Application Deadline: 5th May 2021 09:00AM PDT (GMT-07:00)
Eligible Countries: Be citizens and permanent residents of Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe at the time of application and while participating in the program.
To be taken at (country): USA
Eligible Field of Study: Any STEM fields
About the Award: From the moment the Emerging Leaders arrive, they are immersed in the innovative, constantly evolving culture of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. Emerging Leaders work closely with their Professional Mentors to design meaningful projects while exploring the San Francisco Bay Area with their Cultural Mentor and fellow program participants.
TechWomen Emerging Leaders will:
Challenge themselves with new questions and concepts
Collaborate with like-minded women in their fields on an innovative project
Network with influential industry leaders
Discover their own innovative leadership style
Create meaningful friendships with women from all over the world
Explore the diverse communities of the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C.
Inspire the next generation of women and girls in their home countries
Type: Training, Fellowship
Eligibility: Applicants must
Be women with, at minimum, two years full-time professional experience in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. Please note that internships and other unpaid work experience does not count toward the two-year professional experience requirement.
Have, at minimum, a bachelor’s degree/four-year university degree or equivalent.
Be proficient in written and spoken English.
Be citizens and permanent residents of Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe at the time of application and while participating in the program.
Be eligible to obtain a U.S. J-1 exchange visitor visa.
Not have applied for an immigrant visa to the United States (other than the Diversity Immigrant Visa, also known as the “visa lottery”) in the past five years.
Not hold U.S. citizenship or be a U.S. legal permanent resident.
Preference will be given to applicants who
Demonstrate themselves as emerging leaders in their chosen professional track through their work experience, volunteer experience, community activities and education.
Are committed to return to their home countries to share what they have learned and mentor women and girls.
Have limited or no prior experience in the United States.
Have a proven record of voluntary or public service in their communities.
Have a demonstrated track record of entrepreneurialism and commitment to innovation.
Demonstrate a willingness to participate in exchange programs, welcome opportunities for mentoring and new partnership development, and exhibit confidence and maturity.
TechWomen encourages people with diverse backgrounds and skills to apply, including individuals with disabilities.
Selection: TechWomen participants are selected based on the eligibility requirements above. Applications are reviewed by independent selection committees composed of industry leaders and regional experts. Semifinalists may be interviewed by United States Embassy personnel in their country of permanent residence.
Number of Awardees: 100 women
Value of Scholarship: International travel, housing, meals and incidentals, local transportation and transportation to official TechWomen events are covered by the TechWomen program. Participants are responsible for the cost of any non-program activities in which they wish to partake, such as independent sightseeing and non-program-related travel.
Duration of Scholarship: The 2020 TechWomen program will occur over five weeks from February 2022 – March 2022. Due to the fast-paced nature of the program, arrival and departure dates are not flexible.
Amidst widespread mistrust of authority and governing institutions (politicians, particularly governments, are the least trusted group in society), dogma, from whatever source, appears to be losing its suffocating hold on the minds of people everywhere. Disillusionment with ideologically based solutions is being strengthened by the consistent failure of existing methods to solve the problems of the times, which are many and considerable.
If global and national challenges are to be met fully and whole-heartedly, creative reimagining, free of doctrine, is required; independent thinking outside the ideological box. Decrepit systems must be reappraised, the good retained the rest rejected; values realigned, belief systems revised and expanded. Humanity has been wedded to ideologies of one kind of another for eons. Our devotion to them strengthens self-identity, albeit limited and false, and provides a degree of comfort and order in a chaotic world that has no easily discernible logic or purpose to it. This is particularly so in relation to organised religions with their defined order, fixed doctrine and mapped-out route to ‘God’.
Capitalism, democracy and Christianity (2.2 billion believers) are the most pervasive global ideologies, but there are a host of others. In the religious field there’s Islam, the fastest growing religion (1.8 billion); Hinduism (the world’s oldest, one billion), which is not really a religion but a collection of traditions and ancient philosophies; Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism and Sikhism, plus a bundle of sub-sects. Then there are the socio-economic/political structures: Socialism, Neo-liberalism, Communism, Fascism, and the many divisions; on and on it goes.
A veritable jumble of isms then, conditioning the minds of everyone, everywhere, enabling control, fueling social divisions, historic conflicts, sparking terrorism and wars too numerous to count. Ideologies consisting of systemized forms, inflexible rules and cherished beliefs administered by devotees, suited and enrobed intermediaries — between the ignorant masses and the state or the divine. Ordained or elected to perpetuate the system, devoutly deliver the doctrine, condition the unsuspecting from the pulpit, the election rally or news channel, and orchestrate the hollow rituals designed by their predecessors. Mass media and education, plus already infiltrated peers and parents are key feeding grounds for the perpetuation of ideologies
Love in Action
Alongside the calls for justice, a relentless rhythm of the times is the collective demand for freedom. It adorns the placards and lyrics of protest songs around the world. Various freedoms are contained within The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR): “Freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want, freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.” And crucially, “The right to freedom of thought” (Article 18). This ‘right’, which is the most important of them all, like numerous others contained within the aspirational articles of the UNDHR, does not exist anywhere in the world; it cannot exist within the boundaries of any ideology, and no society is free, not just from a specific ideology, but a potent cocktail of isms.
All belief systems inhibit and condition thinking, colour attitudes and impact behavior. Rigid adherence to isms of all kinds creates divisions, within the individual and by extension the society, and where division exists conflict and fear prosper. All of which runs contrary to the impulse and need of the time, for unity, collective action, cooperation and tolerance. It is these perennial ideals that need to be strengthened if we are to overcome the major issues facing us. All that separates and divides needs to be discarded.
Existing ideologies are in varying states of decay, with devotees of the doctrine lacking the freedom and imagination to allow the system (socio-economic, political or religious) to evolve. But as attitudes and values shift, and this is happening apace throughout the world, in order to be relevant and to adequately meet the demands of the time, evolve they must.
