Hundreds of thousands protest across France against police violence and Macron’s police immunity law

Will Morrow

Hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations across France on Saturday afternoon to protest police violence and oppose the Macron government’s law to criminalize the filming of the police. Opposition is growing amid a series of acts of police violence over the past week.

More than 100 protests were organized across every major city. The largest protest, which took place in Paris, began at Republic Square at 2:00 p.m. and marched to the Place de la Bastille. The government’s own underestimated account claimed that 46,000 people were in Paris alone, but images and videos show that the real number was several times higher. There were more than 10,000 in Bordeaux and Lille, and thousands in Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse.

Protest in France against global security law (Twitter/@Sophie_Busson)

The police responded with a violent crackdown on the protests, particularly in Paris, where hundreds of riot police were deployed. This included the beating of 24-year-old Syrian freelance photographer Ameer Al-Halbi, who works with AFP, at the Place de la Bastille. Reporters Without Borders general secretary Christophe Deloire published a tweet of Al-Halbi in a hospital with his head and faced bandaged on Saturday evening, stating that he had been hit in the face with a police truncheon.

Gabrielle Cézard, another journalist who was with Al-Halbi in a narrow street when the police attacked, said, “We were identifiable as photographers and stuck against the wall. We cried, ‘Press, press!’ There were projectiles thrown from the side of the protesters. Then the police led a charge, truncheons in hand. Ameer was the only photographer not wearing a helmet or armband. I lost him from my sight and then found him surrounded by people, his face covered in blood and bandages.”

In another video, a riot police officer can be seen pointing a beanbag gun point blank at the face of another journalist.

The “global security” law, which was passed by the National Assembly on Monday and will go to the Senate in January, would make it an offense punishable by a €45,000 fine and three years in jail to publish a video showing the face of a police officer. In addition, it expands the powers of off-duty police to carry their firearms, by requiring that they not be refused entry to any public places for carrying a weapon. The law also provides a blanket permission for the use of drones to film protesters by police, which had already been in practice.

The mass turnout on Saturday was also triggered by anger at two incidents of police violence in the past week. On Monday, riot police went on a rampage at Republic Square, attacking a peaceful encampment of between 450 and 500 refugees set up to protest the lack of housing, government support and the approval of their asylum claims.

On Thursday, Loopsider published a video of a vicious police assault of black music producer Michel Zecler in his Paris recording studio. The video has now been seen more than 20 million times. In it, Zecler narrates minute by minute while watching the CCTV footage showing police attacking him for over 20 minutes, repeatedly kicking, punching and hitting him with a truncheon on the head and face, and calling him a “dirty negro.”

The police threw Zecler in prison for 48 hours and falsely charged him with assaulting them, before being forced to drop all charges when presented with the CCTV footage.

The “global security” law is correctly recognized as aimed at providing the police with enhanced impunity to use violence against the population. Over the past two years, not a single policeman was charged for the brutal crackdowns on “yellow vest” protests and railway strikes, during which dozens of people had their eyes shot out and hands blown off by stun grenades and bean bag bullets. On the contrary, the riot police commander whose unit fired the tear gas canister that killed the octogenarian Zineb Redouane in Marseille was among the 9,000 police bestowed with medals of honor, as was the head of the unit that raided a music concert in Nantes that caused the drowning of 24-year-old Steve Canico.

Facing an explosion of opposition in the population, Macron released a statement on Facebook on Friday, stating that the beating of Zecler “brings us shame.” Macron, whose routine police violence against peaceful protests has been condemned by international human rights organizations, absurdly proclaimed his support for the “right to protest,” and that “every citizen must be able to express his convictions and demands, safe from all violence and pressure.”

Three police involved in the beating of Zecler have been placed in temporary detention. The government has announced an internal review of the attack on the refugee encampment on Monday, including the assault of journalist Remy Buisine, by its internal police investigators (IGPN), whose role is to investigate police but inevitably clear them of all wrongdoing.

On Thursday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin falsely claimed in an interview on the 8 p.m. France2 evening news that Buisine had refused to testify in the IGPN investigation, which Buisine has refuted in a tweet, stating that no one had attempted to contact him.

The Socialist Party (PS), the Greens and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmisive France party have intervened into the protest movement to channel it behind empty appeals for police reform. These parties all support the buildup of a police state against growing opposition in the working class over social inequality, and backed the imposition of the two-year state of emergency by the PS under President François Hollande. They are terrified over the possibility of an explosion of working class anger and the development of a movement of the working class against capitalism.

Hollande published a statement on Twitter calling on Macron to withdraw the “global security” law, adding that there is “more honour” in withdrawing a law “when the risk is to create incomprehension and violence.”

LFI deputy Adrien Quatennens called on Darmanin to “go in the direction of de-escalation” through the “removal of the [Paris police] prefect [Didier] Lallement and the withdrawal of the law that is contested even in the ranks of the [governing] majority.”

Mélenchon, speaking to reporters at the protest on Saturday, said that “it is time to proceed to take in hand the police and, to be more clear, to a refounding of the police.” He gave no details about what such a “refounding” would involve, except to declare that in a “democratic” government the police would be “guardians of the peace.”

Mélenchon’s aim is to conceal from workers the essential historical role of the police as the direct repressive arms of the capitalist state, tasked with protecting the interest of a tiny capitalist elite that has amassed immense wealth against popular opposition from below. Macron’s rapid turn to the building of an authoritarian police state is part of a turn towards dictatorship by capitalist governments around the world: from Brazil and the United States, to Germany, where the fascist Alternative for Germany has been elevated to the official opposition party in the German parliament.

This process is being fueled by the tremendous growth of social inequality that has been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. The answer to this strategy of the ruling class is the building of an international revolutionary movement of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish workers’ states, expropriate the wealth of the financial elite, and reorganize economy to meet social need.

French government orders dissolution of leading Muslim rights group

Samuel Tissot

On November 27, the Collectif Contre Islamophobie en France (CCIF) published a “final statement” in response to a November 19 dissolution order from the government. It stated that the board of directors had in fact pronounced its own voluntary self-dissolution, behind closed doors, on October 29. On November 28, the CCIF’s website and social media accounts were removed.

Last week, the CCIF stated on Twitter that they were “reproached for doing our legal work, applying the law and demanding its application.” It described the dissolution order as “as a terrible message to citizens of the Muslim faith: ‘you do not have the right to defend your rights.’”

The CCIF was one of the largest charities in France, primarily offering legal support to Muslims across the country in discrimination cases. It was founded in 2003 by Samy Debah and led legal campaigns against the 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools, the 2010 law banning full-face veils like the burqa, and the 2016 El Khomri law allowing employers to impose “ideological and religious neutrality” on workers.

