An Inconvenient Truth: The Peasant Food Web Feeds the World

Colin Todhunter

landless farmers

In October 2020, CropLife International said that its new strategic partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would contribute to sustainable food systems. It added that it was a first for the industry and the FAO and demonstrates the determination of the plant science sector to work constructively in a partnership where common goals are shared.

A powerful trade and lobby association, CropLife International counts among its members the world’s largest agricultural biotechnology and pesticide businesses: Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, FMC, Corteva and Sumitoma Chemical. Under the guise of promoting plant science technology, the association first and foremost looks after the interests (bottom line) of its member corporations.

Not long after the CropLife-FAO partnership was announced, PAN (Pesticide Action Network) Asia Pacific along with 350 organisations wrote a letter to FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu urging him to stop the collaboration and for good reason.

A 2020 joint investigation by Unearthed (Greenpeace) and Public Eye (a human rights NGO) revealed that BASF, Corteva, Bayer, FMC and Syngenta bring in billions of dollars by selling toxic chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose serious health hazards.

It also found more than a billion dollars of their sales came from chemicals – some now banned in European markets – that are highly toxic to bees. Over two thirds of these sales were made in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India.

The Political Declaration of the People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 stated that global corporations are increasingly infiltrating multilateral spaces to co-opt the narrative of sustainability to secure further industrialisation, the extraction of wealth and labour from rural communities and the concentration of corporate power.

With this in mind, a major concern is that CropLife International will now seek to derail the FAO’s commitment to agroecology and push for the further corporate colonisation of food systems.

The July 2019 UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts Report concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture. This report formed part of the FAO’s ongoing commitment to agroecology.

But agroecology represents a direct challenge to the interests of CropLife members. With the emphasis on localisation and on-farm inputs, agroecology does not require dependency on proprietary chemicals, seeds and knowledge nor the long-line global supply chains dominated by transnational agrifood corporations.

There does now appear to be an ideological assault from within the FAO on alternative development and agrifood models that threaten CropLife International’s member interests.

In the report ‘Who Will Feed Us? The Industrial Food Chain vs the Peasant Food Web (ETC Group, 2017), it was shown that a diverse network of small-scale producers (the peasant food web) actually feeds 70% of the world, including the most hungry and marginalised.

The flagship report indicated that only 24% of the food produced by the industrial food chain actually reaches people. Furthermore, it was shown that industrial food costs us more: for every dollar spent on industrial food, it costs another two dollars to clean up the mess.

However, two prominent papers have since claimed that small farms feed only 35% of the global population.

One of the papers is ‘How much of our world’s food do smallholders produce?’ (Ricciardi et al, 2018).

The other is an FAO report, ‘Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? (Lowder et al, 2021).

Eight key organisations have just written to the FAO sharply criticising the Lowder paper which reverses a number of well-established positions held by the organisation. The letter is signed by the Oakland Institute, Landworkers Alliance, ETC Group, A Growing Culture, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, GRAIN, Groundswell International and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The open letter calls on the FAO to reaffirm that peasants (including small farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers and urban producers) provide more food with fewer resources and are the primary source of nourishment for at least 70% of the world population.

ETC Group has also published the 16-page report ‘Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World‘ in response to the two papers, indicating how the authors indulged in methodological and conceptual gymnastics and certain important omissions to arrive at the 35% figure – not least by changing the definition of ‘family farmer’ and by defining a ‘small farm’ as less than 2 ha. This contradicts the FAO’s own decision in 2018 to reject a universal land area threshold for describing small farms in favour of more sensitive country-specific definitions.

The Lowder et al paper also contradicts recent FAO and other reports that state peasant farms produce more food and more nutritious food per hectare than large farms. It maintains that policy makers are wrongly focused on peasant production and should give greater attention to larger production units.

The signatories of the open letter to the FAO strongly disagree with the Lowder study’s assumption that food production is a proxy for food consumption and that the commercial value of food in the marketplace can be equated with the nutritional value of the food consumed.

The paper feeds into an agribusiness narrative that attempts to undermine the effectiveness of peasant production in order to promote its proprietary technologies and agrifood model.

Smallholder peasant farming is regarded by these conglomerates as an impediment. Their vision is fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm based on the bulk production of commodities that is unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach that accounts for the likes of food sovereignty and diverse nutrition production per acre.

This systems approach also serves to boost rural and regional development based on thriving, self-sustaining local communities rather than eradicating them and subordinating whoever remains to the needs of global supply chains and global markets. Industry lobbyists like to promote the latter as ‘responding to the needs of modern agriculture’ rather than calling it for what it is: corporate imperialism.

The FAO paper concludes that the world small farms only produce 35% of the world’s food using 12% of agricultural land. But ETC Group says that by working with the FAO’s normal or comparable databases, it is apparent that peasants nourish at least 70% of the world’s people with less than one third of the agricultural land and resources.

But even if 35% of food is produced on 12% of land, does that not suggest we should be investing in small, family and peasant farming rather than large-scale chemical-intensive agriculture?

While not all small farms might be practising agroecology or chemical-free agriculture, they are more likely to be integral to local markets and networks, short supply chains, food sovereignty, more diverse cropping systems and healthier diets. And they tend to serve the food requirements of communities rather than those of external business interests, institutional investors and shareholders half a world away.

When the corporate capture a body occurs, too often the first casualty is truth.

Afghanistan: Suffering skyrockets as US replaces soldiers with sanctions.

