‘The UNDP brief comes after a pair of U.N. reports from Wednesday that detailed how debt is burdening the developing works and revealed the climate emergency, conflicts, and the Covid-19 pandemic have pushed an additional 122 million people into hunger worldwide since 2019.’

Nigerians experienced an almost twenty five per cent increase in their food bills in May.

Following on here from a post on poverty in Nigeria, 5 July, it is now reported that:

‘A state of emergency has been declared in Nigeria as a result of food shortages and surging prices, with the country’s government announcing a range of measures to address the crisis.

On Thursday, it was announced that fertilizers and grains will “immediately” be released to farmers, and 500,000 hectares of farmland and river basins will be activated for year-round farming.

The move will also expand the central bank’s role in financing the agricultural value chain.

“We declared a state of emergency and unveiled a comprehensive intervention plan on food security, affordability, and sustainability, taking decisive action to tackle food inflation,” President Bola Tinubu said on Twitter.

Tinubu emphasized that the goal of the intervention was to promote agriculture and increase job creation, pledging that “no one will be left behind” in his government’s efforts to ensure “affordable, plentiful food.”

Attahiru Bafarawa, a former governor of Nigeria’s Sokoto State, had warned earlier this month about banditry in the country’s north, saying it threatens food security and was a “serious disaster.”

Africa’s largest economy has seen a surge in the cost of food and transportation due to the president’s removal of fuel subsidies and sweeping exchange-rate reform since May.

In a statement on Thursday, government spokesperson Dele Alake said “savings from the fuel subsidy removal” would be directed at revamping the agricultural sector.

A National Commodity Board will be established and charged with reviewing food prices and maintaining a “strategic food reserve that will be used as a price stabilization mechanism for critical grains and other food items,” Alake said.

The cost of food in Nigeria had increased by 24.82% in May compared to the same time last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). It explained that the year-on-year increase in food inflation was caused, among other things, by price hikes in oil, yam, bread, cereals, and fish.’

We will keep on saying it; the solution is socialism.

The Guardian reports that Which? Have noted supermarket prices show an increase of twenty five per cent over the last two years.

‘Two years of relentlessly soaring food prices have had a devastating impact on households,” said Sue Davies, the Which? head of food policy. “This isn’t helped by the confusing and inconsistent pricing practices used by some supermarkets, which make it incredibly difficult to work out how to find the best value products.’

Perhaps Which? Should take out a subscription to the Socialist Standard where it will discover that the ‘devastating impact on households’ is caused by capitalism.

The German owned Aldi and Lidl have the highest inflation figures , 19.3 per cent and 21.4 per cent. Across two years their inflation rate is verging on thirty five per cent.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) inflation data for June is expected to show a rate of 8.2% from 8.7% in May. The Bank of England’s target remains at two per cent inflation. Are house buyers in for another kicking soon?

The ‘best value’ products will be those which are produced for use in a socialist society – because they will be free.

The tinkering with the practices of capitalist food providers benefit no one.

Think of the benefits to all if the effort expended in making the capitalist system more palatable to all was focused on bringing about socialism.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/15/uk-supermarket-food-prices-which-loyalty-card-deals

 Friday 14 July 19.30 GMT + 1 (Zoom)

‘As corporate profits soar, the real income of workers in 38 wealthy countries has fallen by an average of nearly 4% over the past year, and the situation could deteriorate further as artificial intelligence and other forms of technology threaten to automate 27% of existing jobs in the same nations.

That’s according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) latest annual employment outlook which stresses the “urgent need to act.”

One of the report’s key findings is that in most high-income countries, labour markets have “stabilized” since the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed economic chaos more than three years ago. The OECD unemployment rate was 4.8% in May 2023, compared with 5.3% in December 2019. However, joblessness varies widely among the club’s members, from 12.7% in Spain to 3.6% in the United States and 2.4% in the Czech Republic.

Tight labour markets typically improve workers’ bargaining power, yielding wage gains. But despite historically low unemployment rates in many OECD countries, the report finds that real wages across the bloc declined 3.8% between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023.

Nominal wages increased 5.6% from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023, but that wasn’t enough to offset the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, the report indicates. As a result of high and persistent inflation—a phenomenon that many experts says is inseparable from corporate profiteering—real income decreased by as much as 15.6% in Hungary, 10.4% in the Czech Republic, and 0.7% in the United States.