Despite the charity’s well-recorded defense of French law, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described the CCIF as an “Islamist office against the republic.”

Barakacity is another charity based in France that received a dissolution order from Darmanin’s office. Over the past ten years, it has provided humanitarian aid to over 2 million people. The charity’s founder, Idriss Sihamedi, was accused of spreading “hateful, discriminatory, and violent ideas.” In October, Sihamedi and his family were subject to a violent no-knock raid in which he was beaten in front of his wife and children, who did not have time to dress. Although Barakacity has pledged to fight the order, Sihamedi is currently seeking asylum in Turkey.

BarakaCity employees (Facebook photo)

Before issuing the order, Darminin described both CCIF and Barakacity as “enemies of the republic.” In flagrant violation of the secular principle of laïcité, which the government falsely claims to defend, since the beginning of the year the government has closed 71 Muslim schools and institutions. Since the murder of schoolteacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist of Chechen origin, 231 Muslims were deported.

The Macron government’s claims to be protecting the population against Islamist terrorism are shot through with hypocrisy. The French imperialist state itself maintains an alliance with ultra-conservative theocratic-monarchy of Saudi Arabia and uses far-right Islamist militias in its regime change operations across the Middle East and North Africa, from Libya to Syria and beyond.

The CCIF has long been a target of the French political establishment. In 2017, it published a piece criticizing ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who followed Macron from the Parti Socialiste to the newly-formed La Republique En Marche. The CCIF criticized Valls for twisting the notion of “republic” and “secularism” to attack Muslims and Roma, accusing him of legitimizing far-right views. In the aftermath of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, the CCIF also campaigned against the state’s attacks on democratic rights after its declaration of a state of emergency.

In moving to officially ban the charity, Macron has realized the wishes of the neo-fascist National Rally. In 2016, National Rally Senator David Rachline released a press statement specifically calling for the dissolution of CCIF. Rachline claimed he was outraged by the CCIF’s campaign “for the repeal of the laws banning headscarves in schools and the full veil in public spaces.”

In response to the CCIF’s tweets, another state agency, the Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalization (CIPDR), accused the CCIF of “duplicity” and of spreading “the fallacious idea that France is a racist anti-Muslim country.” Christian Gravel, a close associate of Valls, was appointed as CIPDR Security General in October. The state instructed the agency to set up a “republican” counter-discourse unit, working to deny the existence of an anti-Muslim campaign and to spin mounting attacks on Muslims as the defense of republican values.

The dissolution of the CCIF is a drastic attack on fundamental democratic rights, as the French government prepares an “anti-separatist” law that would effectively illegalize what it calls “radical” Islam and give the state enormous powers to dissolve legal associations. The dissolution order to the CCIF makes clear that, by introducing this law, the Macron administration intends to permanently undermine the democratic rights of France’s six-million-strong Muslim minority. This policy threatens the democratic rights of the entire working class.

Darmanin’s arbitrary assertion that the CCIF is an enemy of the state, without any evidence of illegal behavior, is a drastic attack not only on the democratic rights of Muslims, moreover, but on the freedom of association. There can be little doubt that such draconian dissolution orders will soon be turned against other associations, organizations, or parties. Amnesty International described the legal grounds for the dissolution order as “problematic” and “vague.”

Initially, Prime Minister Jean Castex had said that he planned to dissolve “all those associations whose complicity with radical Islamism can be established.” This suggested that the state would publicly provide some evidence to justify taking the extraordinary measure of dissolving the association.

Ultimately, however, the government did not bother to provide any evidence of links it alleged the CCIF had to “radical Islamist” groups as a pretext to dissolve it. This only further underscores its contempt for the law and for democratic rights.

“If the CCIF sometimes defends a rather strict version of Islam, it remains prudent and acts in a legal manner,” Professor Franck Frégosi of Sciences-Po-Aix told LCI. “To my knowledge, it has never called for murder, vengeance, or the overthrow of the Republic.”

The history of France and of Europe in the 20th century bears witness to the extreme dangers posed by relentless official scapegoating of religious or national minorities. The cultivation by the ruling class of political anti-Semitism in late 19th-century France as a right-wing counterweight to the socialist movement played a significant role in the development of European fascism and the preparation of world war and the Holocaust.

Today, amid mounting working class anger at Macron’s policies of austerity and of “herd immunity” on the pandemic, it is clear that the government is trying to incite a fascistic atmosphere, using layers of the Muslim population as scapegoats. Workers must be warned: while French Muslims are attacked today, these measures will be used as a precedent to justify attacks on the entire population tomorrow. It is critical to fight for and build a socialist movement in the working class against war and against the incitement of anti-Muslim hatreds.

Migrants protest in India demanding right to return to New Zealand

Tom Peters

Hundreds of stranded migrant workers have protested in India in recent weeks, calling on New Zealand’s government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to allow them to return.

More than 10,000 people who normally live in NZ were stuck outside the country in March when the Labour Party-led government imposed draconian border restrictions in response to the pandemic. The National Herald estimated that 2,000 of work visa holders have been stuck in India for nine months. Some have been separated from family members in New Zealand. Many have lost their jobs and are in severe hardship.

Migrants protest in New Delhi demanding right to return to New Zealand (Source: Facebook)

On November 17, more than 50 people demonstrated in New Delhi. Rallies, organised through social media, have also been held in Sangrur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Mohali and Gujarat. Protest organiser Jagdeep Dhillon said they called on the New Zealand government to give all temporary visa holders visa extensions equal to the duration of the border closure, and to allow all workers normally resident in NZ to return.

Tens of thousands of NZ citizens have returned from overseas during the pandemic. On arrival, they are required to spend two weeks in a quarantine hotel.

The coalition government, which includes the Green Party and is backed by the trade unions, is discriminating against migrants in order to divert popular anger and prevent a unified struggle by workers from all backgrounds against soaring unemployment, austerity and social inequality. Within New Zealand, thousands of migrants on temporary visas who have lost their jobs are barred from accessing unemployment benefits. Tens of thousands who have applied for residency are facing endless delays and fear that they may be forced to leave the country.

Migrants protest in Mohali (Source: Facebook)

In response to the Indian protests, NZ immigration minister Kris Faafoi told Radio Tarana the government was “allowing entry to some normally resident temporary visa holders who can demonstrate a longstanding connection to New Zealand and have a job or business to return to.” Such statements are thoroughly misleading. Only a small handful have been allowed to return.

