Amid mounting tensions, US imposes sanctions on Russia

Clara Weiss

With an executive order, US president Joe Biden imposed sweeping new sanctions on Russia on Thursday. The US is expelling 10 Russian diplomats, and sanctioning almost three dozen companies. The US announced sanctions not only on energy companies, but also on any US financing of Russian state bonds and the issuing of credits to Russian state financial institutions.

The US notably excluded the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 from the new sanctions. The pipeline is bitterly opposed by both the Democratic and Republican parties, NATO members such as Poland, the Baltic states, and also Ukraine, which is heavily reliant on revenues from the transit of Russian gas through its territory to Europe. However, German government representatives have repeatedly argued against US sanctions of the project, insisting that Germany was going to continue to pursue it. Earlier this week, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Germany to discuss the stationing of an additional 500 US troops in the country.

Monday, Feb. 15, 2021 photo of U.S. warship (AP Photo/Mohammad Farooq)

Biden’s executive order said that unproven allegations of Russian interference in US elections and a hack of the SolarWinds company constituted “harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation.” It also accused the Russian government of undermining “security in countries and regions important to United States national security.” The order called these actions “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

On that basis, Biden also declared “a national emergency to deal with that threat.” The last time that the US invoked a “national emergency” as the basis for sanctioning Russia was on March 6, 2014, at the height of the Ukraine crisis. The crisis was triggered by the US-and German-backed coup in Kiev on February 18, 2014, which primarily relied on sections of the oligarchy and the Ukrainian far-right. As the WSWS explained at the time, the coup had created “the most dangerous international crisis since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.”

NATO immediately issued a statement endorsing the US sanctions, and calling “Russia’s actions” a “threat to Euro-Atlantic security.” The alliance, which has aggressively expanded to Russia’s borders over the past three decades, and has backed multiple coups in countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, hypocritically called on Russia “to cease immediately its destabilising behavior.”

In response to the sanctions, Russia summoned US ambassador John Sullivan for what the Kremlin called a “difficult conversation.” Following Biden’s public denunciation of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” in March, Russia had also called back its ambassador to the US. It is assumed that in retaliation for the sanctions Russia will soon expel US diplomatic personnel.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that in the light of the sanctions a summit between Biden and Putin, which Biden had proposed on Tuesday, would not happen anytime soon, but did not rule it out entirely either.

The declaration of new US sanctions comes amidst a dangerous heightening of military and geopolitical tensions in the Black Sea region. The backdrop for the recent flaring up of military clashes between Russian-backed separatists in East Ukraine, where a civil war has raged since the 2014 coup, and the Ukrainian army was the Ukrainian government’s adoption in March of a strategy to “retake Crimea.”

The peninsula, which is strategically located in the Black Sea and home to the naval base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, was annexed by Russia after the coup. The declaration of the “Crimean Platform” and public discussion of an offensive to “retake” the Donbas in East Ukraine made clear that the Ukrainian government was preparing for all-out war against Russia, counting on support from NATO.

Map of the Black Sea region

Since then, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has sought to drum up support for his “Crimean platform.” In particular, he has urged the US and NATO to accelerate Ukraine’s admission to the military alliance. On Thursday, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, threatened that if Ukraine is not soon admitted to NATO, Ukraine would be forced to “rearm on our own.” Speaking to Deutschlandfunk, he said that the Ukrainian government was “considering” the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

On Friday, Zelensky is set to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron. Russian media have reported that, among other things, Macron and Zelensky could discuss a major deal to deliver French Dassault Rafale fighter jets to the Ukrainian air force because Ukraine is dissatisfied with what it considers the slow pace of delivery of American fighter jets.

Shortly before the US announced its new sanctions, Turkish diplomatic sources revealed to Reuters that the US had called off the deployment of two warships to the Black Sea through Turkish straits, which was set to start April 14. That extraordinarily provocative move had prompted angry responses from Kremlin officials. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabko warned the US to “stay away from Crimea and our Black Sea coast…for their own good.” The calling-off of the deployment no doubt reflected the recognition in Washington that going ahead with it could lead to an uncontrollable escalation of the conflict.

However, the situation in the Black Sea region, which is of major geostrategic significance to the US in its efforts to undermine both Russia and China, continues to be on a knife’s edge.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned on Thursday that tensions had not been “eased” despite the cancelling of the deployment of the US warships. Just hours after the US announced the sanctions, media reports suggested that Russia would close the Kerch Strait, a sea passage between the Azov Sea and the Black Sea, starting April 26 and continuing until October 2021, to conduct military exercises. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister immediately issued a protest, but the closure of the Strait has so far not been confirmed by the Russian government.

Shortly thereafter, Ukraine’s General Staff accused Russia on its Facebook page of having violated “the rules of international maritime law” in the Azov Sea. Without providing any details or evidence, it alleged that “boats of the FSB” [Russia’s internal secret service] had blocked the passage of Ukrainian navy ships “on combat duty” the day before. In 2018, the Ukrainian government, then headed by billionaire Petro Poroshenko, launched a major provocation against Russia in the Azov Sea over a stand-off at the Kerch Strait.

