Fish Wars and Brexit

Binoy Kampmark

Warring over fish in the twenty-first century might seem an unlikely proposition.  But the deployment of four Royal Navy ships to deter European fishing vessels from encroaching on British waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit has tongues wagging.  The prospects of a trade pact between the EU and UK by the end of this month are becoming cold and remote.  This much has been admitted by the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and his EU counterpart, Ursula von der Leyen.

A key contention between the parties is the issue of fishing.  Access to British waters by European nations is a long affair that prompted the late diplomat Sir Con O’Neill to remark that, “The question of fisheries was economic peanuts, but political dynamite.”  Eight European member states who fish in British waters are demanding that Britain, despite Brexit, maintain the status quo on fishing arrangements.

Non-UK boats have certainly been very happy to avail themselves of waters within the UK’s 200-nautical mile economic zone.  Between 2012 and 2014, it was estimated that 58% of fish and shellfish landed from the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone were caught by non-UK boats.  This comprised 650,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish worth £408 million each year.  UK fishing boats, in contrast, landed 90,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish, worth £103 million.

As the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier explained to the House of Lords in June, “the fisheries agreement we want with the United Kingdom would be an indissociable part of the economic agreement on trade and the level playing field – or, to make it even more clear, there will be no trade agreement with the UK if there is no balanced agreement on fisheries.”

The picture is a complex tangle.  According to Barnier, various matters must be taken into account: “historical fishing rights, sometimes dating back many centuries; the economic interests of coastal fishing communities in the EU and the UK and international rules from the UN on biodiversity.”

One of the strongest advocates of the status quo position is the French President, Emmanuel Macron.  In October, he put forth his claim that French fishing fleets would continue to fish in British waters irrespective of whether a trade agreement was reached.  As French fishing fleets take 75% of their catch from British waters, the unpopular French leader would like to stay that course.  Last Friday, Macron stated that, while he did not “want to have my cake and eat it” he did not “want the pieces cut equally because I am not giving my piece away”.

The Johnson government sees it differently.  The status quo must change.  Waters are to be reclaimed.  Bigger catches for the British are being demanded.  Barnier has previously suggested some modification of the “two extreme positions” might take place, taking into account the UK’s preference for “zonal attachment”.  Such a softening still looks some way off.

With EU-UK talks teetering on collapse, Johnson’s own gunboat diplomacy is drawing different views.  Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, sees it as “irresponsible”.  Former European commissioner Lord Chris Patten identifies the all too bright colours of nationalism at play.  Johnson, he claimed, was on a “runaway train of English exceptionalism”.

A few government backbenchers disagree.  Chests are being thumped.  Daniel Kawczynski suggested last week that a no-deal scenario would mean that the prime minister give an “absolute guarantee … that British naval forces will be deployed from January 1st to prevent illegal French fishing in our waters.”  Retired Royal Navy admiral Sir Alan West considered it “absolutely appropriate that the Royal Navy should protect our waters if the position is that we are a sovereign state and our government has said we don’t want other nations there.”  British fishermen were “quite stormy people” that might see a “punch-up” and the necessary deployment of “some marines and things.”  Ominous signs.

The last time so much heat was expended over fishing rights between Britain and a European state was the protracted agony that came to be known as the Cod Wars.  Between the late 1940s and 1970s, Britain and Iceland waged a conflict over fisheries that threatened to bring two NATO powers into open conflict.

Instances of conflict began with Iceland’s gaining of control over its territorial waters after 1945.  But matters took a turn for the worse with the unilateral declaration by Iceland of an exclusion zone on September 1, 1958 to prevent British trawlers from operating within 12 nautical miles off the country’s coast.

The British, with its fishing industry heavily reliant on shipping in Icelandic waters, ignored the declaration; the Icelandic coastguard asserted its claims.  The issue was not entirely one of pantomime.  Three British frigates – the HMS Eastbourne, the HMS Russell and HMS Palliser – accompanied by the HMS Hound, a minesweeper, were deployed.  To avoid the “appearance of gunboat diplomacy,” as the Guardian correspondent at the time put it, the vessels had sailed from various British ports the previous week, their movements subject to a security blackout.

The Icelandic navy, with its eight small coastguard patrol vessels, promised an aggressive response, intending to fire into the bridge of any trawler coming within the twelve-mile limit, having refused to heed a shot across the bows.  British trawlers were harried and boarded.

In 1973, Iceland extended the zone to 50 miles, which again saw the deployment of British frigates as protection for the trawlers.  In 1976, the distance had been extended to 200 miles.  It took sessions, mediated through NATO, for the two countries to finally come to agreement.  The British were permitted to keep 24 trawlers within the 200 mile area, limiting their catch to 50,000 tons.  Britain’s fisheries were already in poor shape; these arrangements precipitated a dramatic loss of fishing jobs in such ports as Grimsby, Hull and Fleetwood.

This time, the European fishing industry risks getting a mauling in the event of a no-deal.  French fishing grounds risk being depleted by the vessels of other European states.  Prices of fish in Europe will also rise.  Tom Premereur, director of the Vlaamse Visveilingen fishing auction market in Ostend, is concerned about Belgium’s share of the catch.  Up to 54% is netted in British waters. “We would lose a lot of fish, certainly the high value fish.”  The gruesome spectacle of territorial aggression, ruined fish stocks and environmental degradation seems, at least as things stand, imminent.

Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists?

Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J.S. Davies

Joe Biden will take command of the White House at a time when the American public is more concerned about battling coronavirus than fighting overseas wars. But America’s wars rage on regardless, and the militarized counterterrorism policy Biden has supported in the past—based on airstrikes, special operations and the use of proxy forces—is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging.

In Afghanistan, Biden opposed Obama’s 2009 troop surge, and after the surge failed, Obama reverted to the policy that Biden favored to begin with, which became the hallmark of their war policy in other countries as well. In insider circles, this was referred to as “counterterrorism,” as opposed to “counterinsurgency.”

