Indonesian COVID infections surge past two million

Robert Campion

Indonesia’s daily cases reached a record high on Monday as the country passed the mark of two million cases since the pandemic began.

There were 14,536 infections recorded on Monday, mostly centered in the most populous island of Java, where the capital city of Jakarta is located. High case numbers, however, were also registered in Aceh, Riau Islands and Central Kalimantan. Monday’s infection tally is more than double the typical daily figure at the start of June.

UNICEF aid workers in Indonesia (Credit: UNICEF)

According to the COVID tracking website worldometers, there have been 2,018,113 cases and 55,291 deaths in Indonesia, the highest figures in South East Asia, and third in all of Asia behind India and Iran.

A major reason behind the increased spread has been the emergence of the Delta variant, first recorded in India, which has now spread to over 74 countries worldwide. Scientists have stated that the variant, which is driving an international resurgence of the pandemic, is likely twice as infectious as the initial coronavirus.

According to epidemiologist, Dicky Budiman, from Australia’s Griffith University: “This Delta variant nearly meets the criteria to be a super-variant as it is very conteconomagious, it can clinically worsen the patient’s condition, and it can reduce the efficacy of antibodies, which means that vaccinated people can be infected, as well as COVID-19 survivors.”

Budiman warned there is a “big probability” that Indonesia may face a similar situation as in India, where, at its height, an outbreak of Delta was resulting in up to 400,000 cases per day and thousands of deaths.

Indonesian health officials report that Delta is now the dominant strain in the densely populated areas of Jakarta, as well as Central and East Java.

The rise in cases has also been reflected in an increase in hospital occupancy rates, which shot up from 45 percent in Jakarta over a week ago to 90 per cent, according to government data. In the central Java district of Kudus, bed occupancy rates also exceeded 90 percent last week. There have been reports of sick people forming queues lining the corridors outside the hospitals.

The South China Morning Post stated on Monday that the intensive care ward at Persahabatan hospital in Jakarta is now full, and the emergency ward too overwhelmed to accept new patients. Indonesian lung specialist Erlina Burhan added that supplies of oxygen tubes are dangerously low, and that doctors are begging for beds to be made available for sick relatives.

According to Reuters, hundreds of health care workers have also contracted the virus. The number of health employees dying from the virus has reportedly dropped from the highs of 158 in January to 13 in May, according to independent research group LaporCOVID-19. It states that this is a product of the vaccination of workers in the sector, which began early this year.

Large scale infections of doctors and nurses, however, are compromising the ability of major hospitals to treat those requiring urgent care. Laura Navika Yamani, an epidemiologist from Airlangga University in Surabaya, East Java, stated: “We need to brace for a collapse in our health system, if we don’t take the necessary precautions.”

The positivity rate, indicating the percentage of all tests that return with a confirmation of infection, is at the shocking level of 41.1 percent. This value, far higher than the level advised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 5 percent, indicates that the virus is running rampant and many cases are not being identified.

“With increased transmission due to variants of concern, urgent action is needed to contain the situation in many provinces,” the WHO warned Thursday last week.

The Indonesian government, however, like many of its counterparts internationally, has rejected calls for a comprehensive lockdown to contain the spread.

Instead, 29 “red zones” have been announced, where two-week partial lockdowns have been instituted. Restaurants, cafes and malls are limited to 25 percent capacity and religious activities at houses of worship have also been suspended.

Offices outside the red zone areas have also been instructed to operate at 50 percent capacity.

The governor of Jakarta, Anies Baswedan, has resisted demands for a full lockdown, opting for the closure of non-essential businesses at 8 p.m. Curfews have been imposed between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. in 10 locations including Gunawarman and Senopati roads in the central business district.

Speaking on the spread of the virus, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Pandjaitan attempted to blame it on the population itself for participating in last month’s celebration of the Islamic holiday of Ramadan, when millions visited their hometowns in spite of a government ban.

In a virtual conference, Pandjaitan stated: “It’s all our fault. The government went all out to remind us to stay at home, not to mudik [travel to your hometown ], but we still went ahead. This is the consequence.”

This is a cynical attempt to deflect from the government’s own responsibility. It has consistently sought to downplay the extent of the coronavirus crisis, in order to justify the refusal to implement full lockdown measures when required. This has inevitably undermined the hastily-announced, and partial restrictions that the government has occasionally introduced, when it has been threatened with an explosion of the pandemic and a collapse of the health system.

The circulation of the Delta variant in the world’s fourth-most populous country poses the risk of further mutations, including those that may limit the efficacy of vaccinations.

Speaking outside a vaccination centre near Jakarta, President Joko Widodo called for the acceleration of vaccination efforts last week. “We need vaccination acceleration in order to achieve communal immunity, which we hope can stop the COVID-19 spread,” he said. Widodo said that local governments and cabinet ministers should work to increase vaccinations next month to one million each day.

