Murad Subay (Yemen), Fuck War, 2018.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – along with other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – began to bomb Yemen. These countries entered a conflict that had been ongoing for at least a year as a civil war escalated between the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the Ansar Allah movement of the Zaidi Shia, and al-Qaeda. The GCC – led by the Saudi monarchy – wanted to prevent any Shia political project, whether aligned with Iran or not, from taking power along Saudi Arabia’s border. The attack on Yemen can be described, therefore, as an attack by the Sunni monarchs against the possibility of what they feared would be a Shia political project coming to power on the Arabian Peninsula.
That war has continued, with the Saudis and the Emiratis backed fully by the Western countries, who have sold them billions of dollars of weapons to use against the impoverished Yemeni people. Saudi Arabia, the richest Arab country, has now been at war for the past six and a half years without much gain against Yemen, the poorest Arab country. Meanwhile, Yemen, which has a population of 30 million, has lost over 250,000 people to this conflict, half of them to the violence of war and half of them to the violence of starvation and disease, including cholera. None of the military or political aims of the Saudis and the Emiratis have been attained during the course of the war (the UAE withdrew in 2020). The only outcome of this war has been devastation for the Yemeni people.
Saba Jallas (illustration) / Mohammed Aziz (photograph), From Today’s Bombing on Sana’a, 7/3/2021 AD, Yemen, 2021.
Since February 2021, the military forces of Ansar Allah have made a push to capture the central town of Marib, which is not only at the epicentre of Yemen’s modest oil refining project but is also one of the few parts of the country still controlled by President Hadi. Other provinces, such as those in the south, are in the hands of al-Qaeda, while breakaway factions of the army control the western coastline. The attack on Marib has opened the jaws of death even wider, creating in its wake a flood of refugees. If Marib falls to Ansar Allah, which is likely, the United Nations’ mission to maintain Hadi as the country’s president will fail. Ansar Allah will then move to reintegrate the country by making a push against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which remains in charge in the Abyan Province; AQAP is now being challenged by the newly formed Islamic State in Yemen. Punctual US strikes against AQAP come alongside reliance by the Saudi alliance on AQAP to battle Ansar Allah on the ground, including through the use of assassinations to intimidate civilians and advocates for peace.
Fouad al-Futaih (Yemen), Mother and Child, 1973.
On 19 October, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder briefed the press in Geneva after his return from Yemen. He wrote, ‘The Yemen conflict has just hit another shameful milestone: 10,000 children have been killed or maimed since fighting started in March 2015. That’s the equivalent of four children every day’. Elder’s report is shocking. Of the 15 million people (50% of Yemen’s population) who do not have access to basic facilities, 8.5 million are children. In August, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore told the UN General Assembly, ‘Being a child in Yemen is the stuff of nightmares.’ ‘In Yemen,’ Fore said, ‘one child dies every ten minutes from preventable causes, including malnutrition and vaccine-preventable diseases.’
This, friends, is the cost of war. War is an affliction, hideous in its outcomes. Rarely can one turn to history and point a finger at a war that was worth the price. Even if a list of such wars could be made, Yemen would not figure on it, nor would so many countries which have bled for other people’s failures of imagination.
Millions of people have lost their lives while tens of millions have seen their lives destroyed. The blank stare of the person who has seen constant death and misery is what remains when the bombs stop falling alongside the blank stare of the hungry person whose country struggles to deal with the other quiet yet deadly wars of economic sanctions and trade disputes. Little good comes of this belligerence for the people who are its victims. Powerful countries might move the chess pieces to favour themselves and arms dealers might open new bank accounts to preserve their money – and so it goes.
Ilham al-Arashi (Yemen), Nature is Beautiful, 1990.
The war in Yemen is not only driven by the country’s internal politics; it is also largely a result of the terrible regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This rivalry appears to be due to the sectarian differences between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, while in fact the rivalry stems from something deeper: monarchical Islamic Saudi Arabia cannot tolerate a republican Islamic government in its neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia had no problem when Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi Shahs (1925-1979). Its animosity grew only after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when it became clear that an Islamic republic could be possible on the Arabian Peninsula (this was a repeat of the Saudi and British-inspired war between 1962 and 1970 against the republic of North Yemen).
It is, therefore, a welcome development that high-ranking officials from both Iran and Saudi Arabia first met in Baghdad in April of this year and then again in September to set the table for a de-escalation of tensions. The discussions have already raised the issues of regional rivalries in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen – all countries afflicted by the problems between Saudi Arabia and Iran. If a grand bargain can be reached between Riyadh and Tehran, it could de-escalate several wars in the region.
In 1962, Abdullah al-Sallal, a working-class military officer, led a nationalist military coup that overthrew the last ruler of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. Many sensitive people rushed to staff the new government, including the brilliant lawyer and poet Abdullah al-Baradouni. Al-Baradouni worked at the radio broadcasting service in the capital, Sana’a, from 1962 till his death in 1999, lifting the cultural discourse of his country. His diwan (‘collection’) of poems includes Madinat Al Ghad’ (‘The City of Tomorrow’), 1968 and Al Safar Ela Ay Ayyam Al Khudr (‘Journey to the Green Days’), 1979. ‘From Exile to Exile’ is one of his classic verses:
My country is handed over from one tyrant
to the next, a worse tyrant;
from one prison to another,
from one exile to another.
It is colonised by the observed
invader and the hidden one;
handed over by one beast to two
like an emaciated camel.
In the caverns of its death
my country neither dies
nor recovers. It digs
in the muted graves looking
for its pure origins
for its springtime promise
that slept behind its eyes
for the dream that will come
for the phantom that hid.
It moves from one overwhelming
night to a darker night.
My country grieves
in its own boundaries
and in other people’s land
and even on its own soil
suffers the alienation
of exile.
Abbas al-Junaydi (Yemen), Adult Education and Workforce, c. 1970s.
