There is no food shortage. According to a May 6, 2022 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world enjoys “a relatively comfortable supply level” of cereals. This is confirmed by the World Bank, which noted that global stocks of cereals are at historically high levels and that about three-quarters of Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports had already been delivered before the war started.

These numbers are consistent with data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture that reported on May 19 that the country exported 46.51 million tons of cereals in the 2021/22 season, versus 40.85 million the previous year.

In a repeat of 2007-2008 food crisis, it is speculation which is the key factor behind the current rise in food prices in international markets. As reported by the Lighthouse Reports, “speculators have flooded commodity markets in attempts to make a profit out of escalating prices.” A striking example are two top commodity-linked “exchange traded funds” (ETFs) which have received US$1.2 billion of investments – compared to just US$197 million for the whole of 2021 – a 600 percent increase.

Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, has observed that “speculative activity by powerful institutional investors who are generally unconcerned with agricultural market fundamentals are indeed betting on hunger, and exacerbating it.”

According to the New York Times, “in April, speculators were responsible for 72 percent of the buying activity on the Paris wheat market, up from 25 percent before the pandemic.” 

Instead of food shortage, the reality is that the world produces far more food than we eat. Over 33 percent of the food produced globally is used for animal feed as well as for other non-food uses, mainly agro-fuels.

The US produces roughly 400 million tons of corn, but over 40 percent of this amount – 160 million tons – goes to ethanol production, while another 40 percent goes to animal feed, and only 10 percent is used as food whereas another 10 percent is exported. India was not expected to export more than 10 million tons of wheat in 2022-2023, which is insignificant in comparison to the US numbers.

The increasing amount of food diverted to the production of agro-fuels – again as in the 2007-2008 crisis – is another major factor fueling tension in the global cereal markets. As noted in a 2009 analysis, “although biofuels still account for only 1.5 percent of the global liquid fuels supply, they accounted for almost half the increase in the consumption of major food crops in 2006–07, mostly because of corn-based ethanol produced in the United States.”

In the US, ethanol production increased from 3.6 million barrels in 2001 to over 102 million in 2019. Despite the fact that ethanol is at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than gasoline, under pressure from the Congress and the industry, the Biden administration has just taken steps to encourage further ethanol production while continuing to heavily subsidize it. The US government-funded ethanol industry uses the equivalent of 35 percent of the global world trade of cereals of 473 million tons. 

 Neverthless, even in the absence of a global food shortage, the food crisis is real. Droughts, conflicts, and now high food prices, are threatening to starve hundreds of millions of people. The massive human suffering and hunger that was affecting many countries even prior to the war in Ukraine was barely met with adequate response from rich nations. UN humanitarian appeals for acute crises are chronically underfunded. In 2021, only 45 percent of the UN appeal for Yemen and the Horn of Africa was fulfilled, only 29 percent for Syria.

The US Congress just approved an aid of US$40 billion for Ukraine, including over US$26 billion of military aid. This is US$12 billion more than the US$28 billion that the US will spend globally in 2022 on international assistance through USAID.

A Global Food Crisis: Shortage Amidst Plenty | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Ecuador can be added to the increasing list of countries such as Sri Lanka that now have failing economies. The capital, Quito, is experiencing food and fuel shortages after 10 days of demonstrations in which protesters at times have clashed with police. After officials rejected the conditions for negotiations, the United States government issued an advisory urging travellers to reconsider visiting the country due to “civil unrest and crime”.

Demonstrations led primarily by the Indigenous organization Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), began on 14 June to demand that gasoline prices be cut by 45 cents a gallon to $2.10, price controls for agricultural products and a larger budget for education. The protests began with peaceful roadblocks but levels of violence have escalated in parts of the country prompting conservative ex-banker Lasso to decree a state of exception – martial control – in six provinces. The Indigenous leader Leonidas Iza on Tuesday demanded – among other things – that the government eliminate the state of emergency decree and remove the military and police presence around places where protesters have gathered.

Ecuador facing food and fuel shortages as country rocked by violent protests | Ecuador | The Guardian

In Somalia aid workers report children starving to death “before our eyes.” According to the latest assessment for Somalia, an estimated 1.5 million under-fives face acute malnutrition by the end of the year. Those numbers are only expected to go up.

Michael Dunford, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) regional director for east Africa, said governments had to donate urgently and generously if there was to be any hope of avoiding catastrophe in the Horn of Africa country. 

