Is your drinking water safe?

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The contamination of US drinking water with manmade “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group.



The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems.
“It’s nearly impossible to avoid contaminated drinking water from these chemicals,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at EWG and co-author of the report. “Everyone’s really exposed to a toxic soup of these PFAS chemicals” .



The findings here by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show the group’s previous estimate in 2018, based on unpublished US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, that 110 million Americans may be contaminated with PFAS, could be far too low.
The contamination of US drinking water with manmade “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group.



The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems.



The findings here by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show the group’s previous estimate in 2018, based on unpublished US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, that 110 million Americans may be contaminated with PFAS, could be far too low.


Of tap water samples taken by EWG from 44 sites in 31 states and Washington DC, only one location, Meridian, Mississippi, which relies on 700ft (215m) deep wells, had no detectable PFAS. Only Seattle and Tuscaloosa, Alabama had levels below 1 part per trillion (PPT), the limit EWG recommends. 



In 34 places where EWG’s tests found PFAS, contamination had not been publicly reported by the EPA or state environmental agencies.

The EPA has known since at least 2001 about the problem of PFAS in drinking water but has so far failed to set an enforceable, nationwide legal limit. The EPA said early last year it would begin the process to set limits on two of the chemicals, PFOA and PFOS.

The EPA said it has helped states and communities address PFAS and that it is working to put limits on the two main chemicals but did not give a timeline.

In 2018 a draft report from an office of the US Department of Health and Human Services said the risk level for exposure to the chemicals should be up to 10 times lower than the 70 PPT threshold the EPA recommends. The White House and the EPA had tried to stop the report from being published.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/us-drinking-water-contamination-forever-chemicals-pfas

Guatamala’s drought and malnutrition

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Rising numbers of children in Guatemala are going hungry as drought linked to climate change reduces food harvests, fueling child malnutrition rates in the Central American nation, the United Nations and charities said. 



Guatemala’s farmers are reeling from a series of prolonged droughts in recent years and from a lengthy heat wave last year as climate change brings drier conditions and erratic rainfall, U.N. officials said. Drought is also adding to the area of Guatemala suffering problems, she said.

“With climate change, the dry corridor has expanded,” Santizo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Jose Aquino, a rural development manager in Guatemala for Mercy Corps, said more rivers in the region are running dry at least part of the year.
“2019 was one of the driest years in Guatemala. Rivers that didn’t used to dry up are now doing so,” Aquino said. “All this basically affects the availability of food,” he said.





Guatemala, which has one of the world’s high rates of child malnutrition, recorded more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under 5 last year, up nearly 24% from 2018, according to government figures.



The number of children acutely malnourished was the highest since 2015, when a severe drought hit Central America. 
Children living in poor highland farming communities and along the “Dry Corridor” – running through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – are bearing the brunt, they said.
“There is an increase in cases of acute malnutrition that are related to climate change and the long periods of drought from June to October (last year),” said Maria Claudia Santizo, a nutrition specialist at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.
Poor harvests of staple crops such as beans and maize mean rural families are forced to eat fewer meals a day, and have less food to sell, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).



Families also are unable to store food to see them through the lean period before the next harvest, the U.N. agency said.



“We are seeing a high rate of child malnutrition that’s rising for two reasons – high temperatures which affect the crops and resulting crop losses, and rains that are more erratic and unpredictable,” said Amy English, a technical advisor at international aid agency Mercy Corps, which works in Guatemala.



She said worsening hunger in the region was a contributor to the caravans of migrants moving north toward Mexico and the United States.
Marc-Andre Prost, a WFP regional nutrition advisor, said three in every five people in Guatemala already live in poverty and rural communities are struggling to cope with the additional burden of extreme weather. According to WFP, about one million people in Guatemala – 15% of the population – “cannot meet their food needs on a daily basis”, and hundreds and thousands rely on food aid.



Climate refugees

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The world needs to prepare for millions of people being driven from their homes by the impact of climate change, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said, speaking at the World Economic Forum.



