Food Sovereignty: A Manifesto for the Future of Our Planet

La Via Campesina

Food Sovereignty is a philosophy of life.

It offers a vision for our collective future, and defines the principles around which we organize our daily living and co-exist with Mother Earth. It is a celebration of life and all the diversity around us. It embraces every element of our cosmos; the sky above our heads, the land beneath our feet, the air we breathe, the forests, the mountains, valleys, farms, oceans, rivers and ponds. It recognizes and protects the inter-dependency between eight million species that share this home with us.

We inherited this collective wisdom from our ancestors, who ploughed the land and waded the waters for 10,000 years, a period in which we evolved into an agrarian society. Food Sovereignty promotes justice, equality, dignity, fraternity and solidarity. Food Sovereignty is also the science of life – built through lived realities spread across countless generations, each teaching their progeny something new, inventing new methods and techniques which sat harmoniously with nature.

As holders of this rich heritage, it is our collective responsibility to defend it and preserve it.

Recognizing this as our duty – especially in the late ’90s when conflicts, acute hunger, global warming and extreme poverty were too visible to ignore – La Via Campesina(LVC) brought the paradigm of Food Sovereignty into international policy-making spaces. LVC reminded the world that this philosophy of life must guide the principles of our shared living.

The ’80s and the ’90s were an era of unbridled capitalist expansion – at a pace never seen before in human history. Cities were expanding, growing on the backs of cheap, unpaid and underpaid labour. The countryside was being pushed into oblivion. Rural communities and rural ways of living were swept under the carpet by a new ideology that wanted to turn everybody into a mere consumer of things and an object of exploitation for profit. Popular culture and consciousness were under the spell of glittery advertisements goading people to “buy more”. In all this, though, the ones who produced – the working class in the rural areas, coasts and cities, which included the peasants and other small-scale food producers – remained invisible, while the ones who could afford to consume with wander took centre stage. Pushed to the edges, peasant1 workers and indigenous communities worldwide recognized the urgent necessity for an organized and internationalist response to this globalizing, free-market ideology propagated by the defenders of the capitalist world order. Food Sovereignty became one of the expressions of this collective response.

At the 1996 World Food Summit, in a debate about how we organize our global food systems, La Via Campesina coined the term food sovereignty; to insist upon the centrality of the small-scale food producers, the accumulated wisdom of generations, the autonomy and diversity of rural and urban communities and solidarity between peoples, as essential components for crafting policies around food and agriculture.

In the ensuing decade, social movements and civil society actors worked together to define it further “as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”

The introduction of Food Sovereignty as a collective right changed how the world understood poverty and hunger.

Until then, especially in the early years of the 21st century, a narrow idea of “Food Security” dominated governance and policy-making circles. Noble in its intent, food security treated those affected by hunger as objects of compassion, risked reducing them to passive consumers of food produced elsewhere. While it recognized food as a fundamental human right, it did not defend the objective conditions for producing food. Who produces? For Whom? How? Where? And Why? All these questions were absent, and the focus was decidedly on merely “feeding the people”. An overt emphasis on people’s food security ignored the hazardous consequences of industrial food production and factory farming, built on the sweat and labour of migrant workers.

Food Sovereignty, on the other hand, presents a radical overhaul. It recognizes people and local communities as the principal actors in the fight against poverty and hunger. It calls for strong local communities and defends their right to produce and consume before trading the surplus. It demands autonomy and objective conditions to use local resources, calls for agrarian reform and collective ownership of territories. It defends the rights of peasant communities to use, save, exchange seeds. It stands for the rights of people to eat healthy, nutritious food. It encourages agroecological production cycles, respecting climatic and cultural diversities in every community. Social peace, social justice, gender justice and solidarity economies are essential pre-conditions for realizing food sovereignty. It calls for an international trade order based on cooperation and compassion as against competition and coercion. It calls for a society that rejects discrimination in all forms – caste, class, racial and gender – and urges people to fight patriarchy and parochialism. A tree is only strong as its roots. Food Sovereignty, defined by social movements in the ‘90s and subsequently at the Nyeleni Forum in Mali in 2007, intends to do precisely that.

This year we celebrate 25 years of this collective construction.

The world is nowhere near perfect. Capitalism and free-market ideology continue to dominate policy circles even in the face of unprecedented inequality, rising hunger and extreme poverty. Worse, new attempts are also being made to envision a digital future – of farming without farmers, fishing without fishers- all under the garb of digitalisation of agriculture and to create new markets for synthetic food.

All these challenges notwithstanding, the Food Sovereignty Movement, which is now much more extensive than La Via Campesina and comprises several actors, has made significant advances.

Thanks to our joint struggles, global governance institutions such as the FAO 2 have come to recognize the centrality of peoples’ food sovereignty in international policy-making. The UN Declaration on Rights Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas further re-emphasizes this in Article 15.4, when it states, “ Peasants and other people working in rural areas have the right to determine their own food and agriculture systems, recognized by many States and regions as the right to food sovereignty. This includes the right to participate in decision-making processes on food and agriculture policy and the right to healthy and adequate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods that respect their cultures.”

Some nations have also given constitutional recognition to Food Sovereignty. The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the industrial food chains have further reminded national governments of the importance of creating robust local economies.

Peasant Agroecology, which is fundamental to ensuring food sovereignty in our territories, is now recognized at the FAO as central to our fight against global warming. Current and previous Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations have endorsed food sovereignty as a simple but powerful idea that can transform the global food system favouring small-scale food producers. Sustained campaign by social movements have also resulted in several legal victories against corporations producing agro-toxins, other chemical inputs and transgenic seeds.

Yet, what lies ahead of us is a road ridden with many barriers.