Unity is the key element in any such shift — the required guiding principle underlying the development of existing systems and modes of living. Systems and methodologies rooted not in ideology but in compassion and brotherhood, leading to love in action; systems designed to foster social justice, reduce inequality, dismantle divisions and build relationships.
Unity does not equate to mechanical conformity, that is what exists now; in a tolerant, non-judgmental space where the common good is the collective aim, different ideas can happily co-exist, each contributing to the enrichment and beautification of the whole. Oneness is the very nature of things, the essence of who we are; creating ways of living that are rooted in and encourage expressions of this inherent fact is essential if we are to face the challenges of the time, safeguard the environment and begin to build a just and free world.
Ideologies of all colours –– political, socio-economic, religious, — condition and inhibit.
Ideologies of all colours imprison and
Enslavement to ideology, in the form of a political/economic order or a religious doctrine
Isms of all shapes and colours have dogged
If ideologically rooted belief systems, including organised religion and socio-economic/political structures, are to adequately meet the demands of the day and serve the needs of the people they need to develop as the consciousness of humanity itself evolves.
Such a shift is underway among large numbers of people everywhere, is becoming increasingly clear; attitudes and values are moving, and behavior, which is the most stubborn link in the chain, is changing, and with momentum.
Corruption, inadequacies and failings of existing structures — social, economic, political, religious — and the governing institutions that administer the relevant doctrine are being exposed.
The new Democratic administration is poised to make its first proud step in delivering on its electoral promise to build back (America) better: the successful adoption of a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the main components of which are a third round of stimulus checks, a renewal of federal unemployment benefits, and a boost to the child tax credit, as well as funding for school reopenings and vaccinations. It will probably not include a federal minimum wage hike.
Biden’s stimulus is not the stuff of economic revolution—it’s a mix of common sense and keeping the lights on. And the fundamental thinking behind the stimulus approach reflects a continuation of neoliberal policies of the past 40 years; instead of advancing broader social programs that could uplift the population, the solutions are predicated on improving individual purchasing power and family circumstances. Such a vision of society as a collection of enterprising individuals is a hallmark of the neoliberal policy formula—which, as the stimulus bill is about to make clear, is still prevalent within the Democratic and the Republican parties. This attention to individual purchasing power promises to be the basis for bipartisan agreement over the next four years.
The reality is that social programs on health care and education, and a new era of labor and banking regulation, would put the wider society on sounder feet than a check for $1,400.
There are very few federally elected officials who behave as though they understand that economic insecurity can breed political instability and governing paralysis. Globalization, deindustrialization, the contraction of the public sector, and the rise of contract labor via the gig economy have made individuals feel insecure in their private circumstances. This has contributed to the appeal of populist politicians, whose tenures generally are corrosive to liberal democracies. Moreover, these tendencies have together undermined our social contract as a whole, depriving governments of the means and resources to tend to the public interest.
Missing from the frame of thinking that dominates the stimulus debate, therefore, is something essential—the commons, a robust public sector of goods (e.g., energy) and services (e.g., health care) that makes societies resilient to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and weather-incurred power shortages. Ironically, it is this very deficiency—achieved through decades of cuts to public spending and privatization of public assets—that transformed the COVID-19 epidemic into a public health care disaster (and likewise turned Texas into the equivalent of a broken-down banana republic during the worst of its power grid shutdowns, brought about by decades of adherence to market fundamentalism in regard to public infrastructure goals).
These have been occurring against the backdrop of economic lockdowns that were implemented to prevent the spread of a pandemic and an even greater public health disaster. A veritable Sophie’s choice was imposed because of insufficient hospital capacity and a chronic deficiency of basic protective gear for medical personnel and medical equipment to care for the gravely ill—in other words, more market fundamentalism that eviscerated a robust public health infrastructure. Increasing the number of hospital beds is a worthy objective, but in many instances, this will simply restore cuts to previous programs that were attacked by a private health insurance/pharmaceutical industry complex that prioritized profits and returns on equity over public health considerations.
It is no replacement for the bold social experimentation that would truly address the flaw in capitalist democracies that have dominated the 21st century. If the Biden administration is serious in its ambition to build back better, it must adopt a broader proactive policy approach on these issues, rather than keeping American society on life support through a trickle of stimulus packages that tackle the symptoms, as opposed to the underlying disease.
Through 2019, the last year for which data is available, greenhouse gas emissions and global GDP growth remained as highly correlated as they have been for the last half century. What this means is that despite the rhetorical back-and-forth over technological innovation and government policies as potential solutions to climate change, the role of economic production as its cause is unchanged from prior years. To date, the outsourcing of greenhouse gas emissions to China and India accounts for most or all of the alleged progress being claimed by rich nations.
This relationship between GDP and greenhouse gas emissions is more than a statistical anomaly. It is evidence of the causal relationship between them. And because GDP can be stated in terms of income, responsibility for climate change is approximated through the distribution of income. Those with higher incomes are responsible for a greater quantity of climate change than those with lower incomes. This assignment of responsibility works at the level of nations and economic class. Rich nations are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than poor. And the global rich bear more responsibility than the global poor.
Graph: the level of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere has risen in close proportion to economic production as measured by GDP. While correlation doesn’t prove causation, several decades of examining the sources of greenhouse gas emissions does. And while theoretical analyses suggest that green technologies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the relationship of GDP levels (above) and rates of change (below) show no evidence of this promise to date. As has been demonstrated accidentally through the economic failures of neoliberalism, slowing the rate of economic growth is the only proven way of lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Source: World Bank, Github / Climate Watch.
In a world where capital is both fungible and mobile, the framing of greenhouse gas emissions within national geographical boundaries— as the Paris Climate Accord and other environmental agreements do, substantively misrepresents the political economy that produces them. Additionally, while technological innovation is both welcomed and encouraged here, the declining rate of economic growth since the neoliberal epoch began explains the declining rate of growth in greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, bottom-up theorizing about the impact of green technologies isn’t yet showing up in this top-down data.