In Afghanistan, that meant abandoning the large-scale deployment of U.S. forces, and relying instead on air strikes, drone strikes and special operations “kill or capture” raids, while recruiting and training Afghan forces to do nearly all the ground fighting and holding of territory.

In the 2011 Libya intervention, the NATO-Arab monarchist coalition embedded hundreds of Qatari special operations forces and Western mercenaries with the Libyan rebels to call in NATO airstrikes and train local militias, including Islamist groups with links to Al Qaeda. The forces they unleashed are still fighting over the spoils nine years later.

While Joe Biden now takes credit for opposing the disastrous intervention in Libya, at the time he was quick to hail its deceptive short-term success and Colonel Gaddafi’s gruesome assassination. “NATO got it right,” Biden said in a speech at Plymouth State College in October 2011 on the very day President Obama announced Gaddafi’s death. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”

While Biden has since washed his hands of the debacle in Libya, that operation was in fact emblematic of the doctrine of covert and proxy war backed by airstrikes that he supported, and which he has yet to disavow. Biden still says he supports “counterterrorism” operations, but he was elected president without ever publicly answering a direct question about his support for the massive use of airstrikes and drone strikes that are an integral part of that doctrine.

In the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-led forces dropped over 118,000 bombs and missiles, reducing major cities like Mosul and Raqqa to rubble and killing tens of thousands of civilians. When Biden said America “didn’t lose a single life” in Libya, he clearly meant “American life.” If “life” simply means life, the war in Libya obviously cost countless lives, and made a mockery of a UN Security Council resolution that approved the use of military force only to protect civilians.

As Rob Hewson, the editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the AP as the U.S. unleashed its “Shock and Awe” bombardment on Iraq in 2003, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.” The same obviously applies to people in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and wherever American bombs have been falling for 20 years.

As Obama and Trump both tried to pivot from the failed “global war on terrorism” to what the Trump administration has branded “great power competition,” or a reversion to the Cold War, the war on terror has stubbornly refused to exit on cue. Al Qaeda and Islamic State have been driven from places the U.S. has bombed or invaded, but keep reappearing in new countries and regions. Islamic State now occupies a swath of northern Mozambique, and has also taken root in Afghanistan. Other Al Qaeda affiliates are active across Africa, from Somalia and Kenya in East Africa to eleven countries in West Africa.

After nearly 20 years of “war on terror,” there is now a large body of research into what drives people to join Islamist armed groups fighting local government forces or Western invaders. While American politicians still wring their hands over what twisted motives can possibly account for such incomprehensible behavior, it turns out that it’s really not that complicated. Most fighters are not motivated by Islamist ideology as much as by the desire to protect themselves, their families or their communities from militarized “counterterrorism” forces, as documented in this report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Another study, titled The Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment, found that the tipping point or “final straw” that drives over 70% of fighters to join armed groups is the killing or detention of a family member by “counterterrorism” or “security” forces. The study exposes the U.S. brand of militarized counterterrorism as a self-fulfilling policy that fuels an intractable cycle of violence by generating and replenishing an ever-expanding pool of “terrorists” as it destroys families, communities and countries.

For example, the U.S. formed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with 11 West African countries in 2005 and has so far sunk a billion dollars into it. In a recent report from Burkina Faso, Nick Turse cited U.S. government reports that confirm how 15 years of U.S.-led “counterterrorism” have only fueled an explosion of terrorism across West Africa.

The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies reports that the 1,000 violent incidents involving militant Islamist groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the past year amount to a seven-fold increase since 2017, while the confirmed minimum number of people killed has increased from 1,538 in 2017 to 4,404 in 2020.

Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location Event Data), told Turse that, “Focusing on Western concepts of counterterrorism and embracing a strictly military model has been a major mistake. Ignoring drivers of militancy, such as poverty and lack of social mobility, and failing to alleviate the conditions that foster insurgencies, like widespread human rights abuses by security forces, have caused irreparable harm.”

Indeed, even the New York Times has confirmed that “counterterrorism” forces in Burkina Faso are killing as many civilians as the “terrorists” they are supposed to be fighting. A 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Burkina Faso documented allegations of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians as part of its counterterrorism strategy,” mainly killing members of the Fulani ethnic group.

Souaibou Diallo, the president of a regional association of Muslim scholars, told Turse that these abuses are the main factor driving the Fulani to join militant groups. “Eighty percent of those who join terrorist groups told us that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the armed forces,” said Diallo. “So many people have been killed—assassinated—but there has been no justice.”

Since the inception of the Global War on Terror, both sides have used the violence of their enemies to justify their own violence, fueling a seemingly endless spiral of chaos spreading from country to country and region to region across the world.

But the U.S. roots of all this violence and chaos run even deeper than this. Both Al Qaeda and Islamic State evolved from groups originally recruited, trained, armed and supported by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments: Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Nusra Front and Islamic State in Syria since 2011.

If the Biden administration really wants to stop fueling chaos and terrorism in the world, it must radically transform the CIA, whose role in destabilizing countries, supporting terrorism, spreading chaos and creating false pretexts for war and hostility has been well documented since the 1970s by Colonel Fletcher Prouty, William Blum, Gareth Porter and others.

The United States will never have an objective, depoliticized national intelligence system, or therefore a reality-based, coherent foreign policy, until it exorcises this ghost in the machine. Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who crafted the secret quasi-legal basis for Obama’s drone program and protected CIA torturers, to be his Director of National Intelligence. Is Haines up to the job of transforming these agencies of violence and chaos into a legitimate, working intelligence system? That seems unlikely, and yet it is vital.

The new Biden administration needs to take a truly fresh look at the whole range of destructive policies the United States has pursued around the world for decades, and the insidious role the CIA has played in so many of them.

We hope Biden will finally renounce hare-brained, militarized policies that destroy societies and ruin people’s lives for the sake of unattainable geopolitical ambitions, and that he will instead invest in humanitarian and economic aid that really helps people to live more peaceful and prosperous lives.

