Asia-Pacific Trade Deal: Trading Away Indian Agriculture?

Colin Todhunter

On the back of Brexit, there are fears in the UK that a trade deal will be struck with Washington which will effectively lower food and environmental standards to those of the US. At the same time, it seems that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is being resurrected and could have a similar impact in the EU. These types of secretive, corporate-driven trade deals ride roughshod over democratic procedures and the public interest.

India has not been immune to such deals. The US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (2005) is aimed at widening access to India’s agricultural and retail sectors for US companies. This agreement was drawn up with the full and direct participation of representatives from various companies, such as Monsanto, Cargill and Walmart, in return for India receiving assistance to develop its nuclear sector.

And now, in India, there are serious concerns about another deal. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is currently being negotiated by 16 countries across Asia-Pacific and would cover half the world’s population, including 420 million small family farms that produce 80% of the region’s food. Although stumbling blocks have prevented any deal being struck thus far, there is an increased sense of urgency to get it signed.

The RCEP could further accelerate the corporatisation of Indian agriculture. The plight of farmers in India has been well documented. A combination of debt, economic liberalisation, subsidised imports, rising input costs, deliberate underinvestment and a shift to cash crops has caused massive financial distress. Over 300,000 (perhaps over 400,000) have taken their lives over the last 20 years. From the effects of the Green Revolution (degraded soils, falling water tables, drought, etc.) to the lack of minimum support prices and income guarantees, it is becoming increasingly non-viable for many smallholder farmers to continue.

Indian smallholder/peasant farmers are under attack on all fronts. Transnational corporations are seeking to capitalise the food and agriculture sector by supplanting the current system with one suited towards their needs, ably assisted by the World Bank and its various strategies and directives. There is a push to further commercialise the countryside, which will involve shifting hundreds of millions to cities.

GRAIN is an international non-profit organisation and in 2017 released a short report that outlined how RCEP is expected to create powerful new rights and lucrative business opportunities for food and agriculture corporations under the guise of boosting trade and investment.

Land acquisition and seed saving

The RCEP is expected to create powerful rights and lucrative business opportunities for food and agriculture corporations under the guise of boosting trade and investment. It could allow foreign corporations to buy up land, thereby driving up land prices, fuelling speculation and pushing small farmers out. This could intensify the ‘great land grab’ that has already been taking place in India.

GRAIN notes that giant agribusiness concerns want to put a stop to farmer seed saving and sharing by forcing farmers to buy their proprietary seeds each season. The global seed industry is highly concentrated today and recent mergers only further consolidate its power and influence over both governments and farmers. For example, with China having acquired Syngenta, that country has a new vested interest in seeing seed laws strengthened via tighter intellectual property rights under RCEP.

We have already seen the devastating effects on Indian farmers due to Monsanto’s illegal ‘royalties’ (on ‘trait values’) on GM cotton seeds in India. Monsanto effectively wrote and broke laws to enter India. Under RCEP, things could get much worse. If patents are allowed on inventions ‘derived from plants’ (whether hybrid or genetically modified seeds), we could see higher seed prices, a further loss of biodiversity, even greater corporate control and a possible lowering of standards (or a complete bypassing of them as with GM mustard) for high-risk products such as GMOs.

India’s dairy sector

Access to the huge Indian market is an important focus for New Zealand in the RCEP negotiations, especially where the diary sector is concerned. However, according to RS Sodhi, managing director of the country’s largest milk cooperative, Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, this could rob the vibrant domestic dairy industry and the millions of farmers that are connected to it from access to a growing market in India.

The Indian government has encouraged the co-operative model in the dairy sector with active policy protection. However, the dairy trade could be opened up to unfair competition from subsidised imports under RCEP. India’s dairy sector is mostly self-sufficient and employs about 100 million people, the majority of whom are women. The sector is a lifeline for small and marginal farmers, landless poor and a significant source of income for millions of families. They are the backbone of India’s dairy sector.

New Zealand’s dairy giant Fonterra (the world’s biggest dairy exporter) is looking to RCEP as a way into India’s massive dairy market. The company has openly stated that RCEP would give it important leverage to open up India’s protected market. As a result, many people fear that Indian dairy farmers will either have to work for Fonterra or go out of business.

At the same time, some RCEP members not only heavily subsidise their farmers, but they also have food safety standards that are incompatible with the small-scale food production and processing systems that dominate in other RCEP countries. There is sufficient room for concern here: during the ‘mustard crisis’ in 1998, ‘pseudo-safety’ laws were used to facilitate the entry of foreign soy oil: many village-level processors were thereby forced out of business.

The RCEP could accelerate the growth of mega food-park investments that target exports to high-value markets, as is already happening in India. These projects involve high-tech farm-to-fork supply chains that exclude and may even displace small producers and household food processing businesses, which are the mainstay of rural and peri-urban communities across Asia. This would dovetail with existing trends that are facilitating the growth of corporate-controlled supply chains, whereby farmers can easily become enslaved or small farmers simply get by-passed by powerful corporations demanding industrial-scale production.

From pesticides to big retail

Fertiliser and pesticide sales are expected to rise sharply in Asia-Pacific in the next few years. Agrochemical use is heaviest in China and growing rapidly in India. GRAIN notes that China’s acquisition of Syngenta, the world’s top agrochemical company with more than 20% of the global pesticide market, puts the country in a particularly sensitive position within RCEP.