For those unfamiliar with the history, the U.S. emerged from WWII with the only industrial infrastructure left intact. From about 1948 through the early 1970s, this produced a high level of real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth coincident with high greenhouse gas emissions from within U.S. borders. As industrial infrastructure was built overseas, economic production became more widely distributed. Both China and India implemented export-led economic growth strategies, meaning that they took over greenhouse gas emitting economic production from the U.S. and Europe. The result: goods bound for U.S. and European markets are increasingly produced overseas.
In economic and environmental terms, globalization means that national geographical boundaries are of less value in identifying the sources of economic production. Most complex products like automobiles or computers now incorporate parts, resources, and labor from multiple countries. In environmental terms, this produces opportunistic mobility, a disconnect between legal jurisdiction and physical economic production. With China and India having taken over dirty economic production for the benefit of corporate interests and ‘consumers’ in rich countries, the question of who should bear the environmental costs is complicated.
Graph: this represents the ten-year rate of change in greenhouse gas emissions relative to the ten-year rate of change in global GDP using the same data from the top graph above. As the rate of growth in global GDP has fallen since the 1970s, so has the rate of growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Were ‘green growth’ a factor, greenhouse gas emissions would have fallen at a faster rate than global GDP. This has not happened. To date, cutting economic growth is the only demonstrated way of cutting the emissions that are causing climate change. Source: World Bank, Github / Climate Watch.
In terms of grabbing environmental headlines, the U.S. rejoining the Paris Climate Accord is good news. However, the framework of the accord as an agreement amongst nations plays into this disconnect between discrete national borders and the relocation of greenhouse gas emitting industries to China and India. Another way to consider the question is to ask: who benefits from economic production? The answer from mainstream economists illustrates the intellectual poverty of their premises: everyone. Markets didn’t ‘misprice’ carbon emissions for two centuries. Markets didn’t even know that they existed until climate scientists pointed them out.
One of the central points of the 2018 IPCC Climate Report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is that the problem is global. There is no practical way to limit its impact to those who are creating it. The ‘steady state’ with respect to greenhouse gas emissions is a relative rate of growth. Irrespective of which party occupies the White House, every minute, hour, day, week, year, and decade environmental decline is getting worse in close proportion to economic production— GDP. The collective ‘we’ can either radically transform Western political economy starting three years ago or the future of humanity is an open question.
The longstanding use of marketing in the U.S. to quiet political disputes has resulted in a proneness to conflating symbolism with policy success. A quick perusal of environmental reporting found years of claims of success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that disappear once the national environmental ledgers are adjusted for outsourced emissions. Imports into the U.S. from China and India are assigned carbon footprints based of the pollution that is released in their production. Because these products are made for export to the U.S. and Europe, the political argument can be made that this is where the environmental costs should be borne.
The question for environmental negotiators is how this disconnect between national boundaries and outsourced emissions will be rectified? The national economic goals of the Chinese and Indian political leadership in building-out dirty, export-based industrial infrastructure is development economics 101. It is how Chinese and Indian economists educated at Harvard or Yale would have been taught to do economic development. The problem of differing stages of economic development is well understood in environmental negotiations. The question of how eight billion people can drive Escalades and live in McMansions has not been answered yet.
The problem is complicated by the economic decision making whereby the types of economic production that have been exported aren’t clearly distinct from methods. Not only have the U.S. and Europe outsourced dirty economic production, but the U.S. has been exporting the U.S. coal ‘saved’ through EPA restrictions on its domestic use to India, Brazil, China, etc. That is, if the political leadership in the U.S. were held to account for greenhouse gas emissions, the dirty coal it sold to China— much of it mined from Federal lands, would have been left in the ground. While Trump! is guilty of environmental crimes, it was Barack Obama who did this.
To date, Joe Biden has followed the American practice of making symbolic environmental changes, such as canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and restricting the licensing process for new oil and gas exploration on Federal lands. These are welcomed as symbols. But they will have little environmental impact unless further action is taken. The Keystone XL pipeline was to carry particularly dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, other pipelines are already built, and the capacity exists, such that canceling the Keystone XL pipeline won’t limit the distribution of tar sands oil.
The restrictions placed on the licensing process for oil and gas extraction from Federal lands is temporary, and it won’t have an impact on the volume of oil and gas extracted for a decade or more due to the licenses that were left in place. While these moves are welcomed, and they represent a departure from the Trump administration in terms of signaled interests, prior administrations made similar moves only to cynically undermine them once they had served their political purpose. The political challenge is to support the moves made by Mr. Biden without confusing symbolism with substantive action.
The larger problem, and the purpose of relating GDP to greenhouse gas emissions above, is that ‘better than Trump’ isn’t good enough. The political question of how ‘we’ get from current circumstances to meeting the IPCC timeline for reducing greenhouse gas emissions— already considered conservative by many environmentalists, won’t be answered by adding together a host of small-bore initiatives, no matter how substantive they may feel after decades of neglect. To use a mechanical metaphor, fixing a tractor isn’t a theoretical question. Intentions don’t matter— the tractor either works or it doesn’t. This becomes a life-and-death matter when applied to the environment.
While some of these tensions are tangential for present purposes, they illustrate how thinly considered ‘political’ environmental plans can be. If the Biden plan is to replace gas-burning vehicles with EVs, some effort should have been made to assure that the resources needed to do so are available. However, this doesn’t appear to be the case. And while EVs are expected to reduce the environmental footprint of transportation, this didn’t happen when fuel efficiency standards were applied to cars. While the emissions per mile driven were reduced, both the number of miles driven and the number of cars on the road increased dramatically.
But the real problem is the quantity of pollution that will be produced acquiring resources and manufacturing EVs. What is being proposed is a massive increase in environmental destruction under the theory that the long term payoff will offset the expenditure— and more, in environmental terms. To compound metaphors here, when one finds one’s self in a hole, stop digging. The plan with EVs is to get a better shovel. Again, the purpose of the graphs relating greenhouse gas emissions to GDP (above) is that as of 2021, any increase in GDP means an equivalent increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
The half-baked Trump administration plan to lead a coup in Bolivia was thankfully averted by the Bolivian people. However, the subtext of the coup was lithium, the as-of-now necessary ingredient for EVs to be built. According to Ilargi, as posted on nakedcapitalism.com, EV automaker Tesla alone needed 165% of the available lithium supply in 2020. How precisely is a program to replace the existing stock of gas-burners with EVs going to work without enough lithium? More to the point, if meeting the IPCC timeline is possible, increasing greenhouse gas emissions to do so would have been risky and implausible thirty years ago. But that time has run out.