The inoculation campaign, largely using Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine, which is the least effective against the Delta variant, has been consistently behind schedule. The government has aimed for 181 million of its 270 million population to be vaccinated by March 2022, but currently only 11.8 million are fully vaccinated.

Whilst Bali plans to have fully vaccinated 3 million of its 4.36 million population by the end of this month, so far only 1.9 million residents have received their first dose. In Riau, population 6.83 million, a little more than 490,000 have received their first jab.

Along with the risk that it is posing to the health and lives of ordinary people, the expanding coronavirus crisis is intensifying the social hardships facing workers and the poor. Reports prior to the pandemic consistently recorded rising social inequality. In 2017, Oxfam ranked Indonesia the sixth-most unequal country in the world. In a country of some 264 million people, the four richest individuals have a combined wealth greater than the poorest 100 million.

Australia’s official jobless statistics mask wage-cutting push

Mike Head

Government and media declarations of an extraordinary “recovery” greeted last week’s drop in Australia’s official unemployment rate from 5.48 percent in April to 5.07 percent in May, just above its pre-pandemic level.

Among the boasts were that Australia had outperformed virtually every comparable country, as if it were an exception to the fallout from the COVID-19 disaster.

Unemployed workers outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink office in March 2020 [Source: WSWS Media]

These claims deliberately hide the reality—that the corporate elite and its political servants, no less than their counterparts globally, are exploiting the pandemic to coerce unemployed and under-employed workers, especially young workers, into lower-paid and insecure employment.

As a result, wages are continuing to fall compared to inflation, deepening the cut in average real pay since the 2008–09 global financial crisis, and the widespread collapse of the mining boom from 2012.

At the same time, the wealthiest layers of society are, as a result, reaping an unprecedented boost to their fortunes. Their gains have been further inflated by near-zero interest rates, multi-billion dollar business subsidies and incentives, an ongoing $200 billion injection of funds into the financial markets by the Reserve Bank of Australia, and record prices for iron ore exports, mainly to China.

The official jobless rate estimate produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) masks the reality by not counting anyone employed for more than one hour per fortnight. It also excludes non-resident workers on temporary visas, whose numbers had grown to around 880,000 before the pandemic.

The ABS publishes a broader measure of employment, called the labour market account, which includes these non-resident workers. It indicates that their numbers slumped by 333,900 between December 2019 and March 2021.

If non-resident workers returned to take these jobs, the unemployment rate would increase from 5.1 percent to 7.5 percent, giving a truer picture of the real conditions facing workers.

Instead of the total number of employed people in Australia being one percent above its pre-coronavirus 2020 peak, as the political and media establishment maintains, the broader labour market account shows that in March 2021, employment was 2.1 percent below its level, one year earlier.

This helps explain the sharp reduction in the official unemployment rate. Many local workers have been pushed by financial stress—and the cutting of welfare payments back to poverty-levels—into taking jobs previously filled by temporary visa holders, often on poor pay and conditions.

This is one major reason why the drop in the official jobless rate is generating no increase in wages, despite the government’s mantra that “job creation” and workforce shortages would automatically drive up workers’ pay levels through the operation of supply and demand on the labour market.

In fact, the Liberal-National Coalition government’s latest federal budget, handed down last month, forecasts that record-low wages growth will continue over the forward estimates, that is, until at least 2024–25. For the foreseeable future, the Consumer Price Index will outpace the Wage Price Index.

Last week, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Philip Lowe delivered a speech in which he said that despite the “recovery” being “much stronger” than the RBA had anticipated, “wages growth” remained “subdued.”

“The Wage Price Index increased by just 1.5 percent over the past year, with wages growth slow in the private and public sectors,” Lowe said. “And it is noteworthy that even in those pockets where firms are finding it hardest to hire workers, wage increases are mostly modest.”

Lowe presented this pattern as a quandary, and again repeated the line that strong employment growth would eventually push up wages. But employment has actually fallen, and employers are seizing on these conditions to suppress wages further.

In the budget, the government also allowed impoverished international students “to work unlimited hours” in agriculture, aged care, hospitality and tourism, adding to the downward pressure on wages produced by the scrapping of JobKeeper wage subsidies and the slashing of JobSeeker dole payments, at the end of March.

The pandemic is being used to intensify the protracted corporate-government offensive on wages. According to a report released this week by the McKell Institute, a Labor Party-linked think tank, the average Australian worker would be earning $254 more per week if wages growth had continued at the rate before the Liberal-National government took office in 2013.

That estimate, however, obscures the extent and underlying causes of the wages loss. The marked slowdown actually began under the previous Labor government of 2007–13, first during the 2008–09 crisis and then after the mining boom imploded from 2012.

In fact, the past four decades have seen an historic transfer of income and wealth from the working class to the ruling elite. A report released earlier this year by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) calculated that if workers’ share of gross domestic product had remained at the levels recorded in 1970, total wages would have been $200 billion higher in 2019. Workers would have received, on average, $15,000 each in additional annual income.