“We need money and we need it now,” said Dunford. “Will we able to avert [a famine in Somalia]? Unless there is … a massive scaling-up from right now, it won’t be possible, quite frankly. The only way, at this point, is if there is a massive investment in humanitarian relief, and all the stakeholders, all the partners, come together to try to avert this.”

Across the whole of east Africa, 89 million people are now considered “acutely food insecure” by the WFP, a number that has grown by almost 90% in the past year.

“Unfortunately, I do not see that rate of growth slowing down. If anything, it seems to be accelerating,” said Dunford. He explains inadequate funding had hampered efforts to learn from the 2011 famine. “We are seeing children dying before our eyes, seeing populations that have lost their livelihoods. It’s not that we didn’t learn the lessons of 2011; there was a lot of very good learning from that crisis. It’s just we haven’t been able to implement it to the extent required because of the lack of funding.”

 Claire Sanford, deputy humanitarian director of Save the Children, said, “I can honestly say in my 23 years of responding to humanitarian crisis, this is by far the worst I’ve seen, particularly in terms of the level of impact on children,” she said. “The starvation that my colleagues and I witnessed in Somalia has escalated even faster than we feared.” She added, “We have genuinely failed as an international community that we have allowed the situation to get to the extent it is at the moment. In 2011, we vowed as a community that we would never, ever let this happen again. And yet we have failed in that promise,” she added.

In April, the UN had received only 3% of funds for its $6bn appeal for Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.

Somalia: ‘The worst humanitarian crisis we’ve ever seen’ | Global development | The Guardian

Just because we don’t support the Russian invasion does not mean that we, therefore, support the Ukrainian army. We are against both sides, Ukrainian capitalism as well as Russian imperialism. The war is not worth the sacrifice of a single worker’s life. The orgy of death and destruction which is now convulsing unfortunate Europe was caused by the conflict of capitalist interests. In each of these countries, the workers were oppressed and exploited. They produced enormous wealth but the bulk of it was withheld from them by the owners of the industries. 

The Socialist Party  in the present grave crisis solemnly reaffirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working-class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to all war. Modern wars as a rule have been caused by the commercial and financial rivalry and intrigues of the capitalist interests in the different countries. Whether they have been frankly waged as wars of aggression or have been hypocritically represented as wars of “defence,” they have always been made by the ruling classes and fought by the working people. Wars bring wealth and power to the ruling classes, and suffering and death to the workers.  Wars are sinister and breeds unreason and hatred. They obscure the struggles of the workers for life, liberty, and social justice. They tend to sever the vital bonds of solidarity between them and their brothers in other countries, destroy their organisations and curtail their civic and political rights and liberties.

The Socialist Party is unalterably opposed to the system of exploitation and class rule which is upheld and strengthened by militarism and patriotism. We, therefore, call upon the workers of all countries to refuse support to their governments in their wars. The wars of the contending national groups of capitalists are not the concern of the workers. The only struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic exploitation and political oppression, and we particularly warn the workers against the snare and delusion of so-called defensive warfare. As against the doctrine of national patriotism we uphold the ideal of international working class solidarity. In support of capitalism, we will not willingly give a single life; in support of the struggle of the workers for freedom we pledge our all.

The working class of the United Kingdom has no quarrel with the working class of any other country. 

There is no such thing as an ideal foreign policy. In international politics, there is no policy which will suit all times and all circumstances. There is none which can be carried out to give a guarantee of enduring peace. This is true, though most people do not believe it. After every outbreak of war historians and others look back to this or that turning point, and say that if only a certain Government had acted differently, with more foresight, the war would not have happened. This kind of reasoning rests on assumptions that are not justified. It assumes that a Government is a free agent, able to follow any policy that the international situation may seem to call for. It ignores the forces behind the Government which determine the Government’s attitude and limit its freedom of action; the electorates that have to be considered, not to mention commercial, industrial and financial groups whose demands on foreign policy are coloured by their trading and other interests. The view taken by the “wise-after-the-event” historians assumes, too, that if one Government gave a certain lead in international affairs other Governments would react in a simple practicable way, determined either by fear of opposing a strong group of Great Powers or by mutual desire to maintain world peace. The historians and many other people are obsessed with the idea that international rivalries and alliances are clashes of the personalities of “great men.” They forget that it is not abroad, at international conferences, but at home in their own immediate social environment, that statesmen learn their principles, motives and methods and form their opinions on what is desirable and what is practicable. Pacts and alliances, the United Nations and World Courts, and so on, may control minor disputes and delay the major ones, but they have not succeeded in the past twenty years and will not succeed in the future in preventing war. World peace, like the abolition of property, is something only to be achieved through socialism.

