Child marriage robs girls of their childhood and threatens their lives and health.

And girls who marry before 18 have worse economic and health outcomes than their unmarried peers, which are eventually passed down to their own children, further straining a country’s capacity to provide quality health and education services.

Child brides often become pregnant during adolescence, when the risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth increases – for themselves and their infants.

The practice can also isolate girls from family and friends and exclude them from participating in their communities, taking a heavy toll on their physical and psychological well-being, 

The following facts and figures, which have been compiled by the two main world specialised bodies -UNICEF and UN Population Fund (UNFPA), should suffice to unveil such a flagrant human rights violation.

— Child marriage refers to any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child.

While the prevalence of child marriage has decreased worldwide – from one in four girls married a decade ago to approximately one in five today – the practice remains widespread.

— Child marriage can lead to a lifetime of suffering. Girls who marry before they turn 18 are less likely to remain in school and more likely to experience domestic violence.

— Young teenage girls are more likely to die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s, and their children are more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month of life.

— Infants born to teenage mothers are also more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month of life.

— Wherever they occur, harmful practices rob girls of their childhood, deny them the chance to determine their own future and threaten the well-being of individuals, families and societies.

… And the figures

— Globally around 21% (over 1 in 5) of young women were married before their 18th birthday.

— 650,000,000 girls and women alive today were married as children.

— 12,000,000 girls under 18 are married each year. And more than 150 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030.

Where most?

UNICEF and UNFPA also report that, across the globe, levels of child marriage are highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, where around 4 in 10 young women were married before age 18, followed by South Asia, where 3 in 10 were married before age 18.

Lower levels of child marriage are found in Latin America and Caribbean (25%), the Middle East and North Africa (17%), and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (11%).

Among a raft of alarming statistics, a UN report has just found that children account for around 28 percent of trafficking victims globally. And that Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean have the highest share of children among detected trafficking victims, at the rates of 64 and 62 percent, respectively.

Let alone that girls are forced by traffickers and smugglers to sexual exploitation. “Sexual tourism has a child face. No country is untouched and no child is immune.”

Child Marriage – 800 Million Girls Forced to Be Mothers | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Year in and year out we release millions of tonnes of CO2 and methane gases into the atmosphere. Every year acre upon acre of tropical rainforests are destroyed or seriously degraded. So, at the same time, we are destroying the plant life that uses carbon dioxide and converts it into oxygen. The result is global warming. Many of the dangers are well understood but nobody knows for sure and nobody can predict with certainty the critical tipping points when any combination of such changes might produce a sequence of further rapid changes which would be catastrophic from a human point of view. It must be obvious that a set of problems that are global in scale, affecting populations across the entire planet, can only be effectively tackled by cooperation between all peoples. You can’t have the world divided up between rival capitalist states — all riven by economic competition both within their boundaries and between each other and all driven by the economic pressures of profit and class interests, with a good many of them at actual war with each other — and expect to be in a position to solve the problems of the global environment. Effective action has got to be based on world cooperation.

To get the cooperation we first have to get rid of the present system which is based on economic competition. We need to establish a system based instead on common ownership, a world where all means of producing and distributing goods and all productive resources are held in common by the whole community. This means the end of the wages system through which workers are exploited for profit and the end of producing goods for sale so as to get that profit. It means people living and working in the community in a relationship of direct cooperation with each other, producing the goods and running the services that we need. This is a way of organising the community where the use of money will be entirely redundant.

If we establish common ownership, if we set up a society that is run solely for human needs as a result of people cooperating together, we are at last in a position where we can control our actions. Under capitalism, we are at the mercy of economic forces that nobody can control. Get rid of these economic forces and we are at last in a position to make democratic decisions about how best to use production for the benefit of the community.

Socialism is not the instant solution to problems but the means by which we can resolve problems. In socialism, we get the release of all productive resources — machinery, transport, raw materials, energy and labour — for the benefit of the community, but as, to start with, there will be a great deal to do we would have to make choices. We would have to make decisions in line with agreed priorities of action.

