Government of Austria ITH Fully-funded Masters Scholarships 2021/2022

Application Deadline: 1st March, 2021

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Scholarships are offered to i) ADC Priority countries (See list below) and ii) Other Developing countries

To be taken at (country): The Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management in Salzburg Klessheim, Austria.

About the Award: The Austrian Development Cooperation through the Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management offers about 30 scholarships to applicants from priority countries as well as other developing countries. The Tourism School in Salzburg has an outstanding international reputation and a long tradition. They train future entrepreneurs and employees according to the needs of the international tourism and leisure industry.

Type: Postgraduate

Eligibility: To apply for this programme at ITH, candidate must meet the following criteria:

• Be between 18 – 35 years of age
• Have a secondary school leaving certificate (high school diploma)
• Have a minimum of one year‘s experience within the tourism and hospitality industry
• Non-native English speakers must have an English qualification e.g. TOEFL, Cambridge 1st Certificate, IELTS or equivalent

Successful candidates should be ambitious and open-minded with good organisational and time management skills

Number of Awardees: up to 30

Value of Scholarships: Scholarship for Priority countries include:

• tuition fee
• accommodation
• flight tickets (from home country to Salzburg and back)
• health insurance
• food from Monday – Sunday
• excursions (except field trip to ITB Berlin)
• € 205.- pocket money per month

Not included in this scholarship are:

• transfer from the Airport to the hostel and back to the Airport when leaving
• visa fee: the visa fees have to be paid by the applicants. The entry visa is approximately $ 110, – and the 8 months residence permit, which will be issued in Salzburg, costs approximately € 120.

Scholarship for Developing countries include:

• tuition fee
• health insurance
• food from Monday – Friday
• excursions (except field trip to ITB Berlin)
• € 205.- pocket money per month

Not included in the Scholarship are:

• accommodation: accommodation costs have to be covered by students who are awarded this scholarship. It is € 247, – per month. (€ 1976, – in total). The total accommodation fee of € 1.976, – has to be remitted in advance before admission letter can be issued.
• flight ticket: Students who are on this scholarship have to cover their own travel expenses from their countries to Salzburg and back.
• visa fee: the visa fees have to be paid by the applicants. The entry visa is approximately $ 110, – and the 8 months residence permit, which will be issued in Salzburg, costs approximately € 120.

Eligible Countries: 

ADC Priority countries include: Ethiopia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Bhutan, Palestinian Territories, Georgia, Armenia

Other Developing countries include: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Benin, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Dem. Rep., Eritrea, Gambia, The, Guinea, Guinea-Bisau, Haiti, Kenya, Korea, Dem Rep., Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo, Rep., Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Arab Rep., El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kiribati, Kosovo, Lao PDR, Lesotho, Mauritania, Micronesia, Fed. Sts., Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Samoa, São Tomé and Principe, Senegal, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Timor-Leste, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vietnam, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen, Rep., Zambia, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Angola, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Gabon, Grenada, Hungry, Iran, Islamic Rep., Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonia, FYR, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Montenegro, Namibia, Palau, Panama, Peru, Romania, Serbia,  Seychelles, South Africa, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Thailand, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu and Venezuela

How to Apply: Students may attend ITH by private means or through scholarships given by the Austrian Development Cooperation.

Procedure: 

1. Get information about ITH from an Austrian consulate or embassy
2. Download ITH application form by clicking here. Austrian embassies and consulates have this form as well.
3. Application Process – all applications should be sent directly to the Institute via post.
   Submission deadline is the 1st of March every year, which means the Institute has to receive the application latest by March 1st.
4. Confirmation – You would be informed about the result of your application by the end of April. If you were awarded a scholarship you will receive a letter of acceptance.

It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Rotary Peace Fully-Funded Fellowships 2022/2023

Application Deadline: 15th May 2021

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All countries are eligible

About Fellowship: Each year, Rotary selects up to 100 individuals from around the world to receive fully funded academic fellowships at one of its peace centers. These fellowships cover tuition and fees, room and board, round-trip transportation, and all internship and field-study expenses.

In just over a decade, the Rotary Peace Centers have trained more than 900 fellows for careers in peace building. Many of them go on to serve as leaders in national governments, NGOs, the military, law enforcement, and international organizations like the United Nations and World Bank.

Two types of peace fellowships are available.

1. Master’s degree

Offers master’s degree fellowships at premier universities in fields related to peace and conflict prevention and resolution. Programs last 15 to 24 months and require a practical internship of two to three months during the academic break. Each year, up to 50 master’s degree fellowships are awarded at these institutions: Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, International Christian University, Japan, University of Bradford, England, University of Queensland, Australia and Uppsala University, Sweden

2. Professional development certificate

For experienced professionals working in peace-related fields who want to enhance their professional skills, Rotary offer a three-month program in peace and conflict prevention and resolution at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. This program incorporates two to three weeks of field study. We award up to 50 certificates each year.

Type: Masters, Fellowship

Eligibility: The Rotary Peace Fellowship is designed for professionals with work experience in international relations or peace and conflict prevention and resolution. Fellows are committed to community and international service and the pursuit of peace.

Applicants must also meet the following requirements:

• Proficiency in English; proficiency in a second language is strongly recommended
• Strong commitment to international understanding and peace as demonstrated through professional and academic achievements and personal or community service
• Excellent leadership skills
• Master’s degree applicants: minimum three years of related full-time work or volunteer experience, bachelor’s degree
• Certificate applicants: minimum five years of related full-time work or volunteer experience, strong academic background

Eligibility restrictions: Rotary Peace Fellowships may not be used for doctoral study. And the following people are not eligible for the master’s degree program:

• Active and honorary Rotary members
• Employees of a Rotary club or district, Rotary International, or other Rotary entity
• Spouses, lineal descendants (children or grandchildren by blood or legal adoption), spouses of lineal descendants, or ancestors (parents or grandparents by blood) of any living person in these categories
• Former Rotary members and their relatives as described above (within 36 months of their resignation)

Recipients of Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarships or professional development certificate fellowships must wait three years after completion of the scholarship or fellowship to apply for the master’s degree program.

