Application Deadline: Varying by universities (usually May-October) Offered annually? Yes Eligible Countries: Australia and International To be taken at (country): Australia About the Award: The Research Training Program (RTP) scheme is administered by individual universities on behalf of the Department of Education and Training. Applications for RTP Scholarships need to be made directly to participating universities. Each university has its own application and selection process, please contact your chosen university directly to discuss how to apply for the RTP scheme. Information on commencing a postgraduate research degree and university courses can be found on the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching website. General information about the support arrangements for students may be obtained from the Study Assist website. Frequently asked questions for students are also available to answer student queries. The objectives of the RTP scheme are to:
provide flexible funding arrangements to support the training of domestic students and overseas students undertaking HDRs at Australian HEPs
deliver graduates with the skills required to build careers in academia and other sectors of the labour market
support collaboration between HEPs and industry and other research end-users
support overseas students undertaking HDR studies at Australian HEPs.
RTP scholarships are available to domestic and overseas students enrolled in an accredited HDR course at an Australian HEP.
Other eligibilities to be decided by participating universities
Number of Awards: Not specified Value of Award: Students can be offered RTP scholarships for one or more of the following:
tuition fees offset
stipend for general living costs
allowances related to the ancillary cost of research degrees.
Duration of Award: Two (2) years for a research masters degree and Three (3) years for a research doctorate degree. How to Apply: Applications for an RTP need to be made directly to participating universities. The department does not provide an application form. Contact details for participating universities and general information about courses offered in Australia may be obtained HERE Visit Award Webpage for details Award Provider: Australian Government Department of Education and Training.
If you’re a supporter of Donald Trump — or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Matteo Salvini in Italy — you probably think that democracy has never been in better health.
Recent elections in these countries didn’t just serve to rotate the elite from the conventional parties. Voters went to the polls and elected outsiders who promised to transform their political systems. That demonstrates that the system, that democracy itself, is not rigged in favor of the “deep state” or the Bilderberg global elite — or the plain vanilla leaders of the center left and center right.
Moreover, from the perspective of this populist voter, these outsiders have continued to play by the democratic rules. They are pushing for specific pieces of legislation. They are making all manner of political and judicial appointments. They are trying to nudge the economy one way or another. They are standing up to outside forces who threaten to undermine sovereignty, the bedrock of any democratic system.
Sure, these outsiders might make intemperate statements. They might lie. They might indulge in a bit of demagoguery. But politicians have always sinned in this way. Democracy carries on regardless.
You don’t have to be a supporter of right-wing populists to believe that democracy is in fine fettle. The European Union just held elections to the European Parliament. The turnout was over 50 percent, the highest in two decades.
True, right-wing populists increased their share from one-fifth to one-fourth of the chamber, with Marine Le Pen’s party coming out on top in France, Salvini’s Liga taking first place in Italy, and Nigel Farage’s Brexit party winning in the UK. But on the other side of the spectrum, the Greens came in second in Germany and expanded their stake of the European parliament from 7 to 9 percent. And for the first time, two pan-European parties ran candidates. The multi-issue progressive Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 25) received more than 1.4 million votes (but failed to win any seats).
Or maybe you’re an activist fighting for democracy in an authoritarian state. In some countries, you have reason to celebrate. You just succeeded in forcing out the long-serving leader of long-suffering Sudan. You just booted the old, sick, corrupt head of Algeria. You’ve seen some important steps forward in terms of greater political pluralism in Ethiopia, in Malaysia, in Mexico.
You can cherry-pick such examples and perspectives to build a case that the world is continuing to march, albeit two steps forward and one step back, towards a more democratic future.
But you’d be wrong. Democracy faces a global crisis. And this crisis couldn’t be coming at a worse time.
Democracy’s Fourth Wave
In 1991, political scientist Samuel Huntington published his much-cited book, The Third Wave. After a first wave of democratization in the nineteenth century and a second wave after World War II, Huntington argued, a third wave began to sweep through the world with the overthrow of dictatorship in Portugal in 1974 and leading all the way up to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of apartheid in South Africa.
It was at this time, too, that Francis Fukuyama and others were talking about the inevitable spread of democracy — hand in hand with the market — to every corner of the globe. Democratic politics appeared to be an indispensable element of modernity. As countries hit a certain economic, social, and technological threshold, a more educated and economically successful population demands greater political participation as a matter of course.
Of course, democracy doesn’t just arrive like a prize when a country achieves a certain level of GDP. Movements of civil society, often assisted by reformers in government, push for free and fair elections, greater government transparency, equal rights for minorities, and so on.
