Food aid reliance is set to triple to 3.4 million people in Myanmar within months, the World Food Program has warned. The WFP in its press release blamed three primary causes: Myanmar’s February military coup, “pre-existing poverty,” and the global coronavirus pandemic’s spread across Myamar.

WFP’s director for Myanmar, Stephen Anderson, said families were already “skipping meals” in the 10 poorest suburbs of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

“More and more poor people have lost their jobs and are unable to afford food,” said Anderson, depicting a “sharp” rise in “hunger and desperation.”

Prices for staples — such as rice and cooking oil — had risen nationwide, especially in Myanmar’s border areas of Chin, Kachin, Rakhine and Shan states. For example, said Anderson, rice prices had soared by up to 43% in some townships of Kachin state and cooking oil by 32%. Prices for fuel had increased by “roughly 30% nationwide,” he said.

“The world must act immediately to address this humanitarian catastrophe.” 

In Myanmar’s eastern Karen border region — near Thailand — 24,000 subsistence rice farmers had been displaced by recent military air and ground mortar strikes, said David Eubank of the Christian aid group, Free Burma Rangers. Unable to safely return home to tend their paddy fields, “you’re looking at a six-month problem of no food,” said Eubank.

UN: 3 million facing hunger in coup-hit Myanmar | News | DW | 22.04.2021

101 Nobel laureates published a letter urging world leaders and governments to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” as a critical first step toward addressing the climate emergency. 

The letter notes that the climate emergency “is threatening hundreds of millions of lives, livelihoods across every continent, and is putting thousands of species at risk.” It adds that “the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—is by far the major contributor” to the crisis. The letter concludes. “Allowing the continued expansion of this industry is unconscionable. The fossil fuel system is global and requires a global solution—a solution the Leaders Climate Summit must work towards. And the first step is to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

101 Nobel Laureates Urge World Leaders to ‘Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground’ | Common Dreams News

 Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islamic practice. Every adult Muslim is required to perform hajj once in a lifetime if they can afford the journey. The Saudi royal family has been  profiting from Hajj and has turned Hajj into a lucrative business. Hajj is a huge asset for the Saudi economy, bringing in about $12 billion annually, and may catch up with oil as the country’s main economic asset. Hajj revenues are expected to reach $150 billion in 2022, according to economic experts.

The Saudi authorities have been attempting to convert Mecca from just a religious capital where pilgrims visit it every year in specific times to a luxury city where people would come for commercial reasons. The House of Saud has issued licenses for the construction of 500 hotels near the Grand Mosque in Mecca. 

Mohammed roughly foretold the marketization of Hajj in one of his hadiths:

 “Near the time of Judgement Day, the rich ones from amongst my people will perform Hajj for the sake of travel and holidays. The middle class will perform Hajj for commercial purposes, thereby transporting goods from here to there while bringing commercial goods from there to here. The scholars will perform Hajj for the sake of show and fame. The poor will perform Hajj for the purpose of begging.”

“In the Land of Invisible Women”, the British-American physician Qanta A. Ahmed writes that to some Saudi women “VIP Hajj meant…being waited on hand and foot and enjoying a sense of superiority over…dark-skinned maids from Mecca, poor women who had to work for a living and chose to make a few extra riyals in Hajj season.” 

While the rich enjoy in their lavish quarters, poor pilgrims – mainly from Africa and South Asia – can be seen sitting, eating and sleeping adjacent to shopping complexes constructed near Kaaba.

Rosie Bsheer argues: “In Mecca…urban redevelopment plans centered on the complete overhaul of the city’s physical, cultural, social, and economic landscape. The multi-billion dollar mega projects have been replacing historical sites, cultural landmarks, and private properties in the neighborhoods circling Mecca’s Grand Mosque. Petro-resources, circulated through Saudi Arabian banks in the form of loans to contractors and Mecca’s real estate market, will turn Central Mecca into a collection of mixed-use developments comprising upscale international hotels and short-term and permanent residences, as well as state-of-the-art commercial facilities and markets…”

The Abraj Al Bait Complex project consists of hotels, malls and apartments, valuing $3 billion, with 15,000 housing units and 70,000 square meters of retail space. Mecca is fast becoming a “Vegas” for wealthy pilgrims, with a hotel that has four helipads, five floors for Saudi royalty, and 10,000 bedrooms on 45 levels, called Abraj Kudai. Along the western edge of the city, Jabal Omar Development has been constructed, a complex that will eventually accommodate 100,000 people in 26 luxury hotels – sitting on a large plinth of 4,000 shops and 500 restaurants, along with its own six-storey prayer hall.