GRAIN states that liberalized trade in farm chemicals are bound to be part of the RCEP, resulting in increased residues in food and water, more greenhouse gas emissions, rising rates of illness and further depletion of soil fertility.

The RCEP also demands the liberalisation of the retail sector and is attempting to facilitate the entry of foreign agroprocessing and retail gaints, which could threaten the livelihoods of small retailers and street vendors. The entry of retail giants would be bad for farmers because they may eventually monopolise the whole food chain from procurement to distribution. In effect, farmers will be at the mercy of such large companies as they will have the power to set prices and also will not be interested to buy small quantities from small producers. In effect, the RCEP will usher in a wave of corporate agri-food consolidation.

It is interesting to note that Ashwani Mahajan, economics professor and national co-convener of Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, an Indian political and cultural organization that promotes self-reliance argues that the ‘make in India’ push by the current government is completely at odds with the RCEP. He argues that no sector seems to want the trade deal and that India’s participation in the talks have overshot the original aim. That aim was to be that of observer, so India could learn from the process. However, Mahajan suggests civil servants now seem to be fully engaged and are ready to sign up to the deal.

The RCEP is a recipe for undermining biodiverse food production, food sovereignty and food security for the mass of the population. It will also massive job losses in a country like India, which has no capacity for absorbing such losses into its workforce.

There is a need to encourage localised food economies that are shielded from the effects of rigged trade and international markets. Rather than have transnational agri-food corporations determining global and regional policies and private capital throttling democracy, we require societies run for the benefit of the mass of the population and a system of healthy food and sustainable agriculture that is run for human need.

We need only look at Mexico and what ‘free trade’ has done to that country’s food and agriculture sector: destroyed health, fuelled unemployment, transformed a rural population into a problematic group of migrants who now serve as a reserve army of labour that conveniently depresses the incomes of those in work. The writing is on the wall for India.

Nuclear Weapons are an Existential Threat

Olivia Alperstein

There’s a growing awareness now that climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Inspiring movements are demanding solutions, and politicians are scrambling to offer them.

That’s good. But there’s another existential threat that gets a lot less attention: nuclear war. And a new study suggests it’s time to pay attention — and eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.

The study, published this October in Science Advances, warns that “rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals” could rapidly cause a “global catastrophe.” It examines the possible repercussions of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but it’s relevant to anyone who lives on this planet — and especially in a heavily nuclear-armed country like ours.

The study paints a grim picture. In a conflict between Indian and Pakistan, it says, up to 50 million people would die if 15-kiloton weapons are used. Almost 100 million would die if 50-kiloton weapons are used. And about 125 million if 100-kiloton weapons are used.

Casualties would occur not only in the nuclear explosions themselves, but also due to smoke emissions and other environmental damage resulting from the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.

Because of the dense populations of cities in Pakistan and India, even a war with the lowest-yield weapons could kill as many people as died in all of World War II. But unlike World War II, these casualties would occur within a single week.

“Perhaps for the first time in human history,” the authors conclude, “the fatalities in a regional war could double the yearly natural global death rate.”

The study’s release is particularly timely, given that India and Pakistan are currently locked in another tense standoff over Kashmir. But the authors also point out that their analysis could be used to model potential impacts of a nuclear war between any two nations.

Indeed, India and Pakistan aren’t the only countries increasing tensions and heightening the risk of a nuclear exchange.

A new nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia is giving young people like me a firsthand, time travel-free look at the Cold War era we were too young to experience. This year, President Donald Trump asked Congress to fund a new so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapon, which is touted as being “more usable.”

But if this study shows anything, it’s that no nuclear weapon should be considered “usable.” Any nuclear exchange anywhere is likely to have catastrophic consequences for the earth’s climate and human health everywhere.

The world can’t afford to ignore these disturbing findings, which emphasize the urgent need to prevent nuclear conflict and to reduce — and eliminate — nuclear arsenals.

Pakistan and India have only a fraction of the nuclear weapons possessed by the United States and Russia — and only a fraction of their potential destructive power. Right now, the United States and Russia are currently engaged in a super-high-stakes game of chicken of their own.

We’ve come very close to nuclear war in the past. Human health and survival are at stake in preventing what we cannot cure. No nation on earth can afford the catastrophic regional and global consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.

There is no such thing as a small nuclear war. American decision-makers at every level of government need to heed this study’s findings and work to advance commonsense policies to reduce and eliminate the nuclear weapons threat — before it eliminates us.

Capitalism and the Violence of Environmental Decline

Rob Urie

The Statement Problem

Since the re-beginning of the environmental movement in the 1960s, the scale and scope of environmental ills have been systematically understated, suggesting both that the causal mechanisms weren’t entirely understood and that environmental problems have been growing. That way of proceeding, of identifying problems and solving their proximate causes, occasionally resolved individual problems without addressing their singular generating mechanism— industrial capitalism. Environmental woes are now past the point when solving multiple problems individually constitutes a workable path forward.

Regular assurances that technology will save us have been issued in the 1970s. Since then, environmental problems have aggregated to world-threatening scale. Granting the extraordinary regenerative capacity of nature and, to use a spatial metaphor, the localized cleverness of technology, it is this localized quality that is the problem. If I take a bite from an apple, whither the apple? Without knowing the size of the bite relative to the size of the apple, there is no way to know. Then apply the complexity of the world to the idea of the apple. Technology is the bite of the apple.