Al-Baradouni’s country grieves in its own boundaries not only for the destruction, but also for its ‘springtime promise’, for its lost histories. Like Afghanistan, Sudan, and so many countries across the world, Yemen was once a centre of Left possibility, home to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) from 1967 to 1990 in the country’s south. The PDRY emerged out of an anti-colonial struggle against the British led by trade unions (Aden Trade Union Congress and its charismatic leader Abdullah al-Asnag) and Marxist formations (the National Liberation Front), which – after internal struggles – merged into the Yemeni Socialist Party in 1978 led by President Abdul Fattah Ismail. The PDRY attempted to enact land reforms and advance agricultural production, created a national education system (which promoted women’s education), built a strong medical system (including health centres in the countryside), and pushed through the 1974 Family Law that put women’s emancipation at the front of its agenda. All of this was destroyed when the PDRY was overthrown as part of the unification of Yemen in 1990. That socialist memory remains fragile in the corners of the bomb-torn country. The post Being a Child in Yemen Is the Stuff of Nightmares first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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“It feels like we are at the end of an era,” Bárbara Sepúlveda tells me on October 12, 2021. Sepúlveda is a member of Chile’s Constitutional Convention and of the Communist Party of Chile. The era to which Sepúlveda refers is that of General Augusto Pinochet, who led the U.S.-backed coup in 1973 that overthrew More
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Jaime de Guzman (Philippines), Metamorphosis II, 1970.
On 5 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a historic, non-legally binding resolution that ‘recognises the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right that is important for the enjoyment of human rights’. Such a right should force governments who sit at the table at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow later this month to think about the grievous harm caused by the polluted system that shapes our lives. In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) pointed out that 92% of the world’s population breathes toxic air quality; in the developing world, 98% of children under five are inflicted with such bad air. Polluted air, mostly from carbon emissions, results in 13 deaths per minute globally.
Such UN resolutions can have an impact. In 2010, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution for the ‘human right to water and sanitation’. As a result, several countries – such as Mexico, Morocco, Niger, and Slovenia, to name a few – added this right to water into their constitutions. Even if these are somewhat limited regulations – with little incorporation of wastewater management and culturally appropriate means for water delivery – they have nonetheless had an immediate, positive effect with thousands of households now connected to drinking water and sewage lines.
Kim in Sok (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), Rain Shower at the Bus Stop, 2018.
A major area of futility in our time is that produced by the roaring sound of hunger that afflicts one in three people on the planet. On the occasion of World Food Day, seven media outlets – ARG Medios, Brasil de Fato, Breakthrough News, Madaar, New Frame, Newsclick, and Peoples Dispatch – jointly produced a booklet called Hunger in the World looking at the state of hunger in countries across the world, how this was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, and what people’s movements have done to respond to this catastrophic reality. The closing essay features a speech given by Abahlali baseMjondolo’s president S’bu Zikode. ‘It is morally wrong and unjust for people to starve in the most productive economy in human history’, Zikode said. ‘There are more than enough resources to feed, house and educate every human being. There are enough resources to abolish poverty. But these resources are not used to meet people’s needs; instead, they are used to control poor countries, communities, and families’.
In the introduction to Hunger in the World, written by Zoe Alexandra and Prasanth R of Peoples Dispatch and me, we looked at the state of hunger today and how we got there, as well a vision for the future being created by people’s movements in the fissures of the present. Below is a brief extract from our introduction.
In May 1998, Cuba’s president Fidel Castro attended the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. This is an annual meeting held by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Castro focused his attention on hunger and poverty, which he said were the cause of so much suffering. ‘Nowhere in the world’, he said, ‘in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet’.
Two years after Castro made this speech, the WHO’s World Health Report accumulated data on hunger-related deaths. It added up to just over nine million deaths per year, six million of them children under the age of five. This meant that 25,000 people were dying of hunger and poverty each day. These numbers far exceeded the number of those killed in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, whose death toll is calculated to be around half a million people. Attention is paid to the genocide – as it should be – but not to the genocide of impoverished people through hunger-related deaths. This is why Castro made his comments at the assembly.
Elisabeth Voigt (Germany), The Peasant War, c. 1930.
In 2015, the United Nations adopted a plan to meet certain Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The second goal is to ‘end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture’. That year, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) began to track a rise in the absolute number of hungry people around the world. Six years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered an already fragile planet, intensifying the existing apartheids of the international capitalist order. The world’s billionaires have increased their wealth tenfold, while the majority of humankind has been forced into a day-to-day, meal-to-meal survival.
In July 2020, Oxfam released a report called The Hunger Virus, which – using World Food Programme data – found that up to 12,000 people a day ‘could die from hunger linked to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic before the end of the year, perhaps more than will die each day from the disease by that point’. In July 2021, the UN announced that the world is ‘tremendously off track’ to meet its SDGs by 2030, citing that ‘more than 2.3 billion people (or 30% of the global population) lacked year-round access to adequate food’ in 2020, which constitutes severe food insecurity.
The FAO’s report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021, notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. Hunger is intolerable. Food riots are now in evidence, most dramatically in South Africa. ‘They are just killing us with hunger here’, said one Gauteng resident who was motivated to join the July unrest. These protests, as well as the new data released by the UN and International Monetary Fund, have put hunger back on the global agenda.
Numerous international agencies have released reports with similar findings, showing that the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has solidified the trend of growing hunger and food insecurity. Many, however, stop there, leaving us with the feeling that hunger is inevitable, and that it will be the international institutions with their credit, loans, and aid programmes that will solve this dilemma of humanity.
Teodor Rotrekl (Czechoslovakia), Untitled, 1960s.
But hunger is not inevitable: it is, as S’bu Zikode reminded us, a decision of capitalism to put profit before people, allowing swaths of the global population to remain hungry while one third of all food produced is wasted, all while liberalised trade and speculation in the production and distribution of food create serious distortions.
Jerzy Nowosielski (Poland), Lotnisko wielkie (‘Large Airport’), 1966.
Billions of people struggle to maintain the basic structures of life in a system of profit that denies them the necessary social anchors. Hunger and illiteracy provide evidence of the crushing sadness of our planet. No wonder so many people are on the road, refugees of one kind or another, refugees from hunger and refugees from the rising waters.
By the UN count alone, there are now nearly 83 million displaced people, who – if they all lived in one place – would make up the 17th most populous country in the world. This number does not include climate refugees – whose plight is not going to be part of the COP26 climate discussions – nor does it include the millions of internally displaced people fleeing conflict and economic convulsions.