Steven Strauss

Kabul, November 2021 — This former school teacher lost her job when the Taliban took control. Due to severe sanctions and a collapsing economy she is now shining shoes for survival. PHOTO: Ali Khara / Reuters

Two weeks before the last U.S. and NATO soldiers left Afghanistan on Aug, 30, 2021, President Biden imposed a freeze on Afghan central bank reserves held in U.S. and European banks. The freeze deprived Afghanistan of $9.5 billion of its own state money, broadening sanctions already levied against the Taliban.

The World Bank suspended loans for a variety of development projects. The International Monetary Fund halted about $460 million in emergency reserves. Germany shelved more than a half-billion dollars in funding. This in a country where three-quarters of public spending is financed by grants.

Though barely covered on U.S. evening news, Afghanistan cannot import and export goods, collect taxes, or pay public workers since the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces. Residents cannot withdraw their money from bank deposits. Hospitals have run out of medicine.

The United States of America and all of its allies in this decimating war must immediately halt the paralyzing money freeze and sanctions.

War by other means. Who suffers most from these imperialist tactics? Workers, women, poor people, low-paid soldiers, the elderly and infirm, and most acutely, the very young. At the end of 2021, at least a million children faced starvation. In September 2021, the World Health Organization declared Afghanistan’s healthcare system on the brink of collapse. Hunger stands at 95% and unemployment is 70%. Given this starting point, a United Nations report from Dec. 2, 2021, predicted that more than 24 million Afghans out of a population of 38 million will require life-saving aid in 2022 as a result of the sanctions.

Afghan society has for decades been unable to survive without foreign funds. Despite promises to build its economy, the United States’ twenty-year war bequeathed to Afghanistan an economy dominated by opium trading and smuggling and corruption. This cannot sustain a population of millions.

The Afghanistan war did not end with the defeat of the U.S. military. It simply shifted to war by other means.

U.S. hypocrisy. Since the 9/11 attack on New York City in 2001, U.S. presidents have insisted that their mission in Afghanistan is to fight terrorism and promote democracy. The U.S. government now repeatedly broadcasts that their sanctions are necessary to bring the Taliban to its knees. Some historical truths are in order.

To press its anti-communist cold war against the Soviet Union, the United States supported the Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen fighting against Soviet soldiers and the pro-Soviet Afghan government during the 1980s. At every turn, the U.S. embraced, joined, and financed military forces with women-hating Islamic fundamentalists and corrupt regimes of varying Muslim ideologies — all severely limiting democratic rights. The USSR forces in Afghanistan were defeated in 1989.

Its opponents, the Mujahideen, morphed into a number of repressive and brutally anti-woman militias competing against each other, including the Taliban. The U.S. supported the murderous National Islamic Movement Party to help defeat the Taliban in 2001. At the same time, however, to maintain its influence in Afghanistan, this country has relied on a partnership with the government of Pakistan, which has supported the Taliban.

The Afghan constitution, put together with the help of U.S. and European advisors, enshrined the country as an Islamic republic. According to Left Radical of Afghanistan (LRA), “Marxist, socialist, and secularist organizations and parties, as well as workers’ unions, were never allowed to officially register or have permission for their activities.” LRA has been forced underground by the return of the Taliban.

So much for the U.S. “fighting terrorism and supporting democracy.” Its real role in Afghanistan was to sustain control over a region vital to the geopolitical interests of Wall Street capitalism.

How to help the Afghan people. The U.S. has no intention of abandoning its goals in Afghanistan. As LRA reports succinctly: “Although the United States has ended its military presence in Afghanistan, its intelligence presence and intervention are not over.” The U.S. Secretary of State said as much when he declared that “America’s work in Afghanistan continues. We have a plan for what’s next and we’re putting it into action.”

Internationally, the U.S./NATO defeat in Afghanistan has heightened already dangerous relationships with capitalist Russia and China. Both countries are in a position to exploit U.S. humiliation. They may or may not engage the Taliban directly. But Russian and Chinese politics are based on the needs of their own privileged ruling classes. To take sides in any U.S.-Russia or U.S.-China rivalries will not help the Afghan people.

As activists in the heartland of imperialism, it is our job to focus on and demand that the U.S. government take responsibility for the havoc it has wreaked.

•  Cancel all sanctions and unfreeze Afghanistan’s $9.5 billion from imperialist banks.
•  Organize massive infusions of humanitarian aid.
•  Open U.S. and NATO borders to all Afghan refugees, especially women, civil libertarians, secularists and other protected groups.

To those who argue that solely the Taliban will benefit from unfreezing Afghanistan’s banked money and restoring foreign aid, the LRA has this to say: “The Taliban, as a political-religious group with a much older and more conservative view of Islam, will only insist on enforcing Sharia and strict Islamic principles, and restricting women’s rights and civil liberties. It will not be able to provide health, education and social services to the people of Afghanistan. Given this, it will soon face opposition, protests and resistance from the Afghan people and will be isolated internationally.”

Bank of England governor tells workers, we “need to see a moderation of wage rises”

Thomas Scripps

On Thursday, the governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey openly declared the brutal class war to be waged on the working class.

Asked in an interview on the Bank’s efforts to curb inflation if he was telling people not to ask for a pay rise, he responded, “Broadly, yes. We do need to see a moderation of wage rises. Now that’s painful. I don’t want to in any sense sugar that message. It is painful. But we need to see that.”