Rotary Peace Fellows who have completed the master’s degree program must wait five years to apply for the certificate program.

Number of Scholarships: up to 100

Value of Scholarship: The Rotary Peace Fellowship covers:

• -Tuition and fees
• -Room and board
• -Round-trip transportation
• -Internship/field study expenses.

Duration of Scholarship: 15 to 24 months

How to Apply: Candidates have until 15 May to submit applications to their district. Districts must submit endorsed applications to The Rotary Foundation by 1 July.

It is necessary to go through the Application Process on the Fellowship Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit fellowship webpage for details

Sponsors: Rotary International

WVA Veterinary Student Scholarship Program 2021

Application Deadline: 15th May 2021, 12:00 pm (Brussels time)

Eligible Countries: Countries in Latin America, Africa, North Africa/Middle East and Asia/Oceania.

To Be Taken At (Country): Belgium

About the Award: Following the successful delivery of the 2016-2020 scholarship programs, MSD Animal Health and WVA have agreed to continue the successful collaboration and to launch the 2021 Veterinary Student Scholarship Program to include 80 scholarships of US$ 2,500.

Field of Study: Veterinary Medicine

Type: Masters

Eligibility: 

• Not a recipient of any previous MSD Animal Health/WVA scholarship.
• Citizen of one of the countries under the grant coverage.
• Currently registered for the academic year 2020-2021 at a recognized school of veterinary medicine in the country.
• Have completed all first-year exams.
• Registered in the second – or third-year year of the program (or equivalent if the program is longer than 4 years).
• First and last year students are not eligible candidates for this scholarship program.
• The applications will be reviewed by an ad hoc committee of the WVA Strategic Focus Group on Veterinary Education. The announcement of the selected students will be published by 1st September 2021 on the WVA website and media channels.

Number of Awards: 80 

Value of Award: USD$2,500 each

How to Apply: The completed application must be submitted by 15th May 2021, 12:00 pm CET to wva_assistant@worldvet.org 

The application form can be downloaded by clicking on the following links: English, French and Spanish.

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Duke-UNICEF Accelerator Program 2021

Application Deadline: 5th March 2021 at 11:59pm

About the Award: Water and sanitation are at the core of sustainable development, and the range of services they provide underpin poverty reduction, economic growth and environmental sustainability. However, in recent decades overexploitation, pollution, and climate change have led to severe water stress in locales across the world. The COVID-19 pandemic poses an additional impediment, impairing access for billions of people to safely managed drinking water, sanitation and hygiene services – services desperately needed to prevent the virus from spreading.

Now more than ever the world needs to transform the way it manages its water resources and delivers water and sanitation services for billions of people. Urgent action is needed to overcome this global crisis, as it is affecting all countries around the world, socially, economically and environmentally.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: The Duke-UNICEF Innovation Accelerator is open to any impact enterprises, working in or across Africa, that meet the following criteria:

• Is a nonprofit, hybrid, or for-profit social enterprise
• Has two founders/executives/senior leaders that can represent the enterprise over the course of the 2-year Accelerator and are comfortable working in English
• Has strong evidence of impact over at least 3 years and has a plan for how to use the Duke-UNICEF award to scale that impact in the next 3-5 years
• Deploys a promising sanitation and hygiene product and/or service, innovative supply chain model, business model, or other approach that has potential for widespread, sustainable impact
• Enterprise or enterprise innovation adheres to UNICEF Innovation Principles
• Active in any country, or multiple countries, in Africa
• Preference for social enterprises that have existing working relationship (formal or informal) with UNICEF or a UNICEF country office
• Preference for a diverse, gender-equitable team

To be Taken at (Country): African countries

Number of Awards: 6

Value of Award:

Over the course of the 2-year Accelerator, selected enterprises will receive:

• $25,000 unrestricted, one-time grant
• Personalized coaching from social enterprise experts at Duke University and field experts from UNICEF
• Bespoke mentoring
• Customized capacity building curriculum
• Duke University student support
• Access to our broad networks

Accelerator Awardees should anticipate the following as part of their participation:

• Participate in online communities and webinars
• Participate in regular calls for coaching, mentoring, and peer learning
• Participate in the week-long Duke-UNICEF Virtual Forum on Social Innovation, held twice yearly
• Develop a capacity-building plan for scaling their impact, with support from the Accelerator team
• Implement and track progress of a customized capacity-building plan, with support from the accelerator team and other mentors
• Report relevant program performance and financial data on a semi-annual basis
• Share insights, promising practices, lessons learned, and other expertise with other social enterprises participating in the accelerator

Duration of Award: 2 years

How to Apply: Think you are a good fit? Take our eligibility quiz to find out.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

The Arab Spring Failed But the Rage Against Misery and Injustice Continues

Patrick Cockburn

Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Despotic rulers were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp in countries across the region, as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that “the people demand the fall of the regime”.

There was nothing phoney about this mass yearning for liberty and social justice. Vast numbers of disenfranchised people briefly believed that they could overthrow dictatorships, both republican and monarchical. “We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,” recited the 20-year-old poet Ayat al-Gormezi, speaking to thousands of cheering protesters in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. “We are the people who will destroy the foundations of injustice.”

But these foundations were stronger than she hoped and the dream of a better tomorrow expressed by herself and millions during the Arab Spring in 2011 was to be brutally dispelled as the old regimes counter-attacked. Crueller and more repressive than ever, they reasserted themselves, or where they had fallen, they were replaced by chaotic violence and foreign military intervention.

Out of the six countries where the Arab Spring had the greatest impact, three – Libya, Syria and Yemen – are still being ripped apart by endless civil wars. In two of them – Egypt and Bahrain – state violence and suppression are far worse than in the past. Only Tunisia, where the protests began after a street vendor burnt himself to death, has so far escaped tyranny or anarchy, though the uprising has largely failed to deliver a better life for its people.

In Bahrain, the democratic protests started on 14 February and were centred on the Pearl Roundabout in the centre of Manama. They lasted a month before they were savagely crushed by the Bahraini security forces backed by 1,500 soldiers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Ayat, a trainee teacher, was arrested, imprisoned, beaten with an electric cable, and threatened with sexual assault and rape, and was only released after an international outcry.