Ukrainian media have reported that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has also launched “large-scale, multi-phased anti-terrorist exercises” in the Kherson and Kharkov oblasts (regions) and, according to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Ukrainian troops and military equipment are now focused in the Kherson oblast. The Kherson oblast is located in southern Ukraine, directly adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea, and north of the Crimean peninsula. The Kharkov oblast is in the East of the country, bordering territories that have been controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Both regions are heavily populated by Russian speakers with close family and cultural ties to Russia, among whom the far-right coup in Kiev in 2014 was very unpopular.

Russia’s own military exercises on its southern border are set to last another two weeks. Russia has reportedly also reinforced its Black Sea Fleet.

Cryptocurrency bubble accelerates as Coinbase goes public

Nick Beams

The speculative surge on Wall Street, set in motion by the increased flow of ultra-cheap money initiated by the Fed in March 2020 that has lifted market indexes to record highs—the S&P 500 index recorded its 22nd high for the year yesterday—entered a new phase this week.

On Tuesday Grab Holdings, a Southeast Asian ride-share, food delivery and finance company, announced a near $40 billion launch on New York’s NASDAQ exchange.

Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

It went on to the market through a merger with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter Group. It was the largest ever such operation through which a company comes on to the market not through an initial public offering but by merging with an already listed cash-only company.

The past year has seen what the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) described as “a frenzy of SPAC-related deal making” as companies seek to take advantage of the market surge.

But Grab’s operation was eclipsed on Wednesday with the launch of Coinbase, a trader in cryptocurrencies on the NASDAQ exchange via a direct public listing without being backed by investment banks.

The launch was hailed as the dawn of a new era as Coinbase is the first major Bitcoin-focused company to go public.

Shares in Coinbase opened at $381, then rose to $429 before falling back to $328 at the end of the day. Some analysts had said its market valuation could go as high as $100 billion. It briefly reached that level before falling back at the close of trade to record a market valuation of $85 billion. This compares to a valuation of $8 billion when it was assessed during a fund-raising effort in 2018.

The same escalation in market value was seen in the Grab launch. The $39.6 billion deal with Altimeter meant that its valuation had more than doubled in just 18 months. In October 2019, during a fund-raising operation, Grab was valued at around $15 billion.

The speculative character of the Grab boost was even pointed to by the CNBC business channel commentator Jim Cramer who posed the question: how had the value more than doubled in that time when it was doing nothing different?

The Coinbase launch has further underscored the speculative character of the latest market surge.

Coinbase has 56 million customers and operates the largest digital coin exchange in the US. Its business has surged in the recent period with the escalation in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Since the start of the year Bitcoin has more than doubled in price and is now fetching more than $60,000. It also trades in 50 other cryptocurrencies in addition to Bitcoin.

Other cryptocurrencies, including Dogecoin, which was created as a joke in 2013, has surged by 85 percent this week.

As a result of the surge in cryptocurrency speculation, Coinbase has estimated that it took in between $703 million and $800 million in the first quarter in profits compared to $322 million for the whole of 2020, on a revenue of $1.8 billion, representing a nine-fold increase.

The market valuation of Coinbase at its launch makes it one of the 150 most valuable companies in the US, putting it even ahead of the Nasdaq exchange on which it now sits. It has made the company’s co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong an overnight multi-billionaire with his stake worth $13 billion.

The company is entirely dependent on the cryptocurrency markets, with 96 percent of its revenues in 2020 coming from transaction fees when investors bought and sold them. Dealings in Bitcoin amounted to 44 percent of its fee business. When these currencies go up, it has benefited. But in 2019 when the market fell, it lost about $30 million.

The promoters of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies maintain they represent the future, enabling the bypassing of the present international monetary system and have enthusiastically promoted the Coinbase launch.

As one analyst told the WSJ: “To a lot of people, crypto still seems like a sideshow. Once you have a $100-billion-market-cap company that all they do is buy and sell crypto, it’s going to be the epiphany for everyone that this is real.”

But a bull run in a financial asset, based on the assumption that it will just continue to rise, is no more “real” in the longer term than a stock market bubble inflated by the trillions of dollars pumped into the financial system by the Fed and other major central banks.

Of course, in the short-term, as has been the case over the past year, speculation enables the financial oligarchy to increase its wealth to the tune of trillions of dollars. But this wealth is not the outcome of an increase in productive activity, signifying the underlying health of the real economy, but rather is a symptom of its increasingly diseased character.

As the Coinbase launch was underway, the chairman of the Fed Jerome Powell gave the present view of financial authorities on cryptocurrencies, saying they were largely a means for making bets on further increases in their price.

“They’re really vehicles for speculation,” he said during a virtual interview with The Economic Club of New York. “They’re not really being actively used as payments.”