Bailey issued this edict after the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee announced that CPI inflation would rise to 7.25 percent this April, the highest rate since 1991. It is currently at 5.4 percent. The higher RPI measure of inflation is already at 7.5 percent and will climb more sharply since it includes mortgage payments, likely to rise due to the Bank’s decision to lift interest rates from 0.25 to 0.5 percent.

Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, speaking at the Bank's press conference this week (screenshot: Bank of England/YouTube)

Workers’ pay, already falling behind prices, will be devastated, dwarfing even the catastrophic impact of the 2008 recession. According to the Bank’s measure of real post-tax labour income, real take-home pay will fall by 2 percent overall this year—the biggest drop since comparable records began in 1990. For comparison, the fall in 2008 after the financial crash was 1.4 percent.

For millions, living standards will fall far further, with price rises concentrated in the goods which make up the bulk of poorer households’ budgets.

On the day Bailey made his comments, regulator Ofgem lifted the price cap on energy bills by a record 54 percent, meaning an average increase of £693, or £708 for those on pre-payment meters. The Resolution Foundation thinktank predicts that the number of people spending more than 10 percent of their disposable income on energy bills will double to more than 10 percent, or 5 million people. Analysts expect the cap to rise again in October by up to another £500.

Petrol prices are up 26.8 percent this year and the price of second-hand cars up 30 percent.

According to landlord and tenant insurer HomeLet, average rents in the UK increased 8.3 percent over 2021, to £1,060 a month. With the raise in interest rates, payments on a £150,000 mortgage will cost £254 extra a year; a £200,000 mortgage will cost an additional £324.

Overall food price inflation was running at 4.8 percent in December, but this disguises much higher increases in staple foods. Pasta, margarine, apples and pears have risen in price by more than a quarter, cooking oil is up 13 percent and tomatoes and mushrooms up 8 percent. The increases are frequently higher for the cheapest options.

The Bank also forecasts that unemployment, after falling to 3.8 percent in the early part of this year, will then rise to 5 percent. But these figures are some way off the real picture. The Institute of Employment Studies reported in January that, despite improving unemployment figures, there are 600,000 fewer people in employment than before the pandemic, driven by a sharp rise in economic inactivity. Tellingly, the bulk of the increase is from people off work due to long-term ill-health.

Bailey, paid half a million pounds a year, justified his insistence that workers tighten their belts in these conditions with the claim that inflation would otherwise become “ingrained”. He told Sky News the Bank had to “ensure… there isn’t more inflation pressure domestically. That would come for instance from things like wage bargaining.”

He told the BBC Radio’s Today, “We are looking to see quite clear restraint in the bargaining process. Otherwise it will get out of control.”

The Financial Times explained ahead of the Bank’s Thursday meeting, “Most forecasters expect the monetary policy committee to raise interest rates when it meets on Thursday, to avert the risk of a so-called wage-price spiral developing, when workers demand pay rises to match higher living costs and companies raise prices to protect their margins in a repeating, self-fulfilling process.”

The reality is that wages are falling behind price rises. The Office for National Statistics reported last month that pay grew at an annual rate of just 3.5 percent last November, with CPI inflation then at 5.1 percent.

The Bank claims that average wage growth for the year is now around 4 percent, well behind current CPI inflation (5.4 percent) and even further behind RPI inflation (7.5 percent). It expects wage “growth” to rise minimally to just under 5 percent over the next year as prices race ahead, before falling back towards 2 percent.

For the 6 million people receiving Universal Credit welfare payments, of whom 40 percent are low paid workers, the situation is even worse. The government will increase those payments just 3.1 percent this April, less than half the Bank’s expected rate of inflation.

What Bailey is really saying is that corporate profits need to be secured by ensuring prices rise faster than wages, to make good the huge debts racked up by the government bailing out the corporations and the super-rich in response to the pandemic crisis.

Since March 2020, the UK government has spent £368 billion on COVID-19 measures, according to the National Audit Office. The bulk of the money, £154 billion, has been handed to businesses. An incredible £900 billion has been spent by the Bank of England in quantitative easing programmes, pumping money into the stock market.

As a result, the UK’s national debt climbed from £1.877 trillion (84.7 percent of GDP) in March 2020 to £2.223 trillion (103.7 percent of GDP) in March 2021. Its annual spending deficit has increased from 2.7 percent of GDP to 15.3 percent.

This debt represents the ever-expanding fortunes of a tiny oligarchy, sustained by round after round of quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates since 2008. It must be paid by workers’ increased exploitation.

The same imperative underlies the drive to declare the COVID pandemic “over”, ending all restrictions of the economy, and the escalating drive to war with Russia, whose vast resources the imperialist powers hope to secure for themselves.

Talk of a “wage-price spiral” reveals the ruling class’s deepest fear that this agenda will encounter fierce resistance in the working class. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded nervously yesterday that Bailey’s demand for restraint was “not something that the Prime Minister is calling for… we want wages to increase.”

This is a lie. Johnson’s worry, amid a worsening government crisis, is that the Bank of England governor has let the cat out of the bag: an unprecedentedly savage assault on workers’ living standards is being prepared.

Responsibility for enforcing this agenda lies with the trade unions, whose statements of protest against Bailey are motivated by the same concern as Johnson’s. They know they are sitting on a powder keg.

