Back in the early 1960s I spent three teenage summers in an intimate relationship with 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. more commonly known as 2,4-D.
Employed by the corporation own a system of irrigation canals in two Northern Colorado counties, my job consisted of sitting on the bumpers of tanker trucks traveling easement roads along canals, hose and spray nozzle in hand, dousing Canadian Thistles with chemical to prevent the plants from flowering and spreading their pesky airborne seeds into the waters of the canals and thence on to farmers’ fields, where they crowd out crops of wheat, maize, and sugar beets.
I and another teenager who held the other hose were assured the chemical was harmless to humans, often sprayed each other to cool off during the frequent hot days of July and August.
2,4D gradually faded from the picture after American agroindustrial giant Monsanto delivered a new weed-killer, Roundup, along with seeds genetically engineered to resist the herbicidal properties of glyphosate, the patented active ingredient in the concoction.
The one-two combination of a potent new weed killer and corporate-owned seeds designed to protect crops from the chemical’s otherwise lethal onslaught made Monsanto king on Big Ag globally [the company was sold to German chemical giant Bayer in 2018].
But resistance to Monsanto’s purported panacea, a combination of concerns over the company’s insistence on barring farmers from using seeds from their harvest to plant next years crops and a forced sale of crops only to dealers authorized by the company along with a growing numbers of research papers challenging the chemical’s safety [which we have covered extensively] has led to a resurgence of that old standby 2.4-D, along with new GMO crops designed to resist it.
But a new study just published raises serious questions about the safety of 2,4-D and the revelation that the bodies of a third of Americans now harbor significant amounts of the chemical, with the most troublesome levels found in the bodies of children and women and child-bearing age.
One out of three people in a large survey showed signs of exposure to a pesticide called 2,4-D, according to a study published today by researchers at the George Washington University. This novel research found that human exposure to this chemical has been rising as agricultural use of the chemical has increased, a finding that raises worries about possible health implications.
“Our study suggests human exposures to 2,4-D have gone up significantly and they are predicted to rise even more in the future,” Marlaina Freisthler, a PhD student and researcher at the George Washington University, said. “These findings raise concerns with regard to whether this heavily used weed-killer might cause health problems, especially for young children who are very sensitive to chemical exposures.”
Lead author Freisthler and her colleagues looked for biomarkers of the pesticide found in urine samples from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They estimated agricultural use of 2,-D by studying public and private pesticide use data from 2001 until 2014.
Out of 14,395 participants in the survey nearly 33 percent had detectable levels of 2,4-D in their urine. The researchers found that participants with urine levels of this pesticide went from a low of 17 percent at the start of the study in 2001-2002 to a high of nearly 40 percent ten years later.
Other key findings of the new study:
▪ As the use of the herbicide increased during the study period so did human exposures.
▪ Children ages 6-11 had more than double the risk of increasing exposure to 2,4-D.
▪ In addition, women of childbearing age had nearly twice the risk of increased exposure compared to men in the same age group.
▪ Human exposures are likely to rise even more in the near future as this herbicide’s use continues to go up.
2,4-D was developed in the 1940s and soon became a popular weed-killer for farmers who wanted to increase crop yields. In addition, homeowners looking for a pristine, green lawn also turned to 2,4-D often in combination with other lawn chemicals.
Exposure to high levels of this chemical has been linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and other health issues. While scientists don’t know what the impact of exposure to lower levels of the herbicide might be, they do know that 2,4-D is an endocrine disruptor and this study shows children and women of childbearing age are at higher risk of exposure.
Children can be exposed if they play barefoot on a lawn treated with the weed-killer or if they put their hands in their mouths after playing outside, where the soil or grass might be contaminated with the chemical. People also can be exposed by eating soybean-based foods and through inhalation. The now widespread use of 2,4-D on GMO soybeans and cotton leads to more 2,4-D moving in the air, which can expose more people to this chemical, according to the researchers.
“Further study must determine how rising exposure to 2,4-D affects human health–especially when exposure occurs early in life,” Melissa Perry, a professor of environmental and occupational health and senior author of the paper, said. “In addition to exposure to this pesticide, children and other vulnerable groups are also increasingly exposed to other pesticides and these chemicals may act synergistically to produce health problems.”
Consumers who want to avoid exposures to pesticide can purchase organically grown food, which is less likely to be grown with weed killers. They can also avoid using 2,4-D or other pesticides on their lawn or garden, the researchers said.
Meanwhile, Roundup faces an uncertain fate in Europe, where its use is authorized only until 15 December, pending a further review of the compound’s safety.