Several earlier analyses have shown that since the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted international supply chains—rendered fragile by decades of neoliberal globaliation—highly consolidated corporations have capitalised on myriad crises to justify price hikes that far outpace the rising costs of doing business, padding their bottom lines at the expense of working-class consumers.

The OECD’s new report also acknowledges that “profits have often risen more than labour compensation.”

As corporate profits soar, the real income of workers in 38 wealthy countries has fallen by an average of nearly 4% over the past year, and the situation could deteriorate further as artificial intelligence and other forms of technology threaten to automate 27% of existing jobs in the same nations.

“Going forward,” the report notes, “evidence suggests there is some room for profits to absorb further wage adjustments to recover some of the losses in purchasing power gradually without generating significant price pressures or resulting in a fall in labour demand.”

Workers’ incomes could take additional hits due to technology-induced automation.

“While firms’ adoption of AI is still relatively low, rapid progress including with generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT), falling costs, and the increasing availability of workers with AI skills suggest that OECD countries may be on the brink of an AI revolution,” the report states. “It is vital to gather new and better data on AI uptake and use in the workplace, including which jobs will change, be created or disappear, and how skills needs are shifting.”

The report estimates that 27% of existing jobs in OECD countries are at high risk of automation, from AI and other technologies. If even a fraction of those jobs are automated, it could lead to a surge in unemployment—weakening workers’ bargaining power in relation to employers and setting the stage for further wage repression.

“High-skill occupations, despite being more exposed to recent progress in AI, are still at least risk of automation,” says the OECD. “Low- and middle-skilled jobs are most at risk, including in construction, farming, fishing, and forestry, and to a lesser extent production and transportation.”

According to the report, 63% of finance workers and 57% of manufacturing workers are worried about job loss due to AI in the next 10 years.’

https://www.commondreams.org/news/oecd-wages-down-ai-revolution

Vision

Not twenty-twenty, hindsight’s myopic,

Vision clouded by misapprehension,

Seeing things, whatever the intention,

That are similar to a conjurer’s trick.

Political sleight of hand deceives the eye,

Bouquets of promises plucked from thin air,

Only for each of them to disappear

In a moment. And today the same sly

Misdirection is still there to be seen;

How it fascinates, bamboozling all who

Suspend their disbelief and continue

Mesmerised by blue, red, yellow or green,

Dressing up blatant legerdemain

To dazzle the spectators once again.

D. A.

 The last 800 leaflets were distributed yesterday for the by-election a week on Thursday. Discarded leaflets from some of the candidates were found but nothing from the LibDems — seems they are giving Labour here a free run to garner anti-Tory votes. There is no socialist candidate. 

We talked to the owner of a house decked out with UKIP posters who turned out to be  a former Tory councillor who had defected to UKIP because they were replacing “white” local council candidates by Indians. True, as the three councillors for the ward are now all Indians, but so what? The Tories have in fact been cultivating the Hindu vote in north-west London, with some success.  

We met the Tory candidate himself, local councillor Steve Tuckwell. We had read in a Tory leaflet that the local Hindu temple handed out free fruit and vegetables at 2 o’clock on Tuesdays. Intrigued by this Tory support for free distribution we went along to see. It turned out to be just an ordinary food bank. 

But what we witnessed was a scene that bore some similarity to Dickens’s account of an election in his day. The Tory candidate and the Tory MP for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) forced the 20 or so destitute workers queuing for their bag of food to wait ten minutes to listen to their speeches which the workers dutifully applauded. What followed was even more obscene. The two suitably garlanded politicians were filmed, for an Asian TV channel, handing out food bags to the poor. This must come near to “treating” (giving gifts to voters to get them to vote for you) which since Dickens’s day has become illegal under electoral law. But professional politicians are known to have no shame when it comes to vote-catching. One reason why they are held in contempt, and rightly so.

One big issue in the election is ULEZ, the extension as from the end of August of the Ultra Low  Emission Zone from central London to the whole of Greater London. This will require owners of pre-2006 petrol vehicles and pre-2016 diesel vehicles to pay £12.50 a day to use their vehicles. As all vans are diesel, “white van man” is up in arms. One self-employed tradesman we met told us he had had to spend £10,000 of his own money to buy a new van and that all people like him who owned a pre-2016 van would have to do the same. Workers owning an old banger because they couldn’t afford anything better or a not that old diesel car will also be clobbered. There are two independent anti-ULEZ candidates and the Tories are playing it for all it’s worth (they can’t really play the anti-immigrant card here) saying “No to Labour’s £4,550 ULEZ expansion tax”.