The logic of capitalist solutions ties to the logic of the generating mechanism. Through the latter, the world is broken into pieces and reconfigured using the framework of capitalist efficiency. This is how environmental problems were conceived for a while— as isolated problems to be solved by addressing constituent pieces. ‘External’ solutions like geoengineering to address climate change take this modular view from capitalist production and apply it to ‘the world.’ Rather than changing the configuration of the pieces creating the problem, change the world to accommodate it.

What is seen as a technical problem is, in fact, conceptual. This has been partially recognized with the shift from siloed sciences to environmental ‘systems’ analysis. But holism and systems are variants of the ontology that guides capitalism. They are complex taxonomic objects, but then so are their constituents. The problem is, and always will be, the reciprocal in the world— what isn’t known. Or to go deeper, what may be known in some sense— the feel of the breeze on one’s cheek, the cock of a lover’s arm in sleep, etc. but that isn’t known to be a constituent. Capitalism is the occasional aspect of life that has been put forward as its totality.

This comes to bear in a pragmatic sense through now accumulating environmental crises. The history of pesticides since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring has been to serially replace one adverse side-effect with another. Separately, PFAS were known to cause adverse health effects by the early 1970s. Today, several thousand PFAS exist, each developed to ‘solve a (particular) problem’ while causing a host of others. Even within the ontological conceit that guides capitalism, these serial failures are only plausible under the terms provided until their toxic effects become known. In an earlier age, this was called a ‘long con.’

A temporal dynamic is set up through capitalist production. The choices are, 1) forego the activity that will cause an environmental problem, 2) engage in the activity without regard for the consequences, 3) reconfigure the activity with the hope of not causing the problem, or 4) reconfigure the world to accommodate the problem. Note: only 1) precludes capitalist production. 2), 3) and 4) are first and foremost types of violence toward the world, and second, profit opportunities for capitalists. 3) assumes that the logic that caused the problem will solve it. And 4) relies on the ‘broken window fallacy.’

Violence is as Violence Does

The very idea of ‘the environment’ as a separate and distinct entity is one with the ontological premises that drive capitalism. To the extent these are applicable, animals breath, drink water and eat just fine without any necessary ‘human’ knowledge of what they are doing. Put differently, ‘the world’ doesn’t come with necessary conceptual partitions. Foucault’s ‘Chinese encyclopedia,’ whatever its fealty to its subject, captures this idea wonderfully. His point, if I may (can): the contingency of taxonomy.

‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.

Capitalism is in this sense a meth-addled drone pilot sitting in an air conditioned trailer in bumblefuck Virginia with a pile of pornographic magazines in one hand and the button that slaughters a wedding party in Afghanistan in the other. The choices are, 1) don’t push the button, 2) push the button and slaughter the entire wedding party, 3) push the button, but only target the men, 4) OD on meth with plans to meet the wedding party in the afterlife. If anything, this metaphor is too generous.

A History of Violence

The American story of goodness and benevolence has always depended on a particular conception of time linked to selective history. The Indian Wars— genocide to clear the land for ‘real estate’ and resources, had just concluded, and the American eugenics movement of forced sterilization was just getting started, when Nazism was being conceived in Germany. Far from being driven by ideology, it was the economic success of American industrialization driven by the fruits of slavery and genocide that motivated Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

The conception of a sad and tragic, but necessary, past is used to place this history in a vaguely conceived ‘before.’ However, indigenous women were still being forcibly sterilized in 1976. The U.S. war in Southeast Asia, in which at least four million overwhelmingly innocent human beings were slaughtered, was just ending then. And despite the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the class position of American blacks remained little changed. This marked the start of the era of ‘freedom to’ capitalism— neoliberalism.

Following decades of smaller scale terror, brutality, rape and pillage, George W. Bush launched the U.S. War against Iraq that led to the deaths of at least one million Iraqis and lit the wider Middle East on fire. The bloodshed led several million Iraqis to flee their homes both internally, and to neighboring countries, including Syria. The U.S. has been ‘putting out fires’ it started in the region, including supporting a Saudi-led genocide in Yemen, arming a relentless proxy war in Syria and bombing Libya back to the seventeenth century, ever since. Most of the central architects of the Iraq War spent years or decades working in the oil and gas industry.

This can be understood through epochs, in geopolitical terms, as tragedy related to being human and / or as an amalgam particular to American history. Left out would be the economic motivations, the use and abuse of ‘the world’ as a means to ascend an economic pyramid to wealth, prestige and power. This isn’t to suggest that this is all that it is, history reduced to a single motivation. However, religious, political and cultural ‘freedom’ could in theory have been achieved without slavery, genocide and / or anyone getting rich.

By the late nineteenth century, the American forests had been cut to the ground. Resources had been mined. With ‘industrialization’ in full flower, rivers and lakes were used as open toilets for industrial waste. Jim Crow laws were in force, the later stages of ‘Indian removal’ were underway and industrial conglomerates were using their economic power to eliminate competition, consolidate market power and crush labor. ‘Freedom to’ remained the province of the oligarchs, newly minted industrialists and those outside of government reach.

