The future does not bode well

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The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz and Eduardo Brondizio, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned.



“There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.”



In an article with Dr Peter Daszak, who is preparing the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) next assessment, they write: “Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases.”



These activities cause pandemics by bringing more people into contact and conflict with animals, from which 70% of emerging human diseases originate, they said. Combined with urbanisation and the explosive growth of global air travel, this enabled a harmless virus in Asian bats to bring “untold human suffering and halt economies and societies around the world. This is the human hand in pandemic emergence. Yet Covid-19 may be only the beginning. Future pandemics are likely to happen more frequently, spread more rapidly, have greater economic impact and kill more people if we are not extremely careful about the possible impacts of the choices we make today,” they said. “It may be politically expedient to relax environmental standards and to prop up industries such as intensive agriculture, airlines, and fossil-fuel-dependent energy sectors, but doing so without requiring urgent and fundamental change essentially subsidises the emergence of future pandemics.”



Daszak added, “The health of people is intimately connected to the health of wildlife, the health of livestock and the health of the environment. It’s actually one health…Business as usual will not work. Business as usual right now for pandemics is waiting for them to emerge and hoping for a vaccine. That’s not a good strategy. We need to deal with the underlying drivers.”



The biodiversity experts conclude: “We can emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient than ever, by choosing actions that protect nature, so that nature can help to protect us.”



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/halt-destruction-nature-worse-pandemics-top-scientists

Prepare for the worse

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“There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe.” – Noam Chomsky explained,



 Between 1980 and 2013, the number of annual epidemics has gone from fewer than 1,000 to over 3,000. Infectious diseases such as Zika, MERS-CoV, SARS, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, influenza, and Ebola kill millions every year, and their outbreaks have decimated economies and triggered aftershocks and panic around the world.



A few billionaires have contributed to the fight against Covid-19. But Luke Hildyard, Executive Director of the High Pay Centre, says, “Very generous individual grants can obscure the fact that on the whole, wealthy people’s charitable giving is pretty minimal.” In the most flagrant example of disregard for the rest of us, one company has installed private ‘doomsday’ bunkers in New Zealand with “luxury bathrooms, game rooms, shooting ranges, gyms, theaters and surgical beds.”



The richest 5% have an average net worth of over $5 million. They came away with nearly $35 TRILLION dollars in the past ten years, mainly by waiting out the stock market, which has more than tripled in value since the recession. In the ten years from 2009 to 2019, the average member of America’s richest 5% more than doubled his/her wealth from $2.6 million to $5.4 million.



Capitalist leaders have failed us, both in the past and in our current crisis. We’re not “all in this together” when so few people own so much of the wealth.

Lebanon Unrest Mounts

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The crash of Lebanon’s national currency that sent food prices soaring has boiled over into street violence in the northern city of Tripoli  where a man wounded in clashes between protesters and security forces is now dead.



Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, has soaring unemployment and poverty, and protesters hurled petrol bombs at several banks and caused wide damage. Protests also erupted elsewhere in Lebanon. In Beirut,  cash machines were set on fire.  Anti-government protests resumed as authorities began easing the weeks-long lockdown to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in Lebanon, which has reported 710 cases and 24 deaths so far.



Over the weekend, the Lebanese pound hit a record low, with 4,000 pounds to the dollar on the black market, while the official price remained at 1,507 pounds.  The Central Bank of Lebanon instructed currency exchange shops not to sell the dollar for more than 3,200 pounds. On Monday, most exchange shops were not selling dollars, saying clients who have dollars are refusing to exchange their currency at such a low price. The dollar surged on the black market to 4,300 pounds on Tuesday.



It is the poor who pay the price.

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Britain’s lowest-paid workers, women and young adults have jobs with the biggest health and economic risks during the coronavirus lockdown, according to a report into the uneven impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.



The Resolution Foundation thinktank said jobs in shutdown parts of the economy were lower paid than average, with as many as one in four of the lowest earners in society working in sectors forced into temporary closure, compared with less than one in 20 of the highest paid.



8.6 million key workers have been putting their health at risk to keep the country running, the study found women were more than twice as likely than men to occupy these roles. Dominated by almost 4 million health workers, as well as education, food and pharmaceutical retail staff, parents are also more likely to be key workers, including as many as two in five working mothers.