Urvi, who attended the New Delhi protest, told the World Socialist Web Site she had studied and worked in New Zealand since 2017. She was visiting her grandmother, who was unwell, when the border closed. “My return flight was booked for March 23 and on the 19th they just shut the borders and no time was given to re-book a flight and come back,” she said.

Urvi applied to Immigration NZ (INZ) for an exemption to return on humanitarian grounds, but was turned down. “They won’t tell us what is humanitarian, according to them. People’s lives are at stake but that is not considered humanitarian,” she said. Unable to return, Urvi lost her job in New Zealand with a bank.

Urvi

Urvi said she had been impressed by media coverage glorifying Ardern’s response to the far-right terrorist attack in Christchurch in March 2019, but she now criticised the portrayal of New Zealand as “the most compassionate government in the world.”

“I’ve written to so many MPs and ministers,” Urvi said. “The government doesn’t even acknowledge our emails. They are not ignoring one or two people, they are ignoring thousands of people writing to them.” The New Zealand High Commission had refused to send anyone to meet with New Delhi protesters to receive their list of demands, she said.

Swarna had visited India to give blood to her mother, who was gravely ill, just before the NZ border shut. She has spoken with several other people who had travelled for medical reasons. “There’s a girl who came to India for three weeks’ holiday to have eye surgery because she can’t afford it in New Zealand. One guy I know had an accident in Christchurch and he came to India to rest because there was no one to take care of him in New Zealand.”

She said Ardern was using COVID-19 as a pretext “to throw the migrants away,” with many being plunged into poverty. “We are thinking about each penny because we haven’t earned anything for nine months. It is winter in India and one migrant was saying to me they don’t have enough winter clothes because they left them in New Zealand. When we travelled to India in March it was going to be summer.”

Zee, her husband and their seven-year-old daughter, have been living out of suitcases for nine months after travelling to Bangalore for what was meant to be a four-week visit to see her mother. The family had lived in Christchurch since 2018 and she is employed as an administrator for the Canterbury District Health Board. Zee told the WSWS, “My manager extended my unpaid leave up to January, and if I do not get back in January I will lose my job.”

Despite having no income, Zee and her husband were making repayments on a student loan and paying rent for their Christchurch house. “Whatever meagre savings we had are almost exhausted. Perhaps we will have to use our credit cards to pay our further rent as that is the only option we have,” she said.

Zee with her husband and daughter

“We are staying in my husband’s sister’s house and I don’t know what to do next. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Everything is in New Zealand, we don’t have anything in India. It’s been months that I have not had a peaceful sleep. My daughter is really distressed. She misses her teachers, her school, her friends. I have tried multiple times to apply for an exemption [to return] and I got rejected despite working for the health sector.”

Zee noted that the NZ border was never truly closed and double standards are being applied. “There are cricketers who are coming in and getting tested positive [for COVID-19], there are rugby players, nannies of actresses are being allowed, they are considered as critical workers. What are we then? Why can’t we come back?

“It’s not the general public who do not want us back,” she said. “All our Kiwi friends are very kind, they keep vouching for us, saying that we have the right to come back. It’s just the government that is playing with our lives.”

Zee was scathing about the media’s praise for Ardern’s supposed kindness. “My husband was just showing me that she is nominated for Time magazine’s Person of the Year. This is just a hoax,” she said. During the October election campaign, and in the weeks since then, Ardern has not spoken about the plight of migrants stranded overseas.

RCEP: An Indian Miscalculation?

Sandip Kumar Mishra

The conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) between China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and 10 Southeast Asian countries is an important development in the Indo-Pacific’s economic architecture. After almost eight years of negotiations, the deal—which creates the world’s biggest trading bloc—is finally done. Incidentally, India was part of the negotiations from the very beginning, but opted out in November 2019. It did so to protect itself from possible dumping of Chinese products in the Indian market. Beyond this, further details and reasons have not been shared.

India was likely expecting the RCEP talks to extend indefinitely after its withdrawal from the negotiations. New Delhi could have been overconfident in its belief that a regional free trade deal would ultimately collapse if a 1.3 billion rising economy such as India refused to join. India did have the example of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to go on. New Delhi’s non-participation caused significant damage to China’s intention of redrawing the regional economic map. India was also convinced that following its withdrawal, countries such as Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Vietnam might be dissuaded from going with China, fearing its dominance in the RCEP. Overall, the RCEP’s actualisation is thus an important setback to Indian foreign policy in recent years.

India expected most of the ASEAN countries to review their highly China-dependent supply chains in the aftermath of reports emerging about China’s role in the origin and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and several Chinese attempts to change the regional status quo. In fact, given the widening gap for example between Australia and China over the past few months, India’s expectations appeared on point. New Delhi tried to utilise this opportunity to strengthen its strategic linkages with the Quad, and other ASEAN countries.

The RCEP’s finalisation thus seems to have India off-guard. A plethora of arguments could be made to suggest a lack of significant implications for India. We could be reminded that India in any case has free trade agreements (FTAs) with 12 out of the 15 RCEP countries, bilaterally or collectively. The possibility of India joining the RCEP at a later stage, after sufficiently strengthening its domestic market, could be offered. Some could even argue the possibility of India becoming an observer in the RCEP—such a proposal has already been mooted by Japan. India attempting to compensate for this exclusion by signing another free trade deal with other blocs is one more potential suggestion.

It is however important to admit a missed opportunity. The rule of thumb for any multilateral trade negotiation is that rather than opting out, it is better to stay the course of negotiations and later attempt modification from within. By leaving the table, the door to influence the process generally closes for the departee. India thus made a miscalculation.

Further, even if—in fact especially if—India decided leave the negotiations, it became critically important to reach out to friendly countries in the region and convince them of India’s concerns. India should have tried to at least persuade said friends to move more slowly in concluding the RCEP. New Delhi was unable to do so successfully. It got tied down with the border standoff with China—perhaps a clever ploy by Beijing to distract New Delhi from developments leading up to the RCEP. India was so occupied that it did not seemingly take enough notice of the unprecedented cooperation Japan and South Korea have undertaken with China in addressing the pandemic, as well as in bringing their economies back on the track.

The RCEP as it looks now is a setback for India. It has exposed the limitations of India’s influence among even like-minded countries in the region. It has helped China position itself as a votary of free trade in the region, and India as insufficiently prepared—or even a hurdle in the way. India may deny most of these concerns, although they are obvious to countries in the region. Apart from the geopolitical issues, India is also likely to now face structural obstacles in its trade with the region.