We again take the opportunity provided by one of capitalism’s bloody wars, to reaffirm the fact that no war is worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.

We repeat again: there are no issues or interests involved in any war that are the least concern of the working class. This vile madhouse called capitalism has created an endless succession of wars. Since this Party was formed in 1904 we have condemned them all. It is high time the workers of all lands finished killing and dying for capitalism, and proclaimed their own class interest by establishing socialism. We represent the conception of socialism of the future. We believe that these purposes for which we stand should end impoverishment and win the earth from the fear of war. We seek a world in which the exploitation of man by man shall cease, when the evolution of human society to new and higher forms shall become possible to all mankind, and when socialism and peace shall be enjoyed by all.

Suppose we were in control of our own destiny? Suppose we workers owned the world there would be no war in which we killed each other off like flies.

 American farmers in the late 19th and early 20th century knew exactly how the railroads and banks were screwing them. Likewise, organized labor understood from the Homestead Strike to the Battle of Blair Mountain that they fought and died in shocking numbers for the simple dignity to be free men and women rather than exist as wage slaves. 

 In 2016, the farm vote went 70-80 percent to Trump, a candidate who told them clearly that he would ignite a tariff war with the farmers’ largest overseas customer for soybeans and pork. For good measure, he would cut off the source of labor they needed for harvesting and downstream processing. Farm income plummeted and rural suicides spiked. No matter; they voted again for Tump in 2020 in even higher numbers.

In 2019 a vote on whether to unionize was held at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant. VW, which actually has union members on its board back in Germany, said it was neutral on unionization, so there were no heavy-handed Amazon-style tactics used against the plant’s hourly employees. The workers voted to reject it.

Why is it that people are insidiously bamboozled to act against their own interests on behalf of the wealthy and powerful? Why would poverty-stricken disabled retirees vote for Republicans and against Medicare For All programs?

Elon Musk has a higher net worth than the gross domestic product of a country like Ukraine, with over 40 million people. In the past, Americans knew about corruption and called the oligarchs “Robber Barons”. 

For nearly two centuries, the works of Marx and others have dissected and denounced the machinations of the rich.

 In 2017, Americans spent $71 billion on lottery tickets nationwide, an average of over $1,000 per year per consumer. With the odds of winning the Mega Millions at one in 302 million, there is a good reason why mathematicians do not play the lottery. 

Why are so many of our fellow workers voting irrationally against their own interests? 

Adapted from here

Opinion | Why Do Tens of Millions in US Support an Economic System That Doesn’t Benefit Them? | Mike Lofgren (commondreams.org)

 Annual British pay growth stalled at 4% in May, leaving most workers with a rise in earnings worth less than half the 9% increase in prices.

Sheila Attwood, the  XperHR pay and benefits editor, said: “Despite pay awards reaching record levels not seen for 30 years, any marginal increases we are seeing are outstripped by the sheer pace of inflation.”

A letter on Friday sent to Boris Johnson by 67 economists said there was no wage-price spiral under way in Britain and keeping wages down would risk pushing the economy into a recession.

Stephen Machin, a professor at the London School of Economics, said the survey and official figures from the ONS, which showed pay rises averaging 4.2% across all sectors, revealed workers lacked the bargaining power to push up wages to match inflation.

“Bargaining power in the private sector has been especially weak in the 12 years since the financial crash. And the public sector has suffered even more, with pay deals below the equivalent agreements in the private sector,” he said.

Average UK pay rises stall at 4% – less than half the inflation rate | Pay | The Guardian

40,000 of RMT staff at Network Rail and 13 rail operators walked out from midnight. The RMT union is asking for a pay rise of at least 7% to offset the rising cost of living, but it says employers have offered a maximum of 3% – on condition they also accept job cuts and changes to working practices. 

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said staff were being asked to accept thousands of job cuts, reduced pensions, worse terms and conditions and a cut in real-terms pay as living costs soar. Mr Lynch said industrial action would run “as long as it needs to”, saying the strikes could last months if a deal was not reached. Mick Lynch, the RMT’s general secretary, raised the prospect of further strikes throughout the summer, as the two sides remained far apart.  Lynch said Network Rail had “escalated” the dispute at the talks that day by telling him there would be redundancies from 1 July.