In 1971, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, rattled by the war in Biafra, published a poem called ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ in his 1971 book, Beware, Soul Brother. The beauty of this poem lingers in our wretched world:
No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon would have to forget.
The air was heavy with odours
of diarrhoea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most
mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then –
singing in her eyes – began carefully
to part it… In another life this
would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.
The powerful look at the homeless and hungry in the countryside and cities of our planet with revulsion. They would prefer to be shielded from that sight by high walls and armed guards. Basic human feeling – which saturate Achebe’s poem – is suffocated with great effort. But the homeless and the hungry are our fellows, at one time held in the arms of their parents with tenderness, loved in the way we need to learn to love one another. The post If All Refugees Lived in One Place, It Would Be the 17th Most Populous Country in the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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On October 8, a terrible blast struck the worshippers attending Friday noon prayers at the Gozar-e-Sayed Abad Mosque in the Khan Abad district of Bandar, the capital of Kunduz, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities in its northern belt. This is a mosque frequented by Shia Muslims, who were referred to as “our compatriots” by Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid. Forty-six More
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Junaina Muhammed (India) / Young Socialist Artists, A woman working in the korai fields, where women often work from a young age to earn a living.
Reminder: Indian peasants and agricultural workers remain in the midst of a country-wide agitation sparked by the proposal of three farm bills that were then signed into law by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government in September 2020. In June 2021, our dossier summarised the situation plainly:
It is clear that the problem in Indian agriculture is not too much institutional support, but inadequate and uneven deployment of institutions as well as the unwillingness of these institutions to address the inherent inequalities of village society. There is no evidence that agribusiness firms will develop infrastructure, enhance agricultural markets, or provide technical support to farmers. All this is clear to the farmers.
The farmers’ protests, which began in October 2020, are a sign of the clarity with which farmers have reacted to the agrarian crisis and to the three laws that will only deepen the crisis. No attempt by the government – including trying to incite farmers along religious lines – has succeeded in breaking the farmers’ unity. There is a new generation that has learned to resist, and they are prepared to take their fight across India.
In January 2021, the Supreme Court of India heard a series of petitions about the farmers’ protests. Chief Justice S. A. Bobde reacted to them with the following startling observation: ‘We don’t understand either why old people and women are kept in the protests’. The word ‘kept’ rankles. Did the Chief Justice believe that women are not farmers and that women farmers do not come to the protests of their own volition? That is the implication behind his remark.
A quick look at a recent labour force survey shows that 73.2% of women workers who live in rural areas work in agriculture; they are peasants, agricultural workers, and artisans. Meanwhile, only 55% of male workers who live in rural areas are engaged in agriculture. It is telling that only 12.8% of women farmers own land, which is an illustration of the gender inequality in India and is what likely provoked the Chief Justice’s sexist remark.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation pointed out a decade ago that ‘Closing the gender gap in agricultural inputs alone could lift 100-150 million people out of hunger’. Given the immense problem of hunger in our time – as highlighted in last week’s newsletter – women in agriculture must be, as the FAO notes, ‘heard as equal partners’.
Karuna Pious P (India) / Young Socialist Artists, Brick work, locally known as pakka me kaam.
From Tricontinental Research Services (Delhi) comes a superb new dossier on the status of women in India, Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (no. 45, October 2021). The text opens with an image of five women working at a brick kiln. When I saw that drawing, I was transported to a calculation made by Brinda Karat, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), about the labour of women construction workers. Bina, a young woman working in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, carries between 1,500 and 2,000 bricks to masons in a multi-story building. Bina carries at least 3,000kgs of bricks every day, each weighing 2.5kgs, yet she earns a pittance of under ₹150 ($2) per day and suffers from severe body aches. ‘The pain has become an intrinsic part of my life. I don’t remember a single day without it’, Bina told Karat.
Daniela Ruggeri (Argentina) / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Childcare workers protest the Modi government’s unfair treatment of women and workers.
Reminder: Women in India have been an integral part of the farmers’ movement, the workers’ movement, and the movement to widen democracy. Does this need to be said? It seems that something so evident requires constant repetition.
During this pandemic, women public health workers and women childcare workers have played a central role in holding together society, all while being disparaged and having their work trivialised. On 24 September 2021, ten million scheme workers – those who work for government schemes such as public health (Accredited Social Health Activist or ASHA workers) and crèches (anganwadi workers) – went on strike to demand formal employment and better protection for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Tax the super-rich’, they said, repeal the farm bills, stop the privatisation of the public sector, and defend women workers.
Over the past few years, ASHA workers have complained about routine harassment, including sexual harassment. In 2013, the Indian government enacted the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act to protect both formal and informal workers. No rules have been framed for ASHA and other scheme workers, nor are these workers able to lift up their experiences of harassment to the front pages of corporate media.
Our dossier carefully dissects the prevalence of patriarchal harassment and violence, making sure to identify the different ways that such toxic behaviours strike at women of different classes. Working-class women in unions and in left organisations have built a kind of mass sensibility; as a result, their struggles now incorporate demands against patriarchy that had otherwise been distant from their lives. For instance, it is now clear amongst many working-class women that they must win maternity leave, equal wages for equal work, guaranteed crèches, and redressal and prevention mechanisms against sexual harassment in workplaces. Such demands cascade back into the family and community, where other struggles – such as against patriarchal violence in the home – expand the horizon of democratic movements in India.
Vikas Thakur (India) / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, A cycling training camp in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu.
The dossier closes with wise words about the importance of the farmers’ movement for the women’s movement:
Though the Indian women’s movement has seen many ups and downs over the decades, it has remained resilient, adapted to changing socioeconomic conditions, and even expanded. The current situation might present an opportunity to strengthen mass movements and to steer the focus towards the rights and livelihoods of women and workers. The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future.
Reminder: Nothing in the slogans coming from the farmers’ encampments is unique. Most of these are long-standing claims. The demands made by women farmers at the protest sites and amplified by the farmers’ unions echo the Draft National Policy for Women in Agriculture put forward by the National Commission for Women in April 2008. This policy included the following key demands, each one applicable today:
- Ensure that women have access to and control over resources, including land rights, water, and pasture/forest/biodiversity resources.
- Guarantee equal wages for equal work.