Sometimes, too, outside actors play a role — providing trainings or financing for those movements of civil society. Sometimes democratic nations sanction undemocratic governments for their violations of human rights. Sometimes more aggressive actors, like U.S. neoconservatives in the 2000s, push for military intervention in support of a regime change (ostensibly to democracy), as was the case in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
However, the modernization thesis generates too many exceptions to remain credible. Both China and Saudi Arabia function at a high economic level without democracy. Russia and Turkey, both modern countries, have backslid into illiberal states. Of the countries that experienced Arab Spring revolutions in 2011, only Tunisia has managed to maintain a democracy — as civil war overtook Libya, a military coup displaced a democratically elected government in Egypt, Bashar al-Assad beat back various challenges in Syria, and the Gulf States repressed one mass demonstration after another.
More recently, backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the military in Sudan is using violence to resist the demands of democracy activists to turn over government to civilian hands. In Algeria, the military hasn’t resorted to violence, but it also hasn’t stepped out of the way.
Move back a few steps to get the bigger picture and the retreat of democracy looks like a global rout. Here, for instance, is Nic Cheeseman’s and Jeffrey Smith’s take on Africa in Foreign Affairs:
In Tanzania, President John Magufuli has clamped down on the opposition and censored the media. His Zambian counterpart, President Edgar Lungu, recently arrested the main opposition leader on trumped-up charges of treason and is seeking to extend his stay in power to a third term. This reflects a broader trend. According to Freedom House, a think tank, just 11 percent of the continent is politically “free,” and the average level of democracy, understood as respect for political rights and civil liberties, fell in each of the last 14 years.
Cambodia’s government transformed from an autocratic regime where there was still some (minimal) space for opposition parties into a fully one-party regime. Thailand’s junta continued to repress the population, attempting to control the run-up to elections still planned in February 2019. The Myanmar government continued to stonewall a real investigation into the alleged crimes against humanity in Rakhine State, despite significant international pressure to allow an investigation. And even in Indonesia, one of the freest states in the region, the Jokowi government has given off worrying signs of increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
Or how about this assessment of Latin America from The Washington Post last year (before the Brazilian election):
Brazil is not the only Latin American country with troubled politics. Democracy has collapsed in Nicaragua and Venezuela and is in serious trouble in countries such as Bolivia and Honduras. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, just as in Brazil, criminal organizations rule the poorer parts of many cities, weakening democracy and undermining the rule of law.
Waves, of course, go both ways. And the fourth democratic tide definitely seems to be going in the wrong direction.
The 2019 Freedom House report, entitled “Democracy in Retreat,” chronicles 13 years of decline. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden, in its 2019 report on the state of global democracy, identifies a “third wave of autocratization” affecting 24 countries (including the United States). The Economist Intelligence Unit is somewhat more optimistic, arguing that “the retreat of global democracy ended in 2018.”
But all the threats itemized in the Unit’s actual report are a reminder that this optimism stems from the fact that the terrible state of democracy didn’t get demonstrably worse last year. And, the report concludes, the decline must just have paused last year before continuing on its dismal trajectory.
Democracy’s Dial-Up Dilemma
I’ve written extensively about how Donald Trump has undermined U.S. democracy with his rhetoric, his appointments, his attacks on the press, his executive actions, his self-serving financial decisions, and so on. I’ve connected the attacks on democracy in the United States to trends toward autocracy in East-Central Europe from the 1990s onward. I’ve compared Trump’s politics to the majoritarian aspirations of Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Maybe it’s a positive sign that an outsider won the 2016 elections (putting aside Russian interference for the moment). If Donald Trump can do it, so perhaps can Bernie Sanders or the Green Party. Another politics is indeed possible. But everything else about Trump is profoundly anti-democratic.
Worse, he’s part of a more general trend.
Democracy’s troubles do not simply result from generals seizing power (as in Thailand or Egypt), undemocratic rulers consolidating power (like Xi Jinping in China), or illiberal leaders weakening the institutions of democratic governance (like Victor Orban in Hungary, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, or Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines).
In other words, democracy’s discontents are not solely external to democracy itself. There’s a deeper vein of popular dissatisfaction. According to Pew research from 2018, a majority of people (out of 27 at least formally democratic countries polled) are dissatisfied with democracy. And for good reason. They are disgusted with the corruption of elected leaders. They are unhappy with economic policies that continue to widen the gap between rich and poor. They are fed up with politicians for not responding with sufficient urgency to global problems like climate change or refugees.