More than five million people were killed in the 2010s in a resource war in Democratic Republic of Congo to acquire coltan needed in the manufacture of cell phones. While Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report did some good reporting on the conflict, it was otherwise invisible to Americans. Economists exclude the human costs of these wars from cost estimates of technological solutions to climate change. But all of them imply resource wars. Given how climate change will decimate agricultural production, these wars are destined to become more frequent and vicious.
If the supply of resources hasn’t been thought through, then the environmental accounting relative to EVs most certainly hasn’t been thought through. Lithium mining is profoundly environmentally destructive. And the U.S, military is the largest user of fossil fuels in the world. Paradoxically, much of this use goes toward securing supplies of natural resources. The point: the broader political context in which economic production takes place makes narrow environmental accounting more obfuscatory than illuminating.
More broadly still, a paradox of capitalism, or whichever term you prefer for Western political economy, is that profits are earned in proportion to the ability of polluting industries to dump their costs onto others. This provides the rationale for the proverbial ‘race to the bottom’ where no single industrialist or industrial organization can stop aggregate industrial pollution, but they all benefit from their ability to shift the costs of production to others. These profits produce favorable financing terms from Wall Street, broadly considered, further lowering costs— and enhancing corporate profits. Whomever is best at this game gains the economic power to control political outcomes.
While this reads as a morality play, and on a certain level it is, these intentions are built into the corporate form as well as the logic of capitalism. Corporate managers along multiple lines of responsibility are employed to game whatever regulatory regime exists to govern corporate behavior. This practice is well understood with taxation, where the lawyers and accountants of multinational corporations exploit discrete legal structures through ‘regulatory arbitrage.’ They use international mobility and the power of coercion to seek out and control locales and governments through which taxes can be avoided.
The legal limitation of the Paris Accord, the question of which bodies have the jurisdiction to midwife and enforce environmental agreements, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) clauses embedded in the original NAFTA were removed from the re-negotiated NAFTA, but residual lawsuits remain. Had ‘free-trade’ proponents had their way, the ISDS clauses in the original NAFTA and the TPP would have made the enforcement of environmental regulations by national governments virtually impossible.
Of current relevance is that the legal structures created through ISDS clauses can be used to preclude environmental regulation without in any way identifying them as ‘environmental.’ While those who pay attention to trade issues might know them as such, political opportunists who publicly identify as environmentalists have become particularly adept at undermining their own well-publicized environmental programs. Joe Biden has left the door open to negotiating trade agreements with the promise to ‘give labor a seat at the table.’ However, if ‘the table’ isn’t where binding decisions are made, the offer is worse than useless because it is deceptive.
The point here isn’t to cast aspersions, but to consider how environmental agreements are conceived, negotiated, and enforced. Readers are invited to further consider how the income measure of GDP works as a framework for understanding the political economy of climate change. The logic, again, is that GDP and greenhouse gas emission levels and rates of change are causally related. At the levels of nations and class, rich nations and the global rich bear quanta of responsibility for these emissions approximated by their income-shares of GDP. The relationship isn’t perfect, but it fundamentally reframes environmental politics in the class terms from which the problems emanate.
The prospective benefit of a robust Green New Deal with a Job Guarantee is that it would shift social resources down the class distribution in a way that reflects the class basis of environmental problems. This isn’t what is being proposed and it is important to understand the difference. The rich made themselves rich by trashing the planet that the rest of us depend on for existence. Leaving it to the rich to voluntarily clean up the mess they created would look a lot like making nice-sounding but unenforceable agreements between nations while subsidizing corporations to further trash the planet through ‘green’ capitalism. This will not work, and we’re out of time for marketing b.s. and green capitalist experiments.
Gold has long been considered the most important form of wealth. Diamonds are another. When oil became the most widely used source of energy, then people started referring to oil as the black gold. At various times since then, different important minerals have been highlighted as being very valuable.
But the more these minerals are extracted in any country, the lesser their value that remains with the country. What is more, the very process of their extraction often involves so much damage to the environment of the region. The profit from the mining of these minerals and their trade is often concentrated in the hands of a few rich persons and entities. The wealth of these minerals is often concentrated in a few regions, but there is no assurance at all that the people of these regions will benefit from this. In fact extraction of the more valuable minerals has frequently involved much violence, displacement and hazards, often directed at local people, hence the use of expressions like ‘blood diamonds.’
On the other hand there is another form of wealth available in abundance. The more care with which it is used, the more its value can increase and people can go on using with proper care without reducing its worth. For all who recognize its true worth and use it properly and with due caution benefits will come not just for today but for future as well. This most abundant wealth accessible to all is soil ( known more commonly by local names of mitti or maati in India).
Till about a century ago there was widespread appreciation of the great worth of soil. A reflection of this was that whenever one had to take a pledge of honor and self-respect, this was frequently in the name of soil ( mitti ki saugandh). A pinch of soil would be taken in hand to signify honor and commitment. This was no empty talk—this was matched by the reality of a lot of care and commitment to maintaining and protecting the quality of soil. But as people started giving less attention to care of soil , the references to soil in daily talk also suffered a degradation.
The most precious contribution of soil is of course associated with providing the most essential need of food. The more care we take of soil and protect its natural fertility the more assured we can be of getting healthy , safe and nutritious food on sustainable basis. The less care we give the lesser will be the ability of soil to provide this most valuable service to humanity and all forms of life.
If looked after properly, soil is easily the most abundant provider of sustainable and highly creative, satisfying livelihoods. If soil is eroded and its quality, fertility decline, then its ability to provide sustainable livelihoods declines, and the livelihoods which still depend on it start getting less creative and more precarious.