No leaflets have been distributed in the Ruislip part of the constituency, so the workers there are going to have to work out for themselves that the problem is not  the Tories or Labour but Capitalism.

The words idiot and cretin are very similar in both English and French.

The English word for madman translates as le fou. When AI was asked to supply a definition of these three it came up with Emmanuel Macron, President of France.

Okay, that’s made up but the soubriquets surely apply to aforementioned French president given the latest decision to come out of Paris.

Several news outlets are reporting that France is going to more than annoy the Russians, poking the Bear as it’s known, with its decision to supply Ukraine with fifty SCALP long-range cruise missiles each having a range of one hundred and fifty five miles.

Reuters says that Macron said, “It rebalances things and enables Ukraine to hit deep into Russian lines and can penetrate tougher targets”.

A Russian source quotes a Kremlin spokesman, ‘Dmitry Peskov described it as a “mistake,” and one that was likely to have “consequences” for Ukraine. He warned that Moscow would take “countermeasures,” without specifying details.

Peskov expressed confidence that the delivery of French long-range missiles would not change the outcome of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

Moscow has repeatedly warned Kiev’s Western backers that, by providing Ukraine with ever more advanced weapons systems, they are risking dragging themselves into direct military confrontation with Russia.’

Has Macron been ‘leaned on’ by state actors unknown? Guesses as to whom on a postcard. Or is he trying to impress his mates in NATO prior to the upcoming NATO meeting? Will the French take to the streets to demonstrate their displeasure at this dangerous racking up of international tensions?

Violence is not condoned but the so called ‘leaders’ of European states seem hell-bent on increasing the risk of unimaginable destructive upon the working class of those states.

The position of the SPGB (World Socialist Movement) remains the one it has always articulated, the only side we take in any conflict is that of the global working class.

The solution to this threat to the safety of us all, the only solution, remains the same; abolish capitalism and replace it with the only sane alternative -socialism.

 According to Hedges’, ‘the purging of Corbyn and his supporters effectively emasculated the left within the Labour Party.‘  Questions Hedges and Asa Winstanley fail to answer in their discussion include whether or not Corbyn is so different from others of Labour’s left, past & presentt.  What of Michael Foot, honest John Smith, and the former darling of the Left and current Lord Neil Kinnock? James Callaghan was also of the Left and as Prime Minister presided over the winter of discontent.   And, more importantly, why given Labour’s predictable and lamentable track record, would Corbyn have been any different?

A fable. A scorpion wishes to get to the other side of the river but is a non-swimmer. The scorpion asks a passing frog to carry him cross. The frog is highly suspicious and says how do I know you’re not going to sting me? Because if I do then I’ll drown as well says the scorpion. In mid-stream the scorpion stings the frog. The dying frog gasps Why? No choice, says the scorpion.’ It’s in my nature’.

‘Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has denounced domestic retailers for being engaged in ‘greedflation,’ claiming that some of them have been taking advantage of rampant inflation by raising prices.

In an interview with the BBC Newsnight 5 July, Bailey said certain retailers were “overcharging customers” as millions of families struggle to make ends meet.

“If you look at petrol prices, some sellers of petrol have possibly been charging too much for it,” the BoE head suggested.

According to the top economist, “moves by regulators on retail prices will help to lower inflation,” particularly in the fuel market.

The BoE believes UK inflation will fall back to the 2% target towards the end of next year.

Asked when a fall in interest rates might be seen, Bailey responded: “I can’t give you a date as to when interest rates start to come down because that really depends upon what happens over the period of time ahead, but getting inflation down is the most important thing that we have to do.”

Meanwhile, economists at JPMorgan projected this week that BoE may have to further hike interest rates to 7% from the current 5% to bring inflation under control, hitting household budgets even harder.

Earlier this year, the BoE warned that British households and businesses needed to accept that they were worse off and should stop asking for wage increases and pushing prices higher. The regulator’s chief economist, Huw Pill, said at the time that “a series of inflationary shocks” generated by the pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine, and crop shortages have sent prices in the UK to a 40-year high. He claimed that in response to surging bills and other rising costs, workers and businesses were attempting to transfer the impact of inflation onto each other.’