We’ve got to supply a lot more food, so that has to be increased. We’ve got to supply decent housing for everyone and that is an enormous world project. The mention of just these two priorities of action means that we would need a lot more energy and, as we know, the supply of energy is one of the worst villains in this problem of environmental damage.

It is clear that socialism will have to do two things at the same time: increase the supply of energy and do it in ways that protect the environment.

Do we keep on using nuclear generators knowing that inevitably this leads to what we do with their radioactive waste?

Do we keep on burning oil, knowing that oil is an immensely useful material that can supply thousands of very durable products? The burning of oil in power stations is in fact the kind of profligate waste that only capitalism could go in for.

What about coal, do we keep on burning it? There is no doubt that the burning of coal can be made less damaging by the installation of pollution-abatement equipment but it is expensive. In socialism, money would not be a factor. So we could if we wished to go on burning coal in a less damaging way and, of course, there are immense world reserves of this. Or simply,  we could agree to keep coal in the hole.

However, most people would agree that the most desirable way of producing energy is with the various renewable, benign methods such as solar, wind and wave power etc. This is clearly where the future lies.

Socialism would be free to go in for rapid development of these ecologically-benign methods. With the establishment of socialism, we will throw off the economic shackles of the profit system and break through into the freedom to use all our talents, skills and energies to solve problems through cooperation and collaboration.

America’s Great Plains are being torn up with frightening implications for biodiversity and carbon storage. Everyone knows about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but grasslands are off their radar

Grasslands used to cover a large swath of North America before European settlement. When Europeans arrived, they quickly plowed up about half of the grasslands on the continent and converted them to agricultural use, growing corn, soybeans and wheat. And today, new research shows the rate that the ecosystem is being lost has been increasing.

Patrick Lendrum, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund’s northern Great Plains program, led a research team that released a report in September showing that from 2018 to 2019 an estimated 2.6m acres of grassland were plowed up, primarily to make way for row crop agriculture – an area larger than Yellowstone national park. Lendrum says. “That’s an alarming trend.” It’s also a huge blow for efforts to fight the climate crisis and represents a little reported unfolding environmental disaster in the US.

Farmers and ranchers make decisions based on global commodity prices. There’s an increased demand for crops for human food, livestock feed and fuel. Biofuels like ethanol boomed in 2009 or 2010 and that increased demand.

“Grasslands are mostly used for grazing of livestock and when that balance gets out of line, and crop agriculture becomes more profitable, that’s when we see the resurgence of the tillup,” says Tyler Lark, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who has studied grasslands for the past decade.  Lark is also studying the ways that croplands are being turned into housing – so the total amount of cropland isn’t expanding that much, but it’s being developed for residential use, and crops are being pushed to the periphery. “It’s almost a cascading effect, as we look at future urban expansion,” he says.

There are enormous implications for climate change when people dig up grasses that have been intact for hundreds of years, because grasslands store tons of carbon in their soils. Native prairie grasses have deep roots that stabilize the soil and prevent erosion. When people plow it up, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. It also exposes the soil to the air, which increases erosion and can also lead to nitrate leaching. People often think of forests as natural ecosystems that store huge amounts of carbon, Lark says. But grasslands store immense amounts as well, out of sight, under the ground. “When we plow those up, a lot does become lost. If we can reduce the conversion, that will go a long way in lowering emissions.”

Once grasslands have been destroyed for agriculture, Lendrum says, it can take decades or even centuries to restore them. The WWF is working with landowners to convert croplands back into grasslands, but the process is slow and expensive. “Once that piece of grass is initially tilled, it’s very difficult to restore those ecosystem benefits,” says Lendrum. “Carbon in particular, it’s a slow process.”

Lark says the future is really about using the croplands we have already in the most efficient manner, and improving yields. “There is lots of room to expand production without expanding cropland area – it’s just easier to expand area than work on innovation.”