By the 1960s the environmental consequences of American industrialization had reached their temporary limits. Rivers and lakes were catching fire from high concentrations of industrial pollutants. The ravages of strip mining for coal— along with the human toll that coal mining had on miners, was becoming known outside of Appalachia. The air in major cities was toxic and had been made nearly unbreathable by surrounding industries, vehicular traffic and the burning of waste. The Federal government responded to unrest from below, with Richard Nixon creating the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) shortly after the first Earth Day in 1970.

The ‘process’ of industrialization has been turned into a formula of sorts by economists. 1) produce industrial inputs and consumers goods (dirty production) for export, 2) use the wages and accumulated capital from doing so to shift to higher value-added production and domestic consumption and when this has been accomplished 3) let ‘newly industrializing’ countries take over dirty production. From London to New York to Beijing, two and one-half centuries of toxic air, undrinkable water and rolling public health crises. But then, the pollution moves on and everyone is rich, right?

Back to the conception of time at work for a moment: the idea of ‘progress’ in the economist’s history is an illusion in the sense that it implies a past, present and future to an idea— that of industrialism, that is totalizing. Capitalism is a mode of social organization. Labor is organized as parts of a whole as gears are to a machine. The reciprocal of capitalist social organization is ever-present within capitalist societies. America is littered with the carcasses of past capitalism. The abandoned factories, gas stations and industrial sites exist in the present as much as they did in the past. ‘Capitalism’ doesn’t see them— and live with them, but we do.

Industrial agriculture is a prime example of the capitalist concept of efficiency applied to break a process into constituent parts and then reconfigure it along industrial lines. Monoculture planting reconfigures the landscape and local ecosystems. Chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides reconfigure plants, ecosystems and the makeup of the soil. Formerly prime agricultural land is killed, denuded of the very life that made it good for growing crops for millennia. By the 1970s, farmers in Southeastern Pennsylvania were abandoning orchards, claiming improbably that the land had ‘gone sour’ when industrial methods were to blame.

Liberal economists admit to environmental destruction without granting it primacy. This is by design. Value Theory, the capitalist method of determining what something is worth, is tied to money and power. As the argument goes, something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Two points: in this theory, without a price, there is no value. Second, given the skewed distribution of income and wealth, price means one thing to the rich and another to the poor. And in fact, the relation of price to wealth has its direct corollary in the relation of wealth to political power.

As accumulating environmental crises are in the process of demonstrating, nature exists regardless of whether or not it has a market price assigned to it. And to the extent that wealth can buy temporary respite from the consequences of environmental destruction, the people with the money to adequately price nature, were doing so actually possible, have less motivation than the people who don’t. And this leaves aside the class relations that have environmental destruction as a source of concentrated wealth and power.

An argument is making the rounds that a small number of corporations are responsible for the preponderance of greenhouse gas emissions. This formulation supports not-useful parsing of the problem in favor of a limited response. Climate change is a function of carbon emissions relative to nature’s capacity to absorb CO2— carbon sinks, which are being destroyed. Industrial agriculture both emits greenhouse gases (primarily methane) and destroys carbon sinks. And oceans are giant carbon sinks that are being destroyed. The problem is larger than ‘rogue corporations’ encompasses.

The problem is capitalism, not corporations per se. And the problem with capitalism is political and conceptual, not technological. Technological solutions to climate change 1) address the problem in isolation and 2) provide no indication that the unsolvable problem of unintended consequences is understood. The refocus on science and technology since the 1970s correlates 1:1 with the accumulation of environmental problems in multiple, related dimensions. You can argue that this is coincidence, not correlation, but the technological generating mechanisms— industrial production, industrial agriculture and industrial fishing, tell the true story.

The irony that liberal critics of past totalitarian regimes are about to face is that unless immediate and far reaching action is taken to resolve the environmental crises now unfolding, liberal capitalism might end up being the most murderous force in human history. Since the 1960s the U.S has had enough nuclear weapons to end human life on the planet. Through its promotion and practice of industrial capitalism, the U.S. now has primary responsibility for its consequences. If the powers that be don’t want to lead, then get out of the way.

Corporations that abuse human rights are a threat to SDGs and our planet

Bobby Ramakant

One of the major processes at the United Nations (UN) that gives hope for a better tomorrow where “no one is left behind” is the UN binding treaty on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights.

History is marred with examples how transnational trade and businesses kept profit over people. Domestic laws and legal frameworks failed to hold abusive transnational corporations to account for not just human rights abuses but also for environmental damages (often irreparable loss like that of biodiversity). That is why we urgently need strong legally binding mechanisms globally to end all forms of corporate capture.

Governments need to walk the talk on the promise of sustainable development where “no one is left behind”. When corporate power undermines democracy and democratic processes, a large number of people are left to deal with a range of injustices, inequalities and abuses, as well as, climate crisis deepens which further exacerbates the impact on the poor people.

People’s Representatives globally call for UN binding treaty

This week UN Inter-governmental Working Group (IGWG) is discussing a global binding treaty on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights”.

Interest in this process continues to grows as evidenced in the significant presence of government delegations, civil society and elected officials worldwide. 321 members of regional and national parliaments, as well as municipal authorities have endorsed the Call of People’s Representatives Worldwide for the UN Binding Treaty.

Charles Santiago, Member of the Parliament of Malaysia stated, “Prices of medicines are very high and people are dying because of that. This is a consequence of the monopolies controlled by transnational corporations. The emerging movement for UN binding regulations to tackle power of transnational corporations, is encouraging for all of us.”