Here’s an equally disturbing possibility. Even in the so-called advanced democracies, the political software has become outdated, full of bugs, susceptible to hacking. Put simply, democracy requires a thorough update to deal with the tasks at hand.
So, for instance, democratic institutions have failed to get a handle on the flow of capital, licit and illicit, that forms the circulatory system of the global economy. The corruption outlined in the Panama Papers, the Russian laundromat, and the Odebrecht scandal, among others, reveal just how weak the checks and balances of democracy have been. Watchdog institutions — media, inter-governmental authorities — have been playing catch up as the financial world devises new instruments to “create” wealth and criminals come up with new scams to steal wealth.
The Internet and social media have been hailed as great opportunities for democracy. States can use electronic referenda to encourage greater civic participation. Democracy activists can use Twitter to organize protests at the drop of a hashtag. But the speed of new technologies also establishes certain expectations in the electorate. Citizens expect lightning fast responses from their email, texts, web searches, and streaming services. But government seems stuck in the dial-up age. It takes forever to get legislation passed. The lines at social service centers are long and frustrating.
In some cases, the slowness of government response is more than just irritating.
The last IPCC report suggests that the world has only a dozen years to deal with climate change before it’s too late. All of the patient diplomacy of states leading up to the Paris climate deal, which itself was an insufficient response to the crisis, was then undone by the results of… American democracy.
It’s no surprise, then, that voters have gravitated toward right-wing politicians who promise fast results and easy solutions, however illusory those might be. In other words, these leaders have the opposite appeal of democracy, which is so often slow and messy. Right-wing populists are disruptive technologies that destroy existing structures. That’s why I’ve called populist leaders “disruptors in chief.”
There are no instruction manuals on how to fix hardware and software simultaneously, on how to address climate change at the same time as fixing the political systems that have hitherto failed to tackle the problem. But democracy definitely needs a reboot. Right-wing populists have offered their illiberal fix. Despite the hype, those “solutions” aren’t working, not on climate change, not on refugees, not on trade, not on international disputes with Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela.
So, now it’s time for the rest of us to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty.
A church was burned in Massachusetts; historically black churches were burned to the ground in Louisiana; a church in Georgia was the scene of a horrific mass shooting; worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh were gunned down; a gunman attacked worshippers at a synagogue near San Diego. Readers aren’t being catapulted back in some sort of time machine to the U.S. of the 1950s or 1960s when four girls lost their lives while at a morning religious service in Birmingham, Alabama, and three civil rights workers were tortured and murdered in rural Mississippi during Freedom Summer when they returned from investigating a church burning in a nearby Mississippi town. No, this is the contemporary U.S. with the melding of hate, violence, religious fundamentalism, and political populism. Recall that the nefarious Ku Klux Klan wears and wore white robes and hoods reminiscent of a medieval and extremist religious order.
Religious fundamentalism has been on the rise since the 1970s, even though church affiliation in the U.S. has steadily declined during the same period. Fundamentalists found a home within the Great Communicator’s (Reagan’s) America and they have never left. As the U.S. is battered by the effects of economic globalism and social displacement, many have turned to religious populism as a safe haven in a world of uncertainty. Who, other than Donald Trump and his acolytes, could be further from religious ethical values with his payoffs to sexual liaisons, his violent rhetoric toward opponents, his dyed-in-the-wool misogyny; his tax giveaway to the extremely wealthy, his anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions, his modernization of doomsday weapons and abrogation of nuclear weapons’ treaties, and his push to close off the U.S. economically in a global market with tariffs and economic sanctions against opponents such as those in place in Iran and Venezuela?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a populist as “a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people.” And some of those common people are waking up to the fact that Trump, et al., are treating them in the same way he treated many workers and contractors who were shortchanged in the construction of his real estate empire. Environmental destruction and the use of economic sanctions are a practical tutorial for those in the farming industry who thought Trump was in their corner. If Trump has his way, his followers won’t even be able to afford those plentiful, cheap consumer goods from Asia and then where will they turn for solace?
The Guardian sheds light on the joining of populism and religion in “The populist right is forging an unholy alliance with religion,” (June 11, 2019). The melding of religion, the political system, the social system, and the economy is a dangerous phenomenon taking place across the globe, with resulting hate of the other undergoing a resurgence and metamorphosis in places like Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and of course in the United States. How could the so-called lessons of World War II be learned when masses of people are poorly educated and simple answers are all they seem to want for complex global issues and problems that affect their lives. Great Britain at least has some sense to limit their disastrous view of populism in the economic and social spheres and keep religion and religious intolerance out of the debate for leaving the European Union. But the effects of British populism may be the same as religious fundamentalism in the long term vis-a-vis immigration.