We also hope that Biden will reverse Trump’s pivot back to the Cold War and prevent the diversion of more of our country’s resources to a futile and dangerous arms race with China and Russia.

We have real problems to deal with in this century – existential problems that can only be solved by genuine international cooperation. We can no longer afford to sacrifice our future on the altar of the Global War on Terror, a New Cold War, Pax Americana or other imperialist fantasies.

The pandemic, the profiteers, the people

Farooque Chowdhury

To profiteers, this pandemic is very good; it hasn’t hurt their profit-making mechanism.

Net worth of US billionaires has soared by $1 trillion – to total $4 trillion – since Pandemic began, a report released on December 8, 2020 by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) said:

“The total net worth of the 651 US billionaires rose from $2.95 trillion on March 18 — the rough start of the pandemic shutdowns — to $4.01 trillion on December 7, a leap of 36%, based on Forbes billionaires. By around March 18 most federal and state economic restrictions in response to the virus were in place. Combined, just the top 10 billionaires are now worth more than $1 trillion.”

The ATF and IPS made a comparison:

“The billionaires’ wealth growth since March is more than the $908 billion in pandemic relief proposed by a bipartisan group of members of Congress, which is likely to be the package that moves forward for a vote in the next week, but has been stalled over Republican concerns that it is too costly.

“The monstrous cash-pile amounts to double the two-year budget gap of all state and local governments, a figure estimated to reach $500 billion thanks to the devastating effects of the economic shutdowns on tax revenues. It even approaches the massive sum the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicaid – $644 billion and $389 billion in 2019, respectively.”

With this report, profit, politics of the ruling classes, and the state come to view.

The report mentions the way the information was collected:

“Forbes’ annual billionaires report was published March 18, and ATF and IPS collected the real-time data on December 7 from the Forbes website. The methodology of this analysis has been favorably reviewed by PolitiFact. The ATF-IPS analysis also looks at wealth growth since February 2019 — the date of Forbes’ immediately previous annual billionaires report published well before the start of the pandemic and resulting market gyrations.”

The report presented a few facts:

“The $1 trillion wealth gain by 651 US billionaires since mid-March is:

• More than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,000 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America. A family of four would receive over $12,000. Republicans have blocked new stimulus checks from being included in the pandemic relief package.
• Double the two-year estimated budget gap of all state and local governments, which is forecast to be at least $500 billion. By June, state and local governments had already laid off 1.5 million workers and public services — especially education — faced steep budget cuts.
• Only slightly less than total federal spending on Medicare ($644 billion in 2019) and Medicaid ($389 billion in FY2019), which together serve 120 million Americans (69 million in Medicaid, 63 million in Medicare, less 12 million enrolled in both).
• Nearly four times the $267 billion total in stimulus payments made to 159 million people earlier this year.”

It presented another fact:

“At $4 trillion the total wealth of all US billionaires today is nearly double the $2.1 trillion in total wealth held by the bottom half of the population, or 165 million Americans.”

Two comments on the profit-wealth-fact are striking.

Frank Clemente, executive director of ATF said:

“Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands. As tens of millions of Americans suffer from the health and economic ravages of this pandemic, a few hundred billionaires add to their massive fortunes. Their pandemic profits are so immense that America’s billionaires could pay for a major COVID relief bill and still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches. Their wealth growth is so great that they alone could provide a $3,000 stimulus payment to every man, woman and child in the country, and still be richer than they were 9 months ago. Joe Biden won a tax-fairness mandate in November. We look forward to working with him and Congress to deliver on that mandate by taxing the massive wealth of these billionaires.”

Chuck Collins of the IPS said:

“The updraft of wealth to the billionaire class is disturbing at a time when millions face eviction, destitution, and loss. Billionaires are extracting wealth at a time when essential workers are pushed into the viral line of fire.”

The report added a few more facts, which help comprehend the grim situation:

“Ordinary Americans have not fared as well as billionaires during the pandemic:

• Nearly 14.9 million have fallen ill with the virus and 284,000 have died from it. [Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center]
• Collective work income of rank-and-file private-sector employees—all hours worked times the hourly wages of the entire bottom 82% of the workforce—declined by 2.3% from mid-March to mid-October, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
• Nearly 67 million lost work between Mar. 21 and Oct. 7, 2020. [U.S. Department of Labor]
• 20 million were collecting unemployment on Nov. 14, 2020. [U.S. Department of Labor]
• 98,000 businesses have permanently closed. [Yelp/CNBC]
• 12 million workers have lost employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic as of August 26, 2020. [Economic Policy Institute]
• Nearly 26 million adults reported their household not having enough food in the past week between Nov. 11-23. From Oct. 28 to Nov. 7, between 7 and 11 million children lived in a household where kids did not eat enough because the household could not afford it. [Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (CBPP)]

• 4 million adults — 1 in 6 renters — reported in November being behind in their rent. [CBPP]”

The EPI predicts:

“[W]ithout more federal aid 5.3 million public-sector jobs — including those of teachers, public safety employees and health care workers — will be lost by the end of 2021.”

More facts are there as it said:

“The stock market surge and lock-down economy have been a boon to tech monopolies and helped create four U.S. ‘centi-billionaires’. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are now each worth more than $100 billion. Prior to this year, Bezos had been the only US centi-billionaire, reaching that peak in 2018. Bezos and other billionaires have seen particularly astonishing increases in wealth between March 18 and Dec. 7:

• Jeff Bezos’s wealth grew from $113 billion on March 18 to $184 billion, an increase of 63%. Adding in his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott’s wealth of $60 billion on that day, the two had a combined wealth of almost a quarter of a trillion dollars thanks to their Amazon stock. If Bezos’s $71.4 billion growth in wealth was distributed to all his 810,000 U.S. employees, each would get a windfall bonus of over $88,000 and Bezos would not be any “poorer” than he was 9 months ago.
• Elon Musk’s wealth grew by nearly $119 billion, from $24.6 billion on March 18 to $143 billion, a nearly five-fold increase, boosted by his Tesla stock. SpaceX founder Musk has enjoyed one of the biggest boosts in net worth of any billionaire. That $119 billion growth in wealth is more than five times NASA’s $22.6 billion budget in FY2020, the federal agency Musk has credited with saving his company with a big federal contract when the firm’s rockets were failing and it faced bankruptcy.
• Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth grew from $54.7 billion on March 18 to $105 billion, an increase of 92%, fueled by his Facebook stock.
• Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans, saw his wealth rocket by 543%, from $6.5 billion to $41.8 billion, the second biggest percentage increase of all the billionaires.