Powell’s predecessor at the Fed Janet Yellen, now Treasury secretary, said in an interview with CNBC in February that she viewed Bitcoin as a “highly speculative asset,” that it was not widely used as a “transmission mechanism” and was an “extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions.”

Whatever the virtues and advantages of the blockchain technology, on which Bitcoin is based, in establishing a ledger system in which companies can make rapid transactions and may have wider applications, the cryptocurrency mania is not an expression of efficiencies deriving from this technology. It can only be understood by placing it within a wider context.

The past year has seen an orgy of speculation while the global economy has suffered its deepest contraction since the Great Depression, with consequences for years to come as the global COVID-19 pandemic continues out of control, vast fortunes have been made on financial markets completely disconnected from the underlying real economy.

Evidence of the swelling bubble and its effects is growing every day. Earlier this month the WSJ reported that the so-called “everything rally” of the past year has been boosted by the increased use of borrowed money by investors large and small.

By late February investors had borrowed $814 billion against their portfolios, up 49 percent from a year ago and the fastest rate of increase since 2007 leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. This leaves the market vulnerable to margin calls when banks and other lenders demand more cash as collateral. This is what led to the collapse of Archegos Capital in late March with billions of dollars of debt.

The ever-widening divergence between the financial markets and the underlying real economy is also highlighted by data from the major banks. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan both posted first quarter record profits, largely driven by record revenue from stock trading. Goldman reported a 73 percent increase investment banking fees for the quarter and forecast more to come.

Goldman said stock underwriting revenue more than quadrupled to $1.6 billion. At JPMorgan fees from equity underwriting more than tripled to $1.1 billion. Fees from mergers and securities operations were $3.8 billion and $3.1 billion respectively.

But as the WSJ report on these figures noted, it was a different story when it came to so-called Main Street. Consumer banking revenue was down 6 percent at JPMorgan and flat at Wells Fargo. Loan demand from consumers and businesses was described as “tepid” and it warned that Americans’ finances could “deteriorate when government relied programs on mortgages and loans run out.”

Flooded mine in China traps 29 workers

Robert Campion

A mine in the northwest Xinjiang region experienced an underground flood on Saturday evening, affecting 29 workers. Eight workers have been rescued and the remaining 21 are still trapped.

The accident occurred at the Fengyuan Coal mine in Hutubi County as upgrades were being conducted. According to the Times, the coal mine’s license was revoked last year due to safety concerns.

A coal mine in China (Peter Van den Bossche, Wikimedia Commons)

The flood occurred around 6:10 p.m. local time Saturday, according to the Xinhua News Agency, with the cause remaining unclear. Power outages ensued as well as the loss of communication lines.

As of Sunday morning, eight workers had been rescued and are in good health while another 12 were located on a platform 1,200 metres below ground level. It was not until Monday morning that the remaining nine miners were found; eight were located on a second platform and another worker was found in an escape route.

All 21 miners remain trapped by the floodwaters, which are currently being pumped out. The Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday that Ma Xin, director of Changji’s emergency management bureau, “said that the underground environment is very complex and drainage is the foremost concern at present,” citing the difficulties associated with moving heavy machinery in submerged passages.

Reportedly, three sets of drainage equipment pumping water out at speeds of 450 cubic meters per hour were installed on Sunday. As of Monday morning, seven pumping stations were installed, with some pumping air into the mine as the floodwaters recede.

On Sunday, eight rescue teams comprising 1,484 people from mine rescue, fire, emergency, electricity communications and other departments were assembled at the scene, including 25 ambulances and numbers of medical personnel.

Reporting has been limited since Monday and an investigation is currently underway into the source of the flooding.

China remains one of the most dangerous countries for mining with explosions and gas leaks a regular occurrence. According to official statistics of the National Mine Safety Administration, there were 434 mining accidents in 2020 with 573 deaths.

While there has been a significant drop in accidents and deaths over recent years, this is attributed less to the adoption of stringent safety measures than to the reduction in demand and the consolidation of the industry using larger, mechanized mines employing fewer workers.

The flooding in Fengyuan Coal mine is the latest in a long line of mining disasters in which hazardous enterprises have been fined and ordered to resolve safety issues but have failed to do so. The widespread and longstanding safety issues are rooted in the drive for profits and production at the expense of workers.

It is also a common occurrence for mines to under-report workplace incidents. In January, an explosion at a gold mine in Shandong was not reported until 30 hours after the fact, which seriously compromised rescue efforts. The blast left 10 dead, one missing and 11 rescued two weeks later.

On March 17, authorities in Hebei province were forced to launch an investigation after finally receiving belated reports of six deaths at an iron ore mine in Wuan in the previous month.

According to mining.com, the Wuan city government first heard rumours of the incident on the internet, which reported a death toll of only three miners and compensation offered to the family of at least one.

Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that the six people died after falling down a shaft, which occurred during an inspection of the mine that had halted production in late 2018.