- Pay minimum support prices to primary producers and ensure that sufficient food grains are available at affordable prices.
- Encourage women to enter agriculture-related industries (including fisheries and artisanal work).
- Provide training programmes for women including agricultural practices and technologies that are sensitive to the knowledge that women possess as well as the practices they carry out.
- Provide adequate and equal availability of services such as irrigation, credit, and insurance.
- Encourage primary producers to produce and market seeds, forest and dairy products, and livestock.
- Prevent women’s livelihoods from being displaced without providing viable alternatives.
The left women’s movement has put these demands back on the table. The right-wing government will not hear them.
Ingrid Neves (Brazil) / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, A seaweed harvester facing the rough seas.
Once more, our dossier comes to you designed with great care and love. This time, our team has worked closely with the Young Socialist Artists (India). Together, we found powerful photographs from the history of the Indian women’s movement and from the farmers’ protests and used these as references for the illustrations in the dossier. We look forward to inviting you to an online exhibition of this art, our small gesture towards expanding a possible pathway to a socialist future. The post Women Hold Up More Than Half the Sky first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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Ang Kiukok (Philippines), Harvest, 2004.
On 1 October, the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), a network of over 200 social and political movements, had its public launch. The IPA owes its origin to a meeting held in Brazil in 2015 where movement leaders gathered to talk about the perilous situation facing the world. At this meeting – called the Dilemmas of Humanity – the idea was born to create the IPA and three partner processes: a media network (Peoples Dispatch), a network of political schools (the International Collective of Political Education), and a research institute (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research). Over the course of the next few months, I will be writing more about the history of the IPA and its general orientation. For now, we welcome its launch.
Each year on 16 October, the United Nations commemorates World Food Day. This year, the IPA, Peoples Dispatch, the International Collective of Political Education, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will conduct a political campaign to end hunger. Leading up to this day, Peoples Dispatch has already produced a series of stories in collaboration with six media platforms that uncover hunger in the world today and people’s resistance to it; meanwhile, the International Collective of Political Education is running a series of seminars called Environmental Crisis and Capitalism that explores elements of unsustainable food production.
There is nothing more obscene than the existence of hunger, the terrible indignity of working hard but being without the means for sustenance. To that end, we have drafted Red Alert no. 12, ‘A World Without Hunger’, to sharpen our thinking about hunger and food and to sharpen our campaigns to end hunger.
In a world of plenty, why does hunger persist?
Hunger is intolerable.
World hunger, which had declined from 2005 to 2014, has begun to rise since then; world hunger is now at 2010 levels. The major exception to this trend has been China, which eradicated extreme poverty in 2020. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s 2021 report, The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World, notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. The UN’s World Food Programme projects that the number of those who are hungry could nearly double before the COVID-19 pandemic is contained ‘unless swift action is taken’.
Scientists inform us that there is no shortage of food for the population: in fact, the overall supply of calories per capita has increased across the world. People are hungry not because there are too many of us, but because peasant subsistence producers all over the world are being forced off their land by agribusiness and pushed into city slums, where access to food is dependent on monetary income. As a result, billions of people do not have the means to buy food.
All historical research shows that famines are not primarily caused by a lack of food supply, but by the lack of the means to access food. As the FAO wrote in 2014, ‘current food production and distribution systems are failing to feed the world. While agriculture produces enough food for 12 to 14 billion, some 850 million – or one in eight of the world population – live with chronic hunger’. This failure can be measured, in part, by the fact that one third of all food produced is either lost during processing and transportation or it is wasted. It is not overpopulation that causes hunger as is often argued, but rather inequality and a profit-driven, agribusiness-dominated food system in which the basic material need for food for hundreds of millions of people – at minimum – is sacrificed to quench the hunger for profit of the few.
Quamrul Hassan (Bangladesh), Three Women, 1955.
What is food sovereignty?
In 1996, two necessary phrases, food security and food sovereignty, entered common currency.
The idea of food security, developed out of anti-colonial and socialist struggles and formally established at the FAO’s World Food Conference (1974), is closely linked to the idea of national food self-sufficiency. In 1996, as part of the Rome Declaration, the concept of food security was broadened to bring into focus the importance of economic access to food, and governments committed themselves to guaranteeing food to all people through income and food distribution policies.
In the early 1990s, the idea of food sovereignty was shaped by La Via Campesina, an international network that today includes 200 million peasants from 81 countries, to insist not only that governments deliver food, but also that people be empowered to produce basic foodstuffs. Food sovereignty was defined around the creation of an agricultural and food system that would secure ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’.
Over a decade later, La Via Campesina, the World March of Women, and various environmental groups held the International Forum for Food Sovereignty in Nyéléni (Mali) in 2007. At the forum, they elaborated six core components of food sovereignty:
- To centre the needs of people rather than the needs of capital.
- To value food producers, namely by creating policies that value peasants and enrich their livelihoods.
- To strengthen food system by ensuring that local, regional, and national networks collaborate with and value those who produce food and those who consume food. This would strengthen the involvement of food producers and consumers in creating and reproducing food systems and ensure that poor quality and unhealthy foods do not overwhelm the attempt to create just food markets.
- To localise the control of food production; in other words, to give those who produce food the right to define how to organise the land and resources.
- To build knowledge and skills, which insists on taking local knowledge about food production seriously and further developing it scientifically.
- To work in harmony with nature by minimising harm to ecosystems through agricultural practices that are not destructive to the natural world.
Asger Jorn (Denmark), Landscape in Finkidong, 1945.
The idea of the ‘local’ requires a sharp assessment of the hierarchies of class, ethnicity, and gender; there is no ‘local community’ or ‘local economy’ that is not torn apart by the exploitation and violence of these hierarchies. Equally, local knowledge must be seen alongside the advances of modern science, whose breakthroughs in the field of agriculture should not be discounted. What unites the platform of food sovereignty is the sharp line it creates to distinguish itself from the capitalist form of food production.