What the ACTU report sought to cover up is that this historic reversal is the product of decades of the strangling of the class struggle by the trade unions themselves, especially since the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996, which struck a series of Accords with the ACTU that drove down real wages, and devastated working conditions, under the banner of making Australian capitalism “internationally competitive.”

During this period, the trade unions, like their counterparts worldwide, underwent a transformation. From organisations that once fought for limited improvements in workers’ pay and conditions—always within the framework of capitalist wage labour—they became the police force of the endless “restructuring” demanded by big business, whether under Liberal-National or Labor governments.

Now, the country’s richest billionaires have doubled their worth during the pandemic, and this enrichment is set to keep growing.

In last week’s speech, Lowe also signaled the continuation of the RBA’s “quantitative easing” (QE) bond purchases, which are funneling $100 billion into the money markets every six months. “The RBA’s bond purchase program is one of the factors underpinning the accommodative conditions necessary for our economic recovery,” he said.

It would be “premature” to consider curtailing these purchases when peer central banks, like the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, were expected to continue their own QE programs through 2022.

As well as pouring money into the share and property markets, resulting in soaring house prices and other speculative activity, the RBA’s bond purchases place downward pressure on long-term interest rates and curb the price of the Australian dollar, despite elevated iron ore and other export commodity prices, further benefiting the financial elite.

According to Westpac bank’s Bill Evans, the Australian dollar should now be trading between US85 cents and US90 cents, based on the bank’s exchange rate model. “The only thing we can figure that explains the gap between the Aussie dollar’s fair value and its current level around US75 cents is the RBA’s QE program,” Evans told journalists last week.

Far from being an exceptional “success” story, however, Australian capitalism is extremely dependent on this greatest-ever financial stimulus, alongside currently booming iron ore sales to China. But it depends, above all, on the capacity of the increasingly discredited Labor Party-affiliated trade union apparatuses to suppress mounting discontent in the working class.

Sri Lankan government deploys police to crack down on social media

Sakuna Jayawardana

The Sri Lankan government has announced new anti-democratic measures and mobilised police to suppress so-called fake news on social media.

On June 7, police media spokesman Senior Deputy Inspector General Ajith Rohana declared that the criminal investigation department has established a special team to “patrol in the cyber space” and trace “false news related to COVID-19 or any other sensitive issues.”

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, attends 2020 event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule. [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

It was an offence, Rohana said, “if a person created a panic situation by spreading fake news.”

The following day, a police media statement detailed the new measures. Persons who propagate false information, photos or video, it said, could be arrested without a warrant for disrupting public order, creating ethnic or religious disharmony or contributing to the sexual harassment of women and children.

Those arrested could be charged under any of the country’s harsh laws, including the Penal Code, the Computer Crimes Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and the Pornography Act.

These laws can be used to punish anyone opposing or criticising the government and the capitalist state. Those arrested under the draconian PTA can be detained for up to 18 months, with any confessions obtained during this time used as evidence.

Addressing parliament on June 8, Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara repeated the police statements, indicating that the decision to clampdown on social media was taken at the highest levels of President Rajapakse’s government.

Government claims to be defending religious and ethnic harmony or curbing misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic are outright lies.

Successive Sri Lankan governments, including the current regime, are responsible for countless anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim provocations, most notably the nearly 30-year anti-Tamil civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Likewise, the government is responsible for circulating misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical experts have repeatedly voiced concerns that the number of infections and deaths are greater than those recorded by Sri Lankan health authorities, especially under conditions of very low testing rates. As has been the case internationally, moreover, the Sri Lankan government has sought to downplay the severity of the pandemic, to justify its profit-driven and inadequate response.

In reality, the Rajapakse regime’s moves to criminalise so-called fake news on social media are a response to the deepening political and economic crisis of the Sri Lankan capitalist class and rising social opposition to Colombo’s criminal mishandling of the now worsening pandemic.

Government and big business-imposed wage and job cuts, along with the rising cost of food and other essentials, is provoking working-class resistance with strikes and protests by health, education, railway, electricity and water board state sector workers.

Nervous about this developing opposition, President Rajapakse on May 27 and June 2 used the essential public services act to impose strike bans on virtually all state sector workers. Colombo has also been systemically militarising the state apparatus, appointing senior in-service and retired officers to key positions in the administration. The government’s attack on social media is part and parcel of these repressive preparations.

On June 13, five days after the police announcement, Mass Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella told Sunday Morning that the sharing of fake news on social media had seen some people “pushing the country towards re-enactment of the criminal defamation law.”

The notoriously anti-democratic, criminal defamation law (previously repealed in 2002) was initiated during British colonial rule, but retained after Sri Lanka was granted formal independence in 1948. The law was used by successive governments to intimidate and censor the media.

In April, the cabinet office announced that it had approved a paper, presented by Justice Minister Ali Sabry and the media minister, for new laws to “protect society” from “the harm caused by false propaganda on the internet.”