The non-reporting was a crime in an industry with a poor safety record and lax enforcement of regulations, but in this case it is the government’s direct responsibility. The mine, formerly owned by the Tuanchengdong Mining Company, is wholly owned by the Wuan government itself through the Metallurgical Mining Group, according to the data provider Qichacha.

Limited reports announced that individuals associated with the mining enterprise had been placed “under control” and were being investigated in the nearby steel producing centre of Handan.

In a bid to contain public anger, China launched a year-long series of coal mining safety checks last November, focussing on infrastructure, risk prevention management and response and rescue capabilities. The investigation will also purportedly examine safety checks by local government authorities.

China is the world’s largest producer of coal accounting for 47 percent of output in 2019, and the world largest consumer taking 53 percent of the global total. The Chinese coal industry was valued at around $345 billion in 2018.

The Clandestine War on Africa: France’s Endgame in Mali

Ramzy Baroud

In a recent report, the United Nations Mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, concluded that, on January 3, French warplanes had struck a crowd attending a wedding in the remote village of Bounti, killing 22 of the guests.

According to the findings, based on a thorough investigation and interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses, 19 of the guests were unarmed civilians whose killing constitutes a war crime.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other countries, the French war in Mali receives little media coverage outside the limited scope of French-speaking media, which has successfully branded this war as one against Islamic militants.

What is interesting about the Mali story is the fact that, despite its centrality to the geopolitics of the Sahel region in Africa, it is framed within disconnected narratives that rarely overlap.

However, the story has less to do with Islamic militancy and much to do with foreign interventions. Anti-French sentiment in Mali goes back over a century when, in 1892, France colonized that once-thriving African kingdom, exploiting its resources and reordering its territories as a way to weaken its population and to break down its social structures.

The formal end of French colonialism of Mali in 1960 was merely the end of a chapter, but definitely not the story itself. France remained present in Mali, in the Sahel and throughout Africa, defending its interests, exploiting the ample resources and working jointly with corrupt elites to maintain its dominance.

Fast forward to March 2012 when Captain Amadou Sanogo overthrew the nominally democratic government of Amadou Toumani Touré. He used the flimsy excuse of protesting Bamako’s failure to rein in the militancy of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in the north.

Sanogo’s pretense was quite clever, though, as it fit neatly into a grand narrative designed by various Western governments, lead among them France and the United States, who saw Islamic militancy as the greatest danger facing many parts of Africa, especially in the Sahel.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, Sanogo’s coup, which angered African governments, but was somehow accommodated by Western powers, made matters much worse. In the following months, northern militants managed to seize much of the impoverished northern regions, continuing their march towards Bamako itself.

The army coup was never truly reversed but, at the behest of France and other influential governments, was simply streamlined into a transitional government, still largely influenced by Sanogo’s supporters.

On December 20, 2012, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2085, which authorized the deployment of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali. Armed with what was understood to be a UN mandate, France launched its war in Mali, under the title of ‘Operation Serval’.

It is worth mentioning here that the Mali scenario had just transpired in Libya when, on March 17, 2011, the UNSC passed Resolution 1973, which was conveniently and immediately translated into a declaration of war.

Both scenarios proved costly for the two African countries. Instead of ‘saving’ these countries, the interventions allowed violence to spiral even further, leading to yet more foreign interventions and proxy wars.

On July 15, 2014, France declared that ‘Operation Serval’ was successfully accomplished, providing its own list of casualties on both sides, again, with very little international monitoring. Yet, almost immediately, on August 1, 2014, it declared another military mission, this time an open-ended war, ‘Operation Barkhane’.

Barkhane was spearheaded by France and included Paris’ own ‘coalition of the willing’, dubbed ‘G5 Sahel’. All former French colonies, the new coalition consisted of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. The declared goal of France’s indefinite intervention in the Sahel is to provide material support and training to the ‘G5 Sahel’ forces in their ‘war on terror’.

However, according to Deutsche Welle, the ‘optimism’ that accompanied ‘Operation Serval’ completely vanished with ‘Operation Barkhane’. “The security situation has worsened, not only (in the) the north but (in) central Mali as well”, the German news agency recently reported, conveying a sense of chaos, with farmers fleeing their land and with “self-defense militias” carrying out their own operations to satisfy “their own agendas”, and so on.

In truth, the chaos in the streets merely reflected the chaos in government. Even with a heavy French military presence, instability continued to plague Mali. The latest coup in the country took place in August 2020. Worse still, the various Tuareg forces, which have long challenged the foreign exploitation of the country, are now unifying under a single banner. The future of Mali is hardly promising.

So what was the point of the intervention, anyway? Certainly not to ‘restore democracy’ or ‘stabilize’ the country. Karen Jayes elaborates. “France’s interests in the region are primarily economic,” she wrote in a recent article. “Their military actions protect their access to oil and uranium in the region.”