The facts cited are from the country considered land of honey and milk, land of liberty, and land of opportunities. There’re sky-high opportunities: “Anyone can go to any length.” However, in real terms, those opportunities are for the few; while the rest pass their whole life only with a dream of a happy life. The jingle of “Dream” is circulated widely, in a planned way. But, now, that jingle doesn’t appeal as part of the mainstream media regularly tells: “American Dream” is now a shattered piece to those millions who once kept trust on that dream.

The facts cited above are from one of the advanced capitalist economies. The question is: what happens in other lands where the rich dominate? There, in those rich-dominated lands, the scene is more or less the same: The rich gain a whole while the ordinary persons languish in a difficult life, a life full with adversities, hurdles impossible to jump over. For them, no dream, nothing to hope; just everyday’s struggle to survive, and being silent witness of the loot by the rich. In some of those lands, similar facts surface on very few occasions, and in others, similar fact almost-never surfaces. These lands are designated as “democratic”, and “with free elections” as these are in the world system that the rich own. But the information essential for ascertaining character of the relevant economy and state are difficult to access. The ordinary persons, the men and women on streets, the ordinary taxpayers are not even aware that such information is required to know the economy, the power, and condition of life of the exploiters and of the exploited although it’s the taxpayers’ money that’s used by the exploiters to loot; and a part of the taxpayers’ money is also looted. All in these loots, the exploiters’ ruling machine is used – a coverage of law and legitimacy. But, this fact isn’t exposed to the ordinary taxpayers that include beggars, blind and lame, on streets also.

In this pandemic-period, this exposure is an opportunity to know an exploitative economy, a fact of mindless money gathering. A dig in other lands can also bring out to light similar facts of loot. The more similar facts/information will come out to public view, the more ordinary taxpayers will question: How an economy makes a few “fortunate” and super-“fortunate” while “maintaining” millions in misfortune, keeping millions in a world of uncertainty-hunger-unemployment-no/inadequate health care/public education tied to the exploiting system? What’s the mechanism? Shouldn’t the mechanism, the mechanism “benefitting” a few exploiters and keeping the rest “dumb-fool”-exploited, be identified and dissected? What’s the mechanism of profiteering by a few and the rest’s being powerless to question that mechanism?

Geopolitical Machinations and Diplomatic Wish-lists: Morocco, W.Sahara, Israel, and the U.S…who benefits?

Otobong Inieke

The Trump administration just officially recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara region and like clockwork, the relics of colonial machinations stick out like a sore thumb in, yet another region of Africa divvied up during the Berlin Conference. By 1975, in the wake of independence movements across the African continent, Spain had withdrawn from the Spanish Sahara, a region now regarded as Western Sahara. The conditions revolving around Morocco’s independence from France and regional aspirations for autonomy brought a condition where the Sahrawi -the indigenous people of the Western edge of the Sahara- still seek to establish self-determination in the form of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as proclaimed by the Polisario Front, a liberation movement recognized by the United Nations which maintains Sahrawi self-determination as a central tenet.

Following a cease-fire between SADR and Morocco brokered by the United Nations in 1991, the Kingdom of Morocco has de-facto claimed sovereignty over Western Sahara and with uncanny consistency, the conflict, like many around Africa has an economic angle vis-a-vis the large deposits of phosphate and gas as well as access to the fishing waters of the North Atlantic. Unfortunately, the referendum on Sahrawi self-determination has been repeatedly postponed because of central disagreements as to electorate composition and the status of the region according to a report by Aljazeera.

With the SADR-Morocco situation as context, Tel Aviv has spent most of the year 2020 securing official reconnections of diplomatic relationships with mostly Arab countries of West Asia and more recently a mounting number of African countries. With the Abraham Accords as a springboard of sorts, Israel’s diplomatic reputation is essentially being laundered through assertions of diplomatic re-engagement by governments that will -in a few words- turn a blind eye to the dire conditions experienced by the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. In October 2020, Sudan had agreed to pay $335m as reparations to the United States Government for alleged involvement in the 1998 bombing of U.S embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and as a prerequisite to being taken off the list of ‘state-sponsors of terror’. Furthermore, Sudan had agreed to re-establish official diplomatic relations with Israel seeing that both countries fought wars against each other in 1948 and 1967. Aside from Sudan, Morocco is the fourth country since August 2020 to normalize relations with Israel in addition to the UAE and Bahrain according to reporting by Aljazeera while Chad and Mali have done similar with Malawi strangely vowing to be the first African country to open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem.

It will be naïve to ignore the heavy hand of U.S. government diplomacy in actualizing what amounts to a Christmas diplomatic wish-list for Israel. Following the U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the ‘entire’ Western Sahara region, the Polisario Front said the position is a “blatant violation of the United Nations charter and the resolution of international legitimacy” while a U.S. republican senator said the decision was “shocking and deeply disappointing” and that “the president has been poorly advised by his team”. Additionally, the reciprocal decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara is fitting because the U.S. secretary of state expressed that Morocco was the first country in 1777 to diplomatically grant recognition to the United States and if that year seems familiar its because that was right as thirteen American colonies of European immigrants initiated a revolutionary war against Great Britain.