The promoters of the capitalist world order realize that food sovereignty is an idea that impinges on their financial interests. They prefer a world of monoculture and homogenous tastes, where food can be mass-produced using cheap labour in faraway factories, disregarding its ecological, human and social impacts. They prefer economies of scale to robust local economies. They choose a global-free market (based on speculation and cut-throat competition) over solidarity economies that require more robust territorial markets (local peasant markets) and active participation of local food producers. They prefer to have land banks where industrial-scale contract farming would replace small-holder producers. They inject our soil with agro-toxics for better short-term yields, ignoring the irreversible damage to soil health. Their trawlers will again crawl the oceans and rivers, netting fishes for a global market while the coastal communities starve. They will continue to try to hijack indigenous peasant seeds through patents and seed treaties. The trade agreements they craft will again aim to bring down tariffs that protect our local economies.

An exodus of unemployed youth, deserting village farms and choosing wage work in cities, sits perfectly with their urge to find a regular supply of cheap labour. Their unrelenting focus on “margins” would mean that they will find all means to depress farm-gate prices while trading it at higher prices at retail supermarkets. In the end, the ones who lose are the people – both the producers and consumers. Those who resist will be criminalized. A happy co-existence of the global financial elite with authoritarian governments would mean that even the highest institutions – nationally and globally – meant to oversee and arrest human rights violations will look away. Billionaires would use their philanthropic foundations to fund agencies that churn out “research reports” and “scientific journals” to justify this corporate vision of our food systems. Every global governance space, where the social movements and civil society members campaigned hard to gain a seat at the table, will make way for Corporate Conglomerates who will enter the scene as “stakeholders”. Every attempt will be made to deride those of us who defend Food Sovereignty as unscientific, primitive, impractical and idealistic. All this will happen, as it did over the last two decades.

None of this is new to us. Those condemned to the peripheries of our societies by a cruel and all-devouring capitalist system have no choice but to fight back. We must resist and show that we exist. It is not just about our survival, but also about future generations and a way of life handed down through generations. It is for the future of humanity that we defend our food sovereignty.

This is only possible if we insist that any local, national or global policy proposal on food and agriculture must build from the principles of food sovereignty. The young peasants and workers of our worldwide movement must lead this fight. We must remind ourselves that the only way to make our voice heard is by uniting and building new alliances within and across every border. Rural and Urban Social Movements, Trade Unions and civil society actors, progressive governments, academics, scientists and technology enthusiasts must come together to defend this vision for our future. Peasant women and other oppressed gender minorities must find equal space in the leadership of our movement at all levels. We must sow the seeds of solidarity in our communities and address all forms of discrimination that keep rural societies divided.

Food Sovereignty offers a manifesto for the future, a feminist vision that embraces diversity. It is an idea that unites humanity and puts us at the service of Mother Earth that feeds and nourishes us.

UK: Corporate-backed groups promote mass infection of children with Covid-19

Julie Hyland

Covid-19 is once again ripping through the UK population, as the ruling elite actively enable mass infection. In one day alone, on October 14, 45,066 new cases were recorded—the highest since mid-July—and 157 deaths. Globally, the official death toll stands at almost five million, although the real global death toll, measured by “excess deaths,” is well over 10 million.

A massive, well-funded and well-connected campaign of disinformation is being deployed to legitimise this murderous policy of herd immunity. Various organisations and bodies have been created, deploying pseudo-science and “democratic” clothing to oppose efforts aimed at eradicating Covid. Demonstrations of varying size are held internationally, in which far right groups rub shoulders with libertarians, anarchists, disoriented conspiracy theory advocates and religious fringe organisations, making up the core of protests of a largely petty bourgeois character and dragging in their wake small business owners, ravers, and similar who want an end to anything impinging on their personal “freedom.” To this end they have carried out volent attacks on medical workers involved in the vaccine roll-out and intimidation of children and teachers at school entrances.

With the backing of billionaires and major corporations, they operate as de facto adjuncts of government, the official political parties and the mass media.

All the main ideological organisations involved are connected to the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), an international proposal written and signed at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on October 4, 2020.

As the WSWS explained at the time, the AIER is a libertarian “free-market” think-tank, dedicated to a “highly reactionary, anti-working-class and anti-socialist enterprise. The declaration has been partly funded by the right-wing billionaire, Charles Koch, who hosted a private soiree of scientists, economists, and journalists to provide the homicidal declaration a modicum of respectability and formulate herd immunity as a necessary global policy in response to the pandemic.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with several of the GBD’s authors—Professor Sunetra Gupta, Oxford University’s Carl Heneghan and Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in September 2020—just before he declared “no more f**king lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Faced with public opposition to this criminal policy, the proponents of herd immunity are having to conceal their aims behind spurious “independent” or “grassroots” initiatives.

The latest is the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Pandemic Response and Recovery founded in September. Chaired by a Conservative MP Esther McVey, previously the government’s Work and Pensions Secretary, it counts Labour MP Graham Stringer and Democratic Unionist Party MP Sammy Wilson amongst its number.

The APPG bills itself as a forum “for politicians, scientists, health professionals, economists, business leaders and other experts; to facilitate broad, balanced and open discussion” and “inform a more focused and flexible approach to Government policy.”

But as detailed by the BylineTimes, the APPG is funded and managed by Collateral Global (CG), the GBD’s successor, “established by two of its co-founders, Oxford epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta and Ministry of Defence contractor Alex Caccia.”

CG functions as the APPG’s “secretariat and is also funding it.” The APPG’s “scientific advisors” include fellow GBD co-founders, Harvard University’s Professor Martin Kulldorf, and Stanford University’s Professor Jay Bhattacharya.

Drs. Martin Kulldorf, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya at the American Institute for Economic Research, photo courtesy of American Institute for Economic Research.