Liberalised trade and speculation in the production and distribution of food create serious distortions. Trade liberalisation not only poses the threat of cheaper imports, which depresses crop prices, but also brings with it more volatile prices through the entry of international prices into domestic markets. Such liberalisation also threatens to change cropping patterns in developing countries to suit the demands of richer states, thus undermining food sovereignty. In 2010, the UN’s former special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, cautioned about the way that hedge funds, pensions funds, and investment banks had come to overpower agriculture with speculation through commodity derivatives. These financial methods, he wrote, were ‘generally unconcerned with agricultural market fundamentals’. Financial speculation in agriculture is one illustration of the disregard that money has for a balanced food production system that could benefit both producers and consumers. It encourages money power to distort the food production system.
Fernando Llort (El Salvador), Alegría eterna (‘Eternal Happiness’), 1976.
The concept of food sovereignty is an argument against this kind of distortion, which is rooted in land grabs by agribusiness corporations. Since the beginning of this century, agribusiness corporations such as Unilever and Monsanto have promoted the great global enclosure of our times, sparking the biggest mass movement of populations in history and, in so doing, destroying the relation between people and land.
Two United Nations resolutions – one to declare the right to water (2010) and the other to affirm peasants’ rights (2018) – will help us shape a new agricultural system that centres the rights of the producers (including access to land) and respect for nature and that treats water as a commons and not as a commodity.
Mohammed Wasia Charinda (Tanzania), Village River, 2007.
How do we create a just food production and distribution system?
Peasant and farmer organisations have developed sufficient knowledge of the failures of the capitalist form of food production. Their punctual demands assert a different form, one that insists on greater democratic participation in the construction and reproduction of food systems, a participation which includes the intervention of governments rather than aid agencies or the private sector. From their many demands, we have distilled the following points:
- Give economic power to the people by:
- Implementing agrarian reform for peasants and farmers so that they have access to land and resources to farm the land.
- Developing appropriate forms of production that encourage – among other things – some form of collective action to take advantage of economies of scale.
- Instituting local self-government in rural areas, where peasants wield the political power necessary to shape policies that benefit their lives and that shield the ecosystem.
- Strengthening systems of social welfare so that peasants are protected in adverse times (bad weather, poor harvests, etc.).
- Building public distribution systems, with particular focus on eliminating hunger.
- Ensuring that healthy food is made available to public schools and crèches.
- Develop and implement measures to ensure that agriculture is remunerative by:
- Preventing the dumping of cheapened foodstuffs from agricultural systems in the Global North that benefit from massive subsidies.
- Expanding access of rural producers to affordable bank credit and providing relief from informal lenders.
- Creating a policy to ensure floor prices for farm produce.
- Developing publicly funded, sustainable irrigation systems, transportation systems, storage facilities, and related infrastructure.
- Enhancing the cooperative sector’s food production and encouraging popular participation in food production and distribution systems.
- Building the scientific and technical capacity for sustainable and ecological agriculture.
- Removing patents on seeds and promoting legal frameworks to protect native seeds from being commodified by agribusinesses.
- Providing modern farm inputs at affordable prices.
- Design a democratic international trade system by:
- Democratising the World Trade Organisation, which would include:
- Greater national participation of the Global South countries in shaping the rules for deliberation, greater openness of the process of negotiations (including the publication of reports and negotiation of texts), and greater participation of peasant organisations in the process of rulemaking.
- Greater transparency in trade dispute mechanisms. This includes the timely announcement of any disputes and of the form of arbitration as well as the public announcements of judicial settlements.
- Decreasing reliance upon powerful Global North platforms for designing policy and settling claims; this includes the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. These bodies are controlled by the Global North, and they operate almost entirely in the interest of the multinational corporations domiciled in the Global North.
Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul. Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference. Earlier this summer, Rahmon More
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Rafael Tufiño Figueroa (Puerto Rico), La plena, 1952-54.
Each year in September, the heads of governments come to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City to inaugurate a new session of the General Assembly. The area surrounding the headquarters becomes colourful, delegates from each of the 193 member states milling about the UN building and then going out to lunch in the array of restaurants in its vicinity that scraped through the pandemic. Depending on the conflicts that abound, certain speeches are taken seriously; conflicts in this or that part of the world demand attention to the statements made by their leaders, but otherwise there is a queue of speeches that are made and then forgotten.
On 25 September, the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, took the stage in an almost empty UN General Assembly chamber. ‘How many more leaders must come to this podium and not be heard before they stop coming?’, she asked emphatically. ‘How many times must we address an empty hall of officials and an institution that was intended to be made for leaders to discuss with leaders the advancement necessary to prevent another great war or any of the other great challenges of our humanity?’. Prime Minister Mottley set aside her prepared remarks, since, she said, they would be ‘a repetition of what you have heard from others’. Instead, she offered a biting statement: ‘We have the means to give every child on this planet a tablet. And we have the means to give every adult a vaccine. And we have the means to invest in protecting the most vulnerable on our planet from a change in climate. But we choose not to. It is not because we do not have enough. It is because we do not have the will to distribute that which we have… If we can find the will to send people to the moon and solve male baldness … we can solve simple problems like letting our people eat at affordable prices’.
Albin Egger-Lienz (Austria), Nordfrankreich (‘Northern France’), 1917.
The United Nations was formed in October 1945 when 50 countries met in San Francisco to ratify the UN Charter. ‘This is 2021’, Prime Minister Mottley said, when there are ‘many countries that did not exist in 1945 who must face their people and answer the needs of their people’. Many of these countries were once colonies, the well-being of their people set aside by their colonial leaders at the UN. Now, 76 years later, the people of these countries – including Barbados – ‘want to know what is the relevance of an international community that only comes and does not listen to each other, that only talks and will not talk with each other’, Prime Minister Mottley said.
While the world leaders followed each other to the podium, Sacha Llorenti, secretary-general of ALBA-TCP – an organisation of nine member states in Latin America and the Caribbean set up to further regional cooperation and development – asked a fundamental question during a No Cold War webinar on multipolarity: ‘If the UN Charter was put to a vote today, would it pass?’
The Charter is ratified by every member state of the United Nations, and yet, clause after clause, it remains disrespected by some of its most powerful members, with the United States of America in the lead. If I were to catalogue the incidents of disregard shown by the United States government to the United Nations institutions and to the UN Charter, that text would be endless. This list would need to include the US refusal to:
- Sign the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
- Ratify the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
- Join the 2002 Treaty of Rome (which set up the International Criminal Court).
