Looking to nature for inspiration, drug research, genetically modified crops or other products is nothing new — research groups and major corporations do it all the time. But discoveries based on traditional Indigenous knowledge or the wealth of biodiversity in developing countries can end up being exported and patented without proper credit or compensation, in what’s as biopiracy.

The practice is rooted in history. Colonizers like Spain, the United Kingdom and other global empires frequently took and profited from the natural resources of the regions they occupied, trading in products like coffee, cotton, tea, pepper and rubber.

Today, richer states often exploit the natural resources of poorer nations for medical, agricultural or industrial purposes. Though some protections have been in place for decades — including a World Trade Organization agreement that covers intellectual property rights for varieties of plants and animals — such protections aren’t always effective. Such was in the case in the decade-long fight against a patent granted to a US multinational on an antifungal product derived from the neem tree, the use of which has long been a traditional part of Indian medicinal knowledge. 

Another example is when American cosmetics firm Mary Kay tried to patent an ingredient from the Kakadu plum — a native Australian fruit which can sell for up to 40 Australian dollars ($27, €26) per kilogram — in its skincare line. The move would have shut out Indigenous producers from the Australian market, people who have long benefited from the plum’s medicinal qualities.

In the case of French Guiana,French researchers, based on interviews with Indigenous groups in 2005, identified — and patented — a component in Quassia amara, a traditional medicinal plant with anti-malarial properties. Though the IRD research group eventually agreed to share any potential scientific and economic benefits, it still retains the patent granted by the European Patent Agency in 2015, despite an appeal.

“This patent is a flagrant case of biopiracy. At no time were the six Indigenous communities of French Guiana consulted,” said Michele Rivasi, a French member of the European Parliament with the Greens/European Free Alliance. “This decision jeopardizes the use of traditional remedies, as the IRD can prohibit the use of these remedies by the communities that discovered them.”

How can developing countries confront biopiracy? | Environment | All topics from climate change to conservation | DW | 20.06.2022

 A sombre warning comes from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) that further food ration cuts are imminent for refugees as humanitarian needs multiply around the world while funding struggles to keep pace. The WFP has already been forced to significantly reduce rations to refugees across its operations.

“As global hunger soars way beyond the resources available to feed all the families who desperately need WFP’s help, we are being forced to make the heart breaking decision to cut food rations for refugees who rely on us for their survival,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley. “Without urgent new funds to support refugees – one of the world’s most vulnerable and forgotten groups of people – many facing starvation will be forced to pay with their lives.”

Ration reductions of up to 50 percent are affecting three-quarters of all refugees supported by WFP in Eastern Africa. Refugees living in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda are the most affected. Severe funding constraints in West Africa, where hunger has reached a record high in a decade, have forced WFP to significantly reduce rations for refugees living in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. WFP assists on average 500,000 refugees in Southern Africa annually. Resourcing remains insufficient to meet the very basic needs of refugee households and imminent disruptions are expected in Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

WFP is having to prioritize assistance to ensure that vital food reaches the most vulnerable families first. These painful decisions very often leave refugees without support at a time where food assistance is the difference between life and death. 67 percent of refugees and asylum seekers originated from countries with food crises in 2021. This, coupled with devastating conflict and climate extremes, is hitting refugees the hardest. In 2021, WFP assisted nearly 10 million refugees globally.

WFP is forced to institute ration reductions in order to stretch limited resources, where this year saw an additional 6 million refugee movements from Ukraine. Responding to the crisis, WFP in Moldova has delivered nearly 475,000 hot meals to families affected by the conflict in across 31 different localities.

Escalating needs, rising hunger: refugees caught in the eye of the perfect storm – World | ReliefWeb

Each year the media names “The Most Dangerous Man In The World.” Putin is currently cast as the nastiest despot.

Once again European cities are being bombed. Once again displaced persons are on the move. This has never ceased to be the lot of people in Africa and Asia but one of the claims of Western capitalism was that it had at least established peace and prosperity in Europe. Now full-scale war has returned to Europe. The illusion that permanent peace and prosperity are possible under capitalism has again been shattered. The Yugoslavian civil wars in the Balkans are long forgotten by the media.