Throughout the pandemic, the union bureaucracy has worked flat out to hold back a wave of class struggle as workers seek to defend their pay and conditions. Innumerable strikes have been blocked, isolated and betrayed to keep wage rises in check. Their role was summed up by the health unions’ demobilisation of a pay struggle of National Health Service workers, allowing the government to impose a massively below inflation 3 percent deal.

At companies like British Gas, JDE and Go-Ahead, devastating cuts to pay, pensions and conditions have been implemented under the threat of “fire and rehire”. This will increasingly become the model.

With re-election of Mattarella, Italian government will seek to enforce “EU recovery plan”

Marianne Arens

Palazzo Montecitorio, Seat of Chamber of Deputies in Rome (Image: Maurizio Lupi / flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

In the evening hours of Saturday, January 29, the current president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, in the absence of a successor, was elected head of state for another seven years. The election ended an undignified spectacle. The six government parties, which sit together in a broad all-party coalition, were unable to agree on a personality to replace the office-weary 80-year-old.

For a week, the assembly of more than a thousand deputies, senators and representatives failed to find a common solution. Time and again, proposed candidates failed due to majority abstention. Some cast no vote while others cast blank ballots or voted for soccer stars or fantasy figures. After seven inconclusive ballots, Mattarella was finally persuaded to run for another term. He obtained the overwhelming majority of 759 of the 1,009 “elettori,” the highest tally for a president in 44 years.

A sigh of relief swept over the European press because the only other likely candidate was 74-year-old head of government Mario Draghi. If Draghi had been elected, the country would have needed a new prime minister, and the current all-party coalition would have collapsed. With the current stopgap solution, parliamentary elections are not on the agenda again until the end of the legislative term in May 2023.

Italy’s bourgeois rule is in such deep crisis that its stability depends on two old men, one 80, the other 74.

The German business paper Handelsblatt commented on the election outcome as the “best possible solution for Italy”: “Because the prime minister still has much to do—and not much time left to do it.” The Zurich Tagesanzeiger pointed to the relief in the European banking world: “In Italy, one assumes that the stock markets will joyfully celebrate the epilogue of the long and adventurous election week—although less because of Mattarella’s confirmation in office than because of that of Mario Draghi. In the immediate the latter’s role is more central.”

The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “That’s what this election was about: the future of Italy, about its stability. About the implementation of the initiated reforms and the management of the billions from Brussels for the reconstruction. And since Italy is system-relevant, it was also about the future of Europe.”

And that “future of Europe” ostensibly stands or falls with Draghi’s persona as prime minister. This is the man who took over a year ago after serving in senior roles at the World Bank, Italy’s finance ministry and central bank, Goldman Sachs International in London, and most recently as head of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. He stands for a policy of giving financial markets unlimited funds for self-enrichment. Draghi’s phrase “Whatever it Takes,” with which he opened the central bank’s money spigot in 2012 when the euro was under pressure, is infamous. The consequences are being borne by the European working class in the form of ever-new EU austerity dictates.

Specifically, the Draghi government’s task in Italy is to enforce the “EU recovery plan” against the will of the working population. The European Union, which is granting Italy a €209 billion coronavirus aid package, demands in return that the government “modernize” Italy’s economy, administration, judiciary and pension system. In plain language, this means systematically paring down and abolishing the last social benefits and rights the working class has left after 30 years of austerity.

The country is already a social powder keg. According to the statistics office Istat, official unemployment stands at 9 percent. At least another 12 percent are “working poor,” who can barely make a living from their employment. In addition, the proportion of “inactives,” i.e., people of working age who do not count as “job seekers,” is unusually large in Italy at 35 percent. Youth unemployment, at 26.8 percent, is also extremely high.

The social situation has deteriorated dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic. The number of people living in absolute poverty rose to an all-time high last year. More than 2 million families, or 5.6 million people, were thus categorized in 2020; that is 1 million more people than a year earlier.

The figures also show that poverty has arrived in the relatively affluent North. There, the number of those in absolute poverty grew twice as much as in the South. All these people, who lack the basic necessities for a normal life, are moreover being hard hit by rising inflation: in December, inflation rose to an official 13-year high of 3.9 percent.

The government is resting on a mountain of corpses resulting from its handling of the pandemic: Italy currently counts 147,000 coronavirus deaths out of a population of 60 million. The coronavirus situation was particularly stark in Lombardy at the beginning of the pandemic, sending images around the world of military trucks filled with coronavirus victims.

This may have contributed to the relatively high vaccination rate: More than 90 percent of those over 12 are dually vaccinated, and two-thirds of them are also “boosted.” The government now wants to use this accomplishment, in defiance of the Omicron wave, to disband all measures against the coronavirus at the end of March. This ruthless mass infection, combined with the social crisis, is creating an ever more explosive situation.

To minimize opposition to his “profits before lives” policy, Draghi appointed representatives of all major parties to the cabinet he formed a year ago. The government, which did not emerge from democratic elections, has 23 ministers, 15 of whom are party representatives.

Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement (MfS) provides the foreign minister in the form of Luigi di Maio. The Social Democratic Party (PD) is responsible for social affairs and defence. Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega holds the Economy Ministry, while other ministerial posts are under Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Several key positions—finance, justice and interior—are entrusted to nonpartisan technocrats, who hold a total of eight ministerial posts.

The Ministry of Health, which is particularly important in the pandemic, is headed by Roberto Speranza. His Articolo 1 party (referring to Article 1 of the Italian Constitution) arose from a split within the Democrats. Its members were formerly in the CPI, SEL and Rifondazione. Articolo 1 is part of the Liberi e Uguali (LeU) faction and is supported by pseudo-left groups. Another PD splinter is Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva, whose party provides the Minister for Family.