To appreciate this claim more fully, one only needs a single example of how Mali’s wealth of natural resources is central to France’s economy. “An incredible 75 percent of France’s electric power is generated by nuclear plants that are mostly fueled by uranium extracted on Mali’s border region of Kidal,” in the northern parts of the country. Therefore, it is unsurprising that France was ready to go to war as soon as militants proclaimed the Kidal region to be part of their independent nation-state of Azawad in April 2012.

As for the bombing of the Bounti wedding, the French military denied any wrong-doing, claiming that all of the victims were ‘jihadists’. The story is meant to end here, but it will not – as long as Mali is exploited by outsiders, as long as poverty and inequality will continue to exist, leading to insurrections, rebellions and military coups.

Macron’s Closure of the ENA, France’s Elite School: Political Gimmick or Overdue Reform?

Philippe Marlière

On Thursday 8 April, Emmanuel Macron announced the closure of the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, France’s elite school for turning out senior civil servants and politicians. The president’s announcement sounded familiar – he had already pledged to reform the ENA, a school renowned for its conservatism and aversion to change, back in 2019 – but this time it’s final: Macron said that the time had come to abolish an institution that is widely regarded as a symbol of elitism and inequality.

With just a year until the next presidential election, Macron is neck and neck in the polls with Marine Le Pen. The ENA abolition looks, therefore, as if it’s part of a strategy to reconnect with “the people”. It’s easy to forget, given the pandemic, but before France entered lockdown in March 2020, it had been experiencing the most sustained anti-elite movement for generations in the form of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests. Macron has certainly has not forgotten this.

The president does not want to dispense with the idea of an elite school altogether but to build something that allegedly works better. A new school called the Institut du Service Public, a kind of “public management school”, will replace the ENA. Unsurprisingly, Jean-Louis Debré, once a close ally of Jacques Chirac, declared that this was a “populist” measure (by which he meant it was pandering to public opinion).

His father, Michel Debré, the first of Charles de Gaulle’s prime ministers, founded the ENA in 1945. Its aim was to train students drawn from all walks of life through entrance exams so jobs in the French civil service could be assigned on merit rather than wealth and personal background.

In reality, the school turned out to be a close-knit club for the upper-class, rather than a force for democratisation. The elitist recruitment pattern has worsened over the years: by 2014, 70% of students came from the upper classes, as opposed to 45% in the 1950s. ENA graduates – called énarques – land the best jobs in the civil service, but also in business and frontline politics. Alumni include several presidents, the past eight prime ministers and current CEOs of top business and banking firms. There is even a term, pantouflage (from the word for slippers), referring to the practice by which civil servants find lucrative work in the private sector – the énarques are emblematic of this tendency, which accentuates the public perception of an incestuous old boys’ network.

One may think of énarques as the French counterparts of Oxford PPE graduates. Insofar as they are both effectively finishing schools for the ruling class, the comparison makes sense, although the specifics are quite different. In the UK, private education and elite universities are a fact of life. In France, the ideology of republicanism – which comes from the French Revolution – insists on the notion of equality of treatment for all and on the delivery of state-of-the-art public services owned and run by the state. The ENA is a public institution whose funding almost wholly comes from the state. This makes the way it favours students with high economic and cultural capital not just embarrassing, but a seeming contradiction of the state’s republican ideals.

To get in, candidates spend a year prior to applying to the school in a classe préparatoire, an extremely demanding course. The written exam (concours externe) tests a wide range of subjects and disciplines. Only a minority of candidates make it to the second round, which includes oral exams that essentially test their elocutionary skills. Then comes the dreaded grand oral, a long ordeal in front of a jury during which candidates are asked all kinds of puzzling and provocative questions designed to test their capacity to think on the spot.

It all has the effect of giving richer candidates who have the right social skills the edge over candidates from more modest backgrounds. Once in the ENA, it is essential to graduate in the top 10%, if graduates want to be able to choose from the most prestigious roles in the French state. The rest may be assigned to mediocre positions. Former graduates often complain about the teaching, which has a reputation for being dull and conservative, and describe the institution as a bastion of upper-class snobbery.

Back in 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy (who did not attend the ENA) mocked the “sadist or idiot” who had seen fit to include exam questions for ENA candidates about Madame de la Fayette’s Princess of Clèves, a 17th-century novel. Sarkozy’s mockery alluded to the idea that énarques are trained to discuss subjects as varied as politics, economics, history, arts or literature but can do so in only a superficial manner.

The modernisation of the ENA should therefore involve a comprehensive overhaul of the school’s recruitment process and exam procedures, as well as a dramatic modernisation of the curriculum so it reflects the challenges of the real world. But does Macron really want this? Only he knows. Would it appease the yellow vests and people angered by his economic policies? Though the reform may be welcome and necessary, it will probably not make the slightest difference to them: énarques and ordinary citizens would carry on living on different planets.