Delegates from over 40 countries representing communities affected by transnational corporations’ human rights violations, social movements, trade unions and civil society organisations are speaking up too. These are the voices of affected people that should be in the centre of these negotiations.

Tchenna Maso from La Via Campesina (Movement of affected by Dams) in Brazil, said, ”We are concerned about the content of the revised draft text presented for discussion this week because it does not reflect many of our key concerns and proposals. In particular, the treaty needs a primary focus on transnational corporations, as indicated in the original resolution 26/9, to address the corporate impunity we see in the world.”

Kea Seipato, Coordinator of the Southern African section of the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity, stressed that, “The people of Southern Africa are calling for a self-determined development and are demanding a Treaty that will ensure that. They are calling for the ‘Right to Say No’ to the plunder of their resources by transnational corporations.”

Pablo Fajardo, representative of the Union of People Affected by Chevron in Ecuador, said, “International financial systems and multinationals have captured the Ecuadorian State over the last two years. That is why a binding treaty is needed, which returns sovereignty to peoples and states. But it is also clear to us that a UN binding treaty that is not accompanied by sustained social action will not be effective – as exemplified by recent events in Ecuador over the past ten days.”

Karin Nansen, chair of Friends of the Earth International said: “Environmental and human rights defenders are on the frontline of resisting the violations committed by transnational corporations, enduring systematic attacks of intimidation, silencing and killings. The historical importance of this binding treaty process to end, once and for all, the impunity of transnational corporations and guarantee access to justice for those affected cannot be overemphasized.”

Recently activists performed in front of the Palais de Nations representing how transnational corporations use Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanisms (ISDS) to sue governments that implement regulations to protect labour standards or the environment. The action is part of a tour traveling from Geneva to Vienna, where today the UN Trade Commission UNCITRAL begin negotiations on a reform of the ISDS system.

Dr Thomas Köller from Attac Germany remarked, “We call on the European governments and the European Union (EU) to participate constructively in the negotiations on the UN Binding Treaty. In Vienna the EU must withdraw its push for a Multilateral Investment Court.”

This is not the first time where countries globally have joined hands against corporate abuse. More than a decade back in global tobacco treaty negotiations, despite tobacco industry tactics to water down this treaty process, governments agreed to stop tobacco industry interference in public health policy. This treaty, formally called the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), has two backbone Articles that potentially empowers governments to better implement life saving public health laws: Article 5.3 of this treaty, guidelines of which were adopted in November 2008 by governments, recognizes in its preamble that there is a direct and irreconcilable conflict of interest between tobacco industry and public health policy. Article 19 of this treaty which is being worked upon by governments is to hold tobacco industry legally and financially liable for the damages it has caused. I have been part of every global tobacco treaty negotiations so far (Conference of the Parties to the WHO FCTC) as an observer (part of Corporate Accountability led Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals team). Tobacco industry interference in global tobacco treaty is a stark reminder why we need laws and policies in place to not let abusive corporations interfere with health and development policy making.

No time to lose in dealing with corporate abuses

Only 135 months are left for 193 governments to deliver on promise of sustainable development goals (SDGs). Conflict of interest of several transnational corporations with health and development policies is stark enough to raise alarm for stronger action to make strict legally binding rules and laws against it. It is vital to protect sustainable development policy making from corporate capture. As thousands and millions echoed last month during climate strike, there is no planet-B.

A new phase in Syria and the Middle East?

Salim Nazzal

Sad years had passed when hundreds of thousands died in a senseless war. It destroyed one of the most stable countries in the Middle East. Billions of dollars were allocated to bomb Syria. According to the former foreign minister of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have paid more than two billion dollars to support terrorism, whose gangs have spread death and extremism throughout Syria. What have the Syrian people benefited from the destruction of their country? The immediate answer is nothing except ruin and death. This is a lesson to all those who seek to struggle for political and economic reform?

There should have been clear from the beginning of the Syrian war, the big difference between the criticism of the regime. And the demand for reform, and the demolition of the state.

The Syrian opposition from the democratic forces, made mistakes when it refused to establish a dialogue with the regime. At the instigation of countries, like Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, which was a fatal mistake that contributed to the country’s destruction and devastation?

Now the picture has changed. The criminal gangs did not succeed in achieving their goals thanks to the steadfastness of the Syrian army and the Syrian leadership. If these gangs reached, Syria would have turned to Afghanistan in the Middle East. Syria’s future is bright after the government army has succeeded in liberating most of the country. There are still areas such as Adlib, the capital of terrorists, spreading chaos and destruction, but this will not last long. It is time to get rid of the militias in Syria and the Middle East. So states can resume their role in protecting the security of citizens and the country. Recent developments demonstrate that Syria is heading towards the end of the chaos period and the beginning of another phase of history.

The Turkish Gambit

Arshad M Khan

The only certainty in war is its intrinsic uncertainty, something Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could soon chance upon. One only has to look back on America’s topsy-turvy fortunes in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Syria for confirmation.

The Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria has as its defined objective a buffer zone between the Kurds in Turkey and in Syria. Mr. Erdogan hopes, to populate it with some of the 3 million plus Syrian refugees in Turkey, many of these in limbo in border camps. The refugees are Arab; the Kurds are not.

