Huge price hikes have left Britain’s farmers and growers in a dire situation, which could lead to a food supply crisis across the country, the National Farmers Union (NFU) has warned.

According to its report on Tuesday, fertilizer, feed, fuel, and energy are all now more expensive due to the conflict in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic’s disruption to supply chains. Fertilizer prices have tripled since 2019, on top of a sixfold increase in wholesale gas prices, the NFU said.

The current shortage of eggs could spread to other food products, the union warned. Energy-intensive crops including tomatoes, cucumbers, and pears are reportedly on track for their lowest yields since records began in 1985, as producers leave agriculture in the face of rising costs.

The NFU highlighted that the nation had lost about 7,000 agricultural businesses since 2019.

“The danger is that we produce less and less of our food here, and we become ever more reliant on imports,” NFU president Minette Batters told journalists.

According to the union, £60 million (over $72 million) worth of food went to waste on farms this year as a result of labor shortages.

The NFU urged the government to provide urgent support to struggling farmers and allow 15,000 additional seasonal workers to come from abroad to help pick crops.

RT 7/12/22

Dave C.

 The media headlines are prominently declaring Morocco has made sporting history by becoming the first African nation to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup.

There has, however, been very little news coverage over the conflict between Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) which is aspiring for independence for Western Sahara. Morocco had tried to annex the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara in 1975 and a bloody civil war ensued. An UN-brokered ceasefire has been in place since 1991 with a planned referendum left in limbo leaving the conflict unresolved.  Much of the population has been expelled by force, with many tens of thousands living in refugee camps in the desert. Morocco’s occupation is against international law, which accords the Saharawi people the right to self-determination. Over 100 UN resolutions have called for this right to self-determination. Furthermore, the International Court of Justice has stated that there are no ties of sovereignty between Morocco and Western Sahara,

Morocco has become one of the Arab League countries to agree to normalise relations with Israel. In return, the USA under Trump recognised Morocco’s claim over the disputed Western Sahara territory.  Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. government would maintain that Morocco has sovereignty over Western Sahara and is one of only a few Western countries to recognise Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Africa’s wealth is being appropriated by foreign interests whose operations are leaving a devastating trail of social, environmental and human rights abuses in their wake and mineral-rich Western Sahara is a key example.  

Despite the Sahrawi people’s claim to self-determination and for control of the resources and international criticism, foreign nations are signing trade deals with Morocco. Nations are being allowed to fish in the territorial waters of the Sahrawi Republic. Oil companies are receiving permits to drill on Sahrawi land.

More important, is the presence of phosphates which along with nitrogen, makes synthetic fertilizer for farming. This gives Morocco a powerful influence over world food production. There is no doubt that the occupation of Western Sahara is largely about the presence of natural resources—especially phosphates.

Another neglected aspect is the future renewable green energy potential of the region.

There is a planned £18bn project to provide 8% of Britain’s energy supplies through a 2,360-mile undersea cable linking a vast wind and solar farm in the Sahara with the UK, powering 7m homes by 2030. The solar and wind site will be in the Guelmim-Oued Noun region which is located in a part of the disputed area of Western Sahara claimed by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Perhaps, the Moroccan national football team will go on to make even more World Cup history. But the media will persist in its ignorance and hypocrisy of relegating the struggle of the Sahrawi people to irrelevance. 

“The working class has no countries. The British do not own Britain any more than the Russians own Russia, the Georgians Georgia, the Armenians Armenia or the Serbs Serbia. We, who produce the world’s wealth, must cast off the chains of nationalist illusion. We have a world to win.”  Socialist Standard February 1992

The World Socialist Movement is totally opposed to Nation States and Nationalism.

These will not exist when rational Socialism has replaced Capitalism.

 Sovereignty and Nation State is traced back to the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648.

Given that a sufficient majority of the worldwide working class does not, as of yet, understand and want the transition to a saner society as of yet, realpolitik rules, OK?

So, to pose the question, is virtue signalling, or deliberately antagonising a dangerous bear a sensible thing to do? With the present tensions in and around Russia, acts which are the equivalent of poking an angry animal with a stick may not be the most well-thought-out of accomplishments.

A piece in RT, 10/12/22, headlined, “Moscow blasts Finland over ‘unacceptable’ stunt,” expressed Russia’s anger at what it called “desecration of the state symbol of our nation.” 

A group of protesters burned Russia’s national flag during a rally on Finland’s Independence Day (Finland celebrates its Independence Day on December 6 when the nation formally declared its independence from the Russian Empire in 1917, following the Bolshevik Revolution.)

The report notes that “The Nordic nation, which shares a 1,340km (832-mile) land border with Russia, has maintained military neutrality for decades. However, it applied to join NATO together with its neighbour, Sweden, in May, voicing concerns over security amid Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine. On December 5, Finland’s government submitted a bill on NATO membership for parliamentary approval.

Moscow has said the inclusion of Finland and Sweden in NATO would not make the European continent more stable and secure and has pledged to adjust its military posture in the northern region if the bloc adds two new members.

 Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that the West was “digging dividing lines” in Europe instead of working towards collective security.”

Capitalists not only combine to oppress the working class but are in competition among themselves. The sabre rattling, and worse, currently being played out puts the world’s working class in a dangerous position.

Forget shilling for whatever country you think you owe allegiance to. You don’t.

Marx’s exhortation is even more relevant today. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Dave C.

 Natural resources like seeds, plants, animals and even chemical compounds found in bioresource-rich countries have long been extracted by wealthy nations during periods of colonisation when empires would steal from the territories they occupied. Patented and exported, such resources have led to breakthrough discoveries in medicine, agriculture, even cosmetics. Many of these discoveries wouldn’t have been possible without drawing on traditional knowledge from local indigenous communities, who have often been unaccredited and uncompensated.

At the heart of the debate around biopiracy is the question of ownership and benefit sharing. Why should wealthy, technology-rich countries get the lion’s share of benefits when extracting from less affluent lands?

Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva spoke at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, explaining the problematic practice of seed patenting in layman’s terms.

“A patent is a right of an inventor to exclude anyone else from making, using, selling, distributing what is invented. The problem is that, when it comes to seed, seed is not an invention,” she said, going on to explain that seeds had been exchanged long before the arrival of patents.

“But then you come to me and you take the seed. And then you patent it and say, ‘I created it and now you pay me royalties.’ That’s biopiracy.”  

Biopiracy: The fight for fairness in the scientific exploitation of natural resources (france24.com)

Human rights goes back to 1946, when the first meeting took place of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the late President of the United States, was in the chair.

The Commission was expected to draw up two documents: a Declaration of Human Rights and an International Covenant defining the principles of human rights and making them legally binding on all signatories. 

At the second session, at Geneva in November 1947, the Commission decided that three stages would be necessary — Declaration, Covenant, Implementation. The third session added a Preamble and eventually, in December 1948 in Paris the Declaration, and only the Declaration was accepted. The Covenant had to wait until 1966 for its adoption. And the Implementation? We still await its effective implementation across much of the world regardless of the signatures on treaties and protocols.

 Instead of bewailing the sad state of human rights, we should ask why they are so often violated. 

Sometimes it is simply a case of capitalism being unable to satisfy those rights. Thus although Article 25 of the Declaration states that everyone has the right “. .. . to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family including food, clothing and housing”. If the history of human rights proves anything, it is that they cannot be achieved within a property society. The private property system is itself a matter of privilege and therefore a denial of the right of equal standing to the vast majority of the world’s people.

What about the violations of human rights to liberty? The plain fact here is that a ruling class which suppresses opposition does so because it sees that opposition as a threat to its own position.  A privileged class will always struggle to keep its privileges—often by force and suppression.

Human rights are an outgrowth of both the competitive class and social division of society and the existence of the state. Just as people who do not keep lions do not need a set of written lion safety manuals, so a society of free individuals without a state will not need a written set of state safety manuals. Instead of rights on paper, we would have the practical fulfilment of human needs with the equal access to sufficient democratic power to secure those needs.

We should not let ourselves depend on these judges for our freedoms, though. We can defend ourselves and protect what freedoms and rights we have best by building our own movement for socialism and pursuing the class struggle. We can only ever have the rights we fight for and can defend.

As usual, George Monbiot highlights the hypocrisy of American politics in his latest Guardian article.

“…the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a guess. North Korea? Russia? Wrong. Both ratified the convention years ago. One is the Holy See (the Vatican). The other is the United States of America.

This is one of several major international treaties the US has refused to ratify. Among the others are crucial instruments such as the Rome statute on international crimes, the treaties banning cluster bombs and landmines, the convention on discrimination against women, the Basel convention on hazardous waste, the convention on the law of the sea, the nuclear test ban treaty, the employment policy convention and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities…”

“…it is the only nation to sentence children to life imprisonment without parole, among many other brutal policies. While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses. If this country were a person, we’d call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state…”

“…the US makes the rules, to a greater extent than any other state. It also does more than any other to prevent both their implementation and their enforcement. Its refusal to ratify treaties such as the convention on biological diversity provides other nations with a permanent excuse to participate in name only…”

“… The lack of interest in resolving our existential crises, expressed by the US Senate in particular, is not a passive exceptionalism. It is an active, proud and furious refusal to care about the lives of others…”

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse | George Monbiot | The Guardian

Environment activist Derek Wall of the Green Party has received favourable reviews from the Socialist Party, albeit not fully endorsed, here,  here, here, and here, for instance.

The following are extracts from an interview he conducted discussing  his article entitled “Imperialism is the Arsonist: Marxism’s Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles,” about Marx’s contribution to ecological thought.

Engels, for example, wrote The Condition of the English Working Class in the 1840s. While this is near to the beginning of his writings it was already indicating that air and water pollution were an environmental threat. His notion of social murder encompassed hunger and poverty and such the effect of poisonous pollution, social murder is a concept that might cover the deaths from extreme weather we are already encountering from climate change.