India may cite its trade deficit with FTA partner countries, which reached almost US$ 105 billion in 2018, as needing to be taken stock of. However, it is equally important to realise that most Southeast Asian countries, and South Korea and Japan, are dissatisfied with what they see as Indian oversensitivity about the trade deficit. They argue that bilateral economic exchanges are multi-layered and with innumerable auxiliaries, of which India must not take such a narrow view.

It is time for Indian policymakers to adopt a more nuanced and far-sighted approach to the region’s economic and security architecture, and carefully chart New Delhi’s path and place in it. A sense of overconfidence or self-doubt will not be good for India or for the region, which is the RCEP’s most important lesson.

How the Privatization of Medicine in India Is Accelerating Its COVID-19 Death Toll

Yogesh Jain

Spiraling health care expenses in India have been pushing more than 55 million Indians into a state of abject poverty every year. COVID-19 has only worsened the trend for even more families—like Aghan Singh’s.

To ensure that his sick mother received the best treatment, Singh, a self-employed motor mechanic in the small town of Bilaspur, in Chhattisgarh, India, decided to take her to a popular private hospital nearby. She had been running a fever since July 7 and had also developed breathlessness by July 9. Singh rushed her to the hospital, and when they reached the emergency department around 8 p.m., her oxygen levels were dangerously low. The hospital ordered a battery of tests for COVID-19 and quickly admitted her to an intensive care unit to give her oxygen and medicine. In the first eight hours of his mother being admitted to the hospital, Singh deposited Rs 34,000 ($455) and then paid another Rs 1,96,000 ($2,627) over the next four days. To arrange money for his mother’s treatment, Singh had to sell off two and a half acres of land that he owned in his native village. Despite all his efforts, his mother’s condition worsened progressively, and she died on July 16. While still grieving the loss of his beloved mother, he was further stressed about how his family would survive the next month with most of his resources having been exhausted during his mother’s treatment.

Also in the state of Chhattisgarh, when 60-year-old Savani Bai from the village of Dhanokhar developed mild symptoms of COVID-19, she spoke to a doctor on the state helpline and was advised to go to the hospital. Since all the government hospital beds were occupied, she had to be admitted to the same private hospital in Bilaspur as Singh’s mother, where she was admitted to a general COVID ward. During her 10-day hospitalization, she was given acetaminophen and was kept under daily observation to ensure her condition was not worsening. For this basic treatment, she ended up spending Rs 85,000 ($1,137) and had to mortgage her one-acre farm to meet her hospital expenses.

“I took my mother to a private hospital near my home because it is cleaner and they admit patients swiftly throughout the day,” Singh said. Due to inadequate funding and monitoring of quality control in public hospitals, a large number of people in India are being forced to go to private hospitals for both outpatient, and to a lesser extent, inpatient care. It is a cruel joke that such a move to seek treatment in private hospitals by people is seen as a ‘choice’ rather than a compulsion.

India, which is the “second worst-hit country behind the United States,” has been fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with a fragile health system. The country saw one of the most draconian lockdowns anywhere in March, leading to a sense of panic and causing many private hospitals to simply shut up shop or turn away patients during the lockdown period. “I am 59 years old and [have been taking medication] for diabetes and hypertension for 10 years now—how could I expose myself to the risk of COVID? So I shut my hospital completely when [Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi] announced the lockdown, and reopened [the hospital] three months later,” said Ajay Chandrakar, the doctor who owns the hospital to which Singh took his mother. As a result, the avenues for seeking health care in India during a pandemic-induced lockdown were limited to the inadequate public systems. And the private hospitals that left citizens in the lurch went unquestioned and unpunished by India’s national and state governments.

In fact, this was an opportunity for the public systems to recapture their rightful position as the predominant health care providers in the country. But the public systems were unprepared for the task. There was hardly any increased funding by the center and state governments to build up the capacity of the public health care system in the country to provide treatment and care for the increasing numbers of patients during the pandemic. Instead, there was “a worrying disruption in India’s basic health services in March as local administrations focused on containing the spread of COVID-19,” reports Mint, using data provided by the National Health Mission.

Dr. Gajanan Phutke at the district hospital in Bilaspur said, “I am worried that more than 50 percent of my tuberculosis patients did not return for their drug refills in August, and I don’t know if they are still alive or not. … Immunization rates have also dropped by 50 percent in our health service,” lamented the doctor.

Private providers are able to make massive profits by charging patients exorbitantly—and national and state governments aren’t stopping them. Xavier Minz, who runs the largest private lab in Bilaspur, said, “It is time for me to make good on the losses I suffered when most hospitals were shut [during the lockdown in March]. I got permission to do the COVID Real-Time PCR lab [test] and can charge Rs 3,800 ($51) against my expenses of Rs 1,100 ($14) for a single test.”

Hospitalization and, in particular, intensive care are where private health systems make their major profits. These profits translate into patients incurring catastrophic health expenditure. Private hospitals continue to profiteer during the pandemic by the same methods they used before it—by massively inflating bills for daily bed charges and intensive care.

India has been actively promoting privatization in various social services including in health care for the last 30 years. Private-public partnership (PPP) has been one of the most common models for allowing private systems to perform a task previously done by the public systems while having the state pay for such operations. In India, physicians working with public hospitals are allowed to practice outside their place of employment and treat patients for a fee. “I took my mother to a private hospital owned by Dr. Chandrakar, who is the best doctor in my town and [has worked] in the dharam hospital [government hospitals are called dharam, which means righteous or moral] for the last 25 years.” The PPP system makes it tempting for doctors working in public hospitals to compromise their commitment to their primary role of providing care in the public system. Now in the time of the pandemic, when an acute shortage of doctors and nurses looms large, states still allow their staff to practice privately, causing this chronic problem to become worse.

Back at home after recovering from COVID, Savani Bai cursed herself on her way to work at her farm—which had been mortgaged for her treatment—wondering why she had not demanded that the packed government hospital make space for her too when she required it. Aghan Singh only blamed it on his karma, while trying to come to terms with his bleak future.

China Stabilizes as the West Dithers

Tom Clifford

Beijing.

It isn’t about what happened, it’s about what will happen. Our time has come is the catchphrase, a rallying cry. The people are told they have been cheated. It won’t happen again. We are the justice seekers. Upend the global trade order, it is skewed against us. This is heady stuff.

These are not the viewpoints of the (current) occupant of the White House but rather of another world leader.

The fallout from the 2020 US presidential election is providing fascinating viewing in Beijing. Chinese president Xi Jinping would never boast publicly that he trumped the Donald but the small shots of Baiju to ward off the Beijing chill are being consumed in the leadership compound off Tiananmen Square with more relish than usual.