The only party of national importance that is not in the government is Giorgia Meloni’s fascist party Fratelli d’Italia (FdI). It follows in the tradition of Benito Mussolini, whose march on Rome a hundred years ago kicked off the fascist dictatorship. Its 2018 election result was 4.4 percent, but today, after four years as the sole opposition party, the FdI claims five times that figure in polling.

A new poll by the daily La Stampa from after the presidential election showed Meloni’s Fascists to be the strongest party, with 21.1 percent. This means they have overtaken both the Democrats (20.8) and Salvini’s Lega (18.2), while the Five Star party, at 14.2 percent, is below half of its 2018 vote. As early as last summer, the neo-fascist Meloni proposed herself as a possible new head of government .

The anti-working class offensive of the Draghi government and the rise of the Fratelli d’Italia make clear the urgent necessity of an independent working class movement, a party that resolutely leads the struggle against mass infection, social impoverishment and war. Resistance among the working population is growing daily. In mid-October, for example, tens of thousands immediately joined demonstrations against fascism when far-right thugs attacked a trade union headquarters and tried to storm parliament .

Necessary is a party that opposes the right-wing policies of the PD, the unions and the pseudo-left and leads the struggle for socialism independent of all bourgeois forces. In the absence of such a socialist perspective for the working class, there is a real danger that the fascists will profit from the right-wing policies of politicians officially labelled “left wing.”

COVID outbreak in Tonga after volcanic eruption and tsunami

Tom Peters

A building destroyed by the tsunami on Eueiki Island (Source: Tonganow Facebook page)

The Pacific island nation of Tonga, which has not even begun to recover from the disastrous January 15 volcanic eruption and tsunami, now faces its first potential COVID-19 outbreak.

The impoverished country, with a population of 105,000 spread across dozens of islands, has until now been one of a tiny number of countries that has remained isolated from the devastating pandemic. A single case, which arrived from New Zealand last October, triggered a lockdown and the virus did not spread.

Now, however, the Tongan government was forced to impose a lockdown on Wednesday, which has been extended until Sunday, after five people tested positive for COVID. These cases included two workers who were helping unload aid shipments from the Queen Salote Wharf near the capital Nuku’alofa. The other three cases are the wife and children of one of the workers. More than 700 contacts have since tested negative.

While the source of the cases is reportedly being investigated, the virus appears to have spread from one or more aid shipments sent to Tonga following last month’s disaster.

Agence France-Presse reports that “Australia, New Zealand, the United States, China, France, Fiji and Britain have all sent ships carrying relief supplies including drinking water, medical kits and engineering equipment.”

The highly infectious Omicron variant of COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in all these countries, except China, which maintains a strict zero COVID policy. Everywhere else, governments have chosen to abandon lockdowns and other public health restrictions, resulting in millions of deaths internationally, all for the sake of keeping big businesses open and making profits.

The Tongan cases particularly underline the tremendous dangers facing the Pacific region, particularly as the major regional powers—Australia and New Zealand—adopted policies late last year, to allow the Delta and Omicron variants to spread out of control.

Tonga risks a repeat of its experience during the 1918–1919 pandemic, when a ship from New Zealand brought the deadly influenza virus, which eventually killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Tongans. The same ship also infected Samoa, then a NZ colony, killing over 8,500 people (a quarter of the population).

The lack of preparations, including rundown and poorly-equipped hospitals, and low rates of vaccination throughout the Pacific, are also an indictment of the imperialist powers, which have dominated the region for more than a century.

Australia and NZ continue to exercise considerable neo-colonial control over Tonga, Samoa and other parts of the Pacific. Their military-led aid effort in Tonga is not motivated by altruism, but is aimed at strengthening their influence in the region and pushing back against competition from China.

The Australian Defence Force has declared it is unlikely to be the source of the COVID cases, even though its ship, the HMAS Adelaide, reported 23 of its crew had the virus when it arrived in Nuku’alofa on January 26. The ship was reportedly docked at Vuna Wharf, which was not worked by the Tongans who became infected. Despite planning to leave Tonga immediately after making a “contactless” delivery of supplies, as of February 3 the Adelaide and its 600 crew remained stuck due to a major electrical failure on board.

A member of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force who was involved in aid flights to Tonga tested positive for COVID on January 25, prompting the flights to be temporarily suspended.

The Tongan population is particularly vulnerable to the deadly virus. Only 61 percent are double-vaccinated (83 percent of people over the age of 12) and almost no one has received a third dose, which is necessary to provide meaningful protection against Omicron. Australia is reportedly sending 10,000 booster shots to Tonga, i.e., enough for less than 10 percent of the population.

Tongans also suffer from widespread health problems linked to poverty. According to 2016 statistics, nearly half the population is obese and 40 percent suffers from type 2 diabetes. These are major risk factors for developing severe illness from COVID-19.

The risk of disease spreading is compounded by the tsunami, which wiped out entire villages in some areas, leaving hundreds homeless. Almost all structures on the island of Atata, home to 100 people, have been destroyed, as have those on Mango island, where 50 people lived. Buildings on Fonoi and Nomuka islands were also destroyed, including a health clinic on Nomuka.