Although we are not pacifists (we would countenance fighting should a pro-capitalist minority take up arms to try to prevent the democratic establishment of socialism) we say there is no such thing as a “just war”. Wars are fought over markets, raw material sources, trade routes and strategic spheres of influence. The present war in Ukraine is no different, conducted under the disguise of “national self-determination”. With NATO’s historic enemy Russia seen to be on its knees, it revived certain nations to seek eastwards economic expansion.

The result, however, has not been stability. Quite the reverse, but a miscalculation of Russia’s determination to defend its self-interests.

 Blinded by the hype on their TV screens, large numbers of decent people are weeping for the oppressed Ukrainians and cheering them on as Russia drops its bombs on towns and villages. Because most people are decent and hate to see injustice against the underdogs so they are sucked into the drama of war. But there are many other defenceless and vulnerable communities whose plight and suffering are not shown on the news.

There are numerous other refugees in addition to the Ukrainian exodus. Where are the calls from those  humanitarians to send aid to these refugees and to end the fighting? Conduct a simple experiment. Go on to the streets of New York or  London and ask people what they think about the slaughter of the people in the Sahel. Most will never have heard about the conflicts there.  The media have forgotten to tell them about that atrocities being carried out in the region. Reports of the massacres have not made it on to  CNN or Fox, perhaps because the reporters are too busy congratulating the West upon its campaign to assist Ukraine. . What a terrific diversion from thinking about the poverty of life under the profit system it is for wage slaves to be presented with 24-hour live coverage of Biden’s Heroes.

Faced with this latest manifestation of capitalist barbarity and cynicism we once again place on record our abhorrence of all war and call upon workers everywhere to unite to bring the war-prone capitalist system to a speedy end. Those  who own and control the world—the CEOs of USA Inc and UK Plc—are ruthless, exploitative thieves whose primary interest is in the fast buck and protecting what they imagine their interests to be. The capitalists have never gone to war to promote justice and they never will. Indeed, the notion that justice can be furthered by violence can only make sense when you have a social system that is rooted in violence and plunder. 

There is no glory in battle. 

 “True socialists cannot at the same time be nationalists, militarists and capitalist ‘patriots.’ . . . The self-called socialists who are nationalists first and who set the ‘fatherland’ of their masters above the whole earth and above all the workers of the world are not socialists at all but either mild and harmless capitalist reformers and stool pigeons or traitors to the cause.” – Eugene Debs

Eugene V. Debs: Socialist Internationalism Versus Capitalist Nationalism (jacobin.com)

 Black Americans lost 90% of their lands across the United States during the 20th century, government figures show, due to factors such as predatory developers.

White people own 98% of U.S. farmland.

Black farming projects look to recoup historical U.S. land losses (trust.org)

 The Rich Prevail Over the Poor

The 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO) has implicitly rubber-stamped the widely-condemned policy of “vaccine apartheid” which has discriminated against the world’s poorer nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, depriving them of any wide-ranging intellectual property rights.

Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said at the conclusion of the WTO’s ministerial meeting last week: “The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful. The European Union has blocked anything that resembles a meaningful intellectual property waiver. The UK and Switzerland have used negotiations to twist the knife and make any text even worse. And the US has sat silently in negotiations with red lines designed to limit the impact of any agreement.”

 This so-called compromise, he argued, largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances. And it tries to restrict even that limited right to countries which do not already have capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines.Lawson added, “This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines and treatments for everyone, everywhere. The EU, UK, US, and Switzerland blocked that text.”

“Put simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives.”

Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ explained that rich countries had acted to protect the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies to determine production levels of pandemic-ending medicines.

In doing so, he said “they are not only causing deaths in developing countries, they are causing deaths in their own countries’ too. It’s not Northern interests vs Southern interests. It’s a handful of oligarchs who cannot share vs 8 billion people who want to be safe from pandemics.”