Much of religion on the right today is not marked by participation in a church or other religious meeting place with social connections, but rather a bizarre nod to religion that comes from the likes of Trump, which is religion without redeeming values: It’s not a hand up, but a push down. Both the New Deal and the Great Society were somewhat successful attempts to raise most economic prospects in a secular environment. Those programs brought people together, but the erosion of democratic traditions and values about the worth of people and groups are eroding faster than the soil of the rain-drenched Midwest. It can be seen outside of the U.S. in India, in Brazil, in Russia, and elsewhere.
Religious populism is not the religion that bound people toward the common good, but rather a populist way to attempt to deal with globalization and its myriad displacements of communities and individuals.
We on the left need to respond to the morphing of global capitalism that is leaving so many unmoored and adrift and ready to support the next authoritarian who comes along with the false promises of false prophets. This isn’t that old-time religion, it’s blasphemy!
Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to sudden death. “Burn out” is now described as an occupational phenomenon, resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
This is a phenomenon that in its most extreme manifestation is described by the Japanese as karõshi, literally translated as “death from overwork,” or occupational sudden death, mainly from a heart attack and stroke due to stress. Karõshi has been more widely studied in Japan, where the first case of this phenomenon was reported in 1969.
In 1987, as people’s concerns about karõshi increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labor began to publish statistics on the problem. According to government estimates, 200 people die from overwork annually because of the long hours spent at the workplace.
Death by overwork lawsuits have been on the rise in Japan, prompted by the deceased’s relatives demanding compensation payments. In Japan, if karõshi is considered a cause of death, surviving family members may receive compensation from the government and up to $1 million from the responsible company in damages.
Extension of the phenomenon
This phenomenon is not limited to Japan. Other Asian nations such as China, South Korea and Bangladesh have reported similar incidents. In China, where the phenomenon is called guolaosi, it was estimated in 2010 that 600,000 people had died this way.
Increasingly, workers in more than 126,000 Chinese factories are organizing and demanding better work conditions. In South Korea, where the work ethic is Confucian-inspired, and work usually involves six-day workweeks with long hours, the phenomenon is called gwarosa.
In the United States, workers in some areas such as banking and finance work extremely long hours, despite its obvious negative consequence. A 2018 survey by The Physicians
Foundation states that 80 percent of physicians across all specialties report being at full capacity or overextended and 78 percent report experiencing feelings of burnout.
Causes and consequences
The causes and consequences of karoshi have been studied in particular by Japan’s National Defense Council for Victims of Karoshi, established in 1988. Japan has much longer working hours that any other developed country. The country’s grueling work schedule has been suggested as one of the main causes of karoshi. It is not, however, the only cause.
A growing body of evidence indicates that workers in high-demand situations who have little control of their work and low social support are at increased risk of developing and dying of cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and stroke. Stressful work conditions are a critical component of this phenomenon. In this regard, it has been found that workers exposed to long overtime periods show markedly elevated levels of stress hormones.
The consequences of long working hours and stressful situations at work are not limited to men. Several studies have shown strong links between women with stressful jobs and cardiovascular disease. In the Women’s Health Study (WHS) — a landmark study involving 17,000 female health professionals — a group of Harvard researchers found that women whose work is highly stressful have a 40 percent increased risk of heart disease compared with their less stressed colleagues.
The results of the WHS were confirmed both in Denmark and in China. A large 15-year study conducted in Denmark found that the greater the work pressure, the higher the risk for heart disease among women under the age of 52. In Beijing, a study among white-collar workers found that job strain was associated in women with increased thickness of the carotid artery wall.
Moving forward
Death by overwork affects not only the families themselves who may lose the main breadwinner in the family but also the industries as a result of lawsuits and lost productivity. That, in turn, affects the national economy. It is therefore urgent to devise ways to curb this problem.
It is important for workers to get regular exercise, which will reduce anxiety and depression and improve sleep. Whenever possible, they should practice relaxation techniques and, if they feel overwhelmed by their personal situation, seek help from a mental health professional.
At the industrial level, organizations should provide the workers with the best conditions for their work, a policy that may look expensive but that will be of better economic value in the long run. Business executives should realize that it is counterproductive for them to place excessive demands on their workers.