- Participate in the 2016 Global Compact on Migration.
This inventory would also need to include the usage of unilateral, illegal, coercive sanctions against two dozen member states of the United Nations as well as the illegal prosecution of wars of aggression against several countries (including Iraq).
Would the United States government exercise its veto in the UN Security Council if the UN Charter came up for a vote? Based on the historical actions of the US government, the answer is simple: certainly.
Käthe Kollwitz (Germany), Die Gefangenen (‘The Prisoners’), 1908.
During the UN session, 18 countries – led by Venezuela – held a foreign ministers’ meeting of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter. One in four people who live in the world reside in these 18 countries, which include Algeria, China, Cuba, Palestine, and Russia. The Group, led by Venezuela’s new Foreign Affairs Minister Felix Plasencia, called for ‘reinvigorated multilateralism’. This merely means to uphold the UN Charter: to say no to illegal wars and unilateral sanctions and to say yes to collaboration to control the COVID-19 pandemic, yes to collaboration on the climate catastrophe, yes to collaboration against hunger, illiteracy, and despair.
These countries never get to define what the ‘international community’ thinks because that phrase is used only in reference to the United States and its Western allies, who decide what must be done and how it must be done for the rest of the world. Only then, in the solemnest of voices, do we speak of the ‘international community’; not when the Group of Friends – which represents 25% of the world’s people – nor when the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – which represents 40% of the world’s people – speak, nor even when the Non-Aligned Movement with its 120 members speaks.
Mahmoud Sabri (Iraq), The Hero, 1963.
At the UN, US President Joe Biden said, ‘We are not seeking a new cold war’. This is welcome news. But it is also discordant. Prime Minister Mottley asked for clarity and honesty. Biden’s comment seemed neither clear nor honest, since around the time of the UN meeting, the US entered a new arms agreement that masqueraded as a military pact with Australia and the United Kingdom (AUKUS) and held a meeting of the Quad (Australia, India, and Japan). Both have military implications that intend to pressure China.
Beyond this, US government documents refer over and over again to the desire for the US military to be expanded to ‘fight and prevail in a future conflict with China’; this includes a reconfiguration of military activities on the African continent directed at pushing back Chinese commercial and political interests. Biden’s additional budget request for the US military says that this is needed ‘to counter the pacing threat from China’.
This threat is not from China, but to China. If the US continues to expand its military, deepen its alliances in the Pacific region, and ramp up its rhetoric, then it is nothing other than a New Cold War – another dangerous action that makes a mockery of the UN Charter.
At the No Cold War webinar on multipolarity, ‘Towards a Multipolar World: An International Peace Forum’, Fred M’membe of the Socialist Party of Zambia said that, while he grew up in a world where the bipolar Cold War seemed to pose an existential threat, ‘the unipolar world is more dangerous than the bipolar world’. The system we live in now, dominated by the Western powers, ‘undermines global solidarity at a time when human solidarity is needed’, he said.
Roberto Matta (Chile), El primer gol del pueblo chileno (‘The First Goal of the Chilean People’), 1971.
You cannot eat the UN Charter. But if you learn to read, and if you read the Charter, you can use it to fight for your right to human decency. If we 7.9 billion people came together and decided to form a human chain to advance our human rights – each of us standing three feet apart – we would form a wall that would run for 6.5 million kilometres. That wall would run around the equator 261 times. We would build this wall to defend our right to become human, to defend our humanity, and to defend nature.
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If the United Nations Charter Was Put To a Vote Today, Would It Pass? first appeared on
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Between 2009 and 2011, 80 percent of USAID funds that came into Afghanistan went to areas of the south and east, which had been the natural base of the Taliban. Even this money, a U.S. Senate report noted, went toward “short-term stabilization programs instead of longer-term development projects.” In 2014, Haji Abdul Wadood, then governor of the Argo district in Badakhshan, told Reuters, “Nobody has given money to spend on developmental projects. We do not have resources to spend in our district, our province is a remote one and attracts less attention.” More
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Milwa Mnyaluza ‘George’ Pemba (South Africa), New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 1977.
On 13 July 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a landmark resolution on the prevalence of racism and for the creation of an independent mechanism made up of three experts to investigate the root cause of deeply embedded racism and intolerance. The Group of African States pushed for this resolution, which had emerged out of global anger over the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020. The discussions in the UNHRC considered the problems of police brutality and went back to the formation of our modern system in the crucible of slavery and colonialism. A number of Western countries – such as the United States and the United Kingdom – hesitated over both the assessment of the past and the question of reparations; these governments were able to remove the requirement to investigate systematic racism in US law enforcement.
Recognition of the enormity of the cost of enslavement and colonialism is a basic demand of the majority of the world’s population. Calculations of these costs range from $777 trillion for the trans-Atlantic slave trade to $45 trillion for British colonialism in India; these are partial, but still formidable, calculations. The total cost of the 191,900 tonnes of gold ever mined at the current cost of $46.5 million per ton is merely $9 trillion – far less than the total bill for enslavement and colonialism. No wonder that few governments are willing to entertain the question of reparations for the survivors of enslavement and colonialism. Yet, too often concealed from any meaningful discussion on reparations is the fact that colonial regimes were paid massive sums to compensate the loss of their source of income. The French owners of enslaved people in Haiti collected an estimated $28 billion from the revolutionary Haitian government, a sum that was not paid off till 1947, to compensate them for the property – namely human beings – that was reclaimed during the Revolution. Similarly, Britain paid off the English owners of human beings enormous sums of money following the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act; according to the Treasury, the completion of these payments by British taxpayers was made in 2015.
Cyprian Mpho Shilakoe (South Africa), Let’s Wait Until They Come, 1970.
The denial of humanity to more than half the world’s population remains part of the broad framework of our world system. Even now, in 2021, the life of an Afghan civilian is made to be so much less than the life of a US soldier. When 20,000 or more people died because a US-owned factory exploded in Bhopal (India) in 1984, H. Michael Utidjian, the medical director for American Cyanamid, expressed grief but asked that it be put into context. What is the context? ‘Indians’, he said, do not have the ‘North American philosophy of the importance of human life’. To Utidjian and so many others, their lives are disposable, as disposable as the lives of the 1.6 million Africans who die annually of preventable lower respiratory tract illnesses and diarrhoea.
