Food Insecurity in Venezuela

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One of every three people in Venezuela is struggling to put enough food on the table to meet minimum nutrition requirements.



A total of 9.3 million people – roughly a third of the population – are moderately or severely food insecure, said the study, which was conducted at the invitation of the Venezuelan government. Food insecurity is defined as an individual being unable to meet basic dietary needs.



The study describes food insecurity as a nationwide concern but even in more prosperous regions one in five people are estimated to be food insecure.

74% of families have adopted “food-related coping strategies”, such as reducing the variety and quality of food they eat. Sixty percent of households reported cutting portion sizes in meals, 33% said they had accepted food as payment for work and 20% reported selling family assets to cover basic needs.



The issue appears to be one that is less about the availability of food and more about the difficulty in obtaining it. Seven in 10 reported that food could always be found but said it is difficult to purchase because of high prices. Thirty-seven percent reported they had lost their job or business as a result of Venezuela’s severe economic contraction.



The survey also looked at interruptions in access to electricity and water, finding that four in 10 households experience daily power cuts. Four in 10 also reported recurrent interruptions in water service, further complicating daily life.









Noting that the survey was carried out between July and September, Carolina Fernández, a Venezuelan rights advocate, said she believed the situation had deteriorated even more. While it was once possible for many families to survive off remittances sent by relatives abroad, she said, that has become more difficult as much of the economy is dollarized and prices rise.



Fernández said food insecurity is likely to have an enduring impact on a generation of young Venezuelans going hungry during formative years.



“We’re talking about children who are going to have long-term problems because they’re not eating adequately,” she said.

Truth will prevail

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‘Dark Emu’ by Bruce Pascoe deserves a wide audience.  It’s already sold well over 100,000 copies. Professor Pascoe explains that “Some people are so fixated with Aboriginal incapacity that any thought of a sophisticated Aboriginal civilisation undermines the validity of the colony itself.”



The central thesis of ‘Dark Emu’ is that pre-invasion, Aboriginal Australia had a thriving and sustainable economy based on collectivised agriculture and extensive land management. This alternative history of Indigenous Australia has been erased both physically, intellectually and spiritually from the Australian psyche as a post-factual justification for the systemic genocide of the nation’s First People in the rush to plunder the natural wealth.



 Bruce Pascoe’s second – and more dangerous – thesis is that a return to Aboriginal land management systems might actually be beneficial for Australia economically, spiritually and ecologically. This is the idea that really sparks faux outrage. Any suggestion that current intensive agricultural practices should be replaced with the gentler Indigenous methods of harvesting native grasses and native animals is horrifying to those with vested interests, or those  who see their role in the media as defending the same vested interests.



There is a whole underground industry devoted to disproving both the claims made in ‘Dark Emu’ and the Aboriginal identity of Bruce Pascoe. The website Dark Emu Exposed claims to be a group of self-described “quiet Australians” who refute the thesis of ‘Dark Emu’ but who also fear “retribution” for their politically incorrect views. A second site, Australian History – The Truth Matters, also devotes an extensive series of posts to Bruce Pascoe’s ancestry in an attempt to refute his claim of Aboriginal heritage.



Why would they go to all the trouble and expense just to prove that Pascoe doesn’t have Aboriginal heritage? The answer doesn’t come easily, but there are several factors and they ultimately rely on a view that if Pascoe is not Indigenous, then his views about Aboriginal history, agriculture and animal husbandry can be dismissed. Secondly, the doubters argue, if Pascoe has consistently lied about his Aboriginal heritage then he is also lying about the research and conclusions in ‘Dark Emu’. Pascoe’s greatest “crime” is that he is “anti-white”.
The only sensible conclusion is that the complaints are not directed at correcting the historical record by disproving Pascoe’s claims about Indigenous farming, community building and settlement patterns. Instead, we can confidently suggest that the real battle is to silence any attempt to rescue Aboriginal Australia from the false narrative of savagery, ignorance and superstition that is the basis on which white Australia colonised the continent. This is why they hate ‘Dark Emu’ and vilify its author so relentless. 

The Murdoch media has also shown its willingness to recruit dubious characters into its relentless culture wars. In recent weeks, The Australian has given space to a wildly offensive suggestion that Indigenous Australians should be placed on a register and have to somehow prove their Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage. 
‘Dark Emu’ is an important book because it forces us to look at Australian history with fresh eyes that are not half-closed by the inherent bias that white history brings to our past. It also confronts us with ideas about Australia’s future transformation in the wake of climate change. That scares the denialists even more.