And there are signs of troubles ahead, as the Guardian reported 26 November:
Only two out of a group of 11 industry studies given to European regulators in support of the re-approval of the main ingredient in Roundup herbicide are scientifically “reliable”, according to a new analysis of corporate-backed studies on the chemical glyphosate.
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In a report released on Friday, researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria said their review of a set of safety studies submitted to EU regulators by Bayer AG and a coalition of other chemical companies showed that the vast majority do not meet current international standards for scientific validity.
While two of the corporate studies were considered reliable, six were considered partly reliable and three were not reliable, according to the report.
And as for 2,4-D, it was the one of two primary ingredients in Agent Orange, the notorious compound sprayed over much of South Vietnam to kill crops and the trees used by Viet Cong troops to hide from American air strikes during what folks there now call the American War.
One ailment conclusively linked to Agent Orange exposure is bladder cancer, a malady for which we underwent a surgical removal seven years ago, We can’t but wonder if that affliction stemmed from those cooling spays on hot summer days under the Colorado sun decades before.
Cliff Place, an Anasazi dwelling complex in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, via Wikipedia.
But then, within the span of a few years, violence exploded, the Anasazi cities were abandoned, the roads and canals fell into disrepair, and cannibalism appeared among the haggard survivors..
A major factor in the collapse of the Anasazi civilization, scientists have learned, was a massive drought.
And now a similar crisis has struck the American Southwest, a drought as severe as that destroyed the world of the Anasazi, a drought in which the massive carbon releases of modern industrial civilization is playing a leading role, according to a new study.
Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years
The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a new UCLA-led study [$29 to read for non-subscribers] in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied.
UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.
“It’s extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year,” he said.
The researchers calculated the intensity of droughts by analyzing tree ring patterns, which provide insights about soil moisture levels each year over long timespans. (They also confirmed their measurements by checking findings against historical climate data.) Periods of severe drought were marked by high degrees of “soil moisture deficit,” a metric that describes how little moisture the soil contains compared to its normal saturation.
Since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice as severe as any drought of the 1900s — and greater than it was during even the driest parts of the most severe megadroughts of the past 12 centuries.
Studying the area from southern Montana to northern Mexico, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, researchers discovered that megadroughts occurred repeatedly in the region from 800 to 1600. Williams said the finding suggests that dramatic shifts in dryness and water availability happened in the Southwest prior to the effects of human-caused climate change becoming apparent in the 20th century.
Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.
One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.
“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”
As of Feb. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels since tracking began in 1906.
Regulators have continued to implement water conservation measures in response to water shortages caused by the drought. In August, for example, federal officials cut water allocations to several southwestern states in response to low water levels in the Colorado River. And in October, California Gov. Gavin Newson declared a drought emergency and asked Californians to voluntarily decrease their water usage by 15%.
Williams said initiatives like those will help in the short term, but water conservation efforts that extend beyond times of drought will be needed to help ensure people have the water they need as climate change continues to intensify drought conditions.
The study was a collaboration among researchers from UCLA, NASA and the Columbia Climate School.
Here, from the report, is a look at Southestern droughts as revealed by the scientific record:
(a) Number of years in a running 22-year window when the 22-year mean summer soil moisture anomaly across southwestern North America (SWNA) was drier than the 800–2021 average. (b) The percentage of SWNA area where the 22-mean summer soil moisture was locally ranked in the top 5 driest 22-year periods in 800–2021.
In a rational world, this newest evidence of the profound impacts on climate change and its capacity to generate social collapse, mass violence, and the forced migration of whole peoples should serve as further impetus to change our self-destructive behavior and engage with the the consequences of our actions.
And in a truly rational world we would act, willingly and cooperatively.
As we’ve noted many times before, we are killing the Amazon rainforest, one of the most unique and diverse environments on the planet, and home to dozens of indigenous tribal groups.
While the Amazon rainforest had long been called “the lungs of the planet” for its ability to capture carbon through plant respiration, that role is now in danger.
A study by 18 international scholars [$32 to read for non-subscribers] published in the 14 July 2021 edition of Nature, the world’s per-eminent scientific journal, reaches a stunning conclusion: Part of the Amazon note emits more carbon that in captures, and fire is the culprit.
Here’s the summation, emphasis added:
Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change. Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a carbon source. We performed 590 aircraft vertical profiling measurements of lower-tropospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at four sites in Amazonia from 2010 to 2018. We find that total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part, mostly as a result of spatial differences in carbon-monoxide-derived fire emissions. Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere. Over the past 40 years, eastern Amazonia has been subjected to more deforestation, warming and moisture stress than the western part, especially during the dry season, with the southeast experiencing the strongest trends. We explore the effect of climate change and deforestation trends on carbon emissions at our study sites, and find that the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase in fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon. This is in line with recent studies that indicate an increase in tree mortality and a reduction in photosynthesis as a result of climatic changes across Amazonia.