Sabry said the cabinet was discussing the introduction of laws similar to Singapore’s punitive “Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act,” which carries fines of nearly $US750,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

In a statement condemning Colombo’s anti-democratic measures against internet users, the Journalists for Rights in Sri Lanka group said that the government was “trying to intimidate social media users.”

On June 11, the Bar Association of Sri Lanka issued a statement, voicing its concerns about police being allowed to arrest without warrant anyone accused of publishing fake news. It warned that the new measures meant that “police are allowed to decide on what is or is not fake news and, based on their subjective decisions, arrest and detain those persons.”

The parliamentary opposition parties and the unions do not oppose these repressive measures. The Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main opposition party, attempted to disguise its support by declaring that its youth wing would provide legal support to anyone arrested for holding views opposing the government.

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the Tamil National Alliance and the United National Party, along with the unions, have not said a word about the new measures. Nor have they opposed the government’s anti-strike essential service orders. Like the government, these organisations are terrified of the rising working-class opposition.

These attacks on social media in Sri Lanka are part of an escalating assault on freedom of speech and expression, underway on every continent.

In the US, Twitter suspended the account of data scientist Rebecca Jones in early June, because she published real information about COVID-19 infections in Florida. Jones opposed the reopening of schools during the pandemic last year and refused to alter infection and death counts on the state’s coronavirus dashboard.

In April, Twitter removed over 20 accounts in India at the request of the Modi government, because they had made critical comments about New Delhi’s pandemic response.

The World Socialist Web Site also continues to be censored by Google search engines, and on social media platforms.

Galle Face Green protest in 2018 supporting plantation workers' wage demands (Source: WSWS Media)

In every country, social media provides a powerful weapon for workers to organise their struggles. In Sri Lanka, its use has grown exponentially in recent years. According to the Asia Pacific Institute for Digital Marketing, 63 percent of Sri Lanka’s 10.1 million internet users were active on social media in 2020.

India’s Farmers and the Neoliberal Playbook

Colin Todhunter

Globally, there is an ongoing trend of a handful of big companies determining what food is grown, how it is grown, what is in it and who sells it. This model involves highly processed food adulterated with chemical inputs ending up in large near-monopoly supermarket chains or fast-food outlets that rely on industrial-scale farming.

While the brands lining the shelves of giant retail outlets seem vast, a handful of food companies own these brands which, in turn, rely on a relatively narrow range of produce for ingredients. At the same time, this illusion of choice often comes at the expense of food security in poorer countries that were compelled to restructure their agriculture to facilitate agro-exports courtesy of the World Bank, IMF, the WTO and global agribusiness interests.

In Mexico, transnational food retail and processing companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items, often with the direct support of the government. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and the consequences for public health have been catastrophic.

Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health released the results of a national survey of food security and nutrition in 2012. Between 1988 and 2012, the proportion of overweight women between the ages of 20 and 49 increased from 25 to 35 per cent and the number of obese women in this age group increased from 9 to 37 per cent. Some 29 per cent of Mexican children between the ages of 5 and 11 were found to be overweight, as were 35 per cent of the youngsters between 11 and 19, while one in ten school age children experienced anaemia.

Former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, concludes that trade policies had favoured a greater reliance on heavily processed and refined foods with a long shelf life rather than on the consumption of fresh and more perishable foods, particularly fruit and vegetables. He added that the overweight and obesity emergency that Mexico faces could have been avoided.

In 2015, the non-profit organisation GRAIN reported that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) led to the direct investment in food processing and a change in Mexico’s retail structure (towards supermarkets and convenience stores) as well as the emergence of global agribusiness and transnational food companies in the country.

NAFTA eliminated rules preventing foreign investors from owning more than 49 per cent of a company. It also prohibited minimum amounts of domestic content in production and increased rights for foreign investors to retain profits and returns from initial investments. By 1999, US companies had invested 5.3 billion dollars in Mexico’s food processing industry, a 25-fold increase in just 12 years.

US food corporations began to colonise the dominant food distribution networks of small-scale vendors, known as tiendas (corner shops). This helped spread nutritionally poor food as they allowed these corporations to sell and promote their foods to poorer populations in small towns and communities. By 2012, retail chains had displaced tiendas as Mexico’s main source of food sales.

In Mexico, the loss of food sovereignty induced catastrophic changes to the nation’s diet and many small-scale farmers lost their livelihoods, which was accelerated by the dumping of surplus commodities (produced at below the cost of production due to subsidies) from the US. NAFTA rapidly drove millions of Mexican farmers, ranchers and small business people into bankruptcy, leading to the flight of millions of immigrant workers.

Warning for India

What happened in Mexico should serve as a warning as Indian farmers continue their protest against three recent farm bills that are designed to fully corporatize the agrifood sector through contract farming, the massive roll-back of public sector support systems, a reliance on imports (boosted by a future US trade deal) and the acceleration of large-scale (online) retail.

If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

And if you want to know the eventual fate of India’s farmers, look no further than the 1990s when the IMF and World Bank advised India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture in return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time.