Others in Bahrain suffered far worse and some died under torture according to an international commission of inquiry. Doctors in a hospital that had treated injured protesters were a special target of interrogators from the Bahraini security services. “It was bizarre,” said one consultant who had been badly beaten over four days. “They wanted to prove all the violence came from the protesters or the hospital.” They demanded that he confess that blood from the hospital’s blood bank had been thrown over injured protesters in order to exaggerate their injuries. They also claimed that a sophisticated piece of medical equipment was in fact a secret device for receiving orders from Iran.

Much the same backlash was happening across the Middle East and North Africa, as rulers used mass imprisonment, routine torture and summary executions to crush dissent. Repression not only affected places where the Arab Spring had been at its peak, but spread throughout the region, which is home to 600 million people, as frightened rulers sought to stamp out the slightest hint of dissent in case it could become a threat to their regimes.

Could the Arab Spring have ever succeeded against such odds? The question is highly relevant today because oppression by regimes, aptly described as “looting machines” on behalf of a tiny elite, is no less than it was in 2011. Even more people now live crammed into houses with raw sewage running down the middle of the street outside while their rulers loll on yachts anchored offshore.

But anger and hatred was not enough 10 years ago and it will not be enough in future. I sympathised strongly with the protesters then, though I never gave much hope for their chances of permanent success.

They had initially the advantage of surprise, massive popular support and governments that were baffled by unprecedented events. But none of the kleptocratic powers-that-be intended to give up without a fight. They soon recovered their nerve and struck back with unrestrained violence.

Egypt, with a population of 90 million and a powerful cultural influence on the region, was the crucial test case. For 18 days, the secular and Islamist opponents of President Hosni Mubarak fought side by side in Tahrir Square in a successful bid to end his 29 years in power. When he finally departed, they appeared to have won a great victory, but it was more incomplete than it looked because the revolutionaries failed to gain control of the Egyptian security forces or the state-controlled television and press, which went on smearing the protesters as sexual degenerates and the agents of foreign powers.

Astonished by their own unexpected success, the protest leaders did not know how to consolidate their gains and prevent the return of an old regime that had been shaken but was far from defeated.

It is too easy to retrospectively blame the leaders of the protests for not acting like experienced revolutionaries determined to grasp the levers of power when that leadership, in so far as it existed, had no such background. Their lack of such a revolutionary track record was why the omnipresent secret police of the region had not taken them seriously enough. Sadly, this is not a mistake that those secret police are likely to make in future.

Some protesters, and many foreign diplomats, argued that they should have sought compromise with the existing elites, but that was easier said than done since the latter had no intention of sharing power with anybody.

When street protesters looked for leadership and organisation, the only place they could find it was among Islamists, as with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or among the Islamists and jihadis in Libya and Syria. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad probably deliberately militarised the crisis in 2011 so that his own ruling Alawite sect and other religious and ethnic minorities would feel, with good reason, that they were facing an existential threat from a Sunni jihadi uprising. In Yemen, the Houthis, a Shia sect that had fought the government for years, took advantage of the protest movement to seize the capital Sana’a, which they still hold.

Foreign powers cynically intervened on behalf of their local proxies and their own selfish national interests, usually helping to tip the balance towards autocracy. I always thought it absurd to imagine that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the last absolute monarchies on the planet, would want to spread democracy and freedom of expression among their neighbours.

Was hope of progress towards political freedom a mirage 10 years ago and is it a mirage today? Protests, as widespread and prolonged as anything seen in the Arab Spring, erupted in Iraq and Lebanon in 2019 and are continuing. Political Islam has largely discredited itself because its protagonists have turned out to be as corrupt, violent and incompetent as their opponents.

Overall, the greatest force for revolutionary change in this vast war-ravaged and misruled region is that the humiliation, misery and injustice that Ayat denounced 10 years ago is even greater today – and so is the rage they inspire.

The WEF Agenda Behind Modi Farm Reform

F. William Engdahl

In September 2021 the UN will hold a Food Systems Summit. The aim will be to reshape world agriculture and food production in the context of the Malthusian UN Agenda 2030 “sustainable agriculture” goals. The recent radical farm laws from the government of Narenda Modi in India are part of the same global agenda, and it’s all not good.

In Modi’s India, farmers have been in massive protest since three new farm laws were rushed through Parliament last September. The Modi reforms were motivated by a well-organized effort of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its New Vision for Agriculture, part of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, the corporate side of the UN Agenda 2030.

Modi Shock Therapy

In September, 2020 in a rushed Parliamentary voice vote, rather than a duly-registered formal vote, and reportedly with no prior consultation with Indian farmer unions or organizations, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi passed three new laws radically deregulating India’s agriculture. That has sparked months of national farmer protest and nationwide strikes. The protests which are spreading across all India, demands repeal of the three laws.

In effect the laws end restrictions on large corporations’ buying land and stockpiling commodities to control farmer prices. They also allow large multinational businesses to bypass local or regional state markets where farmers’ produce is normally sold at guaranteed prices, and allows business to strike direct deals with farmers. This all will result in the ruin of an estimated tens millions of marginal or smallholder farmers and small middlemen in India’s fragile food chain.

The new Modi laws are measures the IMF and World Bank have been demanding since the early 1990s to bring Indian agriculture and farming into the corporate agribusiness model pioneered in the USA by the Rockefeller Foundation decades ago. Until now no Indian government has been willing to attack the farmers, the country’s largest population group, many of whom are on tiny plots or bare subsistence. Modi’s argument is that by changing the present system, Indian farmers could “double” income by 2022, an unproven, dubious claim. It allows corporations to buy farm land for the first time nationally so large companies, food processing firms, and exporters can invest in the farm sector. Against them a small farmer has no chance. Who’s behind the radical push? Here we find the WEF and the Gates Foundation’s radical globalized agriculture agenda.