Soil is home to billions of creatures such as earthworms and micro-organisms, very welcome and useful inhabitants of this planet who contribute to its welfare without asking for anything in turn by indulging all the time in activities which contribute to the fertility , porosity and overall well-being of soil. They demand no feed or fodder from human beings, they merely ask for a right to living in the soil undisturbed to make their own arrangements. But human beings have denied even this basic right to their best friends, their most undemanding friends. By indiscriminate use of agro-chemicals and in other ways, human beings have been killing and destroying billions and billions of these humble and sincere friends.
Good care of soil is also very important for ensuring adequate availability of that other most basic need—water. If porosity and stability of soil can be maintained by proper care—earthworms can again be very helpful in this—then rainwater and moisture can be much better conserved.
Care and protection of soil was always very important, but in times of climate change this importance has increased further. It has always been known that the key to maintaining the natural fertility of soil is its organic content, obtained by decomposition of various biological materials including fallen leaves, other plant residues and excreta of various life forms particularly those which dwell in soil itself. But now in times of climate change the importance of this organic content of soil is also enhanced in other important ways in terms of absorbing carbon and hence contributing to checking climate change. Since soil is spread all over, with its better care and increase of organic content over a number of years, we can not only contribute much to improving prospects of healthy food and satisfying sustainable livelihoods, this can also contribute much more to checking climate change.
This protection of soil should be confined not just to rural areas but should extend to urban areas where the craze for indiscriminate concretization of land should be given up and there should be many more green spaces and gardens created not by chemical fertilizers and pesticides but in natural ways.
Soil is thus clearly the most important wealth of any country. While millions of people are willing to slog, cheat, rob or even kill for gold, diamonds and cash, unfortunately the realization of the importance of soil does not get adequate attention and instead of increasing care of soil recent decades have witnessed not just increasing neglect but also increasing , relentless destruction of soil and soil-organisms. The decreasing number of farmers and gardeners who still continue to take care of soil are being scorned and neglected. The family farms and farming communities which alone are capable of taking care of soil are being pushed aside by big corporate interests with their heavy machines and bagfuls of agro-chemicals, mounting nothing less than an assault on soil health and on soil organisms who create this soil health.
Clearly big efforts have to be made to protect soil, the most precious wealth of all nations and of world, and for this farmers, gardeners, scientists and citizens who care should all raise their voice before it is too late.
The green revolution has been widely discussed and its different aspects have been highlighted by various observers according to their own understanding of emphasis and priorities. To this writer the essence of the green revolution seems to be in the following tendencies, all the more significant because these seem to be shared by technological changes in other sectors of rural development spread by the same forces.
Firstly, the green revolution seeks to draw, for better or for worse may be debated later, the peasantry of even very remote rural areas into the pressures and influences of the international market. As long as the farmer continued to grow his traditional varieties with very meager or even nil quantities of agrochemicals, diesel or machinery, he was least affected by what happened in the oil, fertilizer and other related industries of the world, or by the relation of the domestic industry producing these inputs to the industry of other countries, but with the advent of the green revolution all this suddenly became quite important for millions of farmers in the form of the price and availability of fertilizers, pesticides, diesel, tractors etc.
Secondly the propaganda on behalf of the green revolution emphasizes its suitability for small farmers and in a technological sense there is nothing to stop a farmer from growing the new seeds. Seen in the reality of Indian rural conditions and indeed in the conditions of many other countries, the new seeds requiring expensive inputs in large amounts are most likely to trap the low-resource, poor farmer in a debt trap, while those endowed with the largest resource base in rural areas are able to take advantage of the several new opportunities, not necessarily in agricultural production but even more in trade of produce as well as inputs or ‘agro business’ which the green revolution seeds and their related inputs bring.
A related issue is the very narrow way in which the green revolution concerns itself with the basic problem of hunger. In Indian conditions it was evident that to effectively tackle the problem of hunger food production should not just grow but grow specifically on the fields of the poorer farmers in backward areas. On the other hand by emphasizing concentration of resources in the already well endowed regions and at least initially on the better-off farmers the green revolution follows an opposite pattern. By so doing it makes it possible to collect ‘marketable surplus’ of grain from a relatively small area to enhance the government’s stocks of grain which, however, by itself cannot ensure that this food reaches the hungry. Thus the green revolution takes a cynical view of the pain of hunger – flaunting grain stocks and asking where is the problem, while doing nothing effective by itself to really increase the ability of the hungry people to eat better.
Lastly it should be pointed out that the green revolution strategy has been promoted and supported at various levels by the foundations and aid organizations based in western countries, as also the multilateral aid, finance and research organizations in which these countries are dominant. These interests have been generally very supportive of big agribusiness corporations.
If these are accepted as some of the most important features of the green revolution, however, the technological changes in other areas of rural development-dairy-development, fisheries and forestry for instance can be seen as exhibiting much the same tendencies. Hence these overall changes can be described as the greater green revolution.
In the case of dairy development the foreign aid based Operation Flood project strengthened for all time to come the trend of big infra-structure, big city-supply centered path of dairy development, denying a more imaginative and pioneering path more suited to the needs of India. The dairy development strategy of this project put more emphasis on the technology of crossbreed cows which is less suited for small, low resource farmer and for hot weather conditions ( likely to be even less suitable for times of climate change, and for meeting bullock needs of agriculture). By emphasizing the availability of plenty of milk and milk products in cities for those who have the purchasing power for this, the ‘white revolution’ also adopts a cynical attitude towards the problem of malnutrition, being concerned with only the product and not with who gets it. As milk processing moves away from villages, the cheapest by product of chaach, also the cheapest source of protein, is likely to become much less available to poorer households, compared to its much more abundant and more or less free availability earlier. As more emphasis shifts to supplying milk to big cities with large-scale urban milk processing plants, crucial aspects such as improving pastures, equal deal for weaker sections in dairy development get less importance. With oilseed processing also shifting to huge city processing, oilcakes and other nutritive feed do not go to local farm and dairy animals, these go instead to those who can pay more and in practice this often means the export market. Operation Flood established the trend of mixing fresh milk arbitrarily with cheaper stored milk powder and butter oil from any part of world, and using this, the organized dairy sector can price out the independent small dairy producer any day. The independent small dairy producer keeps complaining that her costs are more than her price in a system dominated by the organized sector which can mix milk powder and butter oil etc. with fresh milk to always have a competitive edge over the unorganized sector and the independent small farmer.