Gupta was also the recipient of almost £90,000 from the Georg and Emily von Opel Foundation, Open Democracy has revealed. The foundation is named after its founder Georg, the great-grandson of German car manufacturer founder, Adam Opel, a leading Tory donor with a net worth of $2 billion.

The proponents of herd immunity advocate the deliberate mass infection of the young. Keeping schools open is central to forcing parents into unsafe workplaces and preventing any disruption to profits.

To this end the health and lives of children are being knowingly endangered. To date, 95 children in the UK have died from Covid and 570 educators. Cases of Long-Covid are spiraling, including one in seven of all children infected.

Among those backing the APPG is the Health Advisory and Recovery Group (HART), founded by businessman Narice Bernard. It was Bernard who originated the first campaign for Sir Keir Starmer to be Labour Party leader back in 2015, prior to Jeremy Corbyn’s election. Starmer has been a key advocate of keeping schools open declaring in August 2020, “no ifs, no buts, no equivocation.”

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer's tweet of August 16, 2020 demanding the government reopen schools.

According to chat records and other documents leaked to Logically, a fact-checking tech company, Bernard described HART’s communication strategy in a post as, “We don't [sic] exist to engage the public this a [sic] a top down strategy.” HART is reportedly in direct contact with Sir Graham Brady, chair of the Thatcherite 1922 Committee backbench group of Tory MPs.

APPG press releases are distributed by HART’s head of communications Jemma Moran. Her brother, Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran, who has publicly threatened health professionals advocating pandemic-control measures, is another member.

Another HART connection is Professor Robert Dingwall, advisor to England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty’s Moral and Ethical Advisory Group. Byline Times has previously revealed that while he was an advisor on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), Dingwall was “secretly in contact with the HART network”, with Bernard boasting in the leaked chats that he was “on the inside and is friendly.” In September, the JCVI recommended not giving vaccines to children aged 12-15 years old, much to the astonishment of leading scientists.

Other HART supporters and GBD signatories are Professor David Livermore, who sits on the government’s Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Prescribing, Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection and Ellen Townsend, Professor of Psychology at the University of Nottingham.

Co-ordinating with HART is UsforThem, which shares several of its members. Claiming to be a “parents lobby group”, it has received public support from Johnson’s former advisor Ed Barker and was praised by Tory MP Miriam Coates in parliament for “working tirelessly to stand up for children and campaign for their lives to be allowed to return to normal.” Barker also runs public relations for the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), headed by Tory MP Steve Baker.

In February, the Times reported that the CRG had joined forces with UsforThem to form an umbrella organisation called the Recovery Alliance. Barker’s aim, it wrote, was to bring all these groups “together with business figures who want the focus to shift from health to the economy.”

The demands of UsforThem for an end to all Covid-19 mitigations in schools is government policy. With links to anti-vax movements, including The Alliance for Natural Health, it opposes vaccinating children against Covid. In line with this, the vaccination programme in schools has largely ground to a halt.

HART and UsforThem are also involved in a new creation, the “Safer to Wait” campaign. Portrayed as a collective of “concerned parents, teachers, doctors, and lawyers,” it is described more truthfully by Byline Times as “part of a wider effort to radicalise members of the public, particularly parents, against vaccines and health workers.”

Its advocates include Karol Sikora and Anthony J. Brookes, both signatories to the GBD, and Elizabeth Evans, founder of the UK Medical Freedom Alliance, who is on the advisory board of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Children’s Health Defense.” A notorious anti-vax propaganda group, it has previously financed lawsuits against the immunisation of children in America from measles and rubella.

Tellingly, none of the information uncovered by Byline Times and similar sources has received coverage in the official media. As for Starmer’s Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, they too are silent on the origins and financing of those propagandising in favour of mass deaths. They are just as culpable as Johnson for the policy of social murder.

The pandemic can and must be stopped, but this requires a programme of global eradication. As leading scientists insist it requires the universal deployment of every weapon in the arsenal of measures to combat COVID-19, co-ordinated across the world.

The destruction of Opel in Germany: A new stage in the attack on autoworkers

Marianne Arens & Ulrich Rippert

When the merger of Opel’s parent company PSA with Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) was announced in January, launching Stellantis as the fourth largest automaker in the world, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:

“The €43 billion ($53 billion) merger, first announced in 2019, will have far-reaching consequences throughout the auto industry and heralds an intensified assault on workers’ jobs internationally...”

This is exactly what is happening now. The decision by Stellantis head Carlos Tavares to dismantle the Opel network and transform the Opel plants in Eisenach and Rüsselsheim into independent companies is intended to accelerate job cuts and attacks on benefits and working conditions and initiate the gradual shutdown of the plants.

Old Opel headquarters in Rüsselsheim, on the right the International Technical Development Centre ITEZ

The decision is directed not only against Opel workers. It is related to massive attacks on the employees of automakers and parts suppliers throughout Europe and around the world.

VW boss Herbert Diess announced the elimination of 30,000 jobs at a supervisory board meeting last Tuesday. Ford Germany boss Gunnar Herrmann has stated that the Ford factory in Saarlouis is on the verge of shutting down and has a future only if the employees are willing to make extremely far-reaching concessions. He is demanding “gigantic flexibility” from the autoworkers.

The financial daily Handelsblatt was the first to report Stellantis’ Opel plans. Under the headline “More penetration, less co-determination,” the business paper wrote that the main issue was to rationalize the mammoth group, which has 14 different car brands (Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Opel, Vauxhall, Fiat, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Abarth, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Jeep), “with the help of maximum centralization.”

In view of increasing competition on the global auto market and the pressure of shareholders for ever higher returns, management wants to closely examine all areas of the company, impose restructuring, reduce social standards and impose low wages.