WEF and the Corporativists

The laws are a direct result of several years’ effort of the World Economic Forum and its New Vision for Agriculture (NVA) initiative. For more than 12 years the WEF and its NVA has pushed a corporate model in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The “big target” has been India, where resistance to corporate takeover of agriculture has been fierce ever since the failed 1960’s Green Revolution of the Rockefeller Foundation. For the WEF Great Reset, better known as the UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable agriculture,” India’s traditional farm and food system must be broken. Its smallholder family farmers must be forced to sell to large agribusiness conglomerates and regional or state-level protections for those farmers eliminated. It will be “sustainable,” not for the small farmers, but rather the giant agribusiness groups.

To advance that agenda the WEF created a powerful group of corporate and government interests called the NVA India Business Council. Its website at the homepage of the WEF states, “The NVA India Business Council serves as an informal, high-level leadership group to champion private sector collaboration and investment to drive sustainable agricultural growth in India.” An idea what they mean by “sustainable” is found in their membership.

The WEF’s NVA India Business Council in 2017 included Bayer CropScience, one of the world’s largest purveyors of agriculture pesticides and now,of Monsanto GMO seeds; Cargill India Pvt. of the giant US grain company; Dow AgroSciences, GMO seed and pesticide producer; GMO and agrichemical firm DuPont; grain cartel giant Louis Dreyfus Company; Wal-Mart India; India Mahindra & Mahindra (world’s largest tractor maker); Nestle India Ltd; PepsiCo India; Rabobank International; State Bank of India; Swiss Re Services, the world’s largest re-insurer; India Private Limited, a chemicals maker; and the Adani Group of Gautam Adani, the second richest man in India and major financier of Modi’s BJP party. Notice the absence of any Indian farmer organizations.

In addition to top Modi backer Guatam Adani on the WEF NVA India Business Council, Mukesh Ambani, sits on the Board of Directors of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Ambani, another top Modi backer, is Chairman and Managing Director of India’s largest conglomerate, Reliance Industries, and Asia’s second wealthiest person worth some $74 billion. Ambani is a strong advocate of the radical farm reform as Reliance stands to reap huge gains.

In December farmers in Punjab burned effigies of Prime Minister Modi, along with Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani, accusing them of being behind the new laws of Modi.

For anyone with even a slight idea of these corporate behemoths, it is clear that the interests and welfare of India’s estimated 650 million farmers are not the priority. Notably, IMF’s Chief Economist Gita Gopinath, an Indian now in USA,has endorsed the laws, and has said that India’s recently-enacted agriculture laws have the “potential” to increase farmers’ income.

On 26 November a nationwide general strike began that involved approximately 250 million people in support of the farmers. Transport unions representing over 14 million truck drivers have come out in support of the farmer unions. This is the biggest challenge to the BJP Modi regime to date. The fact the government refuses to back down suggests it will be a bitter battle.

For the Agenda 2030, or Great Reset to transform the global food and agricultural industries as Klaus Schwab prefers to call it, to succeed, it is highest priority that India, with the world’s largest population, be brought into the globalist web of corporate agribusiness control. Clearly the timing of the Modi deregulation has in mind the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit.

AGRA and the UN Food Systems Summit

Indication of the agenda in store for India’s farmers is the upcoming September UN Food Systems Summit. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in 2019 announced the UN will host Food Systems Summit in 2021 with the aim of maximizing the benefits of a “food systems approach” consistent with UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. He named Agnes Kalibata of Rwanda as his Special Envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit. The summit’s founding statement pushes “precision farming” such as GPS, Big Data and robotics, and GMO, as solutions.

Kalibata, former Minister of Agriculture in war-torn Rwanda, is also the President of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. AGRA was created by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations to introduce GMO patented seeds and related chemical pesticides into African agriculture. A key person Gates put in charge of the AGRA, Robert Horsch, spent 25 years as a senior Monsanto executive. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is also a “Contributing Partner” of the WEF.

After nearly 15 years and some $1 billion in funds from Gates, Rockefeller and other large donors, AGRA has failed to lift farmers into a better wellbeing. Farmers are forced by their governments to buy seeds from commercial suppliers, often tied to Monsanto and other GMO companies, as well as commercial fertilizer. The result is debt and often bankruptcy. The farmers are forbidden to reuse the commercial seeds and are forced to abandon traditional seeds which they could reuse. AGRA’s focus on “market-oriented” means the global export market controlled by Cargill and other major grain cartel giants. In the 1990s, under pressure from Washington and agribusiness, the World Bank demanded African and other governments in developing countries end their agriculture subsidies. That, while the USA and EU agriculture remains heavily subsidized. The cheap subsidized EU and OECD imports drive local farmers bankrupt. That’s intended.

A 2020 report on AGRA, False Promises, concluded, “yield increases for key staple crops in the years before AGRA were just as low as during AGRA. Instead of halving hunger, the situation in the 13 focus countries has worsened since AGRA was launched. The number of people going hungry has increased by 30 percent during the AGRA years… affecting 130 million people in the 13 AGRA focus countries.” Gates’ AGRA has made African food production more globalized and dependent than ever on the will of global multinationals whose aim is cheap inputs. It forces farmers into debt and demands specific “cash crops” like GMO corn or soya, be grown for export.

Gates Foundation’s confidential Agricultural Development Strategy 2008-2011 outlined its strategy:

“Smallholders with the potential to produce a surplus can create a market-oriented agricultural system… to exit poverty…The vision of success involves market-oriented farmers operating profitable farms…this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production.” (emphasis added)

In 2008 Rajiv Shah was the Gates Foundation’s Director of Agricultural Development, and led the Foundation’s creation of the AGRA together with the Rockefeller Foundation. Today Shah is President of Rockefeller Foundation, Gates’ partner in AGRA, which foundation also financed the creation of GMO patented seeds back in the 1970s, the creation of CGIAR seed banks with the World Bank and India’s 1960’s failed Green Revolution. Rajiv Shah is also an Agenda Contributor at the World Economic Forum. Small world.

The fact that the President of AGRA is heading the September 2021 UN Food Systems Summit (note the use of “food systems”) exposes the seamless links between the UN, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Economic Forum and their web of global corporate mega companies.