 Just as increased attention to rainforests and savannah led to protecting them globally from deforestation, the same level of awareness could be applied to grasslands. Lark says he could see campaigns around native ecosystems, conversion-free supply chains, and products that aren’t contributing to the loss of grasslands.

Ben Turner, a natural resource management scientist at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas, says “We’re not going to reclaim even a small percentage of all the grasslands we’ve lost,” he says. But farmers can make cropland as functional as grasslands used to be, by diversifying crop systems, integrating livestock with crops, and finding ways to value ecosystem services like pollinators and migratory birds.

America’s native grasslands are disappearing | Endangered habitats | The Guardian

100,000 marched through the streets of Glasgow on Saturday demanding that “something” is done about climate change. Many, many more protested in other cities around the world. 

The global warming crisis as depicted by mainstream media is narrowly conceived and identified most basically as driven by excessive emission of greenhouse gases caused by humans as the result of bad choices made by the economy by humans. The solution is simply to choose a different set of policies that do not lead to excessive emission of greenhouse gases. The changes necessary therefore does not require any systemic restructuring of human society merely some adjustment of its priorities. The problem, however, is far deeper. Capitalism is the cause of the ecological crisis we face. 

The World Socialist Movement (WSM) seeks to dispel the mistaken idea that this environmental crisis is an exception and simply the result of an aberration within the otherwise rational order of the world market and profit accumulation. The system of capitalism must be placed at the centre of any explanation as to the cause of the abuse and destruction of nature. This means accepting that replacing capitalism role as the world’s economic structure is vital and crucial to any answer to the climate emergency

The answer cannot be one of the integration of nature into ‘green’ capitalism and ‘green’ solutions marketed for profit. Capitalism has fully exposed the system’s destructive consequence to nature, guaranteeing food insecurity, driving small family farmers out of business, off the land and frequently into starvation. Socialism is indispensable to any real solution to the environmental crisis. 

Without the vision of a better world and the organisation to change things that go with it, the protests of the green campaigners will go nowhere. We are running out of time and soon there may well be no future at all

Capitalism is the real enemy, not people themselves. Capitalism is overwhelmingly the driver of planetary ecological collapse, from climate change to resource depletion to pollution. Today, a roaring out-of-control economic system is cutting down forests, sweeping clean oceans and seas, gouging out mountains for minerals and ores, pumping toxic effluents into rivers and out lakes, devouring destroying fragile ecosystem built up over millennia. Capitalists and corporations aren’t totally evil, (although many are), but they can’t stop themselves. They’re just doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing for their shareholders, returning dividends and raising their stock prices. That’s what is demanded. The conglomerates can’t end poisoning and pillaging, looting and polluting, trashing the planet into one giant global land-fill site. All that matters is senseless business growth, regardless of the ringing of alarm bells or the sight of red warning lights. 

Solutions to the ecological crisis are blindingly obvious but don’t make “economic” sense to the investors’ logic.

 We all know the answers. Stop excessive greenhouse gas emissions. Cease wasteful consumption of resources. End the harmful pollution of the soil, water, and air.

We don’t need any new technology to solve these problems. We just need to halt doing what we’re doing. But we can’t because of being locked into an economic system in which companies have to grow to compete and reward their shareholders.

Our aim is a society that serves the welfare of humanity and the well-being of our environment. The WSM offer no blueprint here or anywhere else for the society we dare to imagine and seek to build other than to help organise the large majority of the population toward this goal. We are living in terrifying times and no-one knows what seeds will take root.

The US secretary of agriculture, Thomas Vilsack, said: “I do not think we have to reduce the amount of meat or livestock produced in the US. And a significant percentage is exported. It’s not a question of eating more or less or producing more or less. The question is making production more sustainable.”