Drinking water supplies were contaminated by volcanic ash, which also destroyed food crops and livestock that most Tongans rely on to survive. Scientists believe the marine environment and sea life have also been affected.

Internet communications are severely disrupted due to damage to an undersea cable.

Despite the immense risks to health and human life, Tonga’s Health Minister Saia Piukala told a press conference on Thursday that COVID-19 was “here to stay” and people would have to learn to “live with” the virus. This is a warning that the government, controlled by a monarchy and hereditary nobles, has no intention of keeping COVID out of the country.

The pandemic has spread to several Pacific island countries that were until recently isolated from it. The Tongan cases follow recent outbreaks in Kiribati, Palau, Solomon Islands and Samoa.

The Solomon Islands has recorded more than 780 cases and five deaths following an outbreak that began on January 9, after spreading from neighbouring Papua New Guinea, one of the worst-affected countries in the region.

In Kiribati, with just over a third of the population double-vaccinated, there were 767 known cases as of Wednesday. The outbreak originated with the arrival of the first passenger flight in 10 months, on January 14. Out of 54 passengers, 36 tested positive on arrival.

Rimon Rimon, a freelance journalist in Kiribati, told Time magazine on January 31 that people were angry with the decision to open the border to Fiji, where COVID has infected more than 63,000 people and killed 809. “We had two years to prepare for this,” he said, “People are saying the government is not doing a good job, what has it been doing for the past few years?” Flights to Kiribati have again been suspended following the outbreak.

The ruling elites across the Pacific, however, continue to push to reopen the borders, even as global infections and deaths from Omicron reach record levels. Governments are seeking to revive the tourism industry and global supply chains, regardless of the immense danger posed to people’s lives and health.

Europe’s governments go all in for “herd immunity”

Peter Schwarz

Hospital staff treating a Covid patient in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England (Image: Neil Hall Pool via AP)

At the end of last month, Denmark’s Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced a large-scale human experiment. On February 1, virtually all remaining coronavirus regulations were dropped—mandatory mask wearing, social distancing, verification of vaccination or test status. Large events are now also allowed again in Denmark, and bars and discos are allowed to fully open.

Frederiksen had already declared the pandemic over once before, in September last year. But at that time, the number of weekly infections was below 50 per 100,000 inhabitants. Now the seven-day incidence level is more than 100 times higher at 5,300, making Denmark the European frontrunner. One in 10 inhabitants is currently infected.

Nevertheless, the government has abolished all protective measures. This is like opening the dams that were built against catastrophic flooding during continuous rain. The Danish government is deliberately betting on infecting the country’s 5.8 million residents in the shortest possible time, even if many will pay for it with their lives or permanent damage to their health. Particularly at risk are children under age five, for whom there is no vaccine protection.

Millions across Europe responded to Frederiksen’s provocative move with horror. Newspaper editors and government offices, on the other hand, rejoiced. “Herd immunity,” meaning in practice the deliberate mass infection of the population, is now the official policy of every European government. What was only openly advocated in Stockholm and London at the beginning of the pandemic now represents the European consensus. At most, there are only differences in the speed with which this goal is to be achieved.

Britain, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland have already largely abolished previous restrictions and rules. France and Germany are on their way.

In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is going by the motto “hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing.” He has announced not only the abolition of all coronavirus regulations still in force, but also of the obligation to report coronavirus-related deaths. Even the quarantine obligation for those infected is up for discussion.

In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had already declared in mid-January that the pandemic would be treated like influenza in future. Testing and contact tracing have been drastically reduced, and the infection figures are being calculated using new counting methods.

On February 1, Norway abolished all existing restrictions except for the requirement to wear a mask and the one metre distance rule. “We will have to live with high infection numbers, and we can live with high infection numbers,” was the reason given by Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

The government of the Netherlands announced a relaxation of coronavirus protection measures on January 26, despite record infection numbers. Restaurants, theatres, cinemas, museums, and football stadiums will be allowed to reopen.

Switzerland, whose rules were always loose anyway, has abolished the requirement to work from home and quarantining for contacts of those infected. Infected persons must now only quarantine for five days. The requirement to provide a certificate of vaccination status to enter restaurants and events and the obligation to wear a mask at work and in public places are to be dropped in mid-February.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron is gradually lifting contact and mask restrictions, even though more than 320,000 people are still becoming infected every day.

Germany has responded to the steep rise in infections by restricting testing so that the actual numbers can no longer be tracked, and contacts can no longer take sick leave. Although schools have been proven to be major breeding grounds for the virus, they remain open. It is only a matter of weeks before the last protective measures will fall there, too.

Yet coronavirus is ravaging Europe like never before. Last week alone, around 12 million new infections were registered—more than since the pandemic began. There were 21,500 Europeans who died from COVID-19 last week, and more than 1.6 million have died since the beginning of the pandemic, not counting the number of unreported cases. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 60 percent of all Europeans will be infected with the highly contagious Omicron variant by mid-March.

Amid the highest wave of the pandemic, governments are justifying their homicidal herd immunity policies with the lie that a combination of vaccination, immunisation through infection and the milder nature of the Omicron variant will make the pandemic manageable.

Even experts who know better have subscribed to this line of argument, under immense political pressure. For example, at a press conference in Copenhagen, Hans Kluge, WHO Director for Europe, declared that Omicron gave Europe a unique chance to get the spread of the virus under control and ushered in an “end game” of the pandemic.