Johnson has responded to the biggest rail strikes in a generation with plans to break the industrial action by allowing firms to bring in agency staff, a move unions have decried as unworkable, unsafe and potentially breaking international law.  It would make disputes long and bitter, unions warned on Monday, with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) accusing Johnson of taking a step that “even Margaret Thatcher did not go near”. It would inflame divisions between employers and trade unions when the government should be trying to bring about a deal, they said.

Of the estimated 8 million animal, fungi and plant species on our planet, only a fraction have been scientifically documented, according to the international biodiversity council IPBES. Throughout Earth’s history, species have lived, thrived and ultimately died out. But never before has so much biodiversity disappeared in such a short space of time.

Yet according to scientists, the world may lose nearly 1 million species by 2030, with one species already becoming extinct every 10 minutes. This is catastrophic because a world that lacks diversity is a dangerous place for all species, including humans.

Industrial agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, pollution, the spread of invasive species and soil sealing to make way for infrastructure are all contributing to an extinction rate that’s now 1,000 times higher than it would be without humans around.

 Between 1970 and 2014, the global population of vertebrates declined by 60%, while in South and Central America, that figure is almost 90%. The number of species living in freshwater environments decreased by 83% during the same period. 

Will the global community succeed in halting the extinction crisis?

A recent report from the Leibniz Research Network for Biodiversity stressed how the great variety of species on our planet’s is essential to just about every aspect of human life. “Whether it is the air we breathe, clean drinking water, food or clothing, fuel, building materials or medications — our life, our health, our nutrition and well-being all depend on the great diversity of resources that nature provides us with,” it stated. 

More than two-thirds of all crops worldwide rely upon natural pollinators such as insects. Without them, our food supply is likely to become less secure. Yet a third of all insect species worldwide are already facing extinction. 

Losing biodiversity could also spell disaster for the medical sector, as many pharmaceuticals — including close to 70% of cancer treatments — are derived from nature.

“The knowledge of 3.5 billion years of natural evolution is stored in biological diversity,” said Klement Tockner, director of Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, a group based in Frankfurt, Germany. “The progressive decline of our ecological capital poses the greatest threat to all of humanity — because once it’s lost, it’s lost forever.” 

 Ecosystems are the interaction of different species that depend on one another for survival and their environment. Losses within a single genus can have repercussions through the entire ecosystem — including on humans. 

Johannes Vogel, director of the Berlin Museum of Natural History, explained,  “Frogs are currently dying out worldwide because of a fungus spreading due to climate change,” he said. “Frogs eat a lot of mosquito larvae for example, so there will be more mosquitoes in the future — and mosquitoes cause more deaths globally than any other organism.”

As early as 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro adopted the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).  Under the convention, signatory countries committed to promoting sustainable economies that operate within our planet’s ecological limits. Further conferences and agreements followed. But so far, hardly any of the aims set out three decades ago have been achieved. The problem is all individual nations had to set their own conservation targets, but many of these have amounted to nothing more than declarations of intent. Particularly in industrialized nations, very few effective measures have been implemented. 

“While we can agree to work toward the 1.5 degrees Celsius target on the climate crisis — the fight against the crisis of nature is much more complex,” said Nicola Uhde, biodiversity policy expert at German environmental NGO BUND. “It cannot easily be reduced to a buzzword or standard. Awareness of the value of nature often only emerges with its loss,” she added.

Dying frogs rarely make the headlines. Yet the climate and biodiversity crises are intertwined. Rising temperatures and changing climatic conditions are driving some species to extinction. And as forests are cleared and wetlands drained, not only do the species they support vanish, essential carbon sinks are also lost, which in turn increases global warming. This is why both crises need to be tackled together.

′Biodiversity loss is humanity′s greatest threat′ | Global Ideas | DW | 21.06.2022

 According to the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR, more than 100 million men, women and children are currently displaced 

 New research published on Tuesday shows that U.S. corporate price markups and profits surged to their highest levels since the 1950s last year. Authored by Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani of the Roosevelt Institute, the analysis finds that markups—the difference between the actual cost of a good or service and the selling price—”were both the highest level on record and the largest one-year increase” in 2021.

“How high companies can increase their sales up and above their costs… matters for the economy more generally because these markups distribute economic gains from workers and consumers to firms and shareholders,” said Lusiani. “This is especially the case when almost 100% of these firms’ earnings derived from markups are distributed upward to shareholders rather than retained and reinvested.”

Study Shows Excess Corporate Profits in the US Have Become ‘Widespread’ (commondreams.org)