In an interview at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow Vilsack claimed that livestock production could be made more efficient, and the amount of methane produced by farm animals reduced, which along with other measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture would be enough to reduce carbon from farming.

Meat accounts for about 60% of greenhouse gas production from agriculture, which itself is one of the highest carbon-producing sectors globally. 

The US, the EU and scores of other countries signed a deal at Cop26 to reduce global methane emissions by 30% by 2030, though none of the countries has taken on a firm national reduction goal under the deal. If the target is reached, global heating could be reduced by about 0.2C. Cattle and sheep produce methane, as does animal manure. The potent greenhouse gas has a heating effect about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though it breaks down sooner.

Campaigners have focused on meat-eating as a key source of greenhouse gas emissions around the world, but particularly in the US where a meat-heavy diet has become the norm over decades. People in the US eat close to 100kg of meat a year, more than any other country, although there has been a trend towards healthier eating among younger people in recent years. Meat-eating is also a driver of deforestation around the world, as rainforest in countries such as Brazil is cleared for cattle ranches and to produce animal feed.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: “It’s time politicians stopped giving cover to the industrial meat industry. At the moment they get a free ride and we pay the price for their huge health and environmental impacts.”

Vilsack said: “If you reduce methane by livestock by 30%, by food additives or different feed, or you capture the methane to biogas – take the manure and use it as biofuel – then you have made livestock production more sustainable. I do not think you need to reduce meat consumption to get that.” He added: “If we are going to feed 9 billion people, you need meat protein. We will need plant, animal and fish protein.” He said the US was financing demonstration projects for new technology and farming methods that would reduce methane. 

Americans can eat meat while cutting global heating, says agriculture secretary | Cop26 | The Guardian

 A key talking point against the free sharing of vaccine recipes was premised on a false assertion.

In response to October 2020 proposal from India and South Africa that the World Trade Organization suspend enforcement of key patent rules so that cheaper, generic versions of Covid-19 treatments and vaccines can get to more people more quickly, the proposal is referred to as a TRIPS waiver, a reference to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Pfizer and Moderna, both of which produce mRNA vaccines, insisted how intellectual property incentivizes creativity, and rewards those who save lives. Sharing vaccine recipes, they claimed was not the panacea because much of the world lacks the facilities and capacity to produce vaccines in a safe and timely manner. Even if we got rid of all intellectual property rules tomorrow, this would do little to boost immediate global vaccine supply.

Big Pharma warned of the laborious and time-intensive process of developing the ability to produce mRNA vaccines specifically. ​

“There is no idle mRNA manufacturing capacity in the world. This is a new technology, you cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA—those people don’t exist,” Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, said in May.

 ​”Only a few facilities in the world perform some of the critical steps needed to manufacture mRNA vaccines,” industry trade group PhRMA, which represents Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, asserted in March.

It turns out not to be true. 

On October 22, the New York Times ran a story titled, ​”Here’s Why Developing Countries Can Make mRNA Covid Vaccines”.

NYT identified 10 different facilities in India, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Argentina and Indonesia that are strong candidates for producing mRNA vaccines. ​

“The key criteria include existing facilities, human capital, the regulatory system for medicines and the political and economic climate,” writes journalist Stephanie Nolen. Some of the facilities are already producing other vaccines, or testing or making their own mRNA vaccines. In other words, Global South countries could absolutely start producing Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if the companies would only tell them how. 

 Indonesia’s health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, said at a World Health Organization event that the country has the capacity to ​”upscale our vaccine productions to meet regional and global demand.” 

“Moderna’s former director of chemistry estimates that modern factories could start manufacturing mRNA vaccines within a few months if sufficient know-how is transferred,” Oxfam noted.

According to recent research by Doctors Without Borders, Africa-based manufacturers are currently prepared to make mRNA vaccines if provided access to the necessary production information.