Instead of making Hajj a more egalitarian experience for all Muslims, the Saudi royal family has squandered revenues on perpetrating massacres and wars in Muslim lands, such as the bombing of Yemen, the indirect attacks in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Sudan.

In 2019, Libya’s Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani called for all Muslims to boycott the pilgrimage and went as far as stating that anyone who embarked on a second hajj was committing a sin, rather than a good deed. 

A year earlier, the association of “Imams and Religious Leaders” in Tunisia released a statement calling upon Tunisians to boycott the pilgrimage, and urging would-be pilgrims to spend their money on disadvantaged groups in the country. The secretary general of the association, Fadil Achour, told Al-Jazeera that Saudi Arabia “spends Muslims’ money on wars against its neighbors rather than creating development opportunities.” 

Profiting from Hajj: Commodification of Spirituality | Countercurrents

 “The government of Americans means to have its way through the use and threatened to use of superior force. It will lie. It will deceive. It will kill. It will escalate the threat and use of force to the highest level it dares. It will bluff, dangerous as that can be. It will do whatever is must to dominate. It does this in the face of the fact that its very preparation for a nuclear war may destroy all life.” –  Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 1986

 Business Advice

Become a friend to the Prime Minister,

Who will be always open to offers

For contributions to party coffers,

Which are definitely never sinister,

Just free expressions of philanthropy,

Though the tax breaks are not to be ignored,

Then serve your queen and country as a lord

In the ‘other place’, where you deserve to be.

You must, of course, eschew publicity

For all of your largesse and selfless acts,

Quietly fulfilling government contracts

The electorate do not need to see.

But, if people find out more than they should,

Just insist it’s all for the public good.

D. A.

The Socialist Party represent an idea which is unfashionable these days, an idea which is ignored by the media, dismissed coldly by politicians, and avoided by anyone who prefers the status quo to stay put. This idea is the cooperative commonwealth.

 You already know that in our world, private property is king, and that the rich make the rules. You probably know that only about 5 percent of the world’s population is rich, while 95 percent does all the work and lives in varying degrees of poverty, debt and stress. You may have concluded that this situation causes everything from street crime to international warfare, and you have almost certainly suffered yourself from the effects of overwork, deprivation and other people’s “anti-social” behaviour. Considering that private property society, or capitalism in its developed form, was built by human beings, it is an amazingly anti-social and unfriendly system, and it brings out the worse in us. We treat each other with suspicion and we treat the planet with contempt.  

This state of affairs is bad news all round, but what can be done?

 The politicians’ response is to ignore the problem and talk about trivia instead, hoping nobody will notice. Look at their manifestos. That’s why nothing changes. Our response is direct, and simple: the 95 percent need to sort their act out and abolish the private property principle, that mutual agreement that says one person has the right to own and keep what other people need, even if they should die because of it. And every single day, people are dying because of it. The real enemy of humanity is not a person or a group of rich people, it is simply this agreement.

Privately-owned property is an anachronism in this day and age. There is enough food in the world to make every individual fat. There are ten empty houses to every homeless person. Technology is producing abundance so fast that commodity prices keep collapsing, yet nobody has yet recognised what this all means. It means that there is a higher level of civilisation, of science, or arts, of culture, of personal fulfilment, waiting to come after capitalism—an advanced society which, because it has abolished scarcity, does not contain all the horrors that have dogged human organisation until now. From the standpoint of such a society, we in capitalism are still living in the Dark Ages, with our wars, famines, pollution and other disasters, and our outlook is suitably bleak. 

 A post-scarcity society seems a dim and distant image, a matter for the 22nd century perhaps, but not now. Lulled by the incessant idiotic chatter of politicians and their meaningless agendas, we do not notice that even now, today, we are standing on the very threshold of that post-scarcity world. All we have to do, as individuals, is take one step forward.

 As is our custom, when the blog comes across an article worth reading, it will recommend it and quote from it. This is written by Farooque Chowdhury, from Dhaka, Bangladesh and published on the Countercurrents website

The World Meteorological Organization released a report ‘State of the Global Climate 2020′  on April 19, 2021, which has warned: Time is fast running out.

In 2019, according to the UN report, GHG concentrations reached new highs:

Carbon dioxide: 410.5±0.2 ppm = 148% of preindustrial levelsMethane: 1877±2 ppb = 260% of preindustrial levelsNitrous oxide: 332.0±0.1 ppb = 123% of pre-industrial levels.

The report said: In 2020, global mean surface temperature (GMST), measured using a combination of air temperature two meters over land, and sea surface temperature in ocean areas from various databases, was 1.2 ± 0.1 °C warmer than the pre-industrial baseline (1850-1900), Despite developing La Niña cooling conditions, 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record, and the last decade, 2011-2020, was the warmest on record.