At the government level, legislation should be passed to increase job security and skill training as well as employee’s participation in issues that directly affect them such as transfers and promotions. Workers who have better control of their jobs will increase productivity and suffer less from the stressful component of their jobs. In the long run, prevention is the more humane and cheapest alternative to a very serious social and public health problem.
Food is not a commodity, it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is life. Food holds the contributions of all beings that make the food web, and it holds the potential of maintaining and regenerating the web of life. Food also holds the potential for health and disease, depending on how it was grown and processed. Food is therefore the living currency of the web of life.
As an ancient Upanishad reminds us “Everything is food, everything is something else’s food. “
Good Food and Real Food are the basis of health .
Bad food, industrial food, fake food is the basis of disease.
Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine”. In Ayurveda, India’s ancient science of life, food is called “sarvausadha” the medicine that cures all disease.
Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to “stuff” that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process both the planet’s health and our health has been nearly destroyed.
75% of the planetary destruction of soil, water, biodiversity, and 50% of greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial agriculture, which also contributes to 75% of food related chronic diseases. It contributes 50% of the GHG’s driving Climate Change. Chemical agriculture does not return organic matter and fertility to the soil. Instead it is contributing to desertification and land degradation. It also demands more water since it destroys the soil’s natural water-holding capacity. Industrial food systems have destroyed the biodiversity of the planet both through the spread of monocultures, and through the use of toxics and poisons which are killing bees, butterflies, insects, birds, leading to the sixth mass extinction.
Biodiversity-intensive and poison-free agriculture, on the other hand, produces more nutrition per acre while rejuvenating the planet. It shows the path to “Zero Hunger” in times of climate change.
The industrial agriculture and toxic food model has been promoted as the only answer to economic and food security. However, globally, more than 1 billion people are hungry. More than 3 billion suffer from food-related chronic diseases.
It uses 75% of the land yet industrial agriculture based on fossil fuel intensive, chemical intensive monocultures produce only 30% of the food we eat. Meanwhile, small, biodiverse farms using 25% of the land provide 70% of the food. At this rate, if the share of industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet is increased to 45%, we will have a dead planet. One with with no life and no food.
The mad rush for Fake Food and Fake Meat, ignorant of the diversity of our foods and food cultures, and the role of biodiversity in maintaining the our health, is a recipe for accelerating the destruction of the planet and our health.
GMO soya is unsafe for the environment and the eater
“We sought the safest and most environmentally responsible option that would allow us to scale our production and provide the Impossible Burger to consumers at a reasonable cost”.
Given the fact that 90% of the monarch butterflies have disappeared due to Roundup Ready Crops, and we are living through what scientists have called an “insectageddon”, using GMO soya is hardly an “environmentally responsible option”.
In writing this, Pat Brown reveals his total ignorance that weeds have evolved resistance to Roundup and have become “superweeds” now requiring more and more lethal herbicides. Bill Gates and DARPA are even calling for the use of gene drives to exterminate amaranth, a sacred and nutritious food in India, because the Palmer Amaranth has become a superweed in the Roundup Ready soya fields of the USA.
At a time when across the world the movement to ban GMOs and Roundup is growing, promoting GMO soya as “fake meat” is misleading the eater both in terms of the ontology of the burger, and on claims of safety.
The “Impossible Burger “ based on GMO, Roundup sprayed soya is not a “safe” option, as Zen Honeycutt and Moms across America just announced:
“We are shocked to find that the Impossible Burger can have up to 11X higher levels of glyphosate residues than the Beyond Meat Burger according to these samples tested. This new product is being marketed as a solution for “healthy” eating, when in fact 11 ppb of glyphosate herbicide consumption can be highly dangerous. Only 0.1 ppb of glyphosate has been shown to destroy gut bacteria, which is where the stronghold of the immune system lies. I am gravely concerned that consumers are being misled to believe the Impossible Burger is healthy.”
Recent court cases have showcased the links of Roundup to cancer. With the build up of liabilities related to cancer cases, the investments in Roundup Ready GMO soya is blindness to the market.
Or the hope that fooling consumers can rescue Bayer/Monsanto.
There is another ontological confusion related to fake food. While claiming to get away from meat “fake meat” is about selling meat-like products.
Pat Brown declares “we use genetically engineered yeast to produce heme, the “magic” molecule that makes meat taste like meat — and makes the Impossible Burger the only plant-based product to deliver the delicious explosion of flavor and aroma that meat-eating consumers crave.”
I had thought that the plant based diet was for vegans and vegetarians, not meat lovers.