Almost all of the deaths by diarrhea are caused by poor hygiene and sanitation as well as unsafe water, problems that can be fixed by producing better infrastructure. Six populous countries – Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Zambia – spend more to service their debt than on health and education combined. This is yet more hideous evidence of the disregard for people who fought to end colonialism but who remain seen by the powerful – despite their surface liberalism – as lesser and weaker.
The site where the Njwaxa Leatherwork Factory was once located in Njwaxa village near Middledrift in the Eastern Cape (Steve Biko Foundation).
One of the reasons why the Johannesburg (South Africa) office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has spent considerable energy excavating the histories of struggle is to put on the record the Black-led struggle for freedom in southern Africa. They have gone back in time to the tell us about the history of the Industrial & Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) from 1919 to 1931, the ancestor of the modern trade union movement in South Africa (dossier no. 20, September 2019). They have told us about the development of contemporary South African politics (dossier no. 31, August 2020) and about the contemporary shack dwellers movement – Abahlali baseMjondolo – and its grip on the imagination of the country’s poor (dossier no. 11, December 2018). These have been accompanied by dossiers on the impact of powerful social theorists of African insurgencies and pedagogies of the poor offered through the work of Frantz Fanon (dossier no. 26, March 2020) and Paulo Freire (dossier no. 34, November 2020), whose centenary we celebrate this year. Each of these texts are working to build an archive of Black struggle against regimes of disparagement.
Dossier no. 44 (September 2021) is called Black Community Programmes: The Practical Manifestations of Black Consciousness Philosophy. These Black Community Programmes (BCP) ran from 1972 to 1977, each one founded and led by Black South Africans, each one developed to advance the cause of the Black community, and each one shut down by the apartheid regime. The BCP included projects of community welfare, Black art, Black theology, and decolonised education. A key area of the BCP was to develop the consciously neglected health of Black South Africans. Projects such as the Zanempilo Community Health Centre (Eastern Cape) and Solempilo (Durban, KZN) carried the objectives reflected in their names: zanempilo meaning ‘the one bringing health’ and solempilo meaning ‘eye of health’. Both were shut down by the apartheid regime when it banned all Black Consciousness groups in October 1977.
Steve Biko (fourth from the right, wearing a cap) at the University of Natal Medical School Non-European Section in Durban, 5 April 1969 (Lindiwe Edith Gumede Baloyi).
The BCP emerged out of the context of intense popular resistance to the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, resistance that was not demoralised by the banning of the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress, but which thundered into the formation of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in 1968. SASO was led by Steve Biko (1946-1977), who shaped the philosophy of Black Consciousness and who was murdered in the brutal cells of the racist government. Biko’s ideas of Black Consciousness were capacious. He had a deep sense that Black dignity had to be affirmed and that Black leadership had to be developed in order for a true future equality to be established. Black South Africans did not want freedom to be gifted to them; they had to seize it, nurture it, and build it further.
Charlotte Maxeke Street (formerly Beatrice Street) in Durban, 2021 (Nomfundo Xolo).
Biko defined Black Consciousness precisely as an ideology that:
seeks to give positivity in the outlook of the black people to their problems. It works on the knowledge that ‘white hatred’ is negative, though understandable, and leads to precipitate and shot-gun methods which may be disastrous for black and white [people] alike. It seeks to channel the pent-up forces of the angry black masses to meaningful and directional opposition basing its entire struggle on realities of the situation. It wants to ensure a singularity of purpose in the minds of the black people and to make possible total involvement of the masses in a struggle essentially theirs.
This is neither Afro-pessimism nor futile despair for people of African descent, nor is it a declaration of Black separatism. Rather, this is the most profound synthesis of a politics of human dignity and a politics of socialism.
In 2006, journalist Niren Tolsi spoke to the poet Mafika Pascal Gwala (1946-2014) and asked him about the meaning of Black Consciousness in his life. ‘We didn’t take Black Consciousness as a kind of Bible’, Gwala said to Tolsi. ‘It was just a trend, which was a necessary one because it meant bringing in what the white opposition [to apartheid] couldn’t bring into the struggle. So much was brought into the struggle through Black Consciousness’. The Black Consciousness movement – alongside South African Communism (as documented in Tom Lodge’s monumental new book Red Road to Freedom, 2021) and the trade union movement that emerged from the Durban strikes in 1973 – certainly brought the masses into the anti-apartheid struggle in a way that the white opposition could not; but it also brought in the sensibility of worth, of being worthy of human life, of making the struggle for freedom something precise and worthwhile for the dignity of existence rather than an abstraction.
That search for dignity defines the poetry of Gwala, whose Soweto poems sizzle with the desire for freedom:
Our history will be written
at the factory gates
at the unemployment offices
in the scorched queues of
dying mouths
Our history shall be our joys
our sorrows
our anguish
scrawled in dirty Third Class toilets
Our history will be the distorted figures
and bitter slogans
decorating our ghetto walls
where flowers find no peace enough to grow.
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Where Flowers Find No Peace Enough to Grow first appeared on
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n July 9, 2021, the government of Rwanda said that it had deployed 1,000 troops to Mozambique to battle al-Shabaab fighters, who had seized the northern province of Cabo Delgado. A month later, on August 8, Rwandan troops captured the port city of Mocímboa da Praia, where just off the coast sits a massive natural gas concession held by the French energy company TotalEnergies SE and the U.S. energy company ExxonMobil. More
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Alisa Singer (USA), Changing, 2021. Source: IPCC.
In late March 2021, 120 traditional owners from 40 different First People’s groups spent five days at the National First People’s Gathering on Climate Change in Cairns (Australia). Speaking on the impact of the climate crisis on First People, Gavin Singleton from the Yirrganydji traditional owners explained that ‘From changing weather patterns to shifts in natural ecosystems, climate change is a clear and present threat to our people and our culture’.
Bianca McNeair of the Malgana traditional owners from Gatharagudu (Australia) said that those who attended the gathering ‘are talking about how the birds’ movements across the country have changed, so that’s changing songlines that they’ve been singing for thousands and thousands of years, and how that’s impacting them as a community and culture. … We are very resilient people’, McNeair said, ‘so it’s a challenge we were ready to take on. But now we’re facing a situation that’s not predictable, it’s not part of our natural environmental pattern’.