The report said:

“Since the mid-1980s, Arctic surface air temperatures have warmed at least twice as fast as the global average, while sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers have declined over the same period and permafrost temperatures have increased.“This has potentially large implications not only for Arctic population, infrastructure and ecosystems, but also for the global climate through various feedbacks.”“Around the world”, the report said, “[r]ising global temperatures have contributed to more frequent and severe extreme weather events […].”

Extremes

As example of extreme weather incidents, the report mentioned extreme precipitation in 2020, and said:

“Regions with unusually high precipitation amounts […] included East and North-East Africa, South and East Asia, south-eastern North America and the Caribbean and North-East Europe.

“Unusually low precipitation amounts were observed in Southern and North-West Africa, South America, North-East and West Asia, south-western and north-eastern North America and northern New Zealand.”

Ocean warming

Oceans are “the destination” of around 90% of the excess energy that accumulates in the earth system due to increasing concentrations of the GHG. Ocean Heat Content (OHC), a measure of this heat accumulation in the Earth system, is measured at various ocean depths, up to 2000m deep. Ocean warming rates, according to the report, “show a particularly strong increase in the past two decades across all depths.”

The report said:

“In 2019, the 0–2000m depth layer of the global ocean reached a new record high, and a preliminary analysis based on three global data sets suggests that 2020 exceeded that record.”“In 2020, more than 80% of the ocean experienced at least one MHW, causing significant impacts to marine life and the communities that depend on it.”“Globally, sea level has been rising an average of 3.29 (+/- 0.3) mm per year, peaking in 2020. A small decrease in the latter part of 2020 is likely related to La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific.”

Glacial loss

On glacial loss, the report said:

“[G]laciers continued to lose mass in the hydrological year 2019/2020.”“Although, mass balance was slightly less negative, with an estimated ice loss of 0.98 meter water equivalent, there is a clear trend towards accelerating glacier mass loss in the long term.”“Eight out of the ten most negative mass balance years have been recorded since 2010.”

Sea ice

On sea ice, a useful indicator of climate change particularly given the speed of change occurs at the poles and the extent of the repercussions of its cover, the report said:

“Antarctic sea ice remained close to the long-term average”.“In the Arctic, the annual minimum sea-ice extent was the second lowest on record and record low sea-ice extents were observed in the months of July and October 2020.”“Oceans absorb around 23% of the annual emissions of anthropogenic CO2 to the atmosphere, helping to alleviate the impacts of climate change but at a high ecological cost to the ocean.”

It said: “Global mean ocean pH has been steadily declining”.

The report said that increasing global warming are risking achieving of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Displacement of people

It said:

“Over the past decade (2010–2019), weather-related events triggered an estimated 23.1 million displacements of people on average each year.”“Approximately 9.8 million displacements, largely due to hydrometeorological hazards and disasters, were recorded during the first half of 2020, mainly concentrated in South and South-East Asia and the Horn of Africa.”“Events in the second half of the year, including displacements linked to flooding across the Sahel region, the active Atlantic hurricane season and typhoon impacts in South-East Asia, are expected to bring the total for 2020 close to the average for the decade.”

Food insecurity

Food insecurity, the report said, grows out of climate variability and extreme weather incidents, along with economic slowdown and conflicts. It said:

“In 2020, over 50 million people were doubly hit – by climate-related disasters (floods, droughts and storms) and by the COVID-19 pandemic.”“Nearly 690 million people, or 9% of the world population, were undernourished, and about 750 million, or nearly 10%, were exposed to severe levels of food insecurity in 2019.”

The UN report warned: “Overall in 2020, the world remained on course to exceed the agreed temperature thresholds of either 1.5 °C or 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, which will increase the risk of experiencing the pervasive effects of climate change beyond what is already seen. Thus while reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains essential, scaling up adaptation is an urgent need.” The report has suggested massive effort from the governments of the world.

The report is a burning example of the world capitalist order – everything for profit, demolish and destroy for profit, nothing to consider, but profit…

Is there some sort of capitalism, which is non-catastrophic? And was there any phase of the system, when it was not acting catastrophic? Never and never was it…

 …the source of the crisis – capitalist system – isn’t the problem. To the part, climate crisis is a commodity connecting many, as other commodities connect. It’ll try its best to reap a higher profit from the emerging market. It’s aware of this emerging market. To reap profit, it’ll keep the profit-making system intact. So, the source of the crisis will continue hurting people as it hurts today, as it hurt yesterday, because, profit can’t be made without exploiting labor and nature.