India, with 1.4 billion people, perhaps half in agriculture, is the last bastion where global agribusiness has been unable to dominate the production of food. The OECD has been globalized by industrial agribusiness since decades and the deterioration in food quality and nutrition confirms it. China has opened up and is a major player in the GMO world with Syngenta, as well as the world largest producer of glyphosate. China industrial pork factory farms such as Smithfield Farms, where the recent African Swine Fever is believed to have originated, are on the way to wipe out small-scale farmers there. The central role of the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA in the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit, the major role of the WEF in the world “food systems” reset, and the pressures in recent months on the Modi government to implement the same corporate agenda in India as in Africa, are all no accident. It sets the world up for catastrophic harvest failures and worse.

Chile: Third police murder in five days and the fraudulent campaign to reform the Carabineros

Mauricio Saavedra

In the first nine days of February 2021, Chile’s paramilitary Carabineros police force was responsible for the deaths of three young working-class men. While the institution is notorious for its brutality, the three deaths mark an intensification of class war against the youth and the working class initiated by the ultra-right government of President Sebastian Piñera and supported by the parliamentary “left.”

On February 9, Chile was convulsed by the news that two Carabineros agents Andres Navarro Pulgar and Ilton Zambrano Marin were caught assaulting and then discarding the body of a 23-year-old Bolivian, Jaime Veizaga Sánchez. Veizaga was barely alive when the cops from a checkpoint vehicle dumped him outside the Medical Legal Service in the mining town of Calama. He died before paramedics arrived at the scene.

Carabineros in Santiago, Chile

The two cops were arrested after being charged with manslaughter and unlawful coercion. The autopsy pre-report failed to determine the exact cause of death of Jaime Veizaga, which restricted prosecutor Raúl Marabolí to indicating that “the officers did not provide adequate assistance to the victim and left him abandoned in the place where he died.” The preliminary autopsy showed “signs of non-specific systemic shock that could have an infectious origin and should be ruled out through histology” and that there were “no traumatic dynamics in the findings of the head.”

Based on these initial findings, on February 13 the Court of Guarantee (which in the Chilean judicial system examines the legality of the deprivation of liberty) ordered the two cops released and placed under nighttime house arrest and national arrest during the 200 days established for the investigation of the case.

The Bolivian foreign ministry has called on Chile to expedite investigation into the death of Veizaga and demanded concrete actions to repatriate the young man’s remains.

Jaime Veizaga Sánchez is the third person to fall victim to police violence in five days. Earlier, on February 5, Francisco Martínez, a 27-year-old street performer, was shot dead by Sgt. Juan González Iturriaga over an altercation resulting from a preventive identification check. The event happened in broad daylight, in a busy thoroughfare and in view of dozens of witnesses in Panguipulli, a lakeside town in Araucanía, the poorest region in Chile.

Martínez—the uncle of Anthony Araya, the youth who was pushed off a bridge by Carabineros during anti-police violence demonstrations in Santiago the previous October—was shot five times before falling to the ground in the middle of a busy intersection. As crowds descended to the scene chanting “Murderers! Murderers!” the cops drove off leaving the dying man abandoned on the street to only reappear en masse to violently suppress the protest.

While Sgt. González was detained and placed under house arrest, the Court of Appeals of Valdivia has subsequently released the cop, placing him under a national arrest warrant to report fortnightly for the next four months while the investigation is underway.

Then, on the evening of February 7, 27-year-old Camilo Miyaki was found hanging in a cell of the Pedro Aguirre Cerda commune police station—a station known for its role in having tortured and sexually abused at least two people detained during the mass youth and working-class demonstrations at the end of 2019.

Miyaki and his girlfriend had been arrested that morning for not carrying a COVID-19 safe conduct pass. She was released during the day. The young man, however, was removed from his original cell and placed in another that “had a blind spot, which did not allow one to see what was happening to the detainee.” Breaking protocol, he was also given a blanket. Police later claimed that he had committed suicide, a claim strenuously denied by his family. An investigation is ongoing.

These and other recent police crimes reveal the stepping up of a police-state agenda following the social revolt that shook Chile in late 2019 after student civil disobedience triggered by a hike in public transport morphed almost overnight into massive protests. A mass movement arose against decades of extreme social inequality, police violence, and in opposition to a deeply hated political elite that emerged in the transition from military dictatorship to civilian rule.

Over the last two years and amid the deepening economic crisis exacerbated by the global pandemic, the working class has borne the cost with its lives and livelihoods. The main cause for the deaths of tens of thousands from COVID-19 is not the disease alone, but the multi-generational poverty, insufficient and overcrowded housing and densely populated communes, lack of utilities and potable water, and underfunded and under-resourced public hospitals. The victims have come predominantly from the working class.

During these two years, workers and youth facing mass layoffs, price hikes, increased indebtedness, evictions and homelessness have time and again come forward, despite the pandemic, to protest the assault on their social and democratic rights, only to be met with repression. The Piñera government has utilized police-state and quasi-dictatorial measures and deployed the armed forces on Chile’s streets for the first time in decades, killing or disappearing dozens of protesters, causing severe injuries and mutilations to hundreds and inflicting human rights abuses against thousands.

The lynchpin in the government’s ability to implement these measures has been the parliamentary opposition, which, while publicly criticizing Piñera, has rammed through his major policies and entered into a national unity agenda with the aim of redirecting the growing anti-capitalist sentiment into the safe parameters of parliamentary politics.

In response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Piñera’s first significant undertaking was to decree a state of emergency and a curfew, which remains in place to this day. With the explicit approval of the Congress, the state of emergency allowed Piñera to place the chiefs of National Defense in charge of the respective 16 regions of the country. Also approved by Congress was the use of the armed forces for the defense of “critical infrastructure,” without having to declare a state of emergency.

Piñera’s increased budget expenditure on law enforcement and his deepening the militarization of Carabineros and the PDI over the last two years—equipping them with military-grade armored vehicles, bulletproof body armor, weapons and sophisticated surveillance devices—again was also approved by Congress.

Until recently the most significant manifestation of the national unity campaign was a referendum called in favor of a new constitution to replace the charter imposed by means of a rigged plebiscite in 1980 under the hated military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The year-long operation by the country’s “left” political establishment, the trade union apparatus and pseudo-left groups to dissipate a revolutionary situation amid the real danger of authoritarian rule and dictatorship, proved momentarily successful.