The large number of vaccinations and natural immunisation acquired through infection with Omicron, the approaching end of winter, and the reduced severity of the variant gave Europe the prospect of a possible “ceasefire” in the fight against the virus, Kluge said. After the wave subsides, there would be global immunity—at least “for a few weeks and months.”

Kluge cautioned, however, that vaccination must continue, vulnerable people must be protected, emerging variants must be monitored, and the health system must be prepared for possible future waves. The coronavirus had “surprised us more than once, so we have to be very careful,” he said. Nevertheless, his statements irresponsibly downplay the enormous dangers of the herd immunity strategy.

Its costs are unbearably high. Already 3,000 people are dying every day in Europe, and this number will continue to rise due to the steep increase in infections and low vaccination rates in many countries. For example, only 74 percent of the population in Germany and only 76 percent in France are fully vaccinated, compared to 81 percent in Denmark.

Moreover, the pandemic can only be fought internationally. The herd immunity strategy in Europe and the US, where the Biden administration is pursuing the same course, will inevitably lead to an increase in infections on other continents, where even fewer people are vaccinated. This will also increase the risk of more infectious and deadly variants developing that are resistant to the existing vaccines.

Also completely ignored is the danger that large sections of the population will suffer from the results of the disease for life. “A frightening prognosis is being made: Long Covid threatens to become a widespread disease,” writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) in a detailed article on the research results to date.

Due to the lack of uniform disease criteria and recording methods, there are no comprehensive figures yet, but the results of existing studies into Long COVID are alarming. The number of people infected with the coronavirus who still experience symptoms months later, even if the original illness is mild, ranges from 2 to 40 percent, depending on the criteria and the study. The most frequent symptom is fatigue. In addition, there is shortness of breath, concentration problems, a general reduction in performance, heart palpitations, and loss of the sense of taste and smell.

“While Covid-19 is mainly dangerous for the elderly and immunocompromised patients,” FAZ summarises the research results, “Long Covid is a problem for many young adults and children.” Although many links are still unclear, evidence is accumulating that COVID causes sustained damage to the vascular system. “This is another reason why Covid-19 is more than a cold, it is a systemic disease,” concludes FAZ.

The danger that young people and children will suffer lifelong damage to their health is therefore extremely high.

In contrast to Kluge, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has explicitly warned of the consequences of the herd immunity policy. On January 24, at the WHO Executive Board meeting, he said, “Learning to live with COVID cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride. It cannot mean that we accept almost 50,000 deaths a week from a preventable and treatable disease. It cannot mean that we accept an unacceptable burden on our health systems, when every day, exhausted health workers go once again to the front line. It cannot mean that we ignore the consequences of Long COVID, which we don’t yet fully understand. It cannot mean that we gamble on a virus whose evolution we cannot control, nor predict.

“There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out, and how the acute phase could end—but it is dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant, or that we are in the endgame,” he added.

There is no scientific justification for the murderous herd immunity strategy. It has exclusively political motivations. To keep the economy running and profits flowing, the ruling class is willing to sacrifice countless lives and the health of the next generation.

Public health care is one of the greatest social achievements of the 19th century. State hygiene measures and broad access to medical care ensured, for the first time, that a large section of the population reached an age of 60, 70 and more.

All this is being called into question today. Capitalist society is deeply sick. While Amazon founder Jeff Bezos builds himself a yacht for 430 million euros and plans to have a historic bridge in Rotterdam demolished to launch it at sea, there is no money for protecting the lives of millions.

All parties that defend capitalism—from the nominally left to the right—support herd immunity policies. The hope that they can be persuaded to change course through petitions or pressure is illusory.

Chilean and international capital praise Boric’s cabinet picks

Mauricio Saavedra

President-elect and Frente Amplio leader Gabriel Boric, who takes office on March 11, has reassured the financial and corporate elite that his government will be answerable to their needs. His selection of Chile’s current Central Bank chief as his finance minister is the most recent event to puncture popular illusions that the incoming pseudo-left-Stalinist “Apruebo Dignidad” administration will serve the masses.

In the last week of January, Boric announced the selection of his cabinet to an enthusiastic national and international corporate media and the approval of the markets. The Chilean peso gained against the US dollar and the IPSA stock market indicator rose to its highest point in two months.

While the liberal press waxed lyrical about the “progressive” character of the new Chilean government (the Guardian writing that Boric had selected for the “first time anywhere in the Americas a ministerial team which is dominated by women” reflecting “his aim to build a fairer, more inclusive country”), the financial press got down to the real nuts and bolts.

President Piñera meets president-elect Gabriel Boric at La Moneda Palace. (Credit: Marcelo Segura)

Jorge Selaive, chief economist at Scotiabank Chile, was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that “part of the political risk that has weighed on Chile’s currency since (the 2019) protests had receded with Friday’s cabinet announcement.”

“Naming Mario Marcel as finance minister is a very good sign of economic stability, seen positively by markets,” Miguel Angel Lopez of the University of Chile told Bloomberg.

Marcel, from the Socialist Party, is one of several of Boric’s cabinet picks who belong to the center-left that ruled for more than two of the last three decades of civilian rule and which were reduced to a rump in the constitutional, congressional and presidential elections of the last three years.

“Marcel has been praised for the way he guided the central bank’s response during the period of social unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic that followed…,” added the Financial Times.

Beginning in March 2020, as the coronavirus spread, the Central Bank chief prioritized a pro-corporate agenda of low interest rates, offering billions in liquidity and asset purchases, and providing loan guarantees that equaled 15 percent of GDP—“far above what has been done in other Latin American countries,” Marcel told a Senate hearing last year.