The geopolitical repercussions of the move will keep unraveling for a long time to come because Morocco had for decades rejected inclusion in the Organization of African Unity only to be readmitted into the African Union (AU) in 2017 with powerful countries like South Africa and Algeria opposing the return largely because Morocco had not adjusted its stance on Western Sahara per AU principles. Furthermore, Morocco and Liberia had offered to host the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) while Morocco also became a NATO ally as at 2004 and with both developments in contrast to African unity, the question according to Jacob Mundy in the Arab World Geographer is whether Morocco is a colonist or a regional fifth column. It should also be noted that the Polisario Front ended a 29-year ceasefire in November 2020 owing to a border confrontation, while Oubi Bchraya, the Europe representative of the Polisario Front said the U.S. decision does not change “an inch of the reality of the conflict”. On the other hand, U.S. government hegemonic designs only seek to secure a compromise that protects Moroccan interests with possible rapprochement with Algeria which aligns with the final objective of a regional trade bloc, and this is according to Y.H. Zoubir and K.B-Gambier in the journal Mediterranean Politics.

With over 165,000 refugees(2016) in the Algerian desert as a result of the conflict and more than a hundred ignored calls by the United Nations for a referendum on the right to Sahrawi self-determination, research and analysis have shown that Morocco has consistently prioritized EuroAmerican neo-colonial and Arab League relationships over actions that may be considered progressive in an African context.

Finally, the Polisario Front released a statement saying the end of the ceasefire means the beginning of a new war across the region, further stating that the United Nations and the Security Council are being held responsible for the safety and security of Sahrawi civilians. One wonders what this recognition of sovereignty will eventually mean for the troubled region. Struggles for self-determination never actually end, education surrounding such issues are becoming more accessible and individuals are becoming more informed on problems like this which are not properly explained by the mainstream, and on the other hand; it means that as ignorance is reduced, more people will refuse to support blatant acts of injustice let alone colonial machinations of exploitation.

Covid-19: Unveiling Digital Division in India

Dhruv Pachauri

Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, while getting acquainted with new digital modes of learning, it suddenly struck me hard on listening to the plight of a 15-year-old girl, living in a semi-urban area of India and struggling to learn from Zoom classes on the single smartphone of the family being shared between her and four siblings. Plights of children belonging to marginalized sections of the society dropping out of their schools are common nowadays. Covid-19 pandemic has done something or not but has certainly unveiled the lack of preparedness for adopting digital learning across the globe.

Global Scenario of the Digital Divide

Globally, approximately 31% of students (463 Mn) from pre-primary to upper secondary levels of schooling could not be reached out either due to unavailability of infrastructure/equipment to receive the broadcasted learnings or due to lack of robust policies supporting digital learning. The digital gap intensifies according to the developmental and economical status of the region. More than 45% of students in Africa could not be reached digitally while parts of Asia had nearly a 40% gap in the accessibility of digital learning.

Region-wise inaccessibility to remote learning globally

By magnifying our scope of analysis, we could easily see that the problem of inaccessibility of digital learning is much more with specific segments of the society. Globally, more than 70% of the students unable to access digital learning solutions in the Covid-19 pandemic were either from rural areas or from economically weaker sections of the society.

Students from vulnerable sections have been impacted the most globally

Disparate access to Digital facilities in India

Out of 463 Mn students unable to access remote learning globally, 147 Mn students are from South Asia. India has not been an exception too. More than 320 Mn students and 1.5 Mn schools registered in India saw a transition from offline learning to remote learning. Crores of students in India have been impacted by the inaccessibility of remote learning.

As seen globally, in India also there are few segments of the society being impacted much more than the others. While talking about the availability of the required infrastructure to access the digital instructions, stark differences could be observed between rural and urban regions of India. As per the survey conducted by the NSO just 4% of rural households had access to computers, compared with 23% of urban households. And, just 15% of rural households had internet access as compared to 42% of urban households. Such disparities are not limited to the rural and urban areas but extend to the developed and undeveloped states. Economical welfare of any household determines the access to digital equipment too, thus needless to say that these disparities are extended as per the economical sections of the society.

Lack of digital facilities across rural & urban regions of India

Lack of know-how to use digital facilities across rural India

Lack of digital infrastructure is not the only problem, lack of familiarity with the usage of digital equipment raises one more. Again, the stark differences regarding the digital solutions’ usage familiarity amongst rural and urban areas could not be ignored. Only 9.9% of the population could operate computers in rural areas while 32.4% of the population could operate computers in urban areas. Similar trends are observed in internet usage compatibility. Only 13% of the rural population knows how to use the internet while 37.1% of the urban population is comfortable with using the internet. Lack of familiarity with the usage of digital solutions ultimately leads to less digitally experienced teachers in rural areas when compared to urban areas. Also, students in rural areas are not able to receive guidance from their parents or guardians to use digital facilities.

Private Educational Institutions in India are adapting faster

In India, it has been also observed that private institutions have shown much faster adaptability to the shift in learning style from offline to remote. Apart from IITs & IIMs, Governmental institutions are struggling to adapt to the digital learning era. Also, teachers in private institutions showed faster adaptability to the digital learning system than the teachers in the Governmental institutions. This lack of adaptability shown by Governmental schools and colleges pushes the marginalized students to the new margins.

Impact of Digital Divide on young learners

The lack of accessibility to the current digital learning environment is just not a year wasted but it hints out towards the greater issue. In the world of the digital age, universal and uniform accessibility to digital facilities is of paramount importance. Lack of access to digital facilities pushes the population to the world of disparities and financial distress.

Lack of access to the learning might also push the students to the labor market as deprived students would have spare time to utilize in the cash crunch caused to the marginalized households due to the current pandemic. This increases the chances of children being pushed to the labor market

Uneven distribution of the digital facilities across the country is alarming as this is like ensuring another cycle of financial disparities for the already marginalized sections of the society. Not having access to the digital facilities means that the future generations of the deprived ones have been once again pushed one step behind the fortunate ones.