With the help of the trade unions, workers at one location are already being played off against workers at other locations. Short-time work has been announced for three months at the Eisenach assembly plant, which is widely understood as an initial step in the total shutdown of the facility. The global semiconductor shortage was invoked as a pretext, while production was relocated to Sochaux in France, where the workers have to work unpaid Saturday shifts.

An Opel spokesman explained to Handelsblatt that the main issue at the Eisenach and Rüsselsheim plants is to “implement more efficient solutions on site”—a rather transparent euphemism for the destruction of workers’ rights and benefits, which are viewed by shareholders as an expensive legacy cost. What are involved are collectively agreed wages and conditions for which generations of workers have fought. These include company pensions, which have been under attack at Opel for a year. Management has long wanted to lower pensions and switch to an employee-funded system.

Automotive expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer from the Centre for Automotive Research explained to public broadcaster MDR that, in his opinion, the “tough cost optimizer” Stellantis is undoubtedly considering “that Eisenach will no longer be needed in the long term.”

At Opel headquarters in Rüsselsheim, Uwe Hochgeschurtz, the new CEO of Opel Automobile Ltd., says he wants to transform the 150-year-old Adam Opel AG into a so-called “green campus.”

What is being celebrated as a major technological innovation in the direction of “CO2-neutral driving” is actually the cover for the destruction of the main Opel plant. Hundreds of temporary workers have already been laid off and some 1,000 jobs have been cut through “voluntary” redundancy. Time and again, production is interrupted by short-time work and carried out for months at a time with only one shift. The forge and gear manufacturing facility were closed, which alone cost over 200 jobs.

In Rüsselsheim, management has for years been gradually dismantling the International Technical Development Centre (ITEZ). The merged group now has four development centres—in the US, Paris, Turin and Rüsselsheim. The French development service provider Segula has been based at the German Opel parent plant.

The ITEZ is only “a shadow of itself,” say the employees. Over 4,000 of its originally 7,000 highly skilled workers have either been contracted out to Segula, laid off or pressured into signing termination agreements. In July, ITEZ engineers watched during their vacation as an Opel service company, SGR products, sold off for next to nothing machines and production units from their factories on the Ebay Kleinanzeigen online platform.

When it merged with FCA in January, PSA announced that it would save $5 billion a year in costs. At that time, Tavares wanted to “concentrate on using synergies and increasing competitiveness from day one.” This is now being implemented step by step.

Jobs are threatened not only in Eisenach and Rüsselsheim, but also in Kaiserslautern, where up to now engines for diesel and gasoline have been built. The approximately 1,400 Opel jobs there are anything but secure.

A new battery cell plant is to be built there, but it is by no means certain that experienced Opel workers will find work. Stellantis has already founded a joint company with Total-Energies, named Automotive Cells Company (ACC), to manufacture batteries. Mercedes-Benz is also participating in ACC, which has already gone into operation at two French locations, in Bordeaux and in Nersac.

Stellantis has also announced the construction of a battery plant in Italy and has received subsidy commitments from the Italian government.

John Elkann, heir to the billion-dollar Italian Agnelli dynasty (Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Lancia, Abarth), is chairman of the Stellantis Group’s supervisory board. Management also views the cost of production in Italy as too expensive. Next year, the electric version of the Maserati will be relocated from Grugliasco to the main Mirafiori plant (Turin). In the southern Italian city of Melfi two production lines will be merged into a single one, with no indication of how many jobs will be lost.

In Aspern, Austria, near Vienna, engine production has already been ended, wiping out 300 jobs. The transmission plant (350 positions) is still in operation, but, as in Eisenach, production has been halted until the beginning of January 2022 due to short-time work.

Likewise, jobs at Vauxhall’s UK production sites are at risk. The Brexit crisis is an additional threat to jobs at Vauxhall. Due to semiconductor shortages, production lines in both Ellesmere Port (1,000 jobs) and Luton (900 jobs) came to a standstill in September. In addition, parts suppliers at each location have seen thousands of job cuts.

There is only one maxim for all management decisions: profit. In August, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, Stellantis reported a net profit of almost €6 billion for the first half of 2021. This makes one thing clear: the attacks on the jobs, health and conditions of employees can be repulsed only through a joint international struggle of all autoworkers against the capitalist profit system.

That requires a socialist perspective and international strategy.

This is precisely what the IG Metall trade union is seeking to prevent. It defends the capitalist system and wants under all circumstances to prevent a common, worldwide struggle of autoworkers in all locations. Instead, the union demands closer cooperation with Stellantis management and fears losing its privileges and high-paid positions on the works councils and supervisory boards.

Many Opel workers remember how exuberantly the IG Metall officials praised the takeover of Opel by PSA four years ago. Back then, after meeting Tavares in Paris in February 2017, the long-time Opel works council chairman, Wolfgang Schäfer-Klug, celebrated the emergence of the new “European automobile champion with Franco-German roots.” He praised Tavares for having “credibly conveyed in the conversation that he is interested in sustainable development for Opel/Vauxhall as an independent company. We share this interest as employee representatives.”

Since then, the leading IG Metall officials have been working intensively on the “Pace!” restructuring plan, which has laid the groundwork for major attacks on workers over recent years. At Opel alone, more than 5,000 of the 19,000 jobs were cut in less than four years. Even after the Stellantis merger last year, IG Metall and the works council expressly agreed to destroy a further 2,100 jobs.

Escalating COVID crisis overwhelms Papua New Guinea hospitals

John Braddock

Amid an escalating COVID-19 crisis in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the south-west Pacific’s largest and most populous island nation, the fragile health system and its hospitals are being overwhelmed by the number of cases.

Radio New Zealand reported on October 11 that since PNG’s first reported case of the Delta variant, the virus had been largely left to “fester and spread.” The capital Port Moresby is undergoing a third wave of the pandemic, while a health disaster is unfolding around the country, including in the heavily-populated Highlands region.