Arone Meeks (Australia), The Gesture, 2020.
The Yirrganydji traditional owners live on Australia’s coastline, which faces the Great Barrier Coral Reef. That majestic reef faces extinction from climate change: a period of consecutive years of coral bleaching from 2014 to 2017 threatened to kill off the precious coral, during which fluctuating temperatures caused coral to expel symbiotic algae that are crucial to the nutritional health of the coral. Scientists assembled by the United Nations found that 70% of the earth’s coral reefs are threatened, with 20% already destroyed ‘with no hope for recovery’. Of the reefs that are threatened, a quarter are under ‘imminent risk of collapse’ and another quarter are at risk ‘due to long-term threats’. In November 2020, a UN report titled Projections on Future Coral Bleaching suggested that unless carbon emissions are controlled, the reefs will die and the species they support will die out too. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority notes that ‘climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide’. That is why the Yirrganydji traditional owners created the Indigenous Land and Sea Rangers to care for the reef against all odds.
‘Most of our traditions, our customs, our language are from the sea’, says Singleton, ‘so losing the reef would impact our identity. We were here prior to the formation of the reef, and we still hold stories that have been passed down through generations – of how the sea rose and flooded the area, the “great flood”’. The Yirrganydji Rangers, Singleton points out, ‘have their hearts and souls’ in the reef. But they are struggling against all odds.
Pejac (Spain), Stain, 2011.
Not long after the National First People’s Gathering disbanded, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth report. Based on the consensus of 234 scientists from over 60 countries, the report notes that ‘multiple lines of evidence indicate the recent large-scale climatic changes are unprecedented in a multi-millennial context, and that they represent a millennial-scale commitment for the slow-responding elements of the climate system, resulting in worldwide loss of ice, increase in ocean heat content, sea level rise, and deep ocean acidification’. If warming continues to reach 3 °C (by 2060) and 5.7 °C (by 2100), human extinction is certain. The report comes after a string of extreme weather events: floods in China and Germany, fires across the Mediterranean, and extreme temperatures across the world. A study in the July issue of Nature Climate Change found that ‘record-shattering extremes’ would be ‘nearly impossible in the absence of warming’.
Importantly, the 6th IPCC report shows that ‘historical cumulative CO2 emissions determine to a large degree warming to date’, which means that the Global North countries have already taken the planet to the threshold of annihilation before countries of the Global South have been able to attain basic needs such as universal electrification. For instance, 54 countries on the African continent account for merely 2-3% of global carbon emissions; half of Africa’s 1.2 billion people have no access to electricity, while many extreme climate events (droughts and cyclones in southern Africa, floods in the Horn of Africa, desertification in the Sahel) are now taking place across the continent. Released on World Environment Day (5 June) and produced with the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle, our Red Alert no. 11 further explains the scientific and political dynamics of the climate crisis, the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, and what can be done to turn the tides.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), Le serment du Jeu de Paume, 2010.
Governments will gather in October for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Kunming (China) to discuss progress on the Convention on Biological Diversity (ratified in 1993) and in November for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow (UK) to discuss climate change. Attention is on COP26, where the powerful Global North will once more push for ‘net zero’ carbon dioxide emissions and thereby reject deep cuts to their own emissions while insisting that the Global South forgo social development.
Meanwhile, there will be less attention paid to COP15, where the agenda will include cutting pesticide use by two-thirds, halving food waste, and eliminating the discharge of plastic waste. In 2019, an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report showed that pollution and resource extraction had threatened one million animal and plant species with extinction.
The link between the assault on biological diversity and climate change is clear: the opening of wetlands alone has released historic stores of carbon to the atmosphere. Deep emission cuts and better stewardship of resources are necessary.
Amin Roshan (Iran), Wandering, 2019.
Strikingly, just as the IPCC released its report, US President Joe Biden’s administration asked the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost output of oil production. This makes a mockery of the Biden pledge to cut 50% of US greenhouse emissions by 2030.
A recent paper in Nature shows that the passage of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), whose gradual elimination from aerosol sprays, refrigerants, and Styrofoam packaging prevented ozone depletion. The Montreal Protocol is significant because – despite industry lobbying – it was universally ratified. That treaty provides hope that sufficient pressure from key countries, pushed by social and political movements, could result in stringent regulations against pollution and carbon abuse as well as meaningful cultural change.
Simone Thomson (Australia), Awakening, 2019.
Places associated with global negotiations to save the planet include cities such as Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009), and Paris (2015). First amongst these should be Cochabamba (Bolivia), where the government of Evo Morales Ayma held the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April 2010. Over 30,000 people from more than 100 countries came to this landmark conference, which adopted the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth. Several points were discussed, including the demand for:
- The states of the Global North to cut emissions by at least 50%;
- Developing countries to be given substantial assistance to adapt to the effects of climate change and to transition away from fossil fuels;
- Indigenous rights to be protected;
- International borders to be opened to climate refugees;
- An international court to be set up to prosecute climate crimes;
- People’s rights to water to be recognised, and that people have the right not to be exposed to excessive pollution.
‘We are confronted with two paths’, former President Morales said: the path of ‘pachamama (Mother Earth) or the path of the multinationals. If we don’t take the former, the masters of death will win. If we don’t fight, we will be guilty of destroying the planet’. Gavin Singleton and Bianca McNeair would certainly agree.
So would the Yorta Yorta poet and educator Hyllus Noel Maris (1933-1986), whose ‘Spiritual Song of the Aborigine’ (1978) awakens hope and lays the soundtrack for those who march to save the planet:
I am a child of the Dreamtime People
Part of this land, like the gnarled gumtree
I am the river, softly singing
Chanting our songs on my way to the sea
My spirit is the dust-devils
Mirages, that dance on the plain
I’m the snow, the wind, and the falling rain
I’m part of the rocks and the red desert earth
Red as the blood that flows in my veins
I am eagle, crow and snake that glides
Through the rainforest that clings to the mountainside
I awakened here when the earth was new.
Warmly,
Vijay
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I Awakened Here When the Earth Was New first appeared on
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