In the area of forestry, massive aid for forestry projects has been accompanied by increased orientation of forestry officials towards forestry practices and policies to predominantly satisfy the need of industries. Emphasis on supporting the growth of mainly those species which industry finds useful, at the expense of the trees needed by tribals and other villagers, has played havoc with their lives and specially with their access to free food available in forests (which was specially useful in lean agricultural season and in drought years).Forestry projects have emphasized monocultures of commercially and industrially useful species of trees with adverse impacts on environment and availability of food, fodder, medicinal plants as well as other useful forest based products to local communities, particularly tribal communities. This trend is very harmful also for wild life and biodiversity. India’s fifth five-year plan stated its priority is to shift “ to a dynamic program of production forestry aiming at clear-felling and creating large-scale man-made forests with the help of institutional financing.” A little after this the National Commission of Agriculture went to the extent of saying, “ Production of industrial wood will have to be the raison d’étre for the existence of forests”.
In the area of marine fisheries also the traditional fisher folk communities of coastal areas have suffered with the growing linkages of coastal fisheries to the export-led growth and to the subsequent domination of big business interests and increasing mechanization, promoted by international projects and agencies, .In some places rising exports of fish have been accompanied by declining local per capita availability of this staple protein. In many places original fishers, have faced increasing difficulties while late entrants to marine fisheries have made fortunes.. Aquaculture projects promoted by big business interests have faced increasing criticism for ecological ruin and adverse impacts on coastal communities.
The extension of several important features of the green revolution , as also the same thinking underlying the technological change in agriculture, (as well promotion by similar powerful interests) to other areas of rural development may be called the greater green revolution. This writer had written a booklet using the title of the greater green revolution for this clear trend , and as there was much approval and appreciation of this by discerning readers, the use of this phrase for this phenomenon has persisted on his part. It is a common and important part of all aspects of the green revolution and the greater green revolution that strong attempts are made to break the self-reliance of rural communities and to increase their dependence on outer forces, which in course of time leads to the indebtedness and often even the displacement of rural communities from their land or other resource base—this is particularly the fate of the weaker and more vulnerable members of these communities but not entirely confined to them.
Hence following the commonly used description of green revolution in the context of agriculture, the greater green revolution may be defined as the extension of similar thinking and technology in animal husbandry and dairying, fisheries, forestry and other related activities which lead to a disruption of traditional practices and the related wisdom of many , many generations, accompanied by the imposition of technologies and inputs which break self-reliance and impose exploitative linkages which are harmful for sustainable development, nutrition, environment protection and animal welfare, while leading to increased business for industrial interests.
Northern Ireland’s right-wing unionist parties and hardline Tory Brexiteers, with the support of loyalist paramilitary groups, are intent on breaking the Northern Ireland Protocol component of Britain’s European Union (EU) withdrawal agreement.
The protocol is a ramshackle and fragile compromise devised to avoid any return to a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It became necessary because Northern Ireland, which remains part of the UK, has left the EU. But neither the UK, the EU or the Irish government want to be seen to re-impose politically and economically ruinous border checks on the island of Ireland.
Vehicles at the port of Larne, Northern Ireland, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)
A “hard border” risks fatally undermining the 1998 Good Friday, or Belfast Agreement, which brought Northern Ireland’s decades long “Troubles” to an end. Over the years since the agreement established the power-sharing arrangement between the pro-British Unionist and Irish Republican parties, led by Sinn Fein, in the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont, the border has been transformed. The heavily militarised frontier has become near invisible, crossed thousands of times each day without impediment, reflecting the high level of integration of the economy and working population across the island.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the largest unionist party, under leader and First Minister Arlene Foster, supported and campaigned for a hard Brexit and propped up Theresa May’s Conservative government in return for cash and concessions. Boris Johnson attended the DUP conference of 2018, denouncing May’s “backstop” compromise with the EU, which Johnson said turned Northern Ireland into a “semi-colony of the EU.”
After the 2019 UK general election returned Johnson as prime minister with an increased majority, he had no need to rely on the DUP, who were unceremoniously dumped. In October 2019, Johnson made an agreement with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar behind the back of his unionist allies, to allow the minimal Brexit deal, including the protocol, a variant on May’s backstop, to be struck.
The protocol displaces external EU customs checks on trade from the North/South border into the Irish Sea, with ports in Northern Ireland and the UK functioning as the EU’s external trade boundary. Johnson and Varadkar ignored the Northern Ireland Assembly, only allowing Stormont the opportunity to reverse the protocol after four years. Even this would be dependent on a simple majority, rather than the cross-community vote that would have guaranteed a DUP veto. Unionists lost their absolute majority in the assembly in 2017.
Immediately on introduction, January 1 this year, the new arrangements required complex, time consuming and expensive checks on commerce, particularly goods vehicles, between Britain and Northern Ireland. Moreover, the checks are now the norm, rather than merely teething troubles, and impact many aspects of the Northern economy, threatening thousands of businesses and jobs.
Late January, the vaccine wars between the UK and EU prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, centred on a conflict over which contracts took precedence, saw Brussels invoke the protocol’s Article 16 allowing either party to bar trade in the face of “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist”. The EU briefly blocked vaccine exports from the continent to Northern Ireland, enraging the British and Irish governments and underscoring Northern Ireland’s vulnerability under the new arrangements.
The unionist parties were apoplectic. Ian Paisley Jnr, DUP member of parliament for North Antrim, wailed at British government minister Michael Gove in Westminster, “What did we do, to members of the benches over there, to be screwed over by this protocol?”