Of course there are differences between the two, not least in hair styles, but the similarities are also worth commenting on. An outsider comes to power. Xi was originally meant to be premier to Li Keqiang who was meant to be president. But Xi was able to persuade the military that he was their man more than the “economist” Li.  Xi shook things up, refuses to leave office, (an option not available to Trump unless his diligent hair-dye dripping lawyers have reinterpreted the constitution in ways not attempted before) and prefers to have his country invest in itself rather than seek markets elsewhere.

Xi has abandoned “going global” for Chinese business and finance. Xi, instead, is, again you’ve guessed it, putting China first. His policies have resulted in an extension of China’s state sector. Even the Belt and Road Initiative is now seen as primarily beneficial to large-scale state firms.

A personality cult, (much more effective than Donald’s), unseen since the days of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, is being fostered. By stripping term limits from the Chinese constitution, Xi has the right to rule for life.

Nor does Xi care much for global opinion as seen by his willingness to risk international condemnation to stamp out democratic values in Hong Kong. People outside of China still have difficulty is realizing how little the former British colony matters to people on the Chinese mainland. Hong Kongers are simply viewed as ungrateful, they have liberties undreamt of on the mainland, and their economy is not as vital to China as it once was. None of this excuses the dire state of human rights in China but the party has been able to claim, unchallenged because it controls the media, that the right to work is more important than the right to vote. The job rate is national security. The party becomes less secure if the employment rate drops.

And China feels more secure now than it’s has done for centuries. And this is why the South China Sea is so important.

For the first time since Portuguese ships reached the Chinese coast five centuries ago, China is in command or believes it is in command of waters off its coast. This means that Beijing views China as secure and the party is reaping the benefits of that. One reason is sheer, old fashioned patriotism. But the other is that the military, long a byword for inefficiency and corruption, is being seen to deliver. Without a shot being fired in anger, an era of unquestioned US dominance in Asia has drawn to a close. The coverage of the South China Sea militarization in the West has been about that, the military build-up. In China the coverage has been on the security aspect.

Xi’s ascent to power took place at a time when the West was largely distracted. Financial crises, Brexit, Trump. It seemed to have enough on its plate. The West does not know how to handle Xi. Handling the West is a dilemma the Chinese president and his advisors have not had to grapple with.  He can be sanctioned in the US but get trade deals in Europe. In reality, Beijing believes the West needs China more than China needs to change. Xi feels emboldened. The West seems reluctant and dithering. You do not have to be a student of history to appreciate that this is a dangerous mix.

Britain’s Class War on Children

John Pilger

When I first reported on child poverty in Britain, I was struck by the faces of children I spoke to, especially the eyes. They were different: watchful, fearful.

In Hackney, in 1975, I filmed Irene Brunsden’s family. Irene told me she gave her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes. “She doesn’t tell me she’s hungry, she just moans. When she moans, I know something is wrong.”

“How much money do you have in the house? I asked.

“Five pence,” she replied.

Irene said she might have to take up prostitution, “for the baby’s sake”. Her husband Jim, a truck driver who was unable to work because of illness, was next to her. It was as if they shared a private grief.

This is what poverty does. In my experience, its damage is like the damage of war; it can last a lifetime, spread to loved ones and contaminate the next generation. It stunts children, brings on a host of diseases and, as unemployed Harry Hopwood in Liverpool told me, “it’s like being in prison”.

This prison has invisible walls. When I asked Harry’s young daughter if she ever thought that one day she would live a life like better-off children, she said unhesitatingly: “No”.

What has changed 45 years later?  At least one member of an impoverished family is likely to have a job — a job that denies them a living wage. Incredibly, although poverty is more disguised, countless British children still go to bed hungry and are ruthlessly denied opportunities..

What has not changed is that poverty is the result of a disease that is still virulent yet rarely spoken about – class.

Study after study shows that the people who suffer and die early from the diseases of poverty brought on by a poor diet, sub-standard housing and the priorities of the political elite and its hostile “welfare” officials — are working people. In 2020, one in three preschool British children suffers like this.

In making my recent film, The Dirty War on the NHS, it was clear to me that the savage cutbacks to the NHS and its privatisation by the Blair, Cameron, May and Johnson governments had devastated the vulnerable, including many NHS workers and their families. I interviewed one low-paid NHS worker who could not afford her rent and was forced, to sleep in churches or on the streets.

At a foodbank in central London, I watched young mothers looking nervously around as they hurried away with old Tesco bags of food and washing powder and tampons they could no longer afford, their young children holding on to them. It is no exaggeration that at times I felt I was walking in the footprints of Dickens.

Boris Johnson has claimed that 400,000 fewer children are living in poverty since 2010 when the Conservatives came to power. This is a lie, as the Children’s Commissioner has confirmed. In fact, more than 600,000 children have fallen into poverty since 2012; the total is expected to exceed 5 million. This, few dare say, is a class war on children.

Old Etonian Johnson is may be a caricature of the born-to-rule class; but his “elite” is not the only one. All the parties in Parliament, notably if not especially Labour – like much of the bureaucracy and most of the media — have scant if any connection to the “streets”: to the world of the poor: of the “gig economy”: of battling a system of Universal Credit that can leave you without a penny and in despair.

Last week, the prime minister and his “elite” showed where their priorities lay. In the face of the greatest health crisis in living memory when Britain has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe and poverty is accelerating as the result of a punitive “austerity” policy, he announced £16.5 billion for “defence”. This makes Britain, whose military bases cover the world, the highest military spender in Europe.

And the enemy? The real one is poverty and those who impose it and perpetuate it.

A Barefoot Chronicler Of Endangered Crafts

Moin Qazi

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece

— John Ruskin

We’ve all heard of endangered species and forests —now imagine crafts are at risk of going extinct. A rising number of indigenous crafts are now in danger of becoming   endangered on account of their time-consuming nature and fewer craftspeople possessing these specialized skills. Times are changing and not all young people want to take over their parents’ old jobs, nor is it easy to attract new people to enter these trades.

Sunil Deshpande is a bamboo craftsman who is mentoring a movement for popularising bamboo craft. He has also been travelling extensively to study Indian crafts through a dialogue with the craftsmen themselves. His present obsession is chronicling these traditional crafts and the social environment which has nurtured them. His wife Nirupama Deshpande is an academically-trained social worker from a well-known school of social sciences and shares a common social chemistry with him. They have chosen for their home a village called Lavada in the Melghat forests in Amravati district of northern Maharashtra. I met Sunil recently at his small makeshift studio in Nagpur where he has enrolled young women from neighbourng slums as trainees in bamboo craft.