The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.
The landscape contains:
▪ one in 10 known species on Earth ▪ 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests ▪ the 3,977-mile-long Amazon River, the second-longest river on Earth after the Nile ▪ 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America
The Amazon contains millions of species, most of them still undescribed, and some of the world’s most unusual wildlife. It is one of Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, and pink river dolphins, and home to thousands of birds and butterflies. Tree-dwelling species include southern two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys. The diversity of the region is staggering:
▪ 40,000 plant species ▪ 2,400 freshwater fish species ▪ more than 370 types of reptiles
There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation releases significant amounts of this carbon, which is having negative consequences around the world.
Uncontacted tribes at risk, too
In addition to the vast array of plants and animals endangered by deforestation, the Amazon basin is also home to a wide array of indigenous tribal groups, manyu of which have had little contact with modern civilization.
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.
An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.
Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.
In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world’s largest number of uncontacted people are in danger. Anthropologists have recorded groups crossing to Brazil looking for food, metal utensils and clothing to the south of the corridor, reportedly moving away from violence in Peru.
Beefing up deforestation
While mining and logging pose considerable dangers to the rainforest and its inhabitants, as the WWF reports, feeding the global demand for beef is the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon basin:
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation. Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions. Beyond forest conversion, cattle pastures increase the risk of fire and are a significant degrader of riparian and aquatic ecosystems, causing soil erosion, river siltation and contamination with organic matter. Trends indicate that livestock production is expanding in the Amazon.
Brazil has 88% of the Amazon herd, followed by Peru and Bolivia. While grazing densities vary among livestock production systems and countries, extensive, low productivity, systems with less than one animal unit per hectare of pasture are the dominant form of cattle ranching in the Amazon.
And in Brazil, one company dominates, a Brazilian agroindustrial giants which just happens to dominate the U.S. meat market as well.
JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing company [by sales] in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás. As of 2017, the company had 150 industrial plants around the world
In addition to its Brazilian operations, JBS also ranks as the leading meant supplier in the U.S., having acquired Swift & Company, Pilgrim’s Pride, Smithfield Foods’ beef operations, the prok business of Cargil, as well as Mexican and Brazilian operations of Tyson Foods, Inc.
More from Bloomberg on the company’s impact on the Amazonian rainforest:
Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.
For more than a decade, JBS has committed to ridding its supply chain of animals born or raised on deforested land. Bloomberg analyzed about 1 million delivery logs that JBS accidentally posted online to show just how far its footprint has reached into the Amazon in that period. A 10-day trip into the heart of Brazil’s cattle country put on full display how easily and openly cows from illegally cleared land flood supply chains. JBS says it sets the highest standards for its suppliers, but it’s using a greenwashed version of an animal’s origin and working within a legal system so full of loopholes that prosecutors, environmentalists and even ranchers themselves consider it a farce.
Asked to respond to this article, JBS said “it has no tolerance for illegal deforestation.” The São Paulo-based company added that it “has maintained, for over 10 years, a geospatial monitoring system that uses satellite imagery to monitor its suppliers in every biome” in Brazil.
On a positive note, Reuters reported in December that six major European supermarket chains have announced they will stop all beef imports from Brazil.
For more on the role of Big Beef in the plunder of the Amazonian read Beef, Banks and the Brazilian Amazon. a December 2020 investigation by Global Witness.
Fires accelerate ecological catastrophe
Published in the open source academic journal Remote Sensing last month, “Fires Drive Long-Term Environmental Degradation in the Amazon Basin,” a study by team of Brazilian and French scholars, offers an alarming look at the acceleration of ecological destruction wrought by the most commonly employed means of forest “clearance”:
In recent years, the frequency and intensity of fires have increased worldwide, especially during dry years. Globally, fires and deforestation are the main causes of biodiversity loss in the tropics], and the expectation is that without, a reduction in the present disturbance rates, undisturbed forests will have entirely disappeared in large tropical humid regions by 2050. In the Amazon, the use of fire is the fastest, most efficient, and least expensive way to clear a forested Amazonian agricultural frontier area and is often employed in protected areas, such as conservation units (CUs) and indigenous lands (ILs). Ranchers, farmers, miners, and land grabbers all employ this practice. A recent study that determined different types of fires that occur in the Amazon showed that deforestation fires are fires in areas that have been previously cleared and can invade standing forests; their drivers and positive feedbacks can lead to more fires in the region. Such fires lead to the release of a significant amount of GHGs [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere.