India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops for export to earn foreign exchange. Part of the strategy would also involve changing land laws so that land could be sold and amalgamated for industrial-scale farming.

The plan was for foreign corporations to capture the sector, with the aforementioned policies having effectively weakened or displaced independent cultivators.

To date, this process has been slow but the recent legislation could finally deliver a knock-out blow to tens of millions of farmers and give what the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations have wanted all along. It will also serve the retail/agribusiness/logistics interests of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and its sixth richest, Gautam Adani.

During their ongoing protests, farmers have been teargassed, smeared and beaten. Journalist Satya Sagar notes that government advisors fear that seeming to appear weak with the agitating farmers would not sit well with foreign agrifood investors and could stop the flow of big money into the sector – and the economy as a whole.

And it is indeed ‘big’ money. Facebook invested 5.5 billion dollars last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested 4.5 billion dollars. Currently, Amazon and Flipkart (Walmart has an 81% stake) together control over 60% of the country’s overall e-commerce market. These and other international investors have a great deal to lose if the recent farm legislation is repealed. So does the Indian government.

Since the 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration.

Little wonder the government needs to be seen as acting ‘tough’ on protesting farmers because now, more than ever, attracting and retaining foreign reserves will be required to purchase food on the international market once India surrenders responsibility for its food policy to private players by eliminating its buffer stocks.

The plan to radically restructure agrifood in the country is being sold to the public under the guise of ‘modernising’ the sector. And this is to be carried out by self-proclaimed ‘wealth creators’ like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Ambani who are highly experienced at creating wealth – for themselves.

According to the recent Oxfam report ‘The Inequality Virus’, Mukesh Ambani doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. The coronavirus-related lockdown in India resulted in the country’s billionaires increasing their wealth by around 35 per cent, while 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

Prior to the lockdown, Oxfam reported that 73 per cent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent, while 670 million Indians, the poorest half of the population, saw only a 1 per cent increase in their wealth.

Moreover, the fortunes of India’s billionaires increased by almost 10 times over a decade and their total wealth was higher than the entire Union budget of India for the fiscal year 2018-19.

It is clear who these ‘wealth creators’ create wealth for. On the People’s Review site, Tanmoy Ibrahim writes a piece on India’s billionaire class, with a strong focus on Ambani and Adani. By outlining the nature of crony capitalism in India, it is clear that Modi’s ‘wealth creators’ are given carte blanche to plunder the public purse, people and the environment, while real wealth creators – not least the farmers – are fighting for existence.

The current struggle should not be regarded as a battle between the government and farmers. If what happened in Mexico is anything to go by, the outcome will adversely affect the entire nation in terms of the further deterioration of public health and the loss of livelihoods.

Consider that rates of obesity in India have already tripled in the last two decades and the nation is fast becoming the diabetes and heart disease capital of the world. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), between 2005 and 2015 the number of obese people doubled, even though one in five children in the 5-9 year age group were found to be stunted.

This will be just part of the cost of handing over the sector to billionaire (comprador) capitalists Mukesh Ambani and Gautum Adani and Jeff Bezos (world’s richest person), Mark Zukerberg (world’s fourth richest person), the Cargill business family (14 billionaires) and the Walmart business family (richest in the US).

These individuals are poised to siphon off the wealth of India’s agrifood sector while denying the livelihoods of many millions of small-scale farmers and local mom and pop retailers while undermining the health of the nation.

Toxic Corporations Are Destroying the Planet’s Soil

Colin Todhunter

A newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science argues that a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is causing havoc beneath fields covered in corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops. The research is the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health.

The study is discussed by two of the report’s authors, Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone, in a recent article appearing on the Scientific American website. The authors state that the findings should bring about immediate changes in how regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assess the risks posed by the nearly 850 pesticide ingredients approved for use in the USA.

Conducted by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and the University of Maryland, the research looked at almost 400 published studies that together had carried out more than 2800 experiments on how pesticides affect soil organisms. The review encompassed 275 unique species or types of soil organisms and 284 different pesticides or pesticide mixtures.

Pesticides were found to harm organisms that are critical to maintaining healthy soils in over 70 per cent of cases. But Donley and Gunstone say this type of harm is not considered in the EPA’s safety reviews, which ignore pesticide harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species. The EPA uses a single test species to estimate risk to all soil organisms, the European honeybee, which spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes. But 50-100 per cent of all pesticides end up in soil.

The researchers conclude that the ongoing escalation of pesticide-intensive agriculture and pollution are major driving factors in the decline of soil organisms. By carrying out wholly inadequate reviews, the regulatory system serves to protect the pesticide industry.

The study comes in the wake of other recent findings that indicate high levels of the weedkiller chemical glyphosate and its toxic breakdown product AMPA have been found in topsoil samples from no-till fields in Brazil.