The preservation of crafts matters for many people as the traditional occupation is their sole livelihood. It gives them respect and dignity as well. Much of India’s heritage would be lost if people lost their traditional skills. “We have to understand the local challenges to improve their composite livelihoods,” avers Sunil. According to him, it takes local entrepreneurs, empowered to adapt easily to the nuances of local culture, to create and drive change sustainably on the ground. The challenge is to keep the cultural, social and economic balance intact. It is a very tenuous link. These crafts embody not just a socioeconomic narrative, but a political narrative as well.

Cultural mobility was restricted to only the educated upper castes that had the option to move laterally. The under castes did not have these options. This kept them rooted in their traditional identity and helped protect the pipeline of skills learned in the family milieu. These communities kept to their craft skills, partly because of forced immobility and membership of their guild remained their only identity.

Deshpande embarked on his yearlong project, “Search for talented craftsmen: a journey of communication and collaboration” as 150th birth anniversary tribute to the greatest craftsmen of all time, Mahatma Gandhi. The yet to be published monograph documents the diverse skills that weave into India’s vibrant craft landscape. Dehspande has covered almost every craft, some of these are so little known that craft connoisseurs also may not have heard of them. Although the research crystallised during the year, it has long been in the making. Deshpande has undertaken regular padyatras to understand the culture and society of these craftsmen. He is advocating for more voice for craftsmen in policy formulation and probably a small space for them in the decennial census exercise so that we have proper data  on craftsmen to work upon.

Deshpande takes us through a journey into deep blocks, villages and settlements that provide sustenance to these craftsmen who pursue crafts as diverse as clay pottery, terracotta work, metal mirror work, block printing, grass-mat weaving, black stone pottery, metalwork , wax metal casing ,scroll painting and  sheet metal work . What links them together is the ceaseless urge to keep their traditions alive even in the face of heavy odds. Moreover, all these crafts are eco-friendly, using traditional raw materials.  The techniques are also grounded in principles that harmonise with nature. Deshpande has studied the socioeconomic and cultural life of families of these craftsmen and has found close link between them.

It is tragic that what was once an abiding symbol of India’s glorious cultural legacy has left many of its tradition bearers in a state of penury. It is time for the government, businesses and entrepreneurs to infuse new economic oxygen before these traditions become extinct. Ironically, the most authentic connoisseurs of Indian arts and crafts are foreigners who are genuinely interested in patronizing them so that they withstand the onslaught of the changing state of affairs.

For every artisan,   5-6 family members depend on the craft business for daily sustenance. Over the past few decades, the number of Indian artisans has decreased substantially due to declining skills, loss of access to existing markets, and difficulty catering to new markets, resulting in migration of artisans to cities for more stable employment.

The crafts are threatened with extinction primarily by mechanisation which offers a cheaper and faster way to produce the same goods. As a result, many artisan clusters are languishing. Historically, the handmade sector was characterized by local demand, inter-dependence of communities, the use of local raw materials and patronage .Patronage is fast shrinking with consumers preferring the cheaper machine-made varieties. We live in an era of mass-produced goods where economies of scale have led to lower prices. New materials have been developed that are not just cheaper, but also more durable. Competition from the power looms     further hastened the end to the already precarious livelihood. This is a bitter reality that we have to contend with.

It is difficult to distinguish genuine handmade products from those made on power looms or the ones mass-produced by machines. Attempts at certification of genuine craft products have not taken off as consumer demand for certified produce has not grown and producers have limited incentives to adopt it.

While the origin of handicrafts is rooted in history, we have to link their future with the dual realities of culture and economy as they are not just the interpreters of India’s art but are also valuable earners of foreign exchange. They evoke the myths, legends and history of the people.

The artisan is not only a repository of a knowledge system that was sustainable but is also an active participant in its re-creation. To celebrate a craftsman’s perception of design, one must view some of our indigenous craft traditions which have evolved through an instinctive knowledge of the functional needs of a community. While the artisan continues with his craft, marketing remains a paramount problem. Though several crafts have been saved from near extinction, the grouping of artisan communities into modern-day guilds or co-operative societies has helped only in a limited way — it has just  turned despair into a sense of hope.

One of the earliest acts of the new government in India after the country attained freedom was to set up a national Board for the identification of and development of crafts. Realizing the predicament faced by the weavers in the post-independence period, the All India Handicrafts Board stepped in to provide a buffer to the weavers. In 1965, the Board instituted national awards to craftsmen. They were a public recognition of talent, skill, and above all, the creativity of these flag bearers of a hoary tradition.

A plan for the promotion of a craft can yield concrete results only if it is a sincere exercise in which the craftsmen remain the key focus. However, more often than not, such efforts are generally short term. They provide only a cosmetic treatment and are a mere band-aid, the critical issues air brushed. Indian crafts have suffered primarily because of a lack of a visionary approach from the cultural administrators.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. The basic argument is that work should not become stultifying and drudgery that it evokes little interest in the worker. It will be harmful both for the individual as well as the business. At the same time work should not become such leisure that it loses seriousness and doesn’t provide a challenge to the creative faculties of the worker.

“The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern west as the ancient east, “can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work”.

The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom. He must make what his machine is geared to make. A craftsman creates a work of art.  While most people approach their work with the mindset that they just want to get it done, craftsmen are more concerned with who they are becoming and what they are creating rather than how fast they finish it.

The genius of a craftsman can be best described by him alone. A women craftsman was once asked from whom she learnt her craft. She replied “from time as the most ancient, the parampara. We are the holders of sight and skill. We carry it in our wombs” she said. That tells us why these crafts are heirlooms handed down through generations.

Lives of Workers Should Matter

Vidyarthy Chatterjee

Contrary to what she is often made out to be, India is not a poor country. Rather, India is a rich country, the majority of whose people are so poor as to have a tough time securing two meals a day. India is a rich country with  multitudes of starving and half-fed men, women and children because practically her entire wealth has been cornered by a handful of family-owned and other corporates with the active support of successive crony governments at the Centre and in the States cutting across political and ideological lines. But arguably, never before in the history of independent India, have corporates been allowed by the State to call the shots with such impunity as is the case today.

The ascendancy of the far-Right in Indian politics, especially in the past five or six years, has seen the steady whittling away of the rights of the working man. The past few months have been truly catastrophic as far as the fate of the ‘hewers of wood’ and the ‘drawers of water’ in this country is concerned. In one fell stroke, the Narendra Modi government has snatched away, among other things, the right of the worker to an eight-hour working day which was a basic entitlement down the decades. The working class ( and its leaders) have been told in  no uncertain  terms that in view of the so-called emergency in the economy, they will have to  work for twelve hours a day, maybe longer, with no overtime pay or related facilities. Worse still, the employer would have the right not to entertain any questions in this regard from any quarter. Henceforth, there will be no court of appeal for dissatisfied workers.