Short Term & Long-Term fixes to the issue of the Digital Divide in India

Digital learning could be of great use once there is a level playing field across the country. There could be short-term as well as long-term fixes to the issue of the digital divide in India. Short term fixes to the solutions include the increasing reliance on digital facilities such as TV, radio for learning. This would ensure greater accessibility in the deprived sections of the society due to more familiarity with these devices across the country. Such an initiative has been taken by the Ministry of Education of Peru. Other short-term fixes include the usage of digital solutions allowing offline access (Google Suite), distribution of hard copies of the learning materials.

In the long term, it is important to achieve the democratization of access to digital solutions. The Government should focus on providing the required digital facilities to every region of India. To launch BharatNet – to lay down optical fibers across India by 2022 is a welcome step but the Government must ensure last-mile accessibility within the decided timeframe. The Government should also look towards providing financial support to the vulnerable sections of society for buying smartphones, computers. Not only the Government should come forward, but private players should also play a constructive role. Few private players such as Vodafone have come forward to provide financial support to the vulnerable sections of the society for the purchase of digital equipment. With the advent of Jio in India, data/connectivity charges have dipped a lot but private players should consistently focus on providing quality services to these remote areas at affordable prices in the future. Digital learning platforms should also come up with offerings to enhance the inclusion of vulnerable students in the digital learning saga.

Since Covid-19 has already unveiled the digital divide in India, future policy focus should be to bridge the gap rather than ignoring the underlying issue, or else all the claims about India leading the digital inclusion would be big lies.

Impact of pandemic on Child Labour

Swapnil Lohani

Introduction

Over the past nine months, the entire news and social media has been flooded with reports of rising cases of Covid-19 and the impact it has had on India’s economy. Millions of people lost their jobs or were forced to take pay cuts. Migrants were forced to walk hundreds of kilometers back home and economic activity in rural areas came to a halt.

While these visible issues were extensively covered by various news agencies, some other invisible issues remained untouched. One such issue is the effect of Covid-19 pandemic on child labour.

The Pandemic, economic instability and child labour

The last few decades have seen significant progress in the fight against child labour. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has posed a risk of backtracking. Positive trends may fade away, and the problem may even worsen in most places. Therefore, there is an urgent need to acknowledge this aspect of the pandemic’s impact and take urgent action to protect children and their families.

The pandemic has had significant negative impact on the economy. It has led to profound disruptions of supply chains, halts in manufacturing and hence an increased economic insecurity. The very high proportion of workers in the informal economy makes India especially vulnerable to the economic and labour market shocks arising as a result of the pandemic.

The experience of previous epidemics and financial crises also suggest that the coronavirus pandemic will lead to a rise in child labour. During the Ebola pandemic from 2014-2016, large number of children were left vulnerable and child labour in affected areas increased. The global HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s led to a reduced economic growth, in turn impacting children and youth. Many children experienced loss of one or both parents and in the absence of social protection, found themselves head of household and providers for siblings or sick parent. Youth were widely reported to drop out of school and start work at a young age, with no skills or experience. The global financial crisis of 2007-08 also led to a rise in child labour, notably among girls.

The current Coronavirus pandemic has had the following socio-economic impact which threaten the problem of child labor to aggravate.

1. Falling Living Standards – There are millions of people in India living in slums who have been crippled by the pandemic due to informal settlements and inadequate housing. There is still a large population in our country that does not have any social protection. The number of people in extreme poverty has also skyrocketed in this pandemic. With poverty comes child labour as households are forced to use every available resource to survive. Studies have shown that for every 1 percentage increase in poverty there is a 0.7 percentage increase in child labour.
2. Deteriorating employment – As the pandemic is causing an unprecedented drop off in economic activity and working time and as economic contraction reduces opportunities in the labour market, it has pushed more children into hazardous and exploitative work. With falling wages more people in the household are forced to work for sustenance, thus forcing children to work at an early age. In informal sectors like garment manufacturing, flour mills etc., financial pressures on business and employers means exploitation of children as a source of cheap labour. Further, children already working could now be forced to work longer hours and at a lower wage.
3. Rise in informal employment – The current crisis has steered informality through different means. As capital-intensive small enterprises decline and self-employment is growing, risks of child involvement in work is growing. Disruption of domestic and international supply chain has made food supply erratic leading to further job destruction in agriculture and lower incomes for farmers, ultimately contributing to increase in child labour.
4. Credit Crisis – Beyond the current economic crisis lies a looming credit crisis especially in poorer regions. Businesses are not being able to pay debts and hence defaulting. Uncertainty has made investors hesitant to lend. Such a credit crisis has reduced household investment in schooling which can ultimately result in more child labour.
5. Shutting down of schools – The nationwide school closure has affected about 320 million students in primary and secondary schools. It has disproportionately hampered the education of underprivileged children in government schools, with many ending up permanently out of school and into the workforce.

When these and other factors result in losses in household income, expectations that children contribute financially can intensify. More children could be forced into exploitative and hazardous jobs. Those already working may do so for longer hours or under worsening conditions. Gender inequalities may grow more acute within families, with girls expected to perform additional household chores and agricultural work.

The way forward

There is no doubt that the current crisis is dire. At the same time, governments can make choices today that will determine the course and consequences of the pandemic. These choices must include conscious measures to prevent and eliminate child labour. Since potentially dramatic cuts in public spending can aggravate children’s vulnerability to harmful and exploitative forms of work, deliberate choices can be made to mitigate these risks, such as through extended social protection for poor families.

 

Additionally, the government needs to focus on the following points:

1. Guarantee access to credit to poor households
2. Create decent jobs for adults to make up for the job losses
3. Ensure every child’s access to education
4. Strengthen labour administration and enforcement
5. Protect the health and safety of workers
6. Fund and treat social service workers ass essential

 

Making the right socioeconomic and child protection policy choices will safeguard families and their children during the immediate crisis. It will also yield lasting benefits. Ensuring decent employment and safe return-to-work policies for adults, and safe reopening of schools for children are of paramount importance. So are further adapting and strengthening child protection systems and social services, and social protection measures, such as cash transfers. For low-income families, these are the fundamentals to meet basic needs without resorting to child labour or other harmful practices that put children at risk.