The Eastern Med Rivalry

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The alliance between Turkey and the UN-recognised government of Libya changes the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East. 



  On November 27, Turkey and Libya signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that commits Turkey to providing military assistance to Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA). The MoU also redraws Turkey’s maritime boundaries in a way that dramatically impacts the transport of gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe. Particularly worrying is that this new deal will undermine  plans for a 1,900-kilometer EastMed pipeline connecting the Israeli Leviathan  and the Cypriot Aphrodite gas fields to the EU.  



 The deal undermines their ability to transport natural gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe without crossing Turkish waters. In any event, the Turkey-Libya agreement has set the stage for a broader conflict that will unavoidably involve Egypt, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Russia and the United States.



Turkey’s policy makes it more likely that its rivals will increase their support for the Libyan other government led by Haftar who’s forces currently control more than 70% of the Libyan territory while almost 60% of the population is under the control of the GNA led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj. 



 According to Turkish news: “More than half of Haftar’s troops are mercenaries from Russia and Sudan, who are mainly paid by the Gulf states.” 



 Now adding to the civil war are Turkish-supplied and equipped Syrian mercenaries.




India and the US – The Armament Deal

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Trump and Modi announced the two countries were finalizing a $3 billion arms deal. 




“I believe the United States should be India’s premier defense partner,” said Trump, “and that’s the way it’s working out.”


Trump spoke during an event at Sardar Patel Stadium in Gujarat state’s Ahmedabad city  to a crowd of Modi loyalists estimated at around 100,000, telling the attendees that the military partnership between the U.S. and India was strong and that his administration “looks forward to providing India with some of the best and most feared military equipment on the planet.”




“We make the greatest weapons ever made,” said Trump. “Airplanes. Missiles. Rockets. Ships. We make the best and we’re dealing now with India. But this includes advanced air-defense systems and armed and unarmed aerial vehicles.”



Homes or Houses?

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The housing crisis gap – the difference between the current housing stock and the number needed for everyone to have a decent home to live in – is more than one million homes.

The BBC’s Housing Briefing estimates that we have built 1.2 million fewer homes than we should have, and the need for more homes is increasing.
The calculations suggest it will take at least 15 years at current building rates to close the gap, and that not enough of what is being built is affordable.  Government statistics show that the number of young adults living with parents is on the rise.
An analysis of planning documents reveals that 11,410 new homes have been planned for land the government considers high-risk of flooding in the seven English counties where thousands of properties have been devastated by flooding since November.



The government aims to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s to help ease a chronic housing shortage across the UK. Yet local authorities say they are struggling to meet these demands because of a dearth of available land, leading to as many as one in 10 new homes being built on high-risk flood sites since 2013.

Altruism begins young

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Psychologist Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of the University of Washington, explains, ‘We adults help each other when we see another in need and we do this even if there is a cost to the self. So we tested the roots of this in infants.’ 
The researchers conducted a test to see if children would help unknown adults by handing over a tasty-looking piece of fruit, even if they were hungry.
Even hungry babies will share food with strangers in need, it seems, as psychologists discover that the ‘spirit of giving’ starts in infants as young as around 19 months old. They found that more than half the children would ordinarily give up the food, with that number only falling to 37 per cent when the kids were hungry themselves.
‘We think altruism is important to study because it is one of the most distinctive aspects of being human. It is an important part of the moral fabric of society,’ Barragan pointed out.



Summer School 2020

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The Socialist Party’s 2020 Summer School 7-9 August looks at technological progress and its application in the past, present and future.  This weekend of talks and discussion is an exciting opportunity to share and explore revolutionary ideas, in the relaxing setting of Fircroft College in Birmingham.

From the development of the first tools and the wheel through to the invention of the printing press, the steam engine, the microprocessor and beyond, technology has always shaped how we live. Scientific developments take place in the context of the social and economic conditions of the time. In capitalism, technological progress and how technology is used are driven by what is profitable and cost effective more than by what is really needed and wanted. This means that technology is often used in ways which go against our best interests, whether through environmental damage, the development of ever-more destructive weapons or the misuse of data gathered online and through social media. In a future socialist society based on common ownership and democratic organisation of industries and services, technology could really be used to benefit us, in harmony with the environment.
Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100, and the concessionary rate is £50. Day visitors are welcome, but please book in advance.
E-mail enquiries should be sent to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.
To book a place online, go to summer-school-2020 or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.