In a letter, late last month, to Johnson, leaders of the DUP, the pro-Remain (in the EU) Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and the Traditional Unionist Voice warned, “Our unified and unalterable position is that the protocol is incapable of being reformed and must be repudiated and superseded by arrangements which fully respect Northern Ireland’s position as a constituent and integral part of the United Kingdom.”
The unionists warned Johnson that his government would face a legal challenge unless he took “immediate action to settle a new arrangement... consistent with the Act of Union 1800, the Northern Ireland Act of 1998 and the Belfast Agreement”.
That the 1800 Act of Union, still in force in Northern Ireland, should be invoked reveals the extent to which the contradictions between the modern world economy and the outmoded nation state system are tearing at the foundations of even the most longstanding political arrangements.
The Act of Union was the British government’s response to the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion, inspired by the American and French revolutions, led by Wolfe Tone. The rebellion, seeking civil, political, and religious liberty and an end to the British domination of Ireland, suffered from poor organisation and the absence of promised support from revolutionary France. It was brutally put down by British forces.
The Act of Union abolished Ireland’s existing parliament and cemented the rule of the wealthy Protestant Ascendancy, of which today’s vastly weakened unionists are the heirs. It created the political framework for Ireland to be forcibly economically retarded over the next century, its nascent industry destroyed and the country reduced to colonial status as a source of agriculture, cheap labour, and cannon fodder for British imperialism.
That the act is still in force today points to the character of the six county Ulster statelet that emerged from Ireland’s partition by Britain in 1921, after the 1916 Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish war. Ulster, based on the six most Protestant dominated counties, was founded to maintain British control of the island and defend the interests of the Ulster capitalist class, whose then powerful industry was closely to tied to Britain. British imperialism went to war again in 1969, fighting a decades-long “dirty war” against Irish republicans, on behalf of the unionist bourgeoisie, before arriving at the power-sharing Belfast Agreement, designed to create sufficient stability and cross border connections to attract investment.
Both acts, bookending nearly two centuries of British domination of Ireland, are unraveling, a fact that is dawning belatedly on the unionists.
Other actions to follow include steps to “actively oppose at every opportunity” measures “which undermine Northern Ireland’s place in the UK internal market.” A petition demanding the removal of “barriers to unfettered trade within the United Kingdom” drew 140,000 signatures and resulted in a Westminster debate. The letter warned that the DUP would withdraw from bodies such as the North South Ministerial Council, the main body organising cross border co-operation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The unionists have been supported by the European Research Group of 50 hardline Tory Brexiteer MPs in Westminster. ERG members all voted for Johnson’s withdrawal agreement, but now see the EU decision to invoke Article 16 as a “unique political opportunity”. The ERG are calling for Johnson to trigger Article 16 and prepare legislation to “ensure free trade within the UK”.
An article in the Irish Times by former UUP First Minister, and one of the Belfast Agreement’s architects, David Trimble, stressed that, rather than protect the Belfast Agreement, the protocol, with its petty rules “enforced by European Union inspectors who oversee the work of UK officials at Northern Ireland ports” was pulling it apart. Trimble threatened that if the “genuine grievances and resentments caused by the protocol are not addressed politically, then there is real potential for those who have engaged in past violence to take action again into their own hands.”
Trimble’s euphemism to “past violence” was a reference to the state infiltrated loyalist paramilitary groups, responsible for hundreds of murders during the “Troubles” and who retain a controlling influence in some of the most oppressed working class Protestant areas. According to the most recent Independent Reporting Commission, set up in 2017, paramilitarism on both sides of Northern Ireland’s political and religious divide retains thousands of signed up members, although only a relatively small proportion of those were active.
The Loyalist Communities Council (LCC), a legal face for the banned Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association, and the Red Hand Commandos, has told the Johnson government that its affiliates were temporarily withdrawing their backing for the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol.
First Minister Foster and her deputy Nigel Dodds played the same card as Trimble. The pair met with the Loyalist Communities Council before its announcement, with Foster describing the fascistic gangs, mostly involved in drug sales and thuggery against each other and working class youth, as part of the “loyalist and unionist community”.
Last week, the DUP’s Brexit spokesperson, Sammy Wilson, Westminster MP for East Antrim, threatened “guerrilla warfare” against the protocol, “until the big battle opportunity comes”. Northern Ireland agriculture minister, the DUP’s Gordon Lyons, ordered a halt to the construction of permanent customs checking posts in Northern Ireland’s ports, stopped recruiting customs staff and refused to levy charges on traders bringing goods into Northern Ireland.
The Irish bourgeois parties of Sinn Fein, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and the Irish government have promoted the business opportunities, exploiting easy access to the EU and Britain, that the Northern Ireland Protocol offers potential investors. Neither side proposes anything to the working class other than vicious austerity and the consequence of the pandemic, equally badly handled North and South.
Loyalism and Unionism are much reduced forces today. An entire generation has grown up in Northern Ireland used to free movement across the island, and across Europe. Ireland itself is riven with class divisions and with a large and cosmopolitan working population. Nevertheless, sectarian conflicts threaten to re-emerge until the working class, seeking the dismantling of British imperialism’s remaining apparatus in the North and the abolition of capitalist rule across the island, as part of the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe, comes forward to prevent it.
Workers took to the streets across Lebanon and set up roadblocks with barrels and burning tyres for the second day as the Lebanese pound fell on Monday to an all-time low, trading at nearly 10,000 to the US dollar on the black market.
The economic and financial crisis, intensified by the coronavirus pandemic and Lebanon’s default on its sovereign debt to international lenders, has thrown more than half of the country’s six million population into poverty. The falling currency has led to soaring food prices, while the minimum wage has fallen in real terms to just $67 a month, down from about $450 a month two years ago, making it impossible to put food on the table. Last December, the World Bank forecast that Lebanon’s GDP would fall by nearly 20 percent, warning that the country faced an “arduous and prolonged depression.”
A Lebanese protester holds an Arabic placard that reads: “Down with the rule of the bank,” in Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, Feb. 26, 2021.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
The desperate shortage of hard currency has also led to delays in importing fuel oil and diesel to generate electricity, resulting in long power outages across the country lasting more than 12 hours a day.