Filippo Grandi said, “We must be prepared for a large surge of people moving against their will,” he said. “I wouldn’t venture to talk about specific numbers, it’s too speculative, but certainly we’re talking about millions here.”





Potential drivers include wildfires like those seen in Australia, rising sea levels affecting low-lying islands, the destruction of crops and livestock in sub-Saharan Africa and floods worldwide, not least in parts of the developed world.

Grandi said European governments needed to think hard about solutions to the migrant crisis.



http://news.trust.org/item/20200121134931-zo65j/

Biopiracy

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Is it possible to patent a plant which has been a basic food staple in a country for thousands of years?
Teff, also known as dwarf millet, is to Ethiopia what maize is to Mexico and rice is to China: the country’s most important foodstuff, the basis for the national dish injera — a soft, spongy, pancake-like bread — and an important part of its cultural heritage.



Farmers in the Ethiopian highlands started cultivating teff 3,000 years ago.



Perhaps understandably, many Ethiopians are annoyed that a Dutch company holds a patent on processed teff flour. To this day, in some European countries, no flour from the gluten-free and nutrient-rich super grain may be sold without paying royalties to the Netherlands.
Ethiopians find it particularly perfidious that the Dutch company in question started by conducting research on teff together with the Ethiopian state and agreed to share the genetic information obtained for commercial use. But in 2004, it filed a patent alone.



The European Patent Office granted it a monopoly on a wide range of products made from teff in Europe. This caused consternation in Ethiopia. “People said: What are the Dutch doing? Teff belongs to the Ethiopians, not the Europeans,” recalls Azeb Tadesse-Hahn, cultural editor at DW’s Amharic desk.

In principle, international agreements exclude plants from patenting. But there is a loophole: the upstream and downstream value chain of a plant. “When the plant is processed into a foodstuff, technology is used,” Horn told DW. “If you develop something new and inventive, why not get a patent on it?”



This is how the company argued its case, said Horn. “The patent did not concern a plant, but its processed form, namely flour.” Although it was neither new nor inventive to make flour from teff seeds, the patent was granted anyway for structural reasons. “The examiner in front of his computer has four hours to complete the whole process of searching the databases. And if nothing appears in those databases, then it’s new from his perspective.”



Traditional knowledge and cultural heritage from countries of the global south are seldom available in written form. “And what is not written down often does not exist in the databases and is ignored,” said Horn.
This is biopiracy: the act of marketing plants or other biological material from the global south without sharing the profits with the countries of origin. 
The Dutch teff flour patent is not an isolated case, said Jim Thomas, deputy head of the Canadian non-governmental organization ETC Group, which monitors how new technologies and corporate strategies affect farmers and the environment. “Unfortunately, the patent system has evolved over the past 30 or 40 years in such a way that companies often patent not only technical inventions, but entire species and natural species and their uses,” he said.

Examples are patents on the value-added chains of rooibos tea from South Africa or bean varieties from Mexico and parts of Africa that have been used by the locals for generations. “The development and free exchange of plant varieties over thousands of years is the basis of our agriculture today,” Thomas emphasized. Turning plants into legally protected monopolies will ultimately threaten food security in the global south. 



International agreements such as the Nagoya Protocol try to enable countries in the south to share in the added value created by the use and further development of their native plants. However, new technologies such as DNA sequencing and synthetic biology can now be used to circumvent such agreements, said Jim Thomas. These technologies allow biotech companies to determine and digitize the DNA of plants on site.



“What we are seeing today is large-scale genetic sequencing of as many organisms as possible. The data can then be disseminated via the internet to be reconstructed in laboratories in Germany, China or California,” said Thomas. He has called for a general ban on property rights to living organisms, whether genetically modified or not.

https://www.dw.com/en/ethiopian-teff-the-fight-against-biopiracy/a-52085081

A Housing Crisis???