Medical staff of Papua New Guinea’s Defense Force receiving COVID-19 training last year (Credit: World Health Organization/PNG)

Meanwhile, less than 1 percent of the population of nearly 9 million is fully vaccinated, the lowest vaccine coverage in the Western Pacific.

The government largely kept the coronavirus at bay for all of last year, through tight border closures. The Delta strain was first detected on July 10, after the captain of a Philippines ship tested positive, and underwent isolation at the Port Moresby General Hospital. Health professionals warned that the combination of very-low testing rates, a high percentage of positive tests and an extremely slow vaccine rollout provided a “recipe for a major spread.”

Daoni Esorom, the deputy controller of PNG’s national pandemic response, said officials were so concerned that low testing rates were potentially masking a serious outbreak, that they ordered doctors at the hospital to swab all corpses of those people who had died from unknown causes, or who had respiratory illnesses, to ascertain if they had COVID-19.

However, in August, Chief of Medical Emergency Services Sam Yockapua, claimed the rate of transmission and hospital admissions had gone down sufficiently to be “focusing too much” on COVID-19. Reflecting the strategy of the government of Prime Minister James Marape to prioritise business interests above public health, Yockapua said PNG had not been able to enforce lockdowns as in New Zealand or Australia and had to “live with” the disease.

Health authorities scaled back the limited testing regime, on the pretext that it would allow them to “shift focus” to vaccinating vulnerable sections of the population. Consequently, the official statistics drastically understate the reality of what is happening.

What health data is available shows a sharp spike in cases from April through June, and another this month, with 3,935 active cases since September 28. On 14 October, 412 new cases were reported, with a seven-day average of 306 cases. The country has officially recorded a total of 24,041 cases and 266 deaths.

The health system has long suffered from shortages of drugs, lack of funding, crumbling infrastructure and a severe lack of health workers. Shortly after a sit-in during March 2020, by 600 Port Moresby nurses protesting inadequate personal protective equipment, over 4,000 nurses were ready to strike nationwide over the lack of preparation for a coronavirus outbreak. However, the PNG Nurses Association called off the stoppage at the last minute.

With the hospital system now swamped, clinicians warn that the situation is much worse than officials admit, with provinces seeing far more cases than the National Control Centre records. Port Moresby General Hospital is reporting positive COVID testing rates of 60 percent and is scaling down its services due to the surge in patients.

The hospital currently has 50 COVID in-patients with numbers expected to explode over coming weeks. The Guardian reports that surgeries are on hold indefinitely, consultation clinics are closed until further notice, and pathology services, the TB clinic, emergency and radiology departments and all other essential services will be affected.

In Lae, the second largest city, the Angau general hospital is admitting an average of five new cases a day and experienced 19 deaths in September alone. It is the city’s only public hospital, serving a population of 76,255, but has just 320 beds, and a further 150 temporary beds. Authorities have been forced to turn the town’s stadium into a makeshift hospital and morgue.

In the Eastern Highlands, deaths from the virus are being recorded at the hospital in Goroka every day, forcing a two-week lockdown in a bid to stem the surge. Dr. Kapiro Kendaura, the director of curative health services, described the situation as critical. “Our Covid centre is always at capacity,” he told the Guardian. “Our emergency department is always full with Covid patients. We are in dire need of oxygen, amongst other things,” he said.

In the Western Highlands province, the country’s most densely populated region, the Mount Hagen general hospital is on the brink of closure, due to an influx of COVID-19 cases and an acute shortage of government funding. It is the only hospital serving a population of 46,256.

Mount Hagen’s clinical head John Junior McKup told Radio NZ that they recently had over 90 positive patients arrive in a day. “Regularly the numbers have been like 50 or 60 positives in a day. But we’re sending home all the mild and moderate cases to self-isolate at home. We’re only keeping all the severe cases in the hospital,” the doctor revealed.

In one three-week period, over 800 positive cases and 22 deaths from COVID-19 were recorded in the region. According to the provincial health authority, the hospital will be forced to shut down before Christmas if government funding is further delayed.

The PNG government this month formally lodged a “request for assistance” with the Emergency Medical Teams Secretariat in the World Health Organisation. The request stated that from September 20–26, there were 600 newly confirmed cases, including 17 deaths. It admitted that new cases and deaths are significantly underreported “due to the very limited testing across the country and inconsistent reporting from several provinces.”

The government blames “misinformation” and widespread reluctance to be vaccinated for the catastrophic situation. In reality, the fault lies with the crisis-ridden Marape government, which has responded to the pandemic with a mixture of incompetence and blatant self-interest.

According to the PNG Post-Courier, in the midst of the dire healthcare situation, Marape and other government MPs recently travelled to Morobe Province to a health care event, where they were greeted by hundreds of mask-less people. The event “reeked of bad taste,” the Post-Courier observed.

Marape’s visit received widespread criticism on social media, with one person saying: “This is infuriating to see. No wonder people don’t follow niupelapasin [PNG’s official plan] if the people making the mandates about it keep hosting events like this!”

While Pandemic Controller David Manning has banned gatherings of more than 20 people, politicians with an eye towards next year’s elections are traveling around the country, attracting large crowds, indifferent to COVID protection and the risk of spreading the virus.

The abject failure of the government’s vaccine roll-out was further underscored last month when it was forced to transfer to Vietnam 30,000 doses donated by New Zealand, to avoid them being thrown out as they reached their expiry date.

PNG, one of the most impoverished countries in the world, remains largely dependent on the COVAX program. Only 2.5 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. Vaccines have not been distributed on the basis of need, let alone a global public health strategy, but are being provided to advance the economic and strategic interests of competing powers.