Writing on the GMWatch website, Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews note that, despite this, the agrochemical companies seeking the renewal of the authorisation of glyphosate by the European Union in 2022 are saying that one of the greatest benefits of glyphosate is its ability to foster healthier soils by reducing the need for tillage (or ploughing).

This in itself is misleading because farmers are resorting to ploughing given increasing weed resistance to glyphosate and organic agriculture also incorporates no till methods. At the same time, proponents of glyphosate conveniently ignore or deny its toxicity to soils, water, humans and wildlife. With that in mind, it is noteworthy that GMWatch also refers to another recent study which says that glyphosate is responsible for a five per cent increase in infant mortality in Brazil.

The new study, ‘Pesticides in a case study on no-tillage farming systems and surrounding forest patches in Brazil’ in the journal Scientific Reports, leads the researchers to conclude that glyphosate-contaminated soil can adversely impact food quality and human health and ecological processes for ecosystem services maintenance. They argue that glyphosate and AMPA presence in soil may promote toxicity to key species for biodiversity conservation, which are fundamental for maintaining functioning ecological systems.

These studies reiterate the need to shift away from increasingly discredited ‘green revolution’ ideology and practices. This chemical-intensive model has helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health.

If we turn to India, for instance, that country is losing 5334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion and degradation, much of which is attributed to the indiscreet and excessive use of synthetic agrochemicals. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is becoming deficient in nutrients and fertility.

India is not unique in this respect. Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization stated back in 2014 that if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years. She noted that about a third of the world’s soil had already been degraded. There is general agreement that chemical-heavy farming techniques are a major cause.

It can take 500 years to generate an inch of soil yet just a few generations to destroy. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic agrochemicals as part of a model of chemical-dependent farming, you harm essential micro-organisms and end up feeding soil a limited doughnut diet of toxic inputs.

Armed with their multi-billion-dollar money-spinning synthetic biocides, this is what the agrochemical companies have been doing for decades. In their arrogance, these companies claim to have knowledge that they do not possess and then attempt to get the public and co-opted agencies and politicians to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its bought-and-paid-for scientific priesthood.

The damaging impacts of their products on health and the environment have been widely reported for decades, starting with Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking 1962 book Silent Spring.

These latest studies underscore the need to shift towards organic farming and agroecology and invest in indigenous models of agriculture – as has been consistently advocated by various high-level international agencies, not least the United Nations, and numerous official reports.

Russian forces fire warning shots at UK destroyer HMS Defender over territorial encroachment in Black Sea

Robert Stevens

A Russian patrol ship fired a warning shot yesterday at the British destroyer HMS Defender off the coast of Crimea. This was followed by the dropping of high-explosive OFAB-250s fragmentation bombs in the path of the UK vessel.

According to Russia’s defence ministry, HMS Defender made a 3-kilometre incursion into Russia's territorial waters off Cape Fiolent in the south of Crimea. Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia in March 2014, following a US-backed far-right coup in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

The incident began with a major military and political provocation by the UK. HMS Defender had just left Odessa in southern Ukraine and was carrying out exercises with a Royal Netherlands Navy Frigate, HNLMS Evertsen. The Financial Times reported Wednesday, “British and Ukrainian officials met on board the destroyer on Tuesday to agree a defence deal in which the UK will help boost Kyiv’s naval capabilities. The co-operation will include training of Ukrainian navy personnel, the creation of new naval bases, and the purchase of two Sandown class minehunters.”

The Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender leaves the naval base in Portsmouth harbour for exercises in Scotland, prior to deployment to the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Indo-Pacific region as part of the UK's Carrier Strike Group 21. May 1, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

A statement from Russian ministry's TV channel Zvezda said of the incident, “The Black Sea Fleet together with the FSB (security service) stopped a violation of the Russian border by a British destroyer, Defender.

“Today, at 11:52, the Defender crossed the state border of Russia in the northwestern part of the Black Sea. It entered the territorial waters for three kilometres, in the area of Cape Fiolent…

“At 12:06 and 12:08, a Russian border patrol ship fired a warning shot. At 12:19, the Su-24M aircraft of the Black Sea Fleet performed a warning bombing, dropping 4 OFAB-250 bombs on the course of the destroyer.”

“At 12:23 the British destroyer left the borders of the territorial sea of Russia.”

Clearly caught by surprise at Russia’s swift and aggressive response, the MoD stated, “The Royal Navy ship is conducting innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters in accordance with international law. We believe the Russians were undertaking a gunnery exercise in the Black Sea and provided the maritime community with prior-warning of their activity. No shots were directed at HMS Defender and we do not recognise the claim that bombs were dropped in her path.”

This denial was refuted by BBC Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale, speaking from aboard HMS Defender, who made a statement uploaded onto the BBC’s news site as a sound file, and in comments included in an accompanying news update.

Beale wrote, “Two Russian coastguard ships that were shadowing the Royal Navy warship [HMS Defender], tried to force it to alter course. At one stage one of the Russian vessels closed in to about 100m (328ft).