“Almost everyone in every country in the world”, he said, “would be better off if big pharmaceutical companies made slightly less obscene profits so that enough doses of pandemic-ending medicines could be made by multiple producers across the world to reach everyone who needs them on time.”

“The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the rot of the system of monopolies over production of vital medicines. Everyone can see it, and it will fall. How quickly it falls is the only question left. People are organizing nationally and internationally and they won’t let this pass again,” Phillips declared.

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs), said, “unequal access to vaccines is a global scandal that flies in the face of the economic, social and technological progress we claim to have made as humanity”. He pointed out that CSOs around the world have long called for equity in health care and an end to excessive profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of people’s well-being.

The Battle for Covid-19 Vaccines: the Rich Prevail Over the Poor | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

“Ethical” investing is one of the fastest-growing areas of finance. Corporations worldwide are backing projects to plant or protect carbon-absorbing trees which weighs up a company’s commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

Some environmentalists, however, argue that such efforts are often just cases of “greenwashing” – a way for companies to look like they are taking action to curb climate change without actually cutting their own planet-heating emissions.

“Funding for communities is not bad, but that doesn’t make up for the negative impact that the company may be having on the environment,” said Gustavo Pinheiro, a coordinator at the Institute for Climate and Society, a Brazilian philanthropic organization.

But the current ESG wave means many corporations are investing in forest protection as a way to buy external goodwill, instead of using the money to make internal changes to cut their carbon emissions, said Daniela Teston, Brazil’s corporate engagement manager for green group WWF.

“Sometimes a company supports a specific project and communicates that investment to the public as if it were a part of its strategy in terms of social-environmental conservation,” Teston said. Instead, companies should take “a broader look at concrete actions that are not focused on small projects,” she added.

In Brazil between January and March this year, tree loss in the Amazon rose 64% from a year ago to 941 sq km (363 square miles).

Can ethical investment help protect the Amazon rainforest? (trust.org)

The experts now foresee a long protracted war in Ukraine with further inevitable economic consequences for many other peoples across the world. The burden of war always falls heaviest on the poor and vulnerable. They are taught that their masters always know better, and thus when commanded go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they return to face their rulers cutting social and welfare services. You are doomed to sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil. What have you to fight for? National independence? That means the masters’ freedom. Let the workers form one great worldwide union to gain for the workers true liberty and happiness. When millions of workers are set free from making armaments for warfare, then they will be able to turn their attention to building themselves better houses, producing more and better food and healthcare for their families, and they will enjoy the leisure, the comfort, the culture and the education which are now the privileges of the exploiters. Let us work to bring about universal prosperity and peace.

To the Russian soldiers, we say you are being misled and are sacrificing your lives and your family’s happiness in an unjust foreign invasion. You are fighting a most disgraceful and inhuman war. Yours is the robbers’ fight to steal another’s country.  Putin cannot fight even the smallest battle without you. You are the masters of the entire situation. Lay down your weapons, go back home and change conditions back there.

To the Ukrainian soldiers, you are martyring your lives in the name of patriotism so that plutocrats can preserve their privileges and private property. Join your women and children and seek safety outside Ukraine and let the politicians and the employers who benefit do the fighting. Why bleed for the capitalists?

Men and women make their own history, as Marx once said. Imperialism is a product of capitalism and we cannot destroy the one without overthrowing the other. Socialists struggling against economic slavery at home cuts at the roots of war that can only be overcome by the working-class conquest of economic and political power in their respective countries, which will bring to an end the capitalist regime, and call into existence the cooperative world commonwealth.

Capitalism condemns people against one another. Capitalism is the instigator of wars. Instead of uniting the world, it works for its irremediable division and for eternal war. 

The Socialist Party has for years declared against the atrocities of capitalism, but now there are so-called socialists informing us that it is our duty to become accomplices of the rulers in the greatest of all iniquities, the slaughter of fellow workers by fellow-worker, dutifully performing one’s patriotism by taking life, bombing homes, and laying waste to fields of the innocent.