Agriculture’s Greatest Myth

Jonathan Latham

Sustainable, local, organic food grown on small farms has a tremendous amount to offer. Unlike chemical-intensive industrial-scale agriculture, it regenerates rural communities; it doesn’t pollute rivers and groundwater or create dead zones; it can save coral reefs; it doesn’t encroach on rainforests; it preserves soil and it can restore the climate (IAASTD, 2009). Why do all governments not promote it?

For policymakers, the big obstacle to global promotion and restoration of small-scale farming (leaving aside the lobbying power of agribusiness) is allegedly that, “it can’t feed the world”. If that claim were true, local food systems would be bound to leave people hungry and so promoting them becomes selfish, short-termist, and unethical.

Nevertheless, this purported flaw in sustainable and local agriculture represents a curious charge because, no matter where one looks in global agriculture, food prices are low because products are in surplus.

Often, they are in huge surplus, even in the hungriest countries. Farmers will tell you they are going out of business because, as a result of these surpluses, prices are low and continuously falling. Indeed, declining agricultural prices are a broad trend continuing, with the odd blip, for over a century, and applying to every commodity. This downward trend has continued even through a recent biofuel boom designed to consume some of these surpluses (de Gorter et al., 2015). In other words, the available data contradict the likelihood of food shortages. Despite the rising global population, food gluts are everywhere.

Global food models

The standard justification for claiming that these surpluses will one day turn into global food shortages comes from various mathematical models of the food system. These models are based on food production and other figures supplied to the UN by national governments. Whereas anecdotal or local evidence is necessarily suspect, these models claim to be able to definitively assess and predict the enormous, diverse, and highly complex global food system.

The most prominent and most widely cited of these food system models is called GAPS (Global Agriculture Perspectives System). GAPS is a model created by researchers at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012). These models – and most often GAPS – are thus what is being cited in any quantitative discussion of future food needs. GAPS, for example, is the basis for the common ‘60% more food needed by 2050’ prediction, what Britain’s Chief Scientist John Beddington called “a perfect storm” facing humanity.

How reliable are these food system models?

In 2010 Professor Thomas Hertel of Purdue University gave the annual Presidential address of the U.S. Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. He chose to discuss the ability of mathematical models like GAPS to predict future supplies (this work was subsequently published as Hertel, 2011). Hertel told his audience that those models are faulty.

What Hertel highlighted is that economic analysis has plainly shown that food supplies respond to long-term prices. That is, when prices for food items increase, food production also increases. For example, when prices increase, it becomes more worthwhile for farmers to invest in boosting their yields; but when prices are low there is little such incentive. Other actors in the food system behave similarly.

Yet global food models, noted Hertel, have adopted the opposite interpretation: they assume global food supplies are insensitive to prices.

In the firm but diplomatic tone expected of a Presidential Address, Hertel told his audience:

“I fear that much of this rich knowledge has not yet worked its way into the global models being used for long run analysis of climate, biofuels and agricultural land use……it is not clear that the resulting models are well-suited for the kind of long run sustainability analysis envisioned here.”

This is rather important. Since the whole point of these models is long-term prediction, if global food models underestimate the ability of food systems to adjust to higher demand, they will tend to predict a crisis even when there isn’t one.

Like all mathematical models, GAPS and other food system models incorporate numerous assumptions. These assumptions are typically shared across related models, which is why they tend to give similar answers. The reliability of all such models therefore depends crucially on the validity of shared assumptions like the one Hertel focused on.

Hertel’s analysis therefore prompts two important questions. The first is this: If GAPS contains an assumption that contradicts the collective wisdom of conventional agricultural economics, what other questionable assumptions hide in global food models?

Surprisingly though, given the stakes, scarcely any attention has been devoted to rigorous independent testing of these crucial assumptions (Scrieciu, 2007; Reilly and Willenbockel, 2010; Wise, 2013; Lappé and Collins, 2015).

The second question is this: Is it significant that the error identified by Hertel will tend to generate predictions that are unnecessarily alarmist?

Critiquing the critical assumptions

In a new peer-reviewed paper, The Myth of a Food Crisis, I have critiqued FAO’s GAPS – and by extension all similar food system models – at the level of these, often unstated, assumptions (Latham, 2021).

The Myth of a Food Crisis identifies four assumptions in food system models that are especially problematic since they have major effects on the reliability of modeling predictions. In summary, these are:

1) That biofuels are driven by “demand”.

As the paper shows, biofuels are incorporated into GAPS on the demand side of equations. However, biofuels derive from lobbying efforts. They exist to solve the problem of agricultural oversupply (Baines, 2015). Since biofuels contribute little or nothing to sustainability, land used for them is available to feed populations if needed. This potential availability (e.g. 40% of US corn is used for corn ethanol) makes it plainly wrong for GAPS to treat biofuels as an unavoidable demand on production.

2) That current agricultural production systems are optimized for productivity.

As the paper also shows, agricultural systems are typically not optimised to maximise calories or nutrients. Usually, they optimise profits (or sometimes subsidies), with very different results. For this reason, practically all agricultural systems could produce many more nutrients per acre at no ecological cost if desired.