The latest police murders threaten to rekindle the widespread struggles that exploded to the surface in 2019 and resurfaced in 2020. That is the meaning of the comments made by deputy René Saffirio, an ex-Christian Democrat and veteran political operator going back to the 1970s.

Following Francisco Martínez’ death, Saffirio said: “[A] circumstance as painful as this can generate a state of major political convulsion, which could perfectly put at risk our constituent process.”

He recalled that the whole political establishment was caught unawares by the seething mass movement that erupted in 2019 and warned that they could not be placed in the same position again: “Now we do see it, consequently, we have to act promptly, with celerity, with responsibility and with great seriousness.”

The appeals to reform or re-found the Carabineros have to be placed in this context. It is a fraudulent campaign with the same ends as the Constitutional Convention. The Stalinist Communist Party (PCCh), the Frente Amplio and the Socialist Party are all complicit in this promotion of national exceptionalism regarding Chile’s supposed “democratic traditions.” While the counterrevolutionary and anti-working-class nature of the capitalist state is again exposed for all to see, these political forces collectively attempt to hoodwink the masses with this century-old chimera and in that way perform their specific service to capitalism.

“We demand the total re-foundation of the Carabineros institution, which is increasingly delegitimized due to the corruption cases involving it and its autonomous police action, without any civilian control. The only possibility of advancing in a healthy democracy for our country requires this re-foundation and not minor reforms, incapable of modifying the repressive police force we know,” the PCCh declared in a communiqué that was echoed by the rest of the parliamentary “left.”

Dramatic spread of coronavirus in the Czech Republic

Markus Salzmann

The Czech government has extended the state of emergency that has been in effect since October and was originally set to end on Sunday. The reason is the dramatic spread of the coronavirus. The numbers of infections and deaths remain high, and dangerous variants are spreading throughout the country.

For a fortnight now, the districts of Sokolov and Cheb on the German border have seen the number of new weekly cases rise higher than 1,100. The numbers have also risen nationwide in the past few days. On Friday, the two districts were sealed off, as was the district of Trutnov in the Czech Republic’s east. The areas may only be left or visited in exceptional circumstances. According to the European Union health agency ECDC, there were around 915 infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the whole of the country over the last 14 days.

Medical workers move a covid-19 patient into an ambulance at a hospital overrun by the covid pandemic in Cheb, Czech Republic, Friday, Feb. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Hospitals in the border areas are completely overloaded, and increasingly patients have to be transported from there to distant clinics in the country where there are still a few free intensive care beds. The hospital in Nachod, in the country’s northeast, had to transfer 15 patients to places at least 230 kilometres away last Tuesday. All nearby hospitals were fully occupied, according to Reuters. Hospital Director Jan Mach said that of its 339 beds, 120 were occupied by COVID-19 patients.

Care in homes for the elderly and clinics is now only possible with the help of volunteers and the military, where 900 military personnel have been deployed so far. The Ministry of Defence announced that it would continue to keep soldiers on standby.

The situation in the Czech Republic is dramatic. Across Europe, only Portugal has had more people infected in the last two weeks, measured in terms of population. With its 10.7 million inhabitants, about 10 percent of the Czech population have been infected so far, and more than 18,000 have died. According to epidemiologists, the number of unreported cases is far higher, and the trend is rising. “We are picking up sicker and younger people born in 1970 and later. There was no such thing in the autumn,” said Mach.

The government’s irresponsible policies and the unchecked spread of the British strain of the virus are the main reasons for the high numbers and the severe illness of those affected. Bavarian State Premier Markus Söder (CSU) said on Thursday that this strain had become dominant in the German districts of Hof, Wunsiedel and Tirschenreuth on the border with the Czech Republic. Medical experts from the affected areas believe that this variant accounted for between 50 and 60 percent of the total.

The German government has classified the Czech Republic, like the Austrian state of Tyrol, as a “virus variant risk area” and imposed travel restrictions from Sunday. According to the Berlin Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Police had checked around 10,000 people at the borders with the Czech Republic and Austria by Monday morning. About half of them were refused entry.

On Monday, several European governments criticised the border controls, as did business representatives. Car factories in Bavaria and Saxony fear production losses over the next few days due to the disruption of supply chains.

Evolutionary biologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague confirmed the dangers posed by the variants in an interview with Der Spiegel. “If they cannot be prevented from spreading, more people will be infected, and more people will die,” he said. Doctors were already observing “that more and more younger people and even children are becoming seriously ill. The virus is becoming more and more deadly.”

Flegr did not doubt that the government and its policy of opening up the economy were to blame. “It was already foreseeable in the summer that the pandemic would again spread so aggressively,” he said.

Lifting the state of emergency would have inevitably led to disaster under the current conditions, he said. Schools, sports facilities, restaurants, shops and tourist facilities reopened, with consequences that could hardly be underestimated.

Despite this, the Czech parliament was not prepared to extend the state of emergency. The ANO and CSSD (Social Democrats) governing parties lacked the necessary majority to do so after the Communist Party (KSCM) rejected an extension. The minority government can only govern with the tacit support of the KSCM. All opposition parties—several right-wing parties and the Pirates—have long demanded an end to the state of emergency and the lifting of all protective measures. The KSCM, the successor to the former Stalinist state party, vehemently advocates the immediate opening of schools and ski resorts.

In the end, the government decided to extend the state of emergency without parliamentary approval, which is legally problematic. It thus followed the request of the representatives of all 14 administrative regions. Whoever did not vote for the state of emergency, declared head of government Andrej Babis (ANO), “will be directly responsible for the death of our fellow citizens.”

In fact, the irresponsible policies of Babis’ government have led to this situation. After a brief lockdown last spring, during which schools and businesses were closed, the infection figures had dropped sharply. But then the measures were lifted again, and the virus spread rapidly. In the autumn, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency. However, under pressure from the business community, farms remained open and containment measures reintroduced half-heartedly at best. It was precisely in the factories that mass outbreaks occurred time and again. Now the virus has been out of control for months.