Volkswagen: 30,000 jobs under imminent threat

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

At a supervisory board meeting of the Volkswagen Company at the end of September, VW chairman Herbert Diess told some 20 assembled corporate and trade union representatives to prepare for a new massive round of job cuts. The results of the meeting were made public by the Handelsblatt newspaper on October 13. Diess declared that up to 30,000 jobs would become redundant at VW, i.e., one quarter of the company’s core workforce.

VW boss Herbert Diess (Photo: Alexander Migl/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The main plant in Wolfsburg, the largest factory in the world with about 60,000 employees, had to be immediately converted to the production of electric autos, Diess stressed. Currently, it mainly produces the popular VW Golf and Tiguan combustion models.

Diess had already experienced the collapse of a major factory, he declared, when he was manager for BMV autos in Birmingham, UK. Due to the failure of management to act, and the role of trade unions in blocking innovation, the plant was finally forced to close down, Diess warned.

Now the core brand VW and especially its main plant in Wolfsburg are under pressure. In the past, Diess has repeatedly referred to VW’s competitor Tesla, which is building a so-called giga-factory in Grünheide near Berlin in Brandenburg. Tesla plans to produce about 500,000 electric autos from next year based on a workforce of around 10,000. The main VW plant in Wolfsburg employs about 60,000 people, including 25,000 in production, and expects to produce less than 500,000 autos this year.

For the second year in a row, the Wolfsburg plant is threatened with a historic decline in its postwar production. Last year, Wolfsburg produced just under half a million vehicles, reported the car magazine Automobilwoche. This year even fewer autos are expected to roll off VW assembly lines. This means that Wolfsburg is far below its most recent 10-year average of just under 780,000 autos per annum.

Almost a fortnight ago, Diess prepared 120 managers for a massive attack on jobs in a video conference. An electric auto at the Tesla plant in Grünheide is scheduled to be built in 10 hours. At its Zwickau plant, VW needs three times as long for the production of its models.

The most recent auto sales figures for Germany mark the lowest level of new car registrations in September since 1991, with German auto brands suffering heavily.

Compared to the same month last year, Mercedes (-49.8 percent), Mini (-45.0 percent), Audi (-38.9 percent), VW (-23.3 percent) and BMW (-18.7 percent) recorded the most dramatic declines. Despite losses, VW retains the largest market share of 15.7 percent, but a comparison with Tesla illustrates why Diess has now decided to go on the offensive.

The best-selling car in Germany in September was once again the VW Golf, with 6,886 new registrations. But it was closely followed in second place by Tesla's Model 3, which sold 6,828 units.

Diess is now planning to accelerate VW's internal “Trinity” project. VW is developing a new production model under this name as a new premium model with VW's own software operating system and far-reaching autonomous capabilities, to be produced at the company’s main plant starting in 2026.

According to Handelsblatt, the next generation of VWs will have a completely new structure and be much more efficient to produce. Whereas the VW Golf could be produced in 10 million variants depending on customer wishes, Trinity allows less than a hundred variants.

In Wolfsburg, car bodies are still made of several steel and aluminium sheets that must be welded together. In future, a body made from a single cast and without the use of individual sheets of metal should lead to vast increases in productivity. Tesla is already planning this type of production at its new factory in Grünheide.

However, less complexity also means fewer work steps and fewer jobs, according to Handelsblatt, and Diess has already drawn up various scenarios with up to 30,000 jobs at risk in the course of restructuring. The VW management has already converted some plants, including those in Zwickau and Brussels, while the VW factories in Hanover and Emden are currently undergoing transition to e-mobility. So far, only Wolfsburg has been excluded from this process. Diess wants that to change.

Handelsblatt quotes an insider declaring that reception to Diess’ speech was “harsh.” But while the supervisory board, made up of representatives of big business, finance and senior trade union and works council officials, may have some criticisms of Diess's approach, they all agree on the end goal.

“There is no question we have to address the competitiveness of our plant in Wolfsburg in the face of new market entrants,” a VW spokeswoman said after the supervisory board meeting. In a few days’ time Diess will gather his top managers for an executive meeting where he will present his various scenarios and initiate the massive job cuts.

The chair of the VW general and company works council, Daniela Cavallo, successor to Bernd Osterloh, is backing Diess and has the job of justifying and implementing the cuts to the workforce. In light of the low-capacity utilisation at the VW plant in Wolfsburg, she has already proposed the restructuring of production.

The executive board and works council guaranteed a capacity utilisation of at least 820,000 vehicles at VW’s main plant for 2020 in the “Pact for the Future” agreed in 2016. As a result of this “Pact” 30,000 jobs have already been sacrificed. In mid-2018, they were even plans to set a target of producing 1 million vehicles a year. “Even adjusted for the current negative factors of Corona and semiconductor shortages, we are far from these jointly agreed plans,” Cavallo now says.

The much-vaunted Trinity project will not turn the tide, said the works council leader. The Wolfsburg site must find a faster path to e-mobility. But this would have to be a “volume-capable model”—such as the ID3, ID4 and the upcoming ID5 model—by as early as 2024. However, according to the board's plans so far, these all these models are to be produced in other factories.

The next four weeks will see an intensification of haggling between the works councils at individual factories. On November 12, the VW supervisory board will meet again in Wolfsburg, to agree future investment planning. It will then be finally decided at which factories the various models will be produced.

Last week, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the works councils attach importance to the fact that there be no negative consequences for the various plants. The demand for e-cars was growing faster than many had expected, and Wolfsburg, for example, could absorb the additional demand.

However, the growing demand for e-cars does not solve the problem that fewer workers are needed for their production. The VW works councils all support job cuts in principle, but then seek to ensure the cuts take place at any other factory than their own. In this way they divide the workforce and sabotage any effective resistance. This has been the case ever since CEO Diess moved to VW from BMW in 2015 and imposed a radical course of restructuring on Germany’s biggest automaker.