Big Food and Big Money is driving the Fake Food Goldrush
Indeed, the promotion of fake foods seems to have more to do with giving new life to the failing GMO agriculture and the Junk Food Industry, and the threat to it from the rising of consciousness and awareness everywhere that organic, local, fresh food is real food which regenerates the planet and our health. In consequence, investment in “plant based food companies “ has soared from near 0 in 2009 to $600m by 2018. And these companies are looking for more.
Pat Brown declares, “If there’s one thing that we know, it’s that when an ancient unimprovable technology counters a better technology that is continuously improvable, it’s just a matter of time before the game is over.” He added, “I think our investors see this as a $3 trillion opportunity.”
This is about profits and control. He, and those jumping on the Fake Food Goldrush, have no discernible knowledge, or consciousness about, or compassion for living beings, the web of life, nor the role of living food in weaving that web.
Their sudden awakening to “plant based diets” , including GMO soya, is an ontological violation of food as a living system that connects us to the ecosystem and other beings, and indicates ignorance of the diversity of cultures that have used a diversity of plants in their diets.
Ecological sciences have been based on the recognition of the interconnections and interrelatedness between humans and nature, between diverse organisms, and within all living systems, including the human body. It has thus evolved as an ecological and a systems science, not a fragmented and reductionist one. Diets have evolved according to climates and the local biodiversity the climate allows. The biodiversity of the soil, of the plants and our gut microbiome is one continuum. In Indian Civilisation, technologies are tools. Tools need to be assessed on ethical, social and ecological criteria. Tools/ technologies have never been viewed as self referential. They have been assessed in the context of contributing to the wellbeing of all.
Through fake food, evolution, biodiversity, and the web of life is being redefined as an “ancient unimprovable technology”, ignorance of the sophisticated knowleges that have evolved in diverse agricultural and food cultures in diverse climate and ecosystems to sustain and renew the biodiversity, the ecosystems, the health of people and the planet.
The Eat forum which braught out a report that tried to impose a monoculture diet of chemically grown, hyperindustrially processed food on the world has a partnership through FrESH with the junk food industry, and Big Ag such as Bayer, BASF, Cargill, Pepsico amongst others.
FRESH’s Junk Collaborators.
Fake food is thus building on a century and a half of food imperialism and food colonisation of our diverse food knowledges and food cultures.
We need to decolonise our food cultures and our minds of Food imperialism
The industrial west has always been arrogant, and ignorant, of the cultures it has colonised. “Fake Food” is just the latest step in a history of food imperialism.
Soya is a gift of East Asia, where it has been a food for millennia. It was only eaten as fermented food to remove its’ anti-nutritive factors. But recently, GMO soya has created a soya imperialism, destroying plant diversity. It continues the destruction of the diversity of rich edible oils and plant based proteins of Indian dals that we have documented.
Women from India’s slums called on me to bring our mustard back when GMO soya oil started to be dumped on India, and local oils and cold press units in villages were made illegal. That is when we started the “sarson (mustard) satyagraha“ to defend our healthy cold pressed oils from dumping of hexane-extracted GMO soya oil. Hexane is a neurotoxin.
While Indian peasants knew that pulses fix nitrogen, the west was industrialising agriculture based on synthetic nitrogen which contributes to greenhous gases, dead zones in the ocean, and dead soils. While we ate a diversity of “dals” in our daily “dal roti“ the British colonisers, who had no idea of the richness of the nutrition of pulses, reduced them to animal food. Chana became chick pea, gahat became horse gram, tur became pigeon pea.
We stand at a precipice of a planetary emergency, a health emergency, a crisis of farmers livelihoods. Fake Food will accelerate the rush to collapse. Real food gives us a chance to rejuvenate the earth, our food economies, food sovereignty and food cultures. Through real food we can decolonise our food cultures and our consciousness. We can remember that food is living and gives us life.
Boycott GMO Impossible Burger. Make tofu. Cook Dal.
The beginning of this month saw the sorry spectacle of Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom. In spite of him hurling insults at London’s mayor and shamelessly intruding into British political affairs by endorsing Boris Johnson in the Conservative Party leadership race, the UK government nonetheless rolled out the red carpet and spared no expense in kissing his derrière. Though only two members of his immediate family have official positions within his administration, Trump brought the whole clan along for the festivities, including a four-course banquet hosted by the Queen, which the UK government didn’t hesitate to accommodate. This nauseating act of sycophancy was, of course, funded entirely by public money. This is no small matter in a country in which a significant proportion of its population, according to a recent United Nations report, has been subjected to “systematic immiseration” as a result of a decade-long austerity program enacted by successive Conservative governments.