The suffering extends into neighbouring Syria, whose economy is closely linked with that of Lebanon, once part of Syria before the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Syria—whose economy has been ravaged by Western sanctions and the 10-year proxy war waged by the US, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad—saw its currency fall to 3,900 Syrian pounds against the dollar. Many Syrians, who use Lebanese banks that offered consumers savings and checking accounts in US dollars with interest rates of up to 30 percent, found their money blocked as Lebanon’s central bank implemented tighter capital controls.
Many basic commodities are expensive and in short supply, with long queues forming outside bakeries and fuel stations, and frequent power cuts adversely affecting local businesses and exacerbating unemployment. Once a grain exporter, Syria has seen its wheat production fall by half in the wake of several years of drought and then the war that has wreaked havoc on the country’s agriculture. It has now become a wheat importer. The price of bread has shot up in the wake of US-imposed sectoral sanctions and Russia’s restrictions on the export of wheat to maintain its own supplies during the pandemic.
Similarly, once self-sufficient in oil, Syria’s fuel supply has been curtailed via US sanctions on its oil trade and its military support for Kurdish control over the eastern oil fields.
Such is Lebanon’s political impasse—symptomatic of the wider collapse of bourgeois governments around the world—that no new government has been sworn in since the resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s government in the wake of the catastrophic blast in the Beirut port. Last August’s explosion, widely blamed on years of official negligence and corruption by successive governments, killed 211 people, injured more than 6,000 and destroyed much of the northern part of the city.
Last October, President Michel Aoun called on former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a billionaire client of Saudi Arabia and France who was forced to resign in the face of months-long mass demonstrations that started in October 2019. The protests erupted over rising poverty, social inequality and rampant government corruption, and raised the demands for an end to the sectarian political system and elections to form a new government.
But the two men have been unable to agree the membership of a new cabinet that would encompass their different patronage networks.
Protests that started in northern Lebanon soon spread to southern Lebanon, the capital Beirut, its southern suburbs that are home to Hezbollah supporters, and the eastern Bekaa regions, encompassing supporters of all the main political groups.
Pegged to the dollar at 1,500 since 1997, the pound had fallen precipitously on the black market as the economic crisis deepened, stabilising at 8,000-8,500 to the dollar in recent weeks, after falling to 9,900 pounds in July. The central bank subsidised the difference between the two rates, as well as the import of many staple goods, including fuel and flour. The exchange houses and commercial banks are mandated by the government to trade at 3,900 pounds to the dollar, an order uniformly ignored.
This latest fall followed the central bank’s review of Lebanon’s lenders, some of the country’s richest businessmen and politicians, and Sunday’s deadline to the banks to increase their capital by 20 percent. The bank’s review was in response to international pressure for financial reforms as the precondition for releasing loans to the heavily indebted country. According to al-Akhbar, the currency collapse was partly due to the commercial banks withdrawing dollars out of the market to meet the central bank’s demands.
Lebanon—caught in the crosshairs of the escalating conflict between, on the one hand, the US, Israel and the Gulf petro-monarchs, and on the other hand, Iran and its allies, including Syria—has been hung out to dry as US President Joe Biden steps up the pressure on Iran.
The Gulf states have refused to help, despite Hariri’s recent tour with a begging bowl, unless he forms a government that is not dependent upon Hezbollah, the militant Shia group that is backed by Iran and has the largest bloc in Lebanon’s parliament. Western banks and institutions have refused to stump up $11billion pledged at a 2018 conference until the government implements free market reforms, while talks with the International Monetary Fund last spring stalled for similar reasons.
These latest protests follow others in recent weeks against the ruling elite and deteriorating living conditions. Last month, angry clashes broke out between protesters and the security services outside a military court in Beirut after judges ruled that six demonstrators in Tripoli, Lebanon’s poorest city, had committed “terrorism and theft” during anti-poverty riots in January that were broken up by lethal force.
There have been protests against the delays and corruption marking the farcical official inquiry into the port blast. Judge Fadi Sawan, who was leading the investigation, was dismissed by the Court of Cessation, who questioned his objectivity given that his own house was one of those damaged by the explosion. His dismissal came after he had charged caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab, who had sought to investigate the unsafe storage of ammonium nitrate cache at the port for years as soon as he was notified, and three former ministers with negligence over the blast, not his predecessors who had done nothing about it.
There were also protests against the banks that have reportedly delayed implementing the so-called “Student Dollar Law” that allows students to receive up to $10,000 while studying at a university abroad.
Lebanon, whose health care system has collapsed, has some of the world’s highest rates of new COVID-19 infections and deaths, with the total number of infections nearing 400,000 and deaths approaching 5,000.
Further fueling popular anger against the ruling elite is the politicians’ brazen queue-jumping as they sought to get some of the fewer than 30,000 vaccines made available as part of the World Bank’s $34 million grant, the first to be made available to any country, to purchase the BioNTech/Pfizer jab.
President Aoun, his wife and 10 members of his entourage, followed by 16 legislators and a handful of staffers got their shots ahead of some 730,000 people who were registered, prompting outrage and the resignation in disgust of Thalia Arawi, ethics officer for the national vaccination programme. The World Bank has threatened to suspend financing for the vaccines and pandemic support for Lebanon if the violations are confirmed.
This follows the efforts by Lebanon’s leaders to use a $204 million loan by the World Bank to provide cash transfers to 147,000 poor Lebanese families for the next year to their own advantage by distributing the cash to recipients in pounds at a below-market rate, with the banks pocketing the difference.
The divisions and splits within the ruling elite are evidenced by the increased scrutiny of Riad Salameh, governor of Lebanon’s central bank since 1993, who has long been close to Washington and Paris, for his mismanagement of the economy. He, along with two exchange brokers, is reportedly under investigation by a judge over charges related to the disbursement of US dollars to currency exchange brokers. Salameh is also due to be questioned by Swiss officials over money-laundering, allegations he described as “fabrications and fake news.”