Cracks Appear in Peru’s Neoliberal Agriculture

Yanis Iqbal

Farm workers in various regions of Peru- such as Ica, Viru La Libertad and Piurahad – went on a strike in the first week of December, 2020, blocking the strategic Pan-American motorway to demand wage increases, basic social security benefits and the repeal of the decades-old Agrarian Promotion Law, enacted in 2000, as a mechanism to bolster the bourgeoisie’s power in the agro-export sector. The law benefits agro-export corporations in two ways. Firstly, it cuts the corporate tax rate by 30 to 15%, making the government lose out on more than $1 million in tax revenue. Agrokasa, Beta and Miranda are some of the companies benefitting from such hefty income tax cuts.

Secondly, the law authorizes the hiring of personnel for the agricultural industry through intermediary companies. These third-party contractors avoid statutory labor regulations and pay workers extremely low wages. Farm workers complain they are paid about $10 for a 12-14 hour workday. They also don’t receive benefits given to other workers, including annual bonuses and vacations.

Despite its partisan attitude towards the capitalists, the reactionary law was extended until 2031 by the government of Martín Vizcarra. Mobilizations and strikes ensued this decision, with the state deploying police violence to quell mass anger. On December 3, 2020, Peru’s National Police officers shot dead young farmer Jorge Muñoz during a peaceful protest called by farmworkers in Viru city, La Libertad Department. “The police disrupted the march with tear gas and gunshots. My son was hit in the head with a pellet,” the young man’s father said. The next day, President Francisco Sagasti sent a bill to congress to repeal the law in the face of the five days of protests, and it passed by a vote of 114 in favor, two against and seven abstentions.

The Withdrawal of the State

Peru’s current agrarian crisis is historically situated in the authoritarian neoliberal model implemented by former President Alberto Fujimori. Popularly known as “Fujishock”, these economic reforms advanced a structural agenda of ever-deepening precarity for the people. Beginning in 1991, the Fujimori administration opened all sectors of the Peruvian economy to foreign direct investment (FDI) and lifted restrictions on profit remittances. The government offered tax-stability packages for foreign investors for terms of ten to fifteen years and implemented wide-ranging privatization programs that eliminated competition from state-owned and domestic firms. If that was not enough, the government ratified bilateral and multilateral investment-guarantee treaties, such as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) convention and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) accords.

In the agrarian sector, Fujimori’s neoliberal restructuring entailed the closing of the agrarian bank, the cancellation of all forms of subsidies to farmers, the shutting down of the agrarian reform office and the bureau responsible for peasant communities. The Rice Trading Company (ECASA) and the National Supply Marketing Company (ENCI) – two integral institutions of the agricultural state apparatus – were also abolished. While the former established legal monopoly over the trading of rice – a key staple in the Peruvian diet – thus, ensuring rice producers an above-market return on their crop, the latter controlled imports of food and fertilizer.

The liquidation of ENCI and ECASA heavily impacted specific sectors. ENCI, for instance, had been the only institution that was allowed to import milk and its disappearance removed a source of support to the local dairy industry; as imports surged in the early 1990s (principally from New Zealand, but also Australia, the United States and Poland) the livelihood of smaller-scale producers were ruined in areas like Cajamarca and Arequipa. The abolition of ECASA liberalized the market in rice, removing an institution which had maintained prices artificially high for the benefit of producers.

The unleashing of deregulatory market forces led to the championing of individual over collective land rights since fragmentation consolidates profit-maximizing behavior. State farms were privatized and support withdrawn from production cooperatives and other group farming activities that were favored under the earlier state-led developmental model. The 1995 Land Law abolished the upper limits on personal landholding and allowed the state to sell land currently in public ownership. Privatization included the parceling and possible renting or selling of land previously held collectively by indigenous and peasant communities.

Agro-export Industrialization

Towards the end of 1990s, the structure of agricultural production began changing, with a notable increase in the share of tradable goods (such as rice, hard maize, wheat, soya, sugar, milk etc.) and a decline in the proportion of non-tradables (such as potato, quinua and other Andean grains). Policy under Fujimori tended to benefit larger-scale producers oriented primarily towards agro-industry and foreign markets. This was done mainly through the reduction of protective tariffs and the maintenance of an overvalued exchange rate. Both of these measures created a difficult environment for producers of tradable goods who found themselves increasingly subjected to competition from cheap food imports.

The disintegration of locally produced staples was additionally advanced through the dispossession of land and the restriction of proper water supply and credit to small-scale producers. To take an example, in 1989, Supreme Decree 037-89-AG, issued by President Garcia, signaled the transfer of water management in Peru from the state to private water user boards known as Junta de Usuarios (Users Board). In 1990, Fujimori continued this process, issuing Supreme Decree 003-90-AG, which allowed Juntas to collect agricultural water for the management of irrigation systems. The most important Juntas de Usuarios are controlled by agri-businesses and agro-export companies which regulate water services for their own class interests.

As a result of an amalgam of agrarian strategies implemented by the Peruvian state, domestic production of food crops has wholly collapsed. Imports of agricultural goods averaged $488 million in the period between 1986 and 1990, rising to $687 million in 1991–1995, and reaching $1035 million in 1996– 1999. In volume terms food imports rose from 1.6 million tons (1986–1990) to 2.1 million tons (1991–1995) and 2.8 million tons (1996–1999). Peru’s average annual agricultural trade balance, which until 1980 had been consistently in surplus, registered deficits of $216 million in 1986–1990, $383 million in 1991–1995 and $346 million in 1996–1999.