The works councils and IG Metall are the main pillars for the auto companies' assault on jobs, working conditions and wages. The auto corporations and their shareholders are using the switch to e-mobility and the coronavirus pandemic to reverse all the gains made by auto workers in the course of bitter strikes since World War II, and thereby continue their orgy of self-enrichment.

VW profits and shareholders’ dividends have swelled despite the pandemic and short-time work. In 2020, the company made around €10 billion in profits before interest and taxes. In 2021, this sum was trumped in the first half of the year with a profit of €11.34 billion.

At the beginning of July, VW raised the profit targets for the entire company. For 2025, the Wolfsburg-based company now calculates a profit margin of between eight and nine percent, i.e., an increase of one percentage point. Around a 4 percent profit margin is planned for the main VW brand, while its subsidiaries Audi and Porsche plan returns of at least 11 percent for their luxury models.

At all of these automakers, it is the increased exploitation of their workforces that lies behind the increase in profits. At Audi, IG Metall already agreed to cut 9,500 jobs in 2019, with more than half of these jobs already lost.

Alongside VW, all other auto companies in Germany and worldwide are squeezing their workforces to the bone to satisfy the shareholders’ lust for ever higher profits and dividends. Workers must answer this offensive with their own, international declaration of struggle.

Quarterly earnings put major banks on path for record yearly profits

Gabriel Black

The world’s largest banks posted record third quarter earnings this past week, putting 2021 on track to be the most lucrative year in history for the financial world.

Bloomberg estimates that altogether the leading banks have taken in $170 billion over the last four quarters (starting with the fourth quarter of 2020). This is the most profitable four consecutive quarters for banks in history.

In this December 13, 2016 photo the logo for Goldman Sachs appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Leading the banks is JPMorgan Chase, which, during this time, made an estimated $131 million per day .

Goldman Sachs made a net third quarter profit of $5.4 billion. This surpassed estimates that it would take in $3.7 billion and was up from $3.4 billion last year. The investment bank has now recorded a profit of $17.7 billion for the first nine months of year, itself higher than any 12-month period in its history. The news sent Goldman shares 3.8 percent higher, having already gained 80 percent this year.

Profits are up at all the major American banks. Bank of America increased its profits by 64 percent, Citigroup by 48 percent, Morgan Stanley by 38 percent, and JPMorgan Chase by 24 percent.

In Europe, banks also performed well, while not as spectacularly as their US counterparts. UBS and Barclays both posted their highest quarterly profit in over a decade. Their profits over the past 12 months were $7.6 and $7.4 billion, respectfully. Deutsche Bank posted its highest profits in eight years.

The stock index for US banks has gone up 59 percent this past year, while for European banks it has risen by 56 percent.

An analyst for Oppenheimer, speaking to the Financial Times, described the quarter as “quite literally off the charts.”

The record earnings come as a historic strike wave begins in the US and global food and energy prices surge. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to rage, with weekly global deaths of almost 50,000 people, according to Our World in Data .

The surge in bank profits is fundamentally bound up with the unprecedented pumping of money into the stock markets by all the major central banks. In particular, the US Federal Reserve is electronically “printing” $120 billion of new money every month and buying US-backed treasuries and corporate bonds from major banks—flooding these institutions with cash.

This massive loan of money, with no strings attached, allows the banks to gorge themselves on risky financial practices. By trickling down to other sections of capital, stimulating investments, the money encourages acquisitions, corporate mergers and IPOs (initial public offering—when a company goes public with its stock).

Much of the record profits that are being made by these banks comes from precisely this type of speculative activity. Specifically, banks charge large fees for handling mergers, acquisitions and IPOs. They charge fees for advising companies, finding sellers and buyers, executing the financial actions involved and raising capital during the process.

Mergers and acquisitions frequently mean job cuts, eliminating so-called “redundancies” in companies. In the most recent quarter, global merger activity rose to a record $1.52 trillion.

Last quarter, JPMorgan Chase tripled its fees to $1.23 billion, Bank of America increased its fees by 65 percent to $654 million, Morgan Stanley tripled its fees to $1.27 billion, and Goldman Sachs increased its fees by 31 percent, to $1.6 billion.

In a comment to the Financial Times, financier Chris Kotowski said, “[W]ith the Fed printing $120 billion of new money each and every month, every CEO in the world has lots of Monopoly money to play with. So M&A [Mergers and Acquisitions] and investment spending and capital raising will likely remain strong.”

Indeed, this “Monopoly money” is what is keeping capitalist financial markets afloat—markets built on top of a mountain of debt and speculation, liable to pop.

While the Federal Reserve has announced it may begin to draw back the asset purchasing program in November, it has repeatedly delayed this move for fear of sparking a sell-off on Wall Street.

As the banks make record profits, the bottom half of the US have, collectively, negative wealth. The entire bottom 90 percent of Americans, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, own only 26 percent of the country’s wealth. This leaves the top 10 percent with 74 percent of the wealth—a number that does not even include offshore accounts that fly under the radar!

Few banks expect their profit feast to last.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman drew attention in comments last week to the effects of the Fed tapering its cash injections. He stated, “It’s good to be watchful … There’s certainly nothing that suggests there are any issues, but markets are bouncing a little bit. And over the next 18 months, we’ll see more of that as the Fed starts to move.”

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he thought that while the cash injections, or “quantitative easing,” as it is known, may be wound down, interest rates would likely remain at record lows for another year. This means inflation “might go higher than people think.” A further surge in the cost of goods, including food and energy, could, itself, lead to significant economic, social and political explosions.