“Increasingly hostile warnings were issued over the radio—including one that said ‘if you don't change course I'll fire’…”

While speaking on a recording just 99 seconds long, the roaring jet engines of a Russian air force jet can be heard at 23 seconds in, for more than 10 seconds—forcing Beale to exclaim “that is another Russian aircraft buzzing the warship, yeah, in the Black Sea. There have been at times more than 20 aircraft above the warship. And there have been warning from Russia coastguard vessels and indeed we have heard shots fired. We believe they were out of range”.

A section of Beale’s report that was taken down within minutes of being published on the BBC site reveals how tense the situation was: “At one stage they [sailors onboard HMS Defender] did put on anti-flash masks to protect their faces, just in case there was going to be an exchange of fire… They didn't think that would happen and it did not happen. But the Russian jets have taken an interest in this and they had warned the ship not to go into Crimean territorial waters, claiming that they are Russian waters.”

That events took this course was no accident given the provocative mission being carried out by the UK in the region. As Beale notes in his report, “The crew were already at action stations as they approached the southern tip of Russian occupied Crimea. Weapons systems on board the Royal Navy destroyer had already been loaded. This would be a deliberate move to make a point to Russia.”

The incident with HMS Defender must be seen in the context of a ramping up of militarism by British imperialism and its NATO partners, with Moscow and China in their crosshairs.

A Type 45 destroyer primarily designed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare, HMS Defender is one of the several warships—alongside warplanes, submarines, UK and US soldiers and sailors—that are forming a “ring of steel” around one of the UK’s two new aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is on its maiden operational deployment.

The HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier with seven helicopters visible onboard at Portsmouth harbour. May 1, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

Carrier Strike Group 21 (CSG21) left the UK last month on a six-month trip to the Indo Pacific region. CSG21 was described by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Tuesday, just 24 hours before the Black Sea incident, as “the largest concentration of maritime and air power to leave the UK in a generation…”

Eighteen warplanes, including UK and US F35B jets, “carried out operational sorties for the first time from HMS Queen Elizabeth in support of Operation Shader and US Operation Inherent Resolve”.

The bellicose statement continued, “For the task group, which has spent previous weeks in the Mediterranean working with NATO allies and partners, it marks a change of emphasis. From exercises and international engagements, the Carrier Strike Group is now delivering its full might of naval and air power…”

Operation Inherent Resolve and Operation Shader are code names for military interventions by the US and Britain, set up in 2014 ostensibly to target Islamic State, which mainly consist of constant air strikes and hostile surveillance missions in a host of countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Lebanon.

The MoD statement quoted Captain James Blackmore, Commander of the Carrier Air Wing, who pointed to the significance of Royal Navy-led bombing operations: “this time” UK warplanes were “flying from an aircraft carrier at sea, which marks the Royal Navy’s return to maritime strike operations for the first time since the Libya campaign a decade ago.”

The provocation in the Black Sea, as with all CSG21 operations, could not proceed without the say-so of the United States. Blackmore pointed to the integral role of US forces in the military strikes: “This is also notable as the first combat mission flown by US aircraft from a foreign carrier since HMS Victorious in the South Pacific in 1943. The level of integration between Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and US Marine Corps is truly seamless, and testament to how close we’ve become since we first embarked together last October.”

The FT ’s report of the Black Sea exchange quoted Mark Galeotti, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute: “Moscow ‘was trying to show it’s not going to be pushed around’ by ‘provocative’ actions such as HMS Defender’s voyage. ‘The Brits are often in this role as a proxy — they [the Russians] don’t want to be too aggressive against the Americans […] so there is a sense you do it against the Brits because it’s not quite as dangerous,’ he said.”

The MoD announced in May that CSG21 “will participate in NATO exercises such as Exercise Steadfast Defender and provide support to NATO Operation Sea Guardian and maritime security operations in the Black Sea.”

Shortly before the Carrier Strike Group left the UK, MoD sources revealed that HMS Defender would “peel off” in the Mediterranean from the main force and head through the Bosphorus “to carry out her own set of missions in the Black Sea”.

On June 10, the Royal Navy said that HMS Defender would be “heading to the Black Sea after a stop in Istanbul.” Over several weeks, it had “completed intensive training and worked on Operation Sea Guardian, NATO’s mission in the Mediterranean to deter and counter terrorism.”

NATO’s anti-Russian operations will be intensified in the days ahead, with its annual Sea Breeze military exercises taking place in the Black Sea region from June 28 to July 10.

Announcing the operation, the US Embassy in Ukraine said, “This year’s iteration involves the largest number of participating nations in the exercise’s history, including 32 countries from six continents, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft, and 18 special operation and dive teams.” It would “focus on multiple warfare areas including amphibious warfare, land maneuvre warfare, diving operations, maritime interdiction operations, air defense, special operations integration, anti-submarine warfare, and search and rescue operations.”