 Farooque Chowdhury 

Full text can be read at:

Climate crisis: Time is fast running out, and World Bank changes tone | Countercurrents

 A Vietnamese anarchist critique of the so-called “socialism” of Vietnam is well worth a read.

The Broken Promises of Vietnam (libcom.org)

“…As Vietnam’s economy grows by leaps and bounds, so does the chasm between the rich and the poor. And no amount of welfare and regulation can stop the accumulation of capital or reverse the flow of wealth from the hands of the many into those of a few. Nowhere does this accumulation manifest itself more pervasively than in the system of land ownership. ​This system allows control of the land to be wrested from the peasants and the common people for little compensation and given to capitalists who often make many times more profit. All across the country, luxurious residential buildings sprung up but few of those displaced by them can afford to move in. The billionaire Phạm Nhật Vượng, whose family own as much wealth as 800,000 Vietnamese, couldn’t have built his empire without public properties being handed into to his pocket in this manner…”

Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca—three of the world’s top coronavirus vaccine manufacturers—have paid out a combined $26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders over the past year, a sum that could fully fund the cost of inoculating Africa’s entire 1.3 billion-person population.

Pfizer has paid out $8.44 billion in dividends over the past 12 months. Johnson & Johnson, which received $1.5 billion in public money, paid out $10.5 billion in dividends.

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are projecting revenues of $33.5 billion this year from their mRNA vaccines.

 According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, “One of the reasons Pharma companies have been able to generate such large profits is because of intellectual property rules that restrict production to a handful of companies,” alluding to an international agreement that bars generic manufacturers from replicating vaccine formulas.

Heidi Chow, senior campaigns and policy manager at Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “It’s morally bankrupt for rich country leaders to allow a small group of corporations to keep the vaccine technology and know-how under lock and key while selling their limited doses to the highest bidder.”

“Vaccine apartheid is not a natural phenomenon but the result of governments stepping back and allowing corporations to call the shots,” said Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam International. “It is appalling that Big Pharma is making huge payouts to wealthy shareholders in the face of this global health emergency.” She continued, “This is a public health emergency, not a private profit opportunity,” Marriott said. “We should not be letting corporations decide who lives and who dies while boosting their profits. We need a people’s vaccine, not a profit vaccine.”

The soaring shares of vaccine makers has created a new wave of billionaires.

BioNTech founder Ugur Sahin is now worth $5.9 billion and Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel is worth $5.2 billion.

“Instead of creating new vaccine billionaires,” Marriott observed, “we need to be vaccinating billions in developing countries.”

Big Pharma’s ‘Appalling’ $26 Billion in Shareholder Payouts Could Fund Vaccines for All of Africa: Report | Common Dreams News

Mark Lowcock, the coordinator of the UN’s aid relief operation since 2017 and the UN’s humanitarian agency head,  will say this week that “The humanitarian system is set up to give people in need what international agencies and donors think is best, and what we have to offer, rather than giving people what they themselves say they most need.”

“In Chad and Cox’s Bazar [in Bangladesh] and other places too, people in dire humanitarian need are frequently selling aid they have been given, to buy something else they want more – a clear indication that what is being provided does not meet people’s needs and preferences. After the central Sulawesi earthquake in 2018, almost half of displaced households reported shelter as one of their most important and immediate priorities. Yet only a small fraction of people got immediate help with that. Unfortunately, these are not isolated examples. Last year, more than half the people surveyed in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia and Uganda said that the aid they received did not cover their most important needs. In Chad, only 12% of people surveyed were positive about the aid they received.”

Lowcock admits the need for agencies to be more sensitive to the views of those in need of aid has been part of the development reform agenda for two decades. But there has been limited “piecemeal” progress owing to the lack of any incentive structure for aid agencies to respond.

“In many places, we have information on what people want and how they want it. The problem is we are not consistently acting on that information. Ultimately, organisations or decision-makers can choose to listen to people and be responsive, or they can choose not to. There are no real consequences for the choice they make. There are weak incentives to push them in the right direction.”

“If we hold such a mirror up to the system, humanitarian agencies collectively will see that we are simply not adequately listening and responding to what people say they want.”

Lowcock explains underfunding is unsustainable unless the causes of humanitarian need – famine, displacement, conflict and climate change – are addressed at the source.

“Today one in 33 people worldwide needs humanitarian assistance or protection – more than at any time since the second world war. Almost 80 million people are displaced by conflict and violence. Wars last twice as long as in the early 1990s.”

Humanitarian system is failing people in crisis, says UN aid chief | Humanitarian response | The Guardian