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Housebuilder Berkeley will pay out £1bn to shareholders over the next two years, almost doubling the planned financial award to its investors. Shares rose by 5% on Wednesday to a record high, briefly breaking the £55 mark before retreating to £54.40.



The FTSE 100 company has ridden the booming British property market since the financial crisis, with house prices rising particularly in London and south-east England, its main sources of revenue.



Berkeley said it will distribute about £500m in March through a share issue and buyback, followed by another £500m in March 2021.





Berkeley said it has held back investment in light of the “volatile operating environment” since 2016, the year of the EU referendum. During that time its net cash position has increased from £107.5m to more than £1bn.
It expects to deliver profits of more than £3.3bn over the six years to 30 April 2025. Annual earnings are expected to come in between £500m and £700m.
Founder and chairman, Tony Pidgley’s pay in 2016-17 under the previous remuneration policy he received £29.2m. From 2009 to 2019 he received remuneration worth more than £105m, according to company reports.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/22/housebuilder-berkeley-to-pay-out-1bn-to-shareholders

What’s natural?

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The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history. It is ahistorical and unscientific. Humans transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been.



This has been confirmed by recent research. The impact of humans on nature has been far greater and longer-lasting than we could ever imagine, according to scientists.





We are now negatively impacting the world and the species that live in it more than ever before. But this does not mean that we used to live in true harmony with nature in the past,” said study researcher, Dr Søren Faurby of the University of Gothenburg. “We are extremely successful in monopolising resources today, and our results show that this may have also been the case with our ancestors.”



Co-researcher Alexandre Antonelli of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said the view that our ancestors had little impact on the animals around them is incorrect, as “the impact of our lineage on nature has been far greater and longer-lasting than we ever could ever imagine”.



https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51068816

What is in a name?

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In the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand Indian railway officials announced that the signboards of all railway platforms which have names of railway stations written in Hindi, English and Urdu will now be written in Hindi, English and Sanskrit.



According to 2011 census data, the exact number of Sanskrit speakers in the state is 386, while Urdu speakers are more than four percent of the population at 425,752 persons.





Critics say is part of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party‘s (BJP) attack on Muslim cultural heritage.

Professor Chandan Gowda, who teaches sociology at the private university Azim Premji in the southern city of Bengaluru, said the BJP “is hell-bent on Hinduising India”.



“I am actually shocked to see this. How are these Sanskrit signs going to help when you have so few speakers in the state?” he said. “This government started with changing Mughal names or Muslim-sounding names, now they are going after the language, it is highly unfortunate,” he told Al Jazeera.

In October 2018, the BJP government in neighbouring UP state renamed the cities of Allahabad to Prayagraj and Faizabad to Ayodhya, saying it was “correcting wrongs” made by Mughal rulers during the medieval period.

In the same year in August, the UP government renamed the iconic Mughalsarai railway station near Varanasi – the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – to Deen Dayal Upadhyaya station.



There have already been calls to change the name of Agra, where the famous Taj Mahal is located, to Agravan, or Agrawal and Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat state, to Karnavati.



The BJP has also been accused of attempting to distort history by either removing or rewriting the Islamic past and Muslims’ contribution to nation building.



https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/sanskrit-replace-urdu-railway-signboards-uttarakhand-200121104707381.html

The Socialist Party for the planet and its people

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Both Trump and Greta Thunberg are at the World Economic Forum at Davos presenting their very contrasting views on the environment.



Let us make our goal very clear. It is to achieve a civilisation in which cooperation, not competition, will be society’s code. It will be about sharing our planet with other peoples and also with its other forms of life. This does not rule out a certain amount of economic growth, necessary to end poverty. The issue for socialists is not that there will be no economic growth but of what kind growth. We will apply the appropriate technology, no longer making working people slaves to the machines. Producers and consumers at local, regional and global level will exercise shared stewardship and joint control by over products and production processes. The only things worth producing will be the good for all and neither privilege nor diminish anyone. 