Kurds speak a language different from Arabic but akin to Persian. After the First World War, when the victors parceled up the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire, Syria came to be controlled by the French, Iraq by the British, and the Kurdish area was divided into parts in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, not forgetting the borderlands in Iran — a brutal division by a colonial scalpel severing communities, friends and families. About the latter, I have some experience, having lived through the bloody partition of India into two, and now three countries that cost a million lives.

How Mr. Erdogan will persuade the Arab Syrian refugees to live in an enclave, surrounded by hostile Kurds, some ethnically cleansed from the very same place, remains an open question. Will the Turkish army occupy this zone permanently? For, we can imagine what the Kurds will do if the Turkish forces leave.

There is another aspect of modern conflict that has made conquest no longer such a desirable proposition — the guerrilla fighter. Lightly armed and a master of asymmetric warfare, he destabilizes.

Modern weapons provide small bands of men the capacity and capability to down helicopters, cripple tanks, lay IEDs, place car bombs in cities and generally disrupt any orderly functioning of a state, tying down large forces at huge expense with little chance of long term stability. If the US has failed repeatedly in its efforts to bend countries to its
will, one has to wonder if Erdogan has thought this one through.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 is another case in point. Forever synonymous with the infamous butchery at Sabra and Shatila by the Phalange militia facilitated by Israeli forces, it is easy to forget a major and important Israeli goal: access to the waters of the Litani River which implied a zone of occupation for the area south of it up to the Israeli border.

Southern Lebanon is predominantly Shia and at the time of the Israeli invasion they were a placid group who were dominated by Christians and Sunni, even Palestinians ejected from Israel but now armed and finding refuge in Lebanon. It was when the Israelis looked like they were going to stay that the Shia awoke. It took a while but soon their guerrillas were harassing Israeli troops and drawing blood. The game was no longer worth the candle and Israel, licking its wounds, began to withdraw ending up eventually behind their own border.

A colossal footnote is the resurgent Shia confidence, the buildup into Hezbollah and new political power. The Hezbollah prepared well for another Israeli invasion to settle old scores and teach them a lesson. So they were ready, and shocked the Israelis in 2006. Now they are feared by Israeli troops.

To return to the present, it is not entirely clear as to what transpired in the telephone call between Erdogan and Trump. Various sources confirm Trump has bluffed Erdogan in the past. It is not unlikely then for Trump to have said this time, “We’re leaving. If you go in, you will have to police the area. Don’t ask us to help you.” Is that subject to misinterpretation? It certainly is a reminder of the inadvertent green light to Saddam Hussein for the invasion of Kuwait when Bush Senior was in office.

For the time being Erdogan is holding fast and Trump has signed an executive order imposing sanctions on Turkish officials and institutions. Three Turkish ministers and the Defense and Energy ministries are included. Trump has also demanded an immediate ceasefire. On the economic front, he has raised tariffs on steel back to 50 percent as it used to be before last May. Trade negotiations on a $100 billion trade deal with Turkey have also been halted forthwith. The order also includes the holding of property of those sanctioned, as well as barring entry to the U.S.

Meanwhile, the misery begins all over again as thousands flee the invasion area carrying what they can. Where are they headed? Anywhere where artillery shells do not rain down and the sound of airplanes does not mean bombs.

Such are the exigencies of war and often its surprising consequences.

Childhood and adolescent obesity worldwide expected to increase 70 percent by 2030

Katy Kinner

The world’s population of children and adolescents with obesity is predicted to increase by 70 percent by 2030, from 150 million to 254 million. Without intervention, experts predict rates of obesity in higher income countries will stabilize at high levels while low and middle-income countries will struggle to handle a rapidly increasing public health problem.

The above figures were published in the World Obesity Federation’s, “Atlas of Childhood Obesity,” a 212-page report released this October that displays the latest data on obesity prevalence of infants, children and adolescents in 191 countries.

Data for the Atlas was gathered from an article authored by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) titled: “Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2,416 population-based measurement studies in 128.9 million children, adolescents, and adults.” The article was first published in an October 2017 issue of the medical journal The Lancet .

The NCD-RisC analysis was the first of its kind to measure worldwide trends in obesity, analyzing data covering four decades from 1975 to 2016. As the title suggests, the study pooled 2,416 population-based studies that provided height and weight measurements of 128.9 million people, with 31.5 million of the total falling between the ages of 5-19 years.

The study categorizes children as 5-9 years old and adolescents as 10-19 years old and defines obesity as more than two standard deviations above the median of the World Health Organization (WHO) growth reference for children and adolescents. While it will not be addressed in this article, the study also focuses on global figures and health consequences of underweight children and adolescents.

The WOF Atlas begins by displaying the NCD-RisC data through ranked lists of each country’s obesity risk scores, obesity prevalence and predicted 2030 obesity prevalence.

The countries with the current highest prevalence of child obesity by percentage are Cook Islands, Nauru and Palau with obesity rates of 40.7, 40.6 and 40.0 percent respectively. The subsequent eight countries are also Pacific Island countries. The United States is ranked 15th with a 25.4 percent child obesity rate. Kuwait, Qatar and Puerto Rico are 12th, 13th and 14th with one quarter of their child population qualifying as obese. Figures are expected to worsen by 2030 with child obesity rates in Cook Islands, Nauru and Palau expected to reach 45.9, 43.3 and 44.8 percent respectively.