The International Monetary Fund has urged central banks to be “very, very vigilant” about workers demanding higher wages in response to inflation. An IMF report warned that an increase in core prices due to inflation and higher wages could lead to a “spiral of doubt” in the economy that would endanger growth.

A Catch-22 faces the financial oligarchy. Either let the debt bubble balloon further, driven by easy money policies, or burst it through tightening, risking a financial collapse.

Neither option poses a solution. The former risks widespread inflation and devaluation of cash, only making the next financial crisis larger. The latter bursts the bubble that has already grown larger than 2008’s pile of debt.

In either case, the outcome will be the intensification of class struggle both in the United States and globally, as these interconnected, international economic processes reach their logical conclusion.

Lucy spacecraft begins 12-year mission to study asteroids and the origins of the Solar System

Bryan Dyne

The NASA space probe Lucy began its 12-year mission after being successfully launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V 401 rocket. The spacecraft is slated to study eight asteroids in the main asteroid belt and among Jupiter’s trojans, two groups of asteroids that share that planet’s orbit around the Sun, as part of a campaign to more closely study the origins of Earth and the other planets in the Solar System.

An artist's conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying past the binary pair Trojan asteroids the binary pair 617 Patroclus-Menoetius. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Gutierrez

Lucy was selected in 2017 for development and launch, alongside the Psyche mission, after more than two years of review, and winning out over 26 other proposals. Astronomers will use three instruments—L’Ralph, L’LORRI, and L’TES—to image target asteroids in visible and infrared light, measure ice, silicate and organic material on each celestial body’s surface, and study asteroid interiors and bulk properties. These instruments will be operated by teams operating out of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the Southwest Research Institute and the Goddard Space Flight Center.

The spacecraft also has a golden plaque adorned with a sampling of current culture, including quotes from Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, as a time capsule for future generations.

Asteroids have long been a target of astronomical study because they, like comets, are a snapshot of different parts of the Solar System’s history. The eight planets as they are now have been shaped by billions of years of geophysical process, such as weather, climate and tectonic activity (as well as human processes on Earth). In contrast, asteroids (meaning “star-like”) are suspected to be the shattered remains of objects that never became large enough to form actual planets. They thus exist mostly as they have since they were formed and stand as moments of planetary formation preserved over the eons that provide insight into the physical conditions and dynamics of the early Solar System.

Millions of these small bodies exist in the solar system and hundreds of thousands have been cataloged for more careful study. They range in size from just a few meters across to the largest, Ceres, which is 1,000 kilometers in diameter and large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. They are made up of a combination of different metals and minerals and have even been envisioned as the subject of future space-based mining operations.

Several missions have been launched in the past few decades to study asteroids, including the sample return mission to Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, the successful landing of two rovers on 162173 Ryugu by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2, and the Dawn mission, which orbited two different asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, during a mission lasting 11 years. The New Horizons spacecraft was also directed to fly past an asteroid, now named 486958 Arrokoth, four years after the historic first close encounter with Pluto.

Lucy builds on the ambition of and knowledge gained from these previous projects and was one of the primary goals outlined for astronomical research by the most recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey. While targets of most previous missions are either near-Earth asteroids or are part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Lucy will be studying asteroids farther out, focusing on Jupiter’s trojan asteroids.

These two groups of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun were first predicted by Italian-born mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1772. He showed that a small body like an asteroid might be trapped in an orbit of a planet, but at a point leading or trailing the planet by 60 degrees. These leading and trailing points are now denoted Lagrange points 4 and 5 (L4 and L5), and are among the five gravitationally stable points between any two astronomical bodies where one orbits the other. Jupiter’s first trojans were actually observed by German astronomer Max Wold in 1906 and more than 9,800 have been discovered since then.

By convention, all asteroids trapped in such orbits are referred to generically as trojans, including those in co-orbits with Mars, Neptune and Earth. They do not actually orbit the planet, but are held in place in specific orbits around the Sun by the planet’s far greater mass. Those trapped by Jupiter are called the “Trojans” if they are trailing behind the Solar System’s largest planet and the “Greeks” if they are in front of it, and asteroids in each group are named after figures from the Trojan War.

Lucy will be studying seven of these asteroids, 3548 Eurybates and its satellite Queta in August 2027, 15094 Polymele in September 2027, 11351 Leucus in April 2028, 21900 Orus in November 2028 and the binary pair 617 Patroclus-Menoetius in March 2033. In order to travel to so many targets, five of which are in the “Greek camp” and two of which are in the “Trojan camp,” which are separated by about 1.3 billion kilometers, Lucy will use three gravitational assists from Earth to travel between different parts of the Solar System.

Lucy will take a very complex trajectory, as shown in this image, to visit asteroid in very different parts of the Solar System. Credit: NASA

The spacecraft will also make a test run of its operational capabilities at the main belt asteroid 55246 Donald johanson in April 2025. The asteroid is named after Donald Johanson, the discoverer of the fossilized remains of the female hominin australopithecine known as “Lucy” in Ethiopia, a 3.2 million-year-old ancestor of modern humans. The Lucy mission is named after this skeleton as a tribute and in the hopes the Lucy spacecraft will provide insight into the origins of the planets similar to what the Lucy fossil provided in relation to the development of the Homo genus.

Lucy is the American space agency’s 13th Discovery-class mission, a program which is nominally designed to produce missions that have very focused objectives. In practice, the Discovery missions are bound by the philosophy championed by Clinton-appointed NASA administrator Daniel Goldin that space missions should be “faster, better, cheaper” and have very limited budgets.

The political limitations have not, however, stopped the missions that have been launched from producing some fantastic scientific results. Discovery class missions include Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover, the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, and the exoplanet observatory Kepler. All of these missions have brought critical new insights about the physical world and humanity’s place in it.