But none of this seems to matter to the mainstream press on both sides of the Atlantic, which waxed lyrical about the so-called “Special Relationship” between the two nations. Odes were sung to (now former) Prime Minister Theresa May’s jubilant talk of an “enduring partnership” and Trump’s promise that his administration will work to forge a “phenomenal” trade deal with a post-Brexit UK. The coverage got particularly gushing when May harkened back to the two countries’ cooperation on D-day during the Second World War, which forms part of the Anglo-American mythology that it was “us,” rather than the Soviet Union, that defeated Hitler.
But for all the pomp and ceremony and lazy self-congratulation in the media, there’s one glaring problem: the “Special Relationship” is a complete farce. And as a historical analysis shows, the reality is that the alliance is one of utter subservience. It all began, ironically enough, after the Second World War. Though Britain was technically on the winning side, it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. The conflict left the UK and the rest of Western Europe bankrupt. US defense spending soon began to dwarf that of Britain – and, indeed, that of the rest of the world. The bankruptcy also forced the UK to dispense with its remaining colonies – a process that Washington encouraged. Any lingering doubt about the end of its status as a world power was demolished a decade later in 1956 when it was humiliated during the Suez Crisis. After sending troops to the Sinai Peninsula in response to then-Egyptian President Gamal Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the US successfully pressured Britain to withdraw its forces. Ever since, the UK has had no real foreign policy of its own – it simply follows orders from Washington.
As a result, successive post-war British governments have supported practically every major US foreign policy intervention since, often in spite of overwhelming public opposition. The February 2003 mobilization against the Iraq War in London, for instance, has been described as “the largest protest event in human history.” Yet Tony Blair, of the center-left Labour Party, supported George W. Bush’s invasion nonetheless. This followed a long-established historical pattern. The UK contributed British troops to the First Gulf War, launched by George H.W. Bush, in the early 1990s. Paradoxically, it also backed Ronald Reagan’s support for Iraq during its conflict with Iran in the 1980s – and, like the US, supplied then-President Saddam Hussein’s governments with weapons. A similar story played out during the Vietnam War. Though Britain did not contribute troops, historian Mark Curtis points out that Britain “gave important private backing to the US at every stage of military escalation.”
Of course, there are those who attempt to play down Britain’s subservience and argue that it is still an important country on the world stage in its own right. They point, for example, to the fact that Britain has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and an independent nuclear deterrent. But can anyone seriously imagine the UK casting a different vote at the Security Council from that of the US? As for the UK’s nuclear deterrent, known as “Trident,” it has been described by former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as “more a question of sentimental status-seeking” than sensible policy. “I think it’s a tremendous cost, and I do not see that it really, perceptively adds to British security,” Blix said during an Al-Jazeera interview with Mehdi Hassan, adding that there was no particular enthusiasm for Trident in Washington.
Nonetheless, US neoconservatives have the gall to complain that the US contributes a disproportionately large sum to NATO’s budget. Trump himself repeated this mantra during the state visit. “The prime minister and I agree that our NATO allies must increase their defense spending, we’ve both been working very hard to that end,” he stated, adding:
We expect a growing number of nations to meet the minimum 2 percent of GDP requirement. To address today’s challenges, all members of the alliance must fulfil their obligations. They have no choice.
Here we get a glimpse into the incredible narcissism and psychopathy of US power. Make no mistake, Washington’s foreign policy is predicated on one thing and one thing alone – advancing its own geostrategic interests and those of its corporate masters, which neocons now literally make no secret of. The UK and Washington’s other European allies neither benefit from nor have any say over major foreign policy decisions – as was made crystal clear by Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush Jr. administration officials in the run-up to the Iraq War. So, the neocons essentially want Washington’s NATO allies to pay more while remaining completely impotent on the world stage. Large sections of the British public seem to have woken up to this fact, as evidenced by extensive polling data showing overwhelming opposition to UK support for US foreign military interventions and mass demonstrations such as the aforementioned march against the Iraq War.