The thinktank said key workers, such as nurses, teachers and care workers, typically earn less than employees further away from the centre of the crisis, with the bottom 30% of earners in Britain more than twice as likely to be in such jobs than the top 10%.



As well as health risks facing women and low-income workers in sectors where staff are still going into work, the Resolution Foundation identified 6.3 million people in areas of the economy that have been ordered to shut down, including in hospitality, retail, arts, travel and leisure. It said jobs in sectors that have been effectively forced to close were typically lower paid than average, putting workers in these areas at greater risk of financial hardship as redundancies mount.

One in four of the lowest 10% of all UK earners work in sectors where activity has ground to a halt amid tight restrictions on social and business life across Britain, compared with less than one in 20 of the highest paid.



Young people are particularly likely to work in mothballed sectors, given the higher numbers of young adults in hospitality or retail, where their employers have been forced to close. As the generation to experience the toughest squeeze on pay following the 2008 financial crisis, the report warned that almost a quarter of millennials – born between 1981 and 2000 – currently work in shuttered sectors, compared with 16% of working baby boomers and other older adults born before them.



Although the government is providing billions of pounds of emergency financial support to companies and individuals, millions are still expected to fall through the safety net.

Maja Gustafsson, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation, said, “Women, young people and the low-paid are most likely to be bearing the biggest health and economic risks from the crisis, which has shone a spotlight on the vitality of work that has been undervalued and underpaid for far too long,” she added.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/uks-lowest-paid-most-at-risk-during-covid-19-crisis-report-finds



Discord – The solution is still socialism.

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The Socialist Party points out that as a democratic, leader-free socialist party we are committed to the exchange of ideas with others who are interested in changing society. 



The Party has recently introduced Discord, an online tool, with the aim of breaking down the sense of isolation felt by many socialists across the world. If you want to join please don’t delay. And if you know anyone who might want to join, tell them about it.

Details of Discord – See the Party’s website homepage

Talks, meetings, debates – contact Forum Admin for special invite or email H.O.







Can Capitalism Deliver the Vaccines?

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Nobel laureate and immunologist Professor Peter Doherty said the world needed to change its funding model for vaccine development.
“There is just not enough profit margin in it for pharma companies,” he said. “They live by profits and the rules of capitalism. And capitalism has no interest in human beings other than as consumers.”
Professor Mark Sullivan, managing director of Medicines Development for Global Health, a vaccine development company based in Melbourne, described the vaccine development landscape as a “market failure”.
“The problem is this market failure is our only method of developing medicines,” he said. 



The final study needed for a vaccine to be approved is much more expensive than a similar study for a drug because the study needs to be huge to definitively show prevention of a disease – “tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of participants”, said Professor Sullivan. Three SARS vaccine projects, which may have yielded important insights for a COVID-19 vaccine as the viruses are closely related, stalled at this stage.

And manufacturing a vaccine is much more expensive than making a drug because it often involves modifying yeast or bacteria to produce a vaccine – a difficult and costly process.
Because of all those factors, the enthusiasm of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in vaccines has dropped dramatically in the last 20 years.
Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi which works to distribute vaccines to the poor, said it was very difficult to get funding for research on vaccines for viruses that have not yet become pandemics. “We have enough land-based nuclear missiles to destroy the world. And in case that does not work, we keep air-based missiles and submarines. And that’s to prevent something much less likely than the evolutionary certainty that is a pandemic virus.”
“Without immediate additional financial contributions the vaccine programmes we have begun will not be able to progress and ultimately will not deliver the vaccines that the world needs,” Dr Richard Hatchett,  Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation‘s CEO, said in a statement.







Where did their profits go?

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FTSE 100 companies claiming millions of pounds of government support for furloughed workers paid their chief executives an average of £3.6m a year before the coronavirus crisis, according to new analysis that highlights the disparity between workers and their bosses.