In his ‘Letters from Wuppertal’ written back in 1839 Engels notes both air and water pollution as serious ills, ‘Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life.’

At various points in Capital Marx addresses problems that might be identified by environmentalists today such as food additives and deforestation. Capital provides perhaps the clearest application of Marxist thought to the environment, when Marx notes in volume three of our duty to future generations:

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”

Engels, while not using the then newly coined term ‘ecology’, reveals his understanding of the science, based on relationships between species, that can lead to unexpected effects. This is from his text The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man:

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.”

Marx, Ecology, and Politics: An Interview with Dr. Derek Wall — Hampton Institute (hamptonthink.org)

Via RobertS

India’s capital, Delhi usually makes headlines for having dangerous levels of air pollution during the winter months.

  It is a fact that close to 4 billion people –or about half of the world’s total population of 8 billion– still live without access to a safe toilet and other sanitation facilities.

Nearly a full decade ago, the international community, represented in the United Nations General Assembly, decided to declare 19 November every single year, as a world day to address such a staggering problem.

And year after year, the UN continues to behave ‘politically correct’ by saying that progress and achievements were anyway made, however much would still be to do.

Despite such ‘correctness,’ the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, stated on the Day that the world is “seriously off track to keep our promise of safe toilets for all by 2030 – a crucial indicator in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Investment in sanitation systems is too low and progress remains too slow.”

 Every day, over 800 children under age five years old die from diarrhoea linked to unsafe water, sanitation and poor hygiene.

Poor sanitation is linked to the transmission of diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera and dysentery, as well as typhoid, intestinal worm infections and polio. It exacerbates stunting and contributes to the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Globally, 1 in 3 schools do not have adequate toilets, and 23% of schools have no toilets at all. Schools without toilets can cause girls to miss out on their education. Without proper sanitation facilities, many are forced to miss school when they are on their period.

Open defecation: about 900 million people worldwide practice open defecation, meaning they go outside – on the side of the road, in bushes or rubbish heaps. It’s often a matter of where they live: 90% of people who practice open defecation live in rural areas. Of these, 494 million still defecate in the open, for example in street gutters, behind bushes or into open bodies of water.

Moreover, the lack of sanitation services, just in the year 2020, stood behind the fact that 45% of the household wastewater generated globally was discharged without safe treatment. Consequently, at least 10% of the world’s population is thought to consume food irrigated by wastewater.

Inadequate sanitation systems spread human waste into rivers, lakes and soil, polluting underground water resources. However, this problem seems to be invisible. Invisible because it happens underground. Invisible because it happens in the poorest and most marginalised communities. Groundwater is the world’s most abundant source of freshwater. It supports drinking water supplies, sanitation systems, farming, industry and ecosystems. As climate change worsens and populations grow, groundwater is vital for human survival. Safe sanitation protects groundwater. Toilets that are properly located and connected to safely managed sanitation systems, collect, treat and dispose of human waste, and help prevent human waste from spreading into groundwater.

Sanitation must withstand climate change. Toilets and sanitation systems must be built or adapted to cope with extreme weather events, so that services always function and groundwater is protected.

World Toilet Day – In Praise of Toilets | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Via RobertS

A US House of Representatives committee has found some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies have internally dismissed the need to swiftly move to renewable energy and cut planet-heating emissions, despite publicly portraying themselves as concerned about the climate crisis.

Documents obtained from companies including Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron show that the fossil fuel industry “has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come”, said Carolyn Maloney, the chair of the House oversight committee. Documents obtained from companies including Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron show that the fossil fuel industry “has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come”, said Carolyn Maloney, the chair of the House oversight committee.

In reality, executives, the documents show, were derisive of the need to cut emissions, disparaged climate activists and worked to secure US government tax credits for carbon capture projects that would allow them to continue business as usual. 

Maloney said that “these companies know their climate pledges are inadequate, but are prioritizing big oil’s record profits over the human costs of climate change.”

Ro Khanna, who sits on the committee, said that the industry’s approach was one of “intimidation” towards critics, as part of a “cynical strategy” to avoid acting on the climate emergency. He added that the committee will pass on the documents to “other entities”, raising the possibility of charges laid by the US Department of Justice.

Khanna rejected allegations that the committee had engaged in a sort of corporate witch-hunt. “The industry was the one out there continuing to make false statements about climate change and climate legislation,” he said. “Our goal is to get them to stop engaging in climate misinformation.”

Climate campaigners said the committee’s work showed that the fossil fuel industry was continuing to lie over global heating by pretending to act on the issue.

“The key revelation in this report is that big oil has no intention of actually following through on its climate commitments,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media. “It isn’t transitioning to clean energy, it’s doubling down on methane gas, and it’s actively lobbying against renewable energy solutions. This is the big tobacco playbook all over again: pretend you care about a problem, but continue your deadly business as usual.”

Oil firms have internally dismissed swift climate action, House panel says | Oil and gas companies | The Guardian