Participatory democracy means individuals and communities acting as facilitator, adjudicator, monitor and consensus builder, the dispersal of authority in a wide variety of forms, multi-tiered, with the elimination of all manner of formal barriers to involvement. People will know their participation makes a real difference to their lives, of the lives of other people and to their natural surroundings they are interested in. It means individuals satisfying the need for belonging to, and being part of something bigger than oneself, adding to one’s own significance. People will understand the distinctions and differentiation between centralisation and decentralisation; from ‘think locally and act globally’, to ‘think globally and act locally’; from hard technologies to soft ones – renewable energy sources, solar energy, wind power, not fossil fuels; eco-agriculture not industrial farming; global, regional and local food production and processing; re-use – repair – recycle. Capitalism has now run its course. Without change we might succumb to global inundations, economic and social collapse. Life on the planet might become restricted and reduced.

 

What about human nature? Aren’t we wired to? Aren’t we born greedy and lazy and seek to acquire a lot of material things? But our other human traits such as empathy and cooperation are historically greater than the desire to compete and dominate. Even today people work together in times of disaster. It is capitalism which encourages competition, over-consumption and individualism because that is what makes capitalism thrive. This is why those aspects of human nature seem to be the only ones. No cure for capitalism’s deadly excesses can be found in capitalism itself. The message of the Socialist Party is that humanity cannot survive if it allows those whose existence is determined by pursuing profit to determine our future—if we want that future to be a liveable one for all species.



The Socialist Party reaches out to eco-activists for a dialogue but more oftener than not it is a monologue. is really a monologue, as most campaigners in the environment movement are not interested in socialism. Our assessment is many greens are not prepared to take their analysis to its logical conclusion in that they propose class-collaborationist solutions with politicians and corporations. They expect the capitalists to act against their own material interests.



The Socialist Party’s aim is to replace capitalism with a society in which common ownership of the means of production has replaced capitalist ownership, and in which the preservation and restoration of ecosystems will be central to all activity. Environment destruction is not an accidental feature of capitalism, it is built into the system. The capitalist system’s insatiable need to increase profits cannot be reformed away. Capitalism’s insatiable need for growth means that it is very unlikely that we will see effective mitigation policies from any major capitalist country. Anything they do will be too little, too late. Capitalist will “solve” global warming, but their solution will be catastrophic for the great majority of the world’s people. It will do what capitalism always does — it will impose the greatest burdens on the most vulnerable, on poor people and subject nations. The most barbaric forms of capitalism will intensify and spread. Climate refugees will be persecuted and untold numbers will die.



The poor will get poorer

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The average low-income family in the UK’s most deprived areas  is likely to be worse off under universal credit, according to a study by the Resolution Foundation.



The study says those living in the poorest areas will be on average worse off. The thinktank says the economies of those areas with high numbers of disabled, unemployed or single-parent claimants – all groups likely to lose out under the new system – will see falls in spending power when universal credit is fully rolled out.
On average, families will be worse off under universal credit, include places that unexpectedly voted for the government at the last election such as Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Redcar, Hyndburn and Wolverhampton. Other areas where families are on average likely to be worse off when they move on to universal credit include Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Burnley, Kingston-upon-Hull, Blaenau Gwent, Knowsley and Hartlepool.
While overall UK benefit spending will be maintained under universal credit, this masks a “substantial redistribution” of support between different areas of the country, says Resolution, with resources skewed towards families in high-rent areas like London and the south-east over the north and Midlands. The thinktank illustrates this by highlighting the effect on Liverpool and its surrounding boroughs, where 52% of all claimants will be worse off on universal credit by 2024, compared with a national average of 46%. This rises to 65% for Merseyside families with a disabled member (60% UK-wide). On average, Merseyside families will lose £7 a week. Its qualitative research with claimants in Liverpool – supported financially by Liverpool city region – found that despite official insistence, there was no evidence that claimants believed that digitally administered benefits under universal credit were an improvement on the old system.



Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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