Cook Islands, Nauru and Palau also have the highest rates of adolescent obesity with Nauru at 32.3, Cook Islands at 31.3, and Palau at 30.4 percent. The U.S. is ranked 11th with 21.0 percent of its adolescents classified as obese in 2016. In 2030, rates are predicted to grow to 41.6 percent in Cook Islands, 40.1 percent in Palau and 39.4 percent in Nauru.

The Atlas’ list of countries by the assigned risk scores more effectively illustrates the shocking predicted growth. The risk score indicates the risk of a country having or acquiring a significant childhood obesity problem in the next decade. The countries with the top ten risk scores, the first eight with the highest score of eleven, are Cook Islands, Kiribati, Micronesia, Niue, Palau, Puerto Rico, Swaziland, Tokelau, Bahamas, and New Zealand.

Pacific Island countries take many of the top twenty positions in lists of both current and predicted 2030 per capita obesity levels. While neither the Atlas nor the NCD-RisC puts forward a hypothesis, a UNICEF report states that most Pacific Island countries have not returned to pre-2008 per capita GDP levels and due to inflation, food prices, especially fruits and vegetables, are still out of reach for many households. As a result, families turn to cheap and less nutritious alternatives. Low levels of employment, widespread poverty and poor education also plague many islands in the Pacific region.

It is worth mentioning that obesity is not an indication that nutritional needs have been met or exceeded. It is not uncommon that a child could subsist off cheap, but high-calorie food products containing little to no vitamins like vegetable oils, trans fats and processed carbohydrates that render them both obese and malnourished.

The next 200 pages of the Atlas are made up by the “Country Report Cards” which list the country’s obesity prevalence broken up by age and gender and grants a percentage representing its chance of meeting the WHO goal of “no rise in obesity levels from 2010 to 2025”.

According to the Atlas, only one in ten countries have a 50 percent or higher predicted chance of meeting the WHO goal. Many countries received a zero percent chance of meeting the target. Even countries with comparatively significant public health initiatives such as the United Kingdom, only received a 37 percent chance of meeting the target. The US received a 17 percent chance.

A closer look at the original NCD-RisC study provides further details on this global upward trend. The data shows a global increase in both mean Body Mass Index (BMI)—a calculation based on a person’s height and weight—and prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents in the past four decades. In high-income countries, mean BMI plateaued in 2000 at high levels while regions of east, south and southeast Asia still struggle with accelerating rates.

From 1975-2016, the global age-standardized prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents increased from 0.7 percent to 5.6 percent in girls and 0.9 percent to 7.8 percent for boys. Every region worldwide saw an increase in obesity prevalence in the past four decades with the highest proportional growth found in southern Africa, a 400 percent increase per decade, and the smallest proportional growth found in high income countries with an increase of 30-50 percent per decade.

Neither report theorizes at length about why developing countries are facing skyrocketing obesity rates, but other obesity studies point to factors such as globalization and urbanization. Personal food choices are influenced by price and availability and with the globalization of food markets, processed and fast food options are offered at competitive values. Urbanization is also linked to a significant reduction in physical activity levels, leading to weight gain. Contrary to past conceptions that obesity is a moral and personal failing, the latest research paints obesity as a social problem with low socioeconomic status and education levels acting as major risk factors.

As many obesity reports indicate, obesity disproportionately affects poor and working class communities. Children and teens in these communities have less access to tools that contribute to healthy lifestyles such as nutritious food, recreation programs, public initiatives or safe play areas. In addition, poor health care coverage traps young people in a cycle of worsening health issues, further exacerbating the inequalities.

Obesity is not only a social epidemic but one of the most preventable causes of early death. It has been linked to an increased risk of chronic disorders such as type 2 diabetes mellitus, heart disease, stroke, musculoskeletal disorders, and certain types of cancer such as endometrial, breast and colon cancer. Children and adolescents with obesity are also particularly impacted by low self-esteem and depression, with young women at a higher risk for more severe symptoms.

Scientists and medical professionals across the world have rightly recognized childhood obesity as one of the largest public health issues of the 21st century. The solution in fighting against it has less of a clear consensus with a dominant appeal toward governmental reform and local community initiatives. The Atlas itself was released as part of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025) which seeks to coordinate among non-profits and governmental agencies to slow and reverse growing obesity rates.

But no amount of pressure or reform can reverse a health crisis of this magnitude. Obesity is a global social issue that cannot be solved within a capitalist system that places the financial interests of the wealthy elite over the health interests of the vast majority. Across the world, the demand for healthy lives for the world’s youth comes into conflict with the profit interests of food corporations, giant agricultural industries and their governmental representatives.

UK police gain access to details of thousands of men, women and children through government’s Prevent database

Barry Mason

The UK’s police forces have full access to private information, including the political views, of thousands of men, women and children who have been referred to the government’s Prevent programme.

The information is available to police forces through a database—the National Police Prevent Case Management (PCM)—that is centrally managed by the national counter-terrorism body.

Liberty, an organisation defending civil liberties and promoting human rights, established that police had access to this information using Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation.

Any individual referred to the Prevent programme is assessed as to whether they are at risk of being vulnerable to radicalization. Those deemed to be at risk can be referred to the Channel programme on a voluntary basis. The UK government describes this as, “providing support at an early stage to people who are identified as being vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism… (using) a multi-agency approach to protect vulnerable people…”

Prevent was introduced by the then Labour government in 2003 and its remit widened in 2011 by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government. In 2015, legislation made it a statutory duty for school, local authority, prison and National Health Service staff to report any individual deemed vulnerable to radicalization to the Prevent programme.