In other words, using its brute majority, the BJP dispensation has struck down a long and glorious history of struggle and sacrifice whereby the working class had earned the right to an eight-hour working day. The central trade unions have criticized the move as unlawful and autocratic; a lawless law carried out in violation of the spirit of democratic accountability; and an outrage devoid of any moral sense. But who is listening, in this season of fear by disease or starvation, and all–round confusion? Truth to tell, on hindsight, the abrogation of trade union rights during the 19-month ‘declared’ Emergency in 1975-76 seems no more than a pin-prick compared to what workers and their families are being made to suffer in the present times, that is, an ‘undeclared’ Super Emergency, which may well extend to an unspecified number of years.

In this connection, the role of the Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the labour arm of the BJP, should be subjected to severe questioning. It is anybody’s guess why the organization is not coming out against the draconian measures adopted by the Modi government. It would seem that  the Prime Minister’s consolidation of personal power with the support of a handful of high-profile faithfuls in both the BJP and its ideological master, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is at the moment so complete, that no one has the guts to question his authority. But, one would have thought that for the sake of its own credibility, the BMS would go through certain motions of assertiveness; put up at least a token resistance to the dangers facing the working class. But even that was, perhaps, too much to ask for in the present climate of compromise and easy acceptance of conditionalities imposed from above.

However, coming to think of it, it should not be difficult for us to accept that the present culture of dishonourable accommodation is nothing new in Indian politics. The strength of conviction and solidity of character needed to oppose the excesses of a so-called ‘louha purush’ or ‘louha netri’ have always been in short supply in Indian society. It will not do to forget that in the days of Indira Gandhi, rare was the voice of dissent in the Congress. But, admittedly, the situation now is far worse, what with the media and even large sections of the academia burning the midnight oil to be on the right side of the demagogue in democratic disguise, also known as the ‘hriday samrat’ of the average Hindu, sorry, Hindutvawadi citizen.

It may sound bizarre, but it would seem that in the time of corona, the gods are fighting on the side of the godless. What else to make of the calamitous social and economic conditions caused by the pandemic, which are proving to be so handy to the power brokers and conmen of majoritarian politics. Taking full advantage of the popular helplessness induced by the visitation, as also the feeble resistance put up by a disunited and emasculated Opposition, the Centre is driving its juggernaut any way it pleases, no matter which section of the poor and powerless comes in its path. Corona is an unprecedented curse to hundreds of millions, but may well be considered an unexpected windfall for the ‘haves’ and their political patrons.

It is nothing short of black magic that a rich country like India should suddenly become very poor, may be even bankrupt, when asked to share its riches on a war footing with the jobless and the starving; more specifically, with those trying to make their way home hundreds of miles away on foot. A whole college of distinguished economists from Amartya Sen and Abhijit Bandopadhyaya to Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian has gone hoarse asking the Indian government to release enough funds to reach some cash, or a little cash along with a little food, to the country’s working class and other equally affected sections of society. They have been arguing that safeguarding the economic health of the country is no doubt important, but it is wrong to neglect the question of public health or that of the survival of the poorest.

But as it appears, the government, ever-mindful of the debt it owes to the corporates in many ways but principally by way of their huge donations to the BJP’s election kitty in 2014 and 2019, has allowed itself to ignore the advice of the economists. It has had no problems caving in to pressures exerted by employers, managements, and the chambers of commerce. Like Trump in the United States, Johnson in Britain, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi is a willing creature of the tycoons; of the demands of the capitalist market, what if in the process, the working class and other vulnerable sections in the present scenario of shrinking survival opportunities, are thrown to the wolves. Television footage of migrant workers run over by speeding trains and trucks, or of dead bodies of workers being fished out of train compartments, or, most poignant of all, an infant trying to wake up its mother lying dead on a railway platform, may leave a mark on ordinary viewers, but is not quite enough to move the stone-hearted ‘jan-sevaks’.

Perhaps the workers of the world also need to take a part of the blame. It’s been a long time since they last united in a focused and determined manner against those agencies which they have always known to be hostile to their daily interests. Since the workers of the world failed to unite, their traditional oppressors united with greater energy and enterprise than ever before. One does not need to be told that the policies pursued and methods adopted by governments, international financial institutions, indigenous moneybags, foreign multinationals, and last but not the least, their toadies in the newspapers, the television channels and the universities, are getting more sophisticated  and more sinister with each passing day. The present globalised order makes it particularly easy for some people of power and privilege to pursue their agenda of exploitation and marginalization against those who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow.

Till roughly thirty years ago, many artists and intellectuals would show by the nature and quality of their work, their concern for social justice without allowing it to interfere with the depth and focus of their art. In many cases, art and activism would fuse unobtrusively to show the imperfections of the human condition caused largely by the wrongdoings of political operators and their protégés in business and industry. Thirty years later, artists and intellectuals are still there but, apparently, not too many are bothered siding with the abused and the wronged. It would seem that, like careerists everywhere, they too, have been influenced by post-modernist inclinations to dismiss the need for ideas and ideologies of resistance. Sadly, this has led to a political/philosophical bankruptcy causing capitalists to rejoice and, conversely, their victims to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of dejection, if not outright resignation.

Yet, the thought that we shall overcome someday, cannot be allowed to die out. The lakhs of Indian workers who have been so outrageously victimized by the Modi government will ideally, turn around and stage a comeback once the anxiety and panic of the pandemic recede. Notwithstanding his many faults, Man is too noble a creature to die on the ‘rajpath’ without a struggle like a dog. And Covid-19, however satanic it maybe in its reach, longevity, or capacity for sheer evil, cannot be a fixture for all time to come. When the disease lessens or, hopefully, disappears, where will the perpetrators of impromptu injustices on a scale that the working class has never experienced before in free India, hide?

Dispossession and Imperialism Repackaged as ‘Feeding the World’

Colin Todhunter

The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations. Smallholder farmers are being criminalised and even made to disappear when it comes to the struggle for land. They are constantly exposed to systematic expulsion.

In 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, are eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class. Financial returns are what matter to these entities, not food security.

Consider Ukraine. The organisation Grain found that in 2014 small farmers operated 16% of agricultural land in that country, but provided 55% of agricultural output, including: 97% of potatoes, 97% of honey, 88% of vegetables, 83% of fruits and berries and 80% of milk. It is clear that Ukraine’s small farms were delivering impressive outputs.