 The pharmaceutical industry was not driven by altruistic motives: the desire to protect innovation and research, and ensure safe and responsible vaccine production. Instead, they sought to protect pharmaceutical monopolies and their profits.  The drug industry has shown it would rather build its own facilities from scratch—like the BioNTech facilities in Rwanda and Senegal, which won’t even start construction until mid-2022—than give Global South countries the ability to produce vaccines themselves. 

“It’s clear that Pfizer and Moderna cannot supply enough vaccines to make sure everyone on the planet has access, so they must figure out a way to share the technology and know-how,” Robbie Silverman, Oxfam America’s senior manager for private sector engagement, said in a statement. “Pfizer’s and Moderna’s inability to produce enough vaccines threatens global public health and the world economy—as long-term investors, we urge these companies to take immediate action to save lives.”

“Continued vaccine inequality will not only cause more deaths and suffering around the world, it will also devastate our global economy, possibly to the tune of trillions of dollars,” Silverman added. “While a few are profiting handsomely, investors recognize the dangers of vaccine apartheid and are seeking to hold these companies accountable.”

In its Moderna shareholder resolution, Oxfam urged the corporation to share its “intellectual property and technical knowledge (‘know-how’) to facilitate the production of Covid-19 vaccine doses by additional qualified manufacturers located in low- and middle-income countries.”

“Independent estimates indicate that Moderna will miss its 2021 production target of one billion doses by 33%,” the document reads. “To ensure equitable access, Moderna should transfer the intellectual property and know-how associated with its vaccines to allow manufacture in low- and middle-income countries. Pressure, including by the U.S. government, is intensifying on Moderna to make such transfers.”

Taken from here

Opinion | Big Pharma Lies About Vaccine Patents to Protect Profits | Sarah Lazare (commondreams.org)

‘Unprecedented’ Shareholder Resolutions Call on Pfizer, Moderna to Share Vaccine Tech (commondreams.org)

 The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year.

 Elon Musk became the first person to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion.

 According to Inequality.org, America’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The wealthy class are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

We’re talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don’t. This same class influences the policies, laws, and large-scale behavior of our species more than any other.

 Imagine if you had seen a video clip of me calmly watching a child drown to death in a swimming pool and doing nothing to help. After watching such footage, would it ever in a million years occur to you that I am someone who should be in charge of the entire world?

I’m going to guess no. I’m going to guess that, in the unlikely event that you ever decided anyone should rule the world, after watching me let a child drown I’d rank somewhere near the very bottom of possible candidates.

Now imagine if instead of letting one child drown, it was millions.

That’s how absolutely insane it is that we allow this class to shape our civilization. And we most certainly do allow them to shape our civilization.

Take Bill Gates. After pledging to give his immense fortune away over a decade ago; his net worth has more than doubled in that time.

Nobody who chooses day-after-day to let millions of people die of starvation has any business making decisions which affect other people, much less decisions which affect everyone. The fact that the billionaire class and its lackeys make this depraved decision day in and day out permanently disqualifies them from any legitimate claim to having the empathy and compassion that would be required for such a job. They are too narcissistic and dysfunctional to be permitted to have any power or influence whatsoever, much less the ungodly amount they wield today.

Billionaires should not exist. They should have their power and wealth taken from them, and the steering wheel of humanity should be given to the ordinary people who are infinitely more qualified to navigate us through the rough waters ahead for our species.

Taken from here

Billionaires Not Morally Qualified to Shape Civilization – Consortiumnews

 In 2020, disasters, primarily triggered by weather-related hazards, resulted in 30.7 million forced movements. 

That is more than three times the number prompted by conflict and violence.

 India is cutting the taxes on petrol and diesel to “further spur the overall economic cycle”, the government said. However, the move is also expected to boost demand for fuel as countries try to curb fossil fuel consumption. The tax cuts are also expected to increase consumption of petrol and diesel even as global leaders, including Mr Modi, have been gathering for the COP26 climate change conference to tackle the global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels.

 The poorest 50%, however, will be most severely impacted by climate change.