In contrast, government handouts to the poverty-stricken population were so negligible that the virus spread unabated through the congested and overcrowded working class communes, and tens of thousands of destitute migrant families faced the crisis with growing threats of xenophobic violence and deportation.

As of January 30, the cumulative figure of confirmed and probable COVID-19 infections stood at 2,520,224 cases and 50,700 deaths, with the outbreak predominantly impacting 18- to 64-year-olds, the working age demographic.

The crisis compelled the middle class and sections of the working class to dig into their private pension savings. Chile’s GDP grew about 12 percent in 2021 only because of these withdrawals, estimated at US$50 billion, as well as a brief fiscal stimulus.

Key sectors of the export-oriented economy were kept operational despite the spread of the Delta and today the Omicron variants. Only last week, the trade union bureaucracy revealed that over 700 workers had tested positive for COVID-19 at BHP’s Escondida mine (the largest copper mine in the world) affecting almost one-third of the workforce. What the union didn’t report is that it aided and abetted management and the government in keeping the mining industry open throughout the pandemic.

This criminal “herd immunity” approach championed by President Sebastian Piñera, in consort with the parliamentary center-left and pseudo-left-Stalinist-dominated trade unions will now be continued by Boric—with the distinction that he will integrate these corporatist organizations more fully into his administration.

“The last thing we want is to reach measures as restrictive as those we experienced in 2020,” he told CNN Chile’s “Tolerancia Cero” on January 25, adding that schools “must be the first to open and the last to close… (W)e are going to talk with the Teachers’ Association and all its organizations, in order to facilitate the return to classes…”

Boric won the presidential election’s second round last December 19 with close to 56 percent of the vote in a contest that mustered the highest voter turnout in Chilean history. This was not because of, but despite, the center-left launching a campaign to promote him as the only “democratic” alternative to José Antonio Kast, the fascistic candidate of the Christian Social Front. While sections of their dwindling base turned out to support Boric, youth and workers came out en masse to vote for him, with significant numbers alienated from the entire process staying home.

Apruebo Dignidad entered into secret discussions with the deeply unpopular traditional center-left—the Party for Democracy (PPD), Socialist Party (PS), the Christian Democrats and the Radicals—prior to the second round, to signal to the stock markets and the imperialist powers that his government would be one of moderation. He shifted the axis of his platform to the right during the campaign, picking up talking points on “security,” “illegal immigrants” and other issues from the playbook of his fascistic opponent.

Boric has continued to shift course to the right, telling a mass rally in Santiago he would build bridges to the rightist opposition while holding several discussions with big business pledging gradualism and fiscal responsibility.

Like SYRIZA in Greece and Podemos in Spain, the Chilean pseudo-left-Stalinist front has the task of dissipating seething working class and youth opposition to capitalism and safeguarding a crisis-ridden bourgeois state.

The electoral coalition Apruebo Dignidad was formed last year to enter the presidential race with the same political calculations as the much vaunted Constitutional Convention. The latter was born out of National Unity peace talks held between the ruling right-wing government of billionaire President Piñera, the traditional center-left and sections of the Frente Amplio coalition in the midst of the massive anti-capitalist protests in late 2019.

Terrified that the mass demonstrations would escape their control, they lent the embattled Piñera administration their support to shift the anti-capitalist protests into calls to change the country’s authoritarian constitution. In line with this, Apruebo Dignidad claimed that their agenda was to end the free-market economic policies imposed through military rule by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and maintained by the civilian political caste that took power in 1991.

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” postured Boric promising to replace the privatized pension system with a universal basic pension and to create a universal health and education system, “dignified” incomes, gender equality and environmental protection, among other measures.

The crux of the Chilean left’s argument is that Pinochet’s “neoliberalism” and not capitalism in general is to account for the obscene levels of social inequality, poverty, nepotism and corruption, and police state violence.

It is a reformulation of the reactionary nationalist theory of the two-stage revolution that posits that the role of Stalinism in alliance with the middle class and the “progressive bourgeoisie” is to democratize the state and the republic through the bourgeois parliamentary process. The popular front politics founded upon this theory tragically led to the bitter defeat of the working class in Chile, where the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende paved the way to the US-backed fascist-military coup of September 11, 1973.

Fifty years ago, the Communist Party, at least in Chile, still monopolized the loyalty of the working class. The Big Lie that their Soviet counterparts represented the political continuity of the October 1917 revolution held currency and lent political and ideological support to all sorts of reformist, bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalist outfits across Latin America, allowing them to straddle between the Stalinist regimes and American imperialism.

This strategy came to a close by the 1980s with the globalization of capitalist production as waves of renunciationism—the abandonment of revolutionary rhetoric and social reformism—swept the organizations that dominated the labor movement. The final nail came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the restoration of capitalism in Russia as the so-called left political forces in oppressed and semi-colonial bourgeois countries like Chile were stripped of any intermediary agency to imperialism.

Then as tragedy, today as farce, the chameleon-like Boric hasn’t even been able to sustain his reformist rhetoric until at least after taking office under conditions where a profound economic crisis is just around the corner. This treacherous strategy can only embolden the far-right forces that during the last elections galvanized around the candidacy of the fascistic Kast. At the same time, it will pit the incoming government more and more in a direct confrontation with the Chilean working class.