The working class of the world has but one enemy, the capitalist class of the world, those of their own country being at the head of the list.

Fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them “have humanity by the throat,” António Guterres, the UN secretary general has said.

He compared fossil fuel companies to the tobacco companies that continued to push their addictive products while concealing or attacking health advice that showed clear links between smoking and cancer, the first time he has drawn such a parallel.

He said: “We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies. They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.”

Guterres also castigated governments that are failing to rein in fossil fuels, and in many cases seeking increased production of gas, oil and even coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

He said: “Nothing could be more clear or present than the danger of fossil fuel expansion. Even in the short-term, fossil fuels don’t make political or economic sense.”

Guterres has apparently been incensed by the recent behaviour of fossil fuel companies, which have been reaping a bonanza from energy prices sent soaring by the Ukraine war. Much of these bumper profits are likely to be invested in fresh exploration and expansion of fossil fuel resources.

Guterres is understood to be furious that, six months after the Cop26 climate summit, and after three dire reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the “starkest warning yet” from climate scientists – countries and businesses are ignoring the science and squandering opportunities to put the world on a greener path, when renewable energy is cheaper and safer than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency warned last year that all new exploration and development of oil, gas and coal must cease this year to hold to the 1.5C threshold.

A senior UN official explained: “Even given the secretary general’s impressive track record of speaking truth to power, this is a blistering intervention, to the leaders of the world’s largest economies. The fossil fuel industry is taking a page out of big tobacco’s playbook, and that is utterly unacceptable to the secretary general. He’s determined to call out the fossil fuel industry and its financiers, and he won’t be constrained by any diplomatic niceties.” The official added: “For the secretary general, this is the fight of our lives, and he won’t take a backwards step.”

Fossil fuel firms ‘have humanity by the throat’, says UN head in blistering attack | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, has again been distinguishing himself as a patriot. Bluntly put, Starmer regards it as the duty of Britons to sacrifice themselves in defence of their exploiters should the latter be challenged by the exploiters of any other country. In other words it says that the working class should be prepared to slaughter workers of any other country should their respective masters quarrel over the division of the spoils that has been stolen from the working class.

Every member of the Socialist Party knows that the problem of militarism—like that of unemployment—is inseparable from capitalism. Militarism is an inevitable effect of capitalist domination and the struggle for markets and profit, and so long as the workers are ruled by a master class, so long will their masters use them as cannon fodder. The only solution of the question of militarism from the proletarian point of view is the abolition of capitalist exploitation. It is then our duty to concentrate our efforts upon socialism, upon the triumph of those who labour.

The revolutionary socialist is the truest peace advocate. All socialists call themselves internationalists, and this, to every socialist, means to be in favour of the international union of the workers.

The patriotic left-nationalists say: ‘Present day nations, such as history has made them, are entities whose existence is useful to human progress. However imperfect they may be, however inhuman even they may be for working people, the latter have in each country the duty of defending them when attacked. We are internationalists, but if the country in which we chanced to be born is attacked we will defend it to the death’.

This in plain language means simply; ‘Workers of the world unite; but if your rulers order you to massacre your comrades, do so!’

If a wider war happens to break out over Ukraine between NATO and Russia, workers would have protested through the voices of their respective parliamentarians, proclaiming eloquently the fraternity between peoples  and, then, fraternally, the working classes would have gone to massacre each other.

The workers are ill-treated in every existing country.All nations are equal, or nearly so, in this respect, particularly now that the capitalist regime renders more and more uniform the material, intellectual, and political conditions of life for the labouring class in all countries.No country at the present day, is so superior to the others that the workers of that country should get themselves killed in its defence.

 The Socialist Party is the only party of which it can be said that it advocates undiluted socialism. All the various problems that affect the working class hinge upon the ownership of the means of life, and yet outside of our organisation practically the whole of the workers’ energies are being directed against effects rather than to the removal of the cause of the trouble. The origin of poverty, war and slavery lies in class ownership of the means whereby the people live. The straightest road is the shortest road, and the only way to get rid of the evil of militarism is to get rid of capitalism.