The Civilian Casualty Numbers – Afghanistan

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A new UN report has revealed the true scale of the human tragedy in Afghanistan over the past 10 years. The total number of civilian casualties surpassed 100,000.



Over 3,400 civilians were killed in the Afghan conflict in 2019, according to new United Nations data released on Saturday. The United Nations’ Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) also announced 6,989 were wounded, making the sixth year in a row that civilian casualties have surpassed 10,000.

38% of casualties resulted from government or Western allies actions, 62% of the 2019 casualties were caused by non-government forces, with 47% attributed to the Taliban and 12% to the so-called Islamic State (IS) armed group.





Hard Work and Billionaires

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At the February 19 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, Bloomberg was asked




“Have you earned too much — has it been an obscene amount of — should you have earned that much money?” 




“Yes,” Bloomberg, worth an estimated $60 billion replied. “I worked very hard for it.”





Tough at the bottom

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Americans who already enjoyed high incomes saw the most growth in their wages in 2019, according to a new report, while wage growth for low hourly workers was sluggish—a continuation of what the Economic Policy Institute calls an “alarming trend” that has emerged over the last four decades.



In its report, “State of Working America Wages 2019,” EPI revealed that median hourly wages grew by just 1% over the past year, with racial and gender wage gaps persisting, while earners in the 95th percentile saw their incomes grow last year by 4.5%. Even with wage growth for top earners, the think tank said, the median wage in the U.S. “is only $19.33 an hour, which translates into about $40,000 for a full-time, full-year worker.”



Unequal wages and wage growth “have been defining features of the U.S. labor market for the last four decades, despite steady productivity growth,” Elise Gould, senior economist for EPI and author of the report, said in a statement. However, she added, persistent inequality is the result of political choices—not an inevitability.




“These alarming trends,” Gould said, “are a direct result of a series of policy decisions that have reduced the economic power of most workers to achieve faster wage growth.”


The report counted policymakers’ failure to regularly raise the minimum wage, companies offshoring jobs as a bargaining tactic to keep wages low, and corporate tax cuts like those passed by the Republican Party in 2017 among the reasons for worsening income inequality.



In the study, which looked at wage growth over the past 40 years, EPI reported that wages for many workers have not just leveled off but have gone down. The bottom 50% of college graduates earn less than they did in 2000, and the wage gap between black and white Americans has worsened in the past 20 years. In 2000, there was a 10.2% gap between black and white workers’ pay, compared to a 14.9% gap now. The wage gap between men and women persists—even among women who are more highly educated than their male counterparts—but it has narrowed slightly, with women earning 85 cents on the dollar.


EPI rejected myths that slow wage growth for the lowest-paid Americans can be “be explained away by positing education shortages, by including benefits and looking at total compensation, or by changing the price deflator (changing the way wages are adjusted for inflation).”


Instead, Gould said, lawmakers must take responsibility for political choices in the past several decades which have left many American workers behind.


EPI tweeted that declining union membership has played a role in the current crisis of rising inequality. In the 1950s, 35% of Americans working in the private sector were represented by labor unions, compared to just 6.2% now.


“This erosion was not driven by workers’ declining interest in unions but rather by concerted employer opposition along with state and federal policy that has made it near impossible for workers to form unions in the face of unwilling employer,” reads EPI’s report.



 The Communications Workers of America, a labor union with 700,000 members, called on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this week to cut off support to the seven House Democrats who “betrayed working people” by voting against a pro-labor bill which would eliminate state-level “right-to-work” laws and expand workers’ bargaining rights.



 “They must be denied the support of the Democratic Party for refusing to stand with working Americans,” CWA president Christopher Shelton wrote to DCCC chair Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) in a letter (pdf) dated Feb. 18. “I urge the DCCC to no longer provide services for any incumbent House members who turn their back on working people.”


https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/20/new-report-blames-corporate-tax-cuts-attacks-unions-persistent-inequality-and-slow



 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/20/no-tolerance-union-urges-dccc-cut-support-dems-who-voted-against-pro-labor-bill

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