The 18 big companies who have so far publicly revealed that they will use the scheme have spent a combined £321m on pay for their chief executives over the last five years, according to the High Pay Centre, a thinktank.
Under the job retention scheme companies will be able to claim back from the government 80% of the salaries of workers who are furloughed, up to £2,500 a month per worker. Some employers have committed to paying the remaining 20% of furloughed workers’ wages.
The scheme has been one of the most important measures to cushion the blow to the economy during lockdown. However, Luke Hildyard, the High Pay Centre’s director, said the recipients of taxpayer-funded support would face pressure to cut high executive salaries, given that the unprecedented government support also directly benefits businesses and their shareholders.
37% of FTSE 100 companies have already cut executive pay in order to reduce costs during the coronavirus lockdown. However, only 13% have cut the bonuses, and long-term incentive payments often comprise the biggest component of executive pay awards, raising concerns that pay cuts will not necessarily result in large reductions.

The £42bn profits made in the last five years by the 18 companies could have covered the expected cost to the government of the scheme, the High Pay Centre’s analysis suggests. During that same period, those companies paid shareholders £26bn in dividends, although dividend payments.



 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/27/ftse-100-firms-using-furlough-scheme-pay-ceos-average-of-36m

UK – “utterly hypocritical” – UN rapporteur on extreme poverty

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The United Nations’ poverty expert Philip Alston said that globally “the most vulnerable have been short-changed or excluded” by official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The policies of many states reflect a social Darwinism philosophy that prioritises the economic interests of the wealthiest while doing little for those who are hard at work providing essential services or unable to support themselves,” Alston said, warning that the pandemic could push more than half a billion additional people into poverty globally. “Governments have shut down entire countries without making even minimal efforts to ensure people can get by,” he said. “Many in poverty live day to day, with no savings or surplus food. And of course, homeless people cannot simply stay home.”
He highlighted how the most vulnerable populations had been neglected, which “forces them to continue working in unsafe conditions, putting everyone’s health at risk.” And he warned that, while some nations were seeing curves flattening, the virus was “poised to wreak havoc in poorer countries”.
“As for the UK,” Alston told the Guardian, “my thoughts of course hark back to the sense of how utterly hypocritical it is now to abandon ‘austerity’ with such alacrity, after all the harm and misery caused to individuals and the fatal weakening of the community’s capacity to cope and respond over the past 10 years. And of course, many of the worst and most damaging aspects of ‘austerity’ cannot and will not be undone. The damage caused to community cohesion and to the social infrastructure are likely to prove permanent.”
“This pandemic has exposed the bankruptcy of social support systems in many countries.” Alston said. “While some governments have embraced far-ranging measures previously dismissed as unrealistic, most programmes have been short-term, stop-gap measures that merely buy time rather than address the immense challenges that will continue well into the future. Now is the time for deep structural reforms that will protect populations as a whole and will build resilience in the face of an uncertain future.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/26/uk-coronavirus-response-utterly-hypocritical-says-un-poverty-expert

Russian Wheat Restrictions

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The world risks being cut off from Russian wheat.  Russia has already burned through the entire quota. It will halt grain shipments to all but four former Soviet neighbors once the last cargo booked leaves the country.



While the ban will only last until farmers start harvesting in July, some other nearby nations have also restricted grain exports, threatening to reroute global trade and fuelling worries about food shortages and higher prices. Countries from Egypt to Turkey are trying to load up on imports while they still can, and Russian shippers have been feeding that demand. The window has closed fast.  In just a few weeks, shippers booked out all of the 7 million-ton quota set through June. Egypt is taking an unusual step of importing a large amount of wheat during its own harvest to ensure it has enough to feed its population, many of whom live in poverty.  Plus, the collapse in the energy market will likely take its toll on the economies of wheat importers like Algeria and Nigeria, which derive large amounts of income from oil.



There has been “a flurry of activity” recently, said Andrey Sizov Jr., managing director at consultant SovEcon in Moscow. “Buyers want to stock up because they realize they may not have the chance to do it later.”



Russia last imposed an outright ban in 2010 after drought destroyed crops. Some researchers saw it as an indirect contributor to the Arab Spring uprisings. The memories of past food shortages have restarted the debate about food nationalism. Organizations such as the United Nations and European Union said the risk of social and political unrest is rising again as the pandemic spurs discontent, and urged against unjustified measures that could hurt food security and raise prices.