3) That crop “yield potentials” have been correctly estimated.

Using the example of rice, the paper shows that some farmers, even under sub-optimal conditions, achieve yields far in excess of those considered possible by GAPS. Thus the yield ceilings assumed by GAPS are far too low for rice and probably other crops too. Therefore GAPS grossly underestimates agricultural potential.

4) That annual global food production is approximately equal to global food consumption.

As the paper also shows, a significant proportion of annual global production ends up in storage where it degrades and is disposed of without ever being counted by GAPS. There is thus a very large accounting hole in GAPS.

The specific ways in which these four assumptions are incorporated into GAPS and other models produces one of two effects. Each causes GAPS to either underestimate global food supply (now and in the future), or to overestimate global food demand (now and in the future).

Thus GAPS and other models underestimate supply and exaggerate demand. The cumulative effect is dramatic. Using peer-reviewed data, the discrepancy between food availability estimated by GAPS and the underlying supply is calculated in the paper. Such calculations show that GAPS and other models omit approximately enough food annually to feed 12.5 billion persons. That is a lot of food, but it does perfectly explain why the models are so discrepant with policymakers’ and farmers’ consistent experiences of the food system.

The implications

The consequences of this analysis are very significant on a number of fronts. There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario or potential increases in wealth, the current global glut will not disappear due to elevated demand. Among the many implications of this glut is, other things being equal, global commodity prices will continue to decline. The potential caveat to this is climate chaos. Climate consequences are not factored into this analysis. However, for people who think that industrial agriculture is the solution to that problem, it is worth recalling that industrialised food systems are the leading emitter of carbon dioxide. Industrialising food production is therefore not the solution to climate change –­ it is the problem.

Another significant implication of this analysis is to remove the justification for the (frequently suggested) adoption of special and sacrificial ‘sustainable intensification’ measures featuring intensive use of pesticides, GMOs, and gene edited organisms to boost food production (Wilson, 2021). What is needed to save rainforests and other habitats from agricultural expansion is instead to reduce the subsidies and incentives that are responsible for overproduction and unsustainable practices (Capellesso et al., 2016). In this way, harmful agricultural policies can be replaced by ones guided by criteria such as ecological sustainability and cultural appropriateness.

A second implication stems from asking: if the models err on such elementary levels, why are critics largely absent? Thomas Hertel’s critique should have rung alarm bells. The short answer is that the philanthropic and academic sectors in agriculture and development are corrupt. The form this corruption takes is not illegality – rather that, with important exceptions, these sectors do not serve the public interest, but their own interests.

A good example is the FAO, which created GAPS. The primary mandate of FAO is to enable food production – its motto is Fiat Panis – but without an actual or imminent food crisis there would hardly be a need for an FAO. Many philanthropic and academic institutions are equally conflicted. It is no accident that all the critics mentioned above are relative or complete outsiders. Too many participants in the food system depend on a crisis narrative.

But the biggest factor of all in promotion of the crisis narrative is agribusiness. Agribusiness is the entity most threatened by its exposure.

From Syngenta’s career page (April 2021).

It is agribusiness that perpetuates the myth most actively and makes best use of it by endlessly championing itself as the only valid bulwark against starvation. It is agribusiness that most aggressively alleges that all other forms of agriculture are inadequate (Peekhaus, 2010). This Malthusian spectre is a good story, it’s had a tremendous run, but it’s just not true. By exposing it, we can free up agriculture to work for everyone.

Protests erupt in Spanish migrant camps at PSOE-Podemos repression

Alice Summers

Numerous protests have broken out in recent weeks in migrant internment camps on the Spanish Canary Islands. Migrants are protesting appalling living conditions and poor food in the camps, and the lack of medical treatment amid the escalating global COVID-19 pandemic.

Included in their demands is that they be allowed to travel to the Spanish mainland, where many migrants have family members. They are also opposing the violent racism they have faced at the hands of far-right thugs on the archipelago.

At the start of April, dozens of migrants demonstrated at the Santa Cruz de Tenerife internment centre, a former prison. Many are Muslims, but no arrangements have been made for the fasting month of Ramadan, which began this week.

Spain Halts Moroccan Immigrants’ Protests in Canary Islands

Migrants held at the El Matorral internment camp in Fuerteventura at an ex-school in Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria and in the Las Raíces camp in Tenerife have also taken part in numerous hunger strikes over the last two months.

Last Tuesday, a major protest broke out in the Las Raíces concentration camp, the largest of the six camps on the island chain. Las Raíces, a forest site on loan to the Interior Ministry from the Defense Ministry, currently houses 1,200-1,400 migrants.

Tensions have been running high at Las Raíces since it entered into use in February. According to the charity Asamblea de Apoyo a Migrantes de Tenerife (Assembly to Support Migrants in Tenerife—ASMT), “Many people have been protesting for some time, in a hunger strike etc.”