Liberty’s October 7 press release explained that the database was “being used to monitor and control communities.” It noted that the FOI results showed that the police database, “includes the sensitive personal information of every referral ever received by Prevent... (including) the vast majority of referrals which haven’t resulted in any deradicalisation action—meaning potentially thousands of people have been entered into a secret Government database based purely on what they are perceived to think or believe.”

According to Liberty, all police forces add to the database to which the Home Office has access. Those put on the database are not informed or told what information is being held.

The report quoted Liberty’s policy and campaigns manager, Gracie Bradley saying, “This secret database isn’t about keeping us safe. It’s about keeping tabs on and controlling people—particularly minority communities and political activists. It is utterly chilling that potentially thousands of people including children, are on a secret government database of what they’re perceived to think or believe… this database is just the latest example of the government’s increasingly totalitarian approach to policing.”

Muslim Council of Britain general secretary Harun Khan said, “This database—over and above being a hugely authoritarian tool—will mean that the vast majority of those referred, who are found to have no terrorism link, will still be perceived as potential risks by the state, and this will disproportionately affect Muslims.”

According to Liberty, it is not known how long the information is held or if other organisations such as local authorities can access it. Also, it is not known what the implications of being on the database would be or if the record would show up on an enhanced criminal record check.

It is not known exactly how many people appear on the database but according to the FOI all those referred to Prevent are added to it. In the three years up to March last year, 21,042 individuals were referred to Prevent. For the year 2017–18, there were 7,318 people referred to the program. Of these, 90 percent were not forwarded to the next stage of the process, Channel. Two thirds of those referred that year were under 20 years of age and one third of the referrals came from schools.

Liberty highlights how Prevent can end up with discriminatory results, giving as an example how some British Asian children had been questioned by police for having toy guns at home.

Writing in the Metro newspaper on October 8, the advocacy director of Liberty, Clare Collier wrote, “what we found is disturbing for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was built by the police and contains information that is stored and shared without people’s knowledge or consent, which disproves the government’s recent claim that Prevent is a safeguarding policy. Many of those on the database haven’t actually done anything wrong—they are reported to Prevent because of what they’re perceived to think or believe. In fact, less than one out of 10 referrals to Prevent have resulted in deradicalisation action.”

She continued, “the system forces teachers—as well as nurses, doctors and other public servants—to report purported signs of so-called extremism (destroying) the trust that should underscore relationships like those between teachers and pupils.”

In January, the Home Office announced a review of the Prevent programme that would be undertaken later in the year. On August 12, Conservative government Minister for Security, Brandon Lewis, announced the review would be undertaken by Liberal Democrat politician, Lord Carlile.

Carlile is a trusted representative of the British ruling elite and a prominent defender of MI5. He was a supporter the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing the state warrantless access to internet connections and called Edward Snowden’s exposure of illegal mass state surveillance “a criminal act.”

Prior to the announcement of Carlile’s appointment 10 human rights and community groups had written to Lewis. They raised concerns at the manner in which the process of selecting a reviewer of the Prevent programme had been conducted behind closed doors and feared it would become a “whitewash.” The letter to Lewis was quoted in part in an article in the Independent on August 10. It stated, “An incredibly broad range of people and organisations have raised concerns about the impact of the Prevent strategy, including politicians of all parties, health and education workers, members of the security establishment and people from communities disproportionately affected by counter terror policy.” They said any review should look at Prevent’s “underlying assumptions and evidence base, its human rights implications and ultimately whether it is fit for purpose.”

In a public statement on Carlile’s appointment to head the review of the Prevent programme, Liberty stated, “We are deeply troubled by the appointment of Lord Carlile as Independent Reviewer of Prevent. Not only has the government failed to follow its own Governance Code on Public Appointments, but Lord Carlile’s close ties with and publicly declared support for the Prevent strategy undermine the integrity and credibility of this review from the outset.”

It continued, “There seems to be little purpose in an ‘independent review’ whose outcome is pre-ordained by Lord Carlile’s self-declared partiality. His appointment to this vitally important position shatters the credibility of the review from the outset. The review should be comprehensive and wide-ranging in scope and not one that starts with the premise that Prevent should be continued and/or expanded.”

That the widespread and indiscriminate use of Prevent is raising concerns among trusted representatives of the political and intelligence establishment shows the degree to which they fear that such authoritarian measures will generate mass opposition among workers and broader layers in society.

The revelation that data garnered by the Prevent programme is being fed into an all-encompassing police database confirms that central to the plans of the crisis-ridden British ruling class, as with ruling elites internationally—is the enormous strengthening of the state apparatus. There can be no doubt that in the coming period, as the class struggle accelerates, that referrals to Prevent will be used to monitor all manner of opposition, including left-wing, socialist opposition and its information immediately accessible to the police.

As well as fostering divisions among workers and youth, the repression of freedom of speech and democratic rights via Prevent is bound up with the suppression of opposition to the government’s entire reactionary agenda. This is critical for the ruling elite as they seek to impose—in the immediate post-Brexit period—even greater attacks on living standards, and slash the right to health, education and housing.