 Drought is threatening crops across the region. If conditions in the Black Sea deteriorate further, that could prompt buyers around the world to stock up on supplies even more in the coming weeks, SovEcon said.

“The probability of that scenario is growing, given the current weather,” SovEcon’s Sizov said.



https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/exports-russian-wheat-dry-stoking-food-security-concerns-200426172340195.html

India’s Farming Crisis

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India’s nationwide lockdown has confined a record 1.3 billion Indians to their homes since Mar. 24, and one of the hardest hit communities has been that of Indian farmers. Crashing prices and transport bottlenecks due to the lockdown has resulted in the media filled withimages of Indian farmers standing amidst swathes of rotting vegetables, fruits and grain. March and April mark the peak harvesting season in India when crops like wheat, chickpea, barley, flax seed, pea, potato, mustard plant, cotton and millet are reaped and sold. But the current pandemic means this cannot happen. Nearly 700 million people of the country’s 1.3 billion rely directly or indirectly on an agriculture-derived livelihood. Agriculture and allied sectors sector contribute 16.5 percent to the country’s $2.6 trillion GDP, according to the Indian government’s Economic Survey 2019-20. As per International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) statistics, the share of agriculture in India’s total workforce was 43.9 percent in 2018. Of the total agricultural workforce in India, 45.1 percent are cultivators (farmers with land or self-employed in agriculture) and the rest, 54.9 percent, are agricultural labour (or landless), as per the Pocket Book of Agricultural Statistics of 2017.



“We take our produce to the mandi (market) but there are hardly any buyers these days. I was forced to sell four quintals of chilli at Rs 10 per kg as against a normal price of Rs 40. But I was desperate to clinch the deal, else the transportation cost of bringing all that produce back would have broken my back,” Lekhi Ram, a smallholder farmer from Khairpur village of west Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, told IPS.  Unable to harvest his crop in time, Ram’s neighbour, also a smallholder, set his fields on fire.  The leftover vegetables were fed to the sheep and goats. 



“We were hoping to reap a rich harvest of rabi (spring) crops due to a good spell of rains. But God clearly had other plans,” Balbir Singh Rajewal, President of the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Punjab, a representative organisation for small farmers that protects their interests, told IPS. “Urban demand has been minimal during the lockdown. Even online grocery stores, whose orders we normally can’t cope with, have stopped calling.” Grain farmers with larger land holdings are experiencing greater struggles under the combined effects of low demand and acute paucity of migrant farm labour. This has severely interrupted agricultural patterns especially harvesting activities in the northwest northern breadbasket states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana where wheat and pulses are grown, said Rajewal.



Farmer suicides have been reported from some villages. 



According to Jagdish Singh, President, Bhartiya Kisan Union, Madhya Pradesh, a representative body of 0.3 million farmers, bureaucratic apathy has hurt farmers most.

“We didn’t get any combined harvesters from Punjab due to transport restrictions due to which we weren’t able to harvest our grain on time. Lack of farm labour and bad weather last week only made things worse.”  Singh rues the state government made no efforts to operate local mandis to enable farmers to sell whatever grain they were able to harvest.
Transportation has proved to be an issue. Keeping supply chains functioning seamlessly will be vital for future food security, warn experts, for which farmers must have continued access to markets. According to Pravin Paithankar, president of the Maharashtra Heavy Vehicle and Inter-State Container Operators’ Association, as urban areas are reporting more coronavirus cases than rural ones, truck drivers and container operators are preferring to stay in their villages.
“They won’t be back until May-June,” Paithankar told IPS.
The current crisis will also have a domino effect on agricultural output during the kharif (winter) season as good quality seeds, fertilisers and other inputs are not available, a senior official of Uttar Pradesh’s food, civil supplies and consumer affairs department.
 Indian Institute of Technology (Gandhinagar) scientists who analysed 150 years of drought data have highlighted in a report that 2 to 3 million deaths in the Bengal famine of 1943 were due to food supply disruptions—not lack of food availability. According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), among other middle income countries India has an above-average score of 65.5 out of 100 when it comes to sustainable agriculture.



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