ASMT continued: “Yesterday [last Tuesday], there was supposed to be a meeting with someone in charge at Accem [an organisation contracted by the Spanish state to run the camps], but it didn’t happen. As a result, protests were held and the situation became quite tense.” Clashes also reportedly broke out between migrants of different ethnicities, including Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans, according to Accem.

Primary responsibility for the outbreak of tensions in the Canary Islands lies with the PSOE (Socialist Party)-Podemos government, which has imprisoned thousands of migrants in squalid conditions in tent camps, pending deportation. They have point-blank refused to allow migrants to travel to the Spanish mainland, claiming that to do so would be a “pull factor” for further migration.

Explaining the broader causes of the protests, ASMT stated: “The main demand is that they be allowed to continue their migration route. The majority have been in the Canary Islands for more than four months and many have family in Madrid or Barcelona. …. There are people who, with their little money, have bought a [plane] ticket and when they arrived at the airport they were held by the police or not allowed to enter.”

ASMT also noted the lack of education for youth and described the appalling health situation in the camps, providing the perfect breeding ground for the coronavirus. “Many minors are not being schooled, and medical care is dire, with sick children who need immediate attention, pregnant women in pain and badly cared for patients.”

Spanish police reacted violently to the protests at Las Raíces, firing rubber bullets and blank cartridges at the migrants, according to videos posted online by ASMT. Police can also be seen attacking migrants with batons and riot shields. Migrants threw sticks and stones in response.

Isora Mesa, a representative from ASMT, said, “Twenty to 25 people had to be taken to hospital with broken ribs and broken arms, [and] injuries to the head from rubber bullets.” According to the local Government Delegation, three migrants were seriously injured, with another seven also having to be hospitalised.

The organization also posted a video of a trail of blood on a stairway leading to the camp’s infirmary, which Accem later explained had come from a young sub-Saharan man with “a fracture in his leg which was showing the bone.”

Eight migrants were detained by police after the unrest. Last Wednesday, five of them—all of Moroccan origin—were given prison sentences for their role in the protests. PSOE regional President Ángel Víctor Torres responded to the altercations with a vicious anti-immigrant law-and-order campaign, promising that the regional government would immediately deport the migrants involved in the clashes.

“In the face of emergency situations, we have to impose order,” he ominously declared.

Responding to hypocritical criticisms last month by former Canary Islands regional President Fernando Clavijo that refugees are housed in unsanitary tent camps, the PSOE-Podemos government defended its anti-migrant policies. “Of course, there are tents,” PSOE Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration José Luis Escrivá blithely declared, “like in every refugee centre in the world.

“It would be a waste of public money to erect large facilities for temporary situations,” the minister continued. The camps are “the best possible” accommodation and of “the highest standards,” he added.

Reports that Spain has been subjecting child migrants to invasive “medical” examinations to determine their age exposes the “high standards” of care migrants can expect from the PSOE-Podemos government. Children had been forced to undress completely and undergo an examination of their genitalia to establish whether or not they are less than 18 years old.

Other migrant children have been subjected to bone tests or to orthopantomographic examinations, also known as panoramic radiographs. The first involves X-raying the wrists, hands or fingers of the children, while the latter is a radiographic examination providing detailed information about their jaw and tooth structure.

Receiving countries are legally obliged to provide underage migrants with some limited care, including shelter and schooling. To avoid this, the Spanish state is stepping up efforts to declare young migrants arriving in the country to be adults, thereby relieving them of any responsibility for these migrants’ well-being.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has denounced Spain for using the barbaric and humiliating method of genital examinations, stating that it “infringes on their [the children’s] dignity, their privacy and their bodily integrity and should be banned.”

The UN committee’s statement was made as part of a ruling on the case of a young migrant girl known as Arcange. She arrived in Spain in 2017 aged 16, after fleeing sexual abuse by her father and attempts to force her into marriage with an older man in her home country of Cameroon. Although immigration officials initially had no doubts that she was a minor, Arcange was later subjected to numerous degrading physical investigations, including being stripped naked and forced to undergo genital examinations.

The examinations were conducted without the child having had any legal counsel and without the procedure being explained to her in a language she could understand. She was then falsely found to be 18 years of age or over and cast out onto the street to fend for herself.

This is the fourteenth time that the UN has condemned the Spanish government for violating the rights of migrant children by subjecting them to forced undressing and genital examinations.

Representatives of the PSOE-Podemos government responded to the UN’s declaration with feigned indignation. A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Social Rights, which is overseen by Podemos, told news site elDiario.es: “The UN’s condemnation of Spain for the Arcange case demonstrates the necessity of substantially amending the procedure for determining the age of children and adolescents who arrive in our country alone. It is essential to avoid carrying out unnecessary tests, especially those that involve the undressing of minors.”

The criticisms by PSOE and Podemos ministers are utterly cynical. The coalition government has imposed fascistic anti-refugee policies indistinguishable from those of the far right. The task of defending migrants and asylum seekers falls to the working class, as part of a struggle against the reactionary policies of the entire European Union and for socialism.