We hardly get any type of facilities, don’t have enough money for our children’s education, we barely get 3kg flour as ration once a week. Some days we don’t even get to eat, which is why we are protesting,” Kundu pointed out in Srimongal, known as Bangladesh’s tea capital.

Why are Bangladesh tea garden workers protesting? | Workers’ Rights News | Al Jazeera