From the beginning, the government and all the parties advocated unscrupulous policies in the interests of big business. While generous economic aid flowed to the corporations, there were far too few testing facilities, and the ailing hospitals were left to fend for themselves. The vaccination campaign announced is a pure fiasco. The Ministry of Health recently had to admit that the vaccine from Moderna will only arrive on February 22—a week later than planned—with only half the agreed quantity.

The situation in the Czech Republic is a prime example of the criminal policies of all the European governments, which are callously sacrificing human lives in the interests of the economy. Most recently, Poland enforced massive relaxations. During the weekend, the country’s ski resorts promptly reported fully booked lifts and hotels. In Austria, which ended the lockdown at the beginning of the month, the infection figures rose again just a few days later. In Germany, the complete reopening of schools is currently being prepared; further relaxations will come into force next month.

Like the Czech Republic, the situation in neighbouring Slovakia is developing in a similarly dramatic way. Here, too, as of Sunday, airlines as well as bus and train companies will no longer be allowed to transport passengers to Germany. So far, the number of confirmed infections in the country, with 5.5 million inhabitants, has climbed to 274,000. More than 5,700 people have died. This means that Slovakia is now one of the most severely affected countries in Europe.

Because there were no protective measures taken against the UK variant of the virus now dominant in Slovakia, the pathogens were able to spread rapidly, raising the imminent collapse of the health care system. Intensive care units are already fully occupied, ventilators are so busy with COVID-19 patients that other intensive care patients can no longer be adequately treated, warn medical experts.

Under these conditions, the right-wing government of Igor Matovic largely reopened the country’s schools last week, paving the way for an even greater spread of the virus.

UK: Boris Johnson’s herd immunity government readies “irreversible” measures to end the “last lockdown”

Robert Stevens

The Conservative government is making the final preparations for what UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson describes as a “roadmap” to exit the pandemic. What will in fact be outlined next Monday is a timetable for the loss of many thousands more lives to a deadly and constantly mutating disease.

At Monday’s Downing Street press conference Johnson said, “Next week I will be setting out a roadmap saying as much as we possibly can about the route to normality even though some things are very uncertain. Because we want this lockdown to be the last. And we want progress to be cautious but also irreversible.”

As with the premature endings of the previous two lockdowns, reopening schools is at the centre of the government’s agenda, According to the Daily Mirror, “Schools will be the first to reopen from March 8, while outdoor ‘recreation’ is likely to resume around the same time… Non-essential shops will open next, followed finally by hospitality venues, in plans being examined by Downing Street.”

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson stands inside 10 Downing Street, London, Tuesday April 28, 2020. (Stefan Rousseau/Pool via AP)

Johnson is speaking about irreversible moves away from lockdowns under conditions in which the pandemic is still taking the lives of thousands of people with record numbers still hospitalised. Johnson acknowledged, “[T]he level of infection remains very high, with more people still in hospital today than at the peak last April and admissions running at 1,600 a day.”

Only in recent days have daily deaths begun falling to three figures. As recently as the week ending February 5, the Office for National Statistics announced 7,320 deaths (over a thousand a day) where “novel coronavirus” was mentioned on the death certificate.

The Tories herd immunity policy has overseen what the British Medical Journal described as “social murder.” Tuesday’s almost 800 COVID-19 fatalities took the government’s official toll of deaths to 118,195—the highest tally among any country in Europe and tens of thousands more deaths than France (82,226).

The UK has the fifth highest number of deaths to Covid globally and its death rate per million population (1,724) is the highest in the world among nations with an equivalent or larger population.

Johnson stated in reply to questions that he could not guarantee that schools would all reopen on March 8, but this was the aim. Such caveats and all the talk of exercising caution is only the packaging required to allow a continuation of the herd immunity policy that has already claimed at least 126,000 lives, according to excess deaths, as modelled by the Financial Times.

On Monday, further details emerged about a new mutation of the virus first detected in mid-December in Britain. The B.1.525 strain, with 38 cases already detected in the UK, may have originated in Nigeria, but has already spread to 11 countries including the US, Canada and Denmark. Given that the B117 strain of the virus, first detected in the Kent, England last September, is present in at least 82 countries and is the dominant strain in a number of them, it is ominous that the new B.1.525 strain also carries the E484K mutation found in the Kent variant and the highly contagious South African and Brazilian variants.

Under conditions in which there are still around 10,000 new infections being reported daily in Britain, the statement of a government official Tuesday revealed why Johnson’s verbal contortions are necessary. “We need to drive infection rates down much lower than they are right now to avoid the mutations you get when there is high prevalence,” the official said. “The reason numbers are coming down now is by and large not vaccine-related yet, even though there are some early signs. If you unlock from a high level of people in hospital, then numbers will go straight back up again —we saw that happen in Israel. We cannot deal with high levels of it knocking around—we need much, much lower levels.”

Johnson is seeking to cover up his criminal agenda with saccharine phrases due to fear of an explosive reaction in the working class.

Telegraph columnist Ross Clark outlined the concerns of the ruling elite in an opinion piece published last Saturday Referencing comments by the health secretary that Covid would be viewed by the end of the year as a “disease we can live with, like flu”, Clark’s piece was headlined, “Matt Hancock may be ready to 'live with the virus' —but is Britain?

Clark complained that “the pandemic has managed to shift [public] opinion, possibly for good. Death has become less tolerable.”

Nevertheless, Johnson’s insistence on moving “irreversibly” out of lockdown expresses the real intentions of a party whose sole genuine concern is the profit drive of the major corporations.

Steve Baker MP is a leading figure in the 70-strong Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs. He wrote in an op-Ed in the Daily Telegraph February 14, “[W]e must focus on how we open up society in the short run. The priority is getting all pupils back into school by 8 March, opening hospitality by Easter and a free life by 1 May once we have vaccinated groups 1-9. Then we must ensure that any future restrictions undergo proper analysis and scrutiny. We cannot live in a society where lockdowns are perpetually on the table…”

The media was in no doubt about Johnson’s real intentions. The Daily Mail proclaimed on its front page, “Now it's ready, steady, shop!" The Daily Mirror, which backs the opposition Labour Party who are part of a de facto coalition government with Johnson, wrote that next week’s speech would outline, “The road to freedom".