Wednesday’s incident in the Black Sea is a stark indication of how the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the interests of competing imperialist powers have transformed the entire region into a powder keg that could ignite a worldwide conflagration. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Russia firing on the UK warship was “A clear proof of Ukraine's position: Russia’s aggressive and provocative actions in the Black and Azov seas, its occupation & militarization of Crimea pose a lasting threat to Ukraine and allies. We need a new quality of cooperation between Ukraine & NATO allies in the Black Sea.”

Migrant children speak of horrifying conditions in detention centers set up by the Biden administration

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

Testimonials filed in a California federal court this week reveal the horrific conditions faced by migrant children who are being held in federal detention centers, euphemistically categorized as “emergency shelters,” set up by the Biden administration. The conditions described in the 17 testimonials from children aged nine to 17, largely from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, include being given spoiled food, lack of drinking water and clean clothes, overcrowding, inability to contact family members and severe mental health issues.

Young unaccompanied migrants, from ages 3 to 9, watch television inside a playpen at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, in Donna, Texas. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, Pool, File)

The testimonials were gathered by attorneys with the Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law and the National Center for Youth Law, who are representing the children in the long-running Flores settlement, a court agreement setting bedrock standards of care for children in federal custody. Recorded between March and early June, these testimonials make it obvious that the Biden administration’s promises of a more humane approach to immigration remain mere rhetoric.

The situation described by the children in their accounts presents a grim picture of what it means to be a detained, unaccompanied minor under the Democratic Party’s watch.

A 13-year-old from Honduras, who was separated from her father while crossing into the US, has been held in Fort Bliss, Texas, for over two months. She told attorneys that she had problems sleeping in her overcrowded tent because the bright lights were on all night. But it was the food that was an even bigger issue. Much of it was inedible, the hamburger they had been served the night before had a distinct odor that made it impossible for them to eat, and one of her friends had been served some chicken that still had feathers on it. “I really only eat popsicles and juice because that is the only food I can trust,” she said.

A 14-year-old from Guatemala, who is being held in a facility in Houston, spoke of the extreme heat in the tents that caused children to faint, the lack of clean drinking water and being forced to drink rancid milk when they ran out of water. A 17-year-old Guatemalan girl detained at Fort Bliss described sleeping in a large white tent with about three hundred girls, on cots stacked on top of each other. She said it was hard to sleep due to the rattling noise the tent’s metal beams made at night.

Many of the testimonies highlighted the impact of the situation on the metal health of the detainees. A teenager, who had been held in the Dallas, Texas, convention center, spoke of feeling “asphyxiated” in the overcrowded facility which held 2,600 children. The testimonial continues in a heartbreaking vein: “There is no one here I can talk to about my case. There’s also no one here I can talk to when I’m feeling sad. There’s no one here; I just talk to God. It helps me and I cry. It would help if I could have a Bible.” A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy, who has been held in a facility in Pecos, Texas, for over two months when his testimonial was collected, spoke of a sense of despair, “a lot of sadness” among the detainees: “Every day, I don’t have the desire to eat… I just want to lie down all the time.” In Fort Bliss, the teenagers spoke of being placed on suicide watch, and the fact that many of the detainees were so depressed that they used the plastic ID tags to cut themselves.

A CBS News report released Tuesday further reinforces the general horror of the situation in these emergency shelters. Focusing particularly on Fort Bliss, the report describes protests by detainees to demand improved living conditions, an aborted attempt by some to escape what even federal employees described as a “juvenile detention center,” and a level of distress so high as to require “bans on pencils, pens, scissors, nail clippers, and regular toothbrushes.” At one point, workers reported having been asked to “remove the metal nose clips from N95 face masks.”

The federal employees, who spoke to CBS on the condition of anonymity, described an abysmal pit of despair where panic attacks were par for the course, and children were held without any information about their fates or contact with family members. An employee who had volunteered at Fort Bliss stated that she saw girls having panic attacks that involved seizure-like symptoms: “Their bodies start to twist… They can’t take it anymore.” Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents the Texas district where Fort Bliss is located, told CBS News that the problem with the shelter has been chronic, and has not improved despite her raising these issues after each of her four visits to the center.

In response, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided a pro-forma and blatantly false PR statement deeming the detention camp a paradise for children: “From exercise classes to weekly meetings with case managers for every child at Fort Bliss, we’ve worked hard to provide access to recreation, counseling and behavioral health services and more… There is a library on site which kids are encouraged to visit anytime, weekly spiritual services and comment boxes in every residential space for kids to confidentially reach out with concerns.”

Emergency shelters like the one at Fort Bliss were set up by the Biden administration to supposedly alleviate the horrendous overcrowding in Border Patrol Facilities that was exposed in late-March. These shelters do not have state licenses that certify their ability to care for minors and their standards of care as well as ability to provide services such as case management is much lower than what is expected of normal HHS shelters. Over the past few months, the administration has prevented reporters from accessing any of these sites. The testimonials of the detainees and that of the concerned federal employees makes the reasons for this secrecy obvious.