Following the toppling of Ukraine’s government in early 2014, the way was paved for foreign investors and Western agribusiness to take a firm hold over the agri-food sector. Reforms mandated by the EU-backed loan to Ukraine in 2014 included agricultural deregulation intended to benefit foreign agribusiness. Natural resource and land policy shifts were being designed to facilitate the foreign corporate takeover of enormous tracts of land.

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, stated at the time that the World Bank and IMF were intent on opening up foreign markets to Western corporations and that the high stakes around the control of Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector, the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat, constitute an overlooked critical factor. He added that in recent years, foreign corporations had acquired more than 1.6 million hectares of Ukrainian land.

Western agribusiness has been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time, long before the coup. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. An article by Oriental Review in 2015 noted that since the mid-90s the Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council had been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.

In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds. When GMO crops were legally introduced into the Ukrainian market in 2013, they were planted in up to 70% of all soybean fields, 10-20% of cornfields and over 10% of all sunflower fields, according to various estimates (or 3% of the country’s total farmland).

Interestingly, the investment fund Siguler Guff & Co acquired a 50% stake in the Ukrainian Port of Illichivsk in 2015, which specialises in agricultural exports.

In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine. According to the Brettons Wood Project website, the government committed to lifting the 19-year moratorium on the sale of state-owned agricultural lands after sustained pressure from international finance. The World Bank incorporated further measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine approved in late June. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”

In response, Frederic Mousseau recently stated:

“The goal is clearly to favor the interests of private investors and Western agribusinesses… It is wrong and immoral for Western financial institutions to force a country in a dire economic situation amidst an unprecedented pandemic to sell its land.”

But morality has little to do with it. The September 2020 report on the grain.org website ‘Barbarians at the barn: private equity sinks its teeth into agriculture’ shows that there is no morality where capitalism’s profit compulsion is concerned.

Private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – are being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world. This money is used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. The article outlines how offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has targeted Ukraine.

In addition to various Western governments, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation’s endowment, is also investing in private equity, taking positions in farm and food businesses around the world.

Grain notes that this forms part of the trend whereby the world of finance – banks, funds, insurance companies and the like – is gaining control over the real economy, including forests, watersheds and rural people’s territories.

Apart from uprooting communities and grabbing resources to entrench an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture, this process of ‘financialisation’ is shifting power to remote board rooms occupied by people with no connection to farming and who are merely in it to make money. These funds tend to invest for a 10-15 year period, resulting in handsome returns for investors but can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food insecurity.

This financialisation of agriculture perpetuates a model of farming that serves the interests of the agrochemical and seed giants, including one of the world’s biggest companies, Cargill, which is involved in almost every aspect of global agribusiness.

Still run as a privately held company, the 155-year-old enterprise trades in purchasing and distributing various agricultural commodities, raises livestock and produces animal feed as well as food ingredients for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. This includes Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities.

A recent article on the Unearthed website accused Cargill and its 14 billionaire owners of profiting from the use of child labour, rain forest destruction, the devastation of ancestral lands, the spread of pesticide use and pollution, contaminated food, antibiotic resistance and general health and environmental degradation.

As if this is not concerning enough, the UN Food and Agriculture is now teaming up with CropLife, a global trade association representing the interests of companies that produce and promote pesticides, including highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs).

In a 19 November press release issued by PAN (Pesticide Action Network) Asia Pacific, some 350 organisations in 63 countries representing hundreds of thousands of farmers, fisherfolk, agricultural workers and other communities, as well as human rights, faith-based, environmental and economic justice institutions, delivered a letter to FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu urging him to stop recently announced plans to deepen collaboration with CropLife International by entering into a formal partnership.

HHPs are responsible for a wide range of devastating health harms to farmers, agricultural workers and rural families around the world and these chemicals have decimated pollinator populations and are wreaking havoc on biodiversity and fragile ecosystems.

Marcia Ishii, senior scientist at PAN North America, explained the serious implications of the proposed collaboration:

“Unfortunately, since Mr. Qu’s arrival at FAO, the institution appears to be opening up to deeper collaboration with pesticide companies, which are likely to exploit such a relationship for bluewashing, influencing policy development and enhancing access to global markets.”

She went on to state:

“It is no surprise that FAO’s recently appointed Deputy Director General, Beth Bechdol, comes to FAO with a history of close financial ties to Corteva (formerly Dow/DuPont).”

The FAO has in recent years shown a commitment to agroecology but, in calling for an independent FAO, Susan Haffmans from PAN Germany, argues:

“The FAO should not jeopardize its successes in agroecology nor its integrity by cooperating with precisely that branch of industry which is responsible for the production of highly hazardous pesticides and whose products contribute to poisoning people and their environment worldwide.”

The July 2019 UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts concludes that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.

Agroecological principles represent a shift away from the reductionist yield-output chemical-intensive industrial paradigm, which results in among other things enormous pressures on human health, soil and water resources. Agroecology is based on a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, local calorific production, cropping patterns and diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.

Such a system is underpinned by a concept of food sovereignty, based on optimal self-sufficiency, the right to culturally appropriate food and local ownership and stewardship of common resources, such as land, water, soil and seeds.

However, this model is 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, pirated seeds and knowledge nor long-line global supply chains.

By seeking to develop a formal partnership with the FAO, CropLife aims to further entrench its interests while derailing the FAO’s commitment to agroecology. This much has been apparent in recent times with US Ambassador to the FAO Kip Tom having attacked agroecology –  and like CropLife members – he perpetuates the myth (recently debunked by Dr Jonathan Latham in the new book   ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture’) of impending disaster if we do not accept the chemical-industrial paradigm.

Whether it involves farmers in India recently taking to the streets to protest against legislation that will throw the sector wide open to foreign agricapital, land acquisitions in Ukraine or struggles for land rights and seed sovereignty (etc) elsewhere, it is clear that a small cabal of unscrupulous global agribusiness giants are driving and benefitting from deregulated capital flows, peasant displacement, land acquisitions and decisions made at international and national levels via the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The web that global capitalism weaves in a quest to seek out new profits, capture new markets and control common resources (commonwealth) is destroying farmer livelihoods, the environment and health under the bogus claim of ‘feeding the world’.

Those farmers who survive the profiteering strategies of dispossession and imperialism are to become incorporated into a system of contract farming dictated by global agri-food giants tied to an exploitative food regime based on market dependency and corporate control. A regime that places profit ahead of biodiverse food security, healthy diets and the environment.