The pandemic has exposed the pretentions of the Scottish National Party (SNP) devolved government in Edinburgh to be a progressive alternative to the Tory and Labour parties. Last August 11, three weeks ahead of the Johnson government’s reopening schools in England from September 3, the SNP reopened schools in Scotland. Predictably, schools, colleges and universities throughout the UK became major vectors of the disease, contributing to an even greater loss of life in the second wave of the pandemic.

Yesterday, SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that Scottish schools will be reopened in stages beginning February 22, three weeks before the March 8 date being contemplated by the Tories.

It is a certainty that due to these criminal decisions even more deaths will be lost in another wave of the virus. The R (Reproduction) value has only just fallen below 1—after fully seven months—because national lockdown restrictions were imposed in November and January, and, under pressure from teachers and parents, schools were finally closed in January. Now, these gains are to be destroyed as the homicidal policy of fully reopening the economy is once again being green lighted, despite scientists warning of the dire consequences.

On Tuesday, ITV ran an interview with Professor Azra Ghani, a chair in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health. Professor Ghani explained forecasts by Imperial College’s new modelling system, COVIDSIM. It forecasts a significant wave of deaths by summer 2021 if restrictions are eased in July, even with a successful vaccine rollout.

Over two months after the vaccination rollout began, only 15 million of the UK’s 66 million population (less than 25 percent) have received even one dose of the required two doses of the vaccine, with millions of vulnerable people still in danger of infection. Less than 1 percent of the population have received two doses.

Ghani said of the virus, “The problem is that it is highly transmissible. We now have these new variants in place that we know are even more transmissible than previously, and not everybody will be vaccinated for various reasons. That can lead to subsequent epidemics if we just relaxed everything straight away.

“If we just allowed everything to open up for example at the beginning of the summer, then we would potentially see a quite a large new wave of infections occurring and tens of thousands of deaths could occur as a result.”

SUNY colleges face rapid spread of COVID-19 just weeks into semester

Alex Findijs

The first two weeks of in-person instruction at colleges across the State University of New York (SUNY) system has seen a rampant spread of COVID-19. SUNY has recorded 2,721 cases among students and staff in the six weeks between January 2 and February 14, more than a third of all cases reported for 2020. The total number of cases in SUNY has now surpassed 10,000 and three staff members have died from the virus. At least 1,237 students have contracted COVID-19 in just the two weeks since school reopened for in-person instruction.

There are two main reasons for this explosion in cases. One is that on-campus SUNY students are now required to be tested once every week. During the fall semester students were neither required to be tested before returning to campus nor while they were attending classes. With students receiving consistent tests, case numbers have inevitably gone up.

SUNY Administration building (Wikimedia Commons)

The second explanation for the rise in cases is the higher overall spread of cases in the state of New York. When colleges first returned in the fall of 2020 the average daily rate of infection in New York was around 3.5 new cases per 100,000. The average infection rate is now 13 times higher, at 45 cases per 100,000 every day.

Returning students, staff and educators to school under such circumstances is a disastrous decision bound up with the campaign of the former Trump administration, now being pursued by Joe Biden’s administration, to reopen schools and the economy.

Higher education has been used throughout the pandemic as a justification for reopening K–12 schools. Public schools are in turn being used to force open the rest of the economy. All of this is done not in the interest of students, but instead in the interests of the capitalist system and its need to exploit the labor of the working class.

SUNY schools have consistently refused to close down when cases start rising quickly. Two SUNY schools this month, Geneseo and Cortland, passed the threshold to temporarily close—100 cases in a two-week period—but were allowed by the state to remain open. Both schools claimed that enough cases were from pre-return tests that their numbers did not actually pass the threshold.

In a statement published on February 12, SUNY Cortland President Erik Bitterbaum told the student body that “today’s benchmark will not result in a similar forced pause. In-person classes will remain in session, and campus facilities … will remain open by following our strict health and safety guidelines.”

Further on in the statement Bitterbaum exposed the unscrupulous role that the Democratic-run state government has played in keeping schools open unsafely. “Yesterday, the New York State Department of Health revised its guidelines for the Spring 2021 semester to exclude positive test results from student pre-arrival testing. For SUNY Cortland, this lowers the number of cases counted toward the 100-case threshold by 20.”

The timing of this announcement is no coincidence. Both Geneseo and Cortland were on the verge of having to close down on-campus activities and revert to a two-week period of all online instruction. Last semester SUNY Oneonta was forced to close for the entire semester just 11 days into classes after 500 people became infected. If two schools were to temporarily close within the first two weeks of the spring semester, even with increased safety measures, it would be a disastrous exposure of the continued danger of reopening schools.

It is also no coincidence that this is taking place at the same time that teachers across the country are engaged in bitter struggle with their districts and government authorities to keep schools closed and save lives.

Amidst the betrayal of the Chicago teachers by the Chicago Teachers Union and the growing unrest among teachers in Philadelphia, the capitalist system cannot afford to lose any ground. Any evidence that schools are unsafe to open must be obscured at all costs or run the risk of further igniting social unrest.

SUNY Geneseo has 118 active cases of COVID-19. Livingston County, New York, where Geneseo is located, has 189 active cases. The direction of spread is undetermined. However, considering that all Geneseo students should have tested negative prior to arriving on campus, it appears likely that the virus spread from the local community onto campus.

The simple fact of the matter is that COVID-19 is spreading at universities. Regardless of how much schools test and how well students adhere to guidelines, concentrating thousands of students into a small area has and will continue to contribute to the spread of this deadly virus.

All of these schools stand at the abyss. The United Kingdom variant, which is not only more contagious but potentially more deadly, is only a few weeks away from spreading quickly through the United States just as it did in the UK. Several other variants are also spreading around the globe, with concerns about how they may impact the effectiveness of current vaccines.

The reopening of schools while it is still unsafe must be opposed. University students and educators must link up with public school teachers and other sections of workers to build a mass movement to oppose the deadly policies of the two capitalist political parties, close schools and provide full funding for remote education until the pandemic is over.