What, then, explains successive UK governments’ loyalty to US foreign policy? The answer lies in the realm of economics. For one thing, UK economic and political elites benefit from the process of globalized capitalism that the US imperial system upholds. This largely explains why “Brexit” was led by figures such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage – both of whom made fortunes in London through involvement in the kinds of work that have been made insanely lucrative by this system. Boris Johnson (who at the time of writing is poised to become the UK’s next prime minister), on the other hand, made his fortune propagandizing for it as a “journalist” at right-wing publications like The Spectator. These figures see the European Union as providing the last vestiges of those pesky regulations and social protections that, for all its imperfections, the EU does provide to some limited extent. To them, leaving the EU would free the UK from this counterbalance to US corporate power and allow full integration into the yoke of US world economic hegemony. This looming reality was on full display during Trump’s visit as he openly boasted about how a post-Brexit US-UK trade deal could lead to privatization of the National Health Service by US corporate interests. Given that proposing such a thing has long been considered political suicide since the institution was founded in 1948, it is clear just how great a threat US globalized capitalism is not just to such social democratic gains as public universal healthcare but to the very idea of democracy itself.
But what, then, explains Labour governments also falling in line with US foreign policy? In the case of Tony Blair, it was simply a matter of him being a right-wing infiltrator who hijacked the Labour Party to serve the same interests represented by the Conservative Party. But for previous Labour leaders, the answer to this question is a bit more complex. As both the sole remaining superpower and the largest economy in the world, the US has had huge economic as well as political influence over Europe since the end of the Second World War. The US’s huge import market has given it immense buying power that exerts enormous economic pressure on European exporters. They need their governments to be on friendly terms with the US government, which largely acts as the political wing of corporations and financial capital, in order to maintain access to the huge North American market. Furthermore, European governments have been subservient to Washington via its preferred international organizations, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 1976, for instance, the Labour government of James Callaghan was offered a loan from the IMF on the condition of enacting austerity measures. In spite of fierce opposition from the labor movement his party was founded to represent, he followed IMF dictates. (Ironically, this was the direct cause of the “Winter of Discontent” of the late 1970s – not, as is often falsely claimed, his initial (mildly) left-wing policies.) Washington has used this imbalanced economic relationship to demand obedience to its foreign policy. And European government have, for the most part, been too scared to ever test whether or not Washington is bluffing.
In short, successive UK governments have seen themselves as having two options vis-a-vis relations with the US – either to kowtow to Washington and stay afloat in the global economy or else sink. Whether the choice was actually this binary is, of course, somewhat of an academic question at this point. Perhaps it was a necessity of the power structure of the Cold War era or perhaps it was a case of an overly meek Labour Party failing to stand up to Washington. But either way, in the here and now there is a huge opportunity for a change of course. Though the Cold War is over, US power is also in decline. Any remaining lipstick on the ugly face of US neoliberal imperialism was washed away by the election of Donald Trump, who personifies the fascist trajectory that it had long been taking. Though the US has long been one of the most hated countries in the world, his presidency has plunged its image and reputation to new depths of acrimonious scorn across the globe. Furthermore, several developments in global affairs have brought the primacy of US power into question. From the failure of the US-instigated coup attempt in Venezuela (supposedly the US’s “backyard”) to the refusal of European governments to cooperate with the Iran nuclear deal withdrawal, there are growing signs that US power might be on the wane. Above all, the rise of Russia and China as major players on the world stage who are consistently willing to take an independent approach signals a seismic shift in global power relations. In Latin American and Africa, they have proven themselves as more neutral actors who, unlike the US, will happily invest without attaching political strings – as has so long been Washington’s modus operandi.
On the back of these developments, the UK along with the US’s other historic European allies have the opportunity to create a new non-aligned movement to challenge US global hegemony. Democratization and grassroots organizing has led to the UK Labour Party being led by an actual socialist for the first time since the early 1980s. It is currently the largest political party in Europe by membership. The election of Alexis Tsipras in Greece and the emergence of left-wing populist parties like Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy leaves open the possibility of a Europe-wide progressive movement that could resist US power.
In sum, the UK puts a lot into its alliance with the US and gets little in return. The ultimate irony of the “Special Relationship” is that the UK is not even the US’s number one ally; that distinction goes to Israel. The UK would do better to forge a more independent stance on foreign policy – even if doing so doesn’t ultimately affect US behavior on the international stage in the short- to medium-term. In the run up to the Iraq War, for instance, the French government of Jacque Chirac took a brave stand against Washington by refusing the back the UN resolution to intervene in Iraq. Even if the UK had done likewise, it probably wouldn’t have affected the outcome. But it would have at least underlined how the US was at core unilaterally launching an illegal war of aggression. But as life-long anti-imperialist George Galloway pointed out at the time, Tony Blair instead choose to become Bush’s poodle in order to preserve the “Special Relationship” – even though the price was British dignity.