The Escalation of Class Struggle

With the pandemic-induced deterioration of economic conditions in Peru, the internal ruptures of the agricultural sector are being nakedly exposed. In the years between 2008 and 2018, there were considerably more individuals employed in agriculture than in the mining, communication, and finance sectors together. In spite of being the most labor-absorbing sector, agriculture is also the one where super-exploitation, accumulation through dispossession and permanent primitive accumulation have by and large prevailed. These inhumane features of the agricultural sector have been constantly criticized by the National Agrarian Confederation (CNA) – an organization which has highlighted the government’s prioritizing of agribusiness and called for recovering ancestral practices and land security. A groundswell of opposition against the ruling elite’s brutal policies will keep increasing as the masses confront the effects of a pandemic exacerbated by a pre-existing capitalist framework.

Coding or Crayoning for Small Kids?

Anirudh Agarwal

 “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”

– Albert Einstein

Coding is a short reference to the use of programming languages to provide lengthy sets of instructions for a computer to perform specific tasks. The continuous lines of text written behind the fancy looking websites and apps are what constitute as code for the application. The idea of the programming language being very similar to human languages like English or French has been debated a long time. While learning English or French, a student learns to talk and recite as well as write while people communicating with them immediately understand any mistakes and make corrections. However, a computer language cannot be spoken, its only written and doesn’t talk about real world objects like apples, oranges or clouds. The ‘objects’ in code have a completely different connotation. If a single comma (,) also goes out of place, the computer is not smart enough to spell check or be able to correct you, it’ll only reply with an error. Now imagine a long set of instructions and the countless errors the computer can throw, that testing for errors is actually a full-time IT job role.

Small kids and coding

Recently, the country has seen a growing trend where parents are having their small kids as old as 6 years learn coding through online platforms. The idea of coding is painted in such bright light while the reality is far from it. Coding is not a world filled with colours, robot designs, and games. It’s rather the opposite of it, where it writes colours as 6 digit numbers, pictures as another set of defined words and is devoid of any real world creativity. The advertisements circling around how kids could become millionaire CEOs after learning to code and misleading quotes from top CEOs like Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates, etc. are taken out of context to fuel the peer pressure to learn coding.

Presently, small kids are already subjected to tuitions and coaching with parents trying their best to get their kids to learn as many things as possible, just so their kid wouldn’t be left behind in this imaginary race against others. Sumantini Dhuru, a film director, social activist and ardent promoter of the Avehi Abacus Project (which creates educational material to help students understand the link between their different subjects); says she is hardly surprised by this. With India being the largest education market and on the boom of technology, companies are going to drive the young generation to make profits especially on the shoulder of parents who are highly aspirational. She agrees that parents feel that Coding is something their kids need to learn early or they might miss the train. Many academicians believe that early education should be more open-ended and interactive, before kids can grow up to become “experts” in any field. Magaret Leary, chair and director of curriculum at the National Cyberwatch Centre is stated to say that studies have shown that every 2 years, 60% of technical skills become obsolete, which means that programming language learnt at the age of 5 or 6 will essentially be of no use by the time the child is at 20.

The Fear of missing out (FOMO)

The fear of missing out on the technological revolution by not participating in coding is completely misplaced. For kids to be successful in a technology world, they should rather think more creatively, innovatively and expansively. Saying coding jobs are the most in-demand jobs is a bit of a misleading statement. Even within IT sector there are many different kinds of jobs. One who are just involved in testing, some roles are actually maintenance crew given that software glitches and problems happen all the time with the clients using the software, while only some are actually writing a part of a new software. In India, contrary to the popular belief, sales and marketing jobs are the most in-demand and not IT jobs according to a survey conducted by ManpowerGroup India in early 2020. Recently, Pradeep Poonia, an engineer who had gone on to criticize the ed-tech startup WhiteHarJr.’s marketing tactics calling it a Ponzi scheme. Byju’s WhiteHatJr. aims to provide coaching of coding to kids aged 6-14 and Poonia claims that the much advertised Wolf Gupta, who is a 13-year old kid that learnt AI and got a job at Google for some crore rupee package is completely bogus. The ASCI has asked Byju’s owned coding startup to take down its some of its advertisements against complaints that they made fake and misleading claims. The marketing message is again intended to induce fear among parents that their kid might miss out on something revolutionary.

Experts of any field do not start that young at the age of 6-10. Take surgeons, physicists, astronauts or even lawyers as examples, none of them start out so early. No big lawyer was understanding the legal framework of the constitution being six years old so why should being a software developer be any different. The majority of the successful technological experts did not start so early, yet the few examples of who did are highlighted in the media.

Thinking skills are important, not coding skills

The kids have only a limited bandwidth after their school. In that free time, they can either learn to code or enjoy crayoning, exercising, interact with different people and expand their horizons of thought. Engaging in creative thought activity brings out ideas and shapes their understanding of the world. It builds their ability to think of the world in a different way and identify problems in everyday life that can be solved. Sundar Pichai is not known for his coding skills, he is rather appreciated for his vision of the Google Chrome web browser. Bill Gates may have started coding early, but his vision for Microsoft is what made him successful and not his ability to code windows. Similarly, today we have entrepreneurs, scientists and even software developers thinking about the next frontier because learning to code as Dhuru says is like becoming an electrician. You can fix a light bulb if it goes bad yourself or you could get someone to do it but thinking about the functioning of the bulb or the smartphone is not something enabled by learning to code.

Conclusion

Parents should take a step back and evaluate, what their child is ultimately gaining from this exercise. There are alternate activities that can keep the child engaged like learning a musical instrument or even dancing. Parents should think back to their childhood about all the times spent playing and crayoning, and that would now be deprived from their children in the name of coding. The future is about innovation, not just in technology but actually in thought as all technology we see today are tangible outcomes of ideas. Those ideas are worth millions and not the product. An Iphone today costs about 1 lakh rupees give or take, depending upon the model you choose but the ideas behind making the iphone powers the trillion dollar apple company. Investing in developing moral values in children and engaging them in creative activity will be most beneficial as well as help them have happy childhood memories for life.