In the Amazon region, fires are ubiquitous at the end of the dry season (September-October), but have often worsened in years of extreme drought (i.e., 2005, 2010, and 2015). Anomalously dry years are associated with tropical seas surface temperature anomalies; high temperatures and low humidity provide favorable conditions for the rapid spread of fires. These extreme-drought events have the potential to destabilize large areas by reducing rainfall and thereby increasing the risk of forest death, which could, in turn, lead to the further intensification of regional droughts as a result of vegetation loss. A warmer and drier climate can lead to the mortality of plant species adapted to wetter climates, as well as a decrease in water recycling in the central part of the Amazon Researchers forecast a possibility of doubling of the burned area south of the Brazilian Amazon in the coming decades]. This projection is in accordance with the scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are based on global numerical models] that indicate increased environmental degradation in the near future. Indeed, the Amazon ecosystem has been identified as a region with the highest vulnerability index in ecosystem function, particularly in areas of large-scale forest degradation and fragmentation.
The great Brazilian land grab continues
Just as White settlers and corporations swallowed up land belong to indigenous tribes in the U.S. starting with the arrival of the first settlers [who were brought over from Europe to populate corporate-owned colonies, encouraged and assisted by an expropriating monarchy] so too the Amazon is being grabbed up with the aid of a government headed by a verybigoted Right-wing populist.
So show does it work?
Consider the following from three University of Florida scholars – Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, graduate student Fellow and doctoral candidate in Geography; Cynthia S. Simmons, Professor of Geography; and Robert T. Walker, Professor of Latin American Studies and Geography – and published in The Conversation, an open source online academic journal written in everyday language:
The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation
Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction.
Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon.
The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab we’vebeenstudying for the past decade.
Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, southern Amazonas State, starting in 2012 as rates of deforestation began to increase because of loosened regulatory oversight. Our research shows how land grabs are tied to accelerating deforestation spearheaded by wealthy interests, and how Brazil’s National Congress, by changing laws, is legitimizing these land grabs.
How the Amazon land grab began
Brazil’s modern land grab started in the 1970s, when the military government began offering free land to encourage mining industries and farmers to move in, arguing that national security depended on developing the region. It took lands that had been under state jurisdictions since colonial times and allocated them to rural settlement, granting 150- to 250-acre holdings to poor farmers.
Federal and state governments ultimately designated over 65% of Amazonia to several public interests, including rural settlement. For biodiversity, they created conservation units, some allowing traditional resource use and subsistence agriculture. Leftover government lands are generally referred to as “vacant or undesignated public lands.”
Tracking the land grab
Studies have estimated that by 2020, 32% of “undesignated public forests” had been grabbed for private use. But this is only part of the story, because land grabbing is now affecting many types of public land.
Importantly, land grabs now impact conservation areas and indigenous territories, where private holdings are forbidden.
We compared the boundaries of self-declared private holdings in the government’s Rural Environmental Registry database, known as CAR, with the boundaries of all public lands in southern Amazonas State. The region has 50,309 square miles in conservation units. Of these, we found that 10,425 square miles, 21%, have been “grabbed,” or declared in the CAR register as private between 2014 and 2020.
In the United States, this would be like having 21% of the national parks disappear into private property.
In Pará State, Amazonas State’s neighbor, deforestation in the 1990s was dominated by poor family farms in rural settlements. On average, these households accumulated 120 acres of farmland after several decades by opening 4-6 acres of forest every few years in clearings visible on satellite images as deforestation patches.
Since then, patch sizes have grown dramatically in the region, with most deforestation occurring on illicit holdings whose patches are much larger than on legal holdings.
Land grabbers benefit by selling the on-site timber and by subdividing what they’ve grabbed for sale in small parcels. Arrest records and research by groups such as Transparency International Brasil show that many of them are involved in criminal enterprises that use the land for money laundering, tax evasion and illegal mining and logging.
In the 10-year period before President Jair Bolsonaro took office, satellite data showed two deforestation patches exceeding 3,707 acres in Southern Amazonas. Since his election in 2019, we can identify nine massive clearings with an average size of 5,105 acres. The clearance and preparation cost for each Bolsonaro-era deforestation patch, legal or illicit, would be about US$353,000.
Legitimizing land grabbing
Brazil’s National Congress has been making it easier to grab public land.
A 2017 change in the law expanded the legally allowed size of private holdings in undesignated public lands and in rural settlements. This has reclassified over 1,000 square miles of land that had been considered illegal in 2014 as legal in southern Amazonas. Of all illegal CAR claims in undesignated public lands and rural settlements in 2014, we found that 94% became legal in 2017.
Our research also shows that the federal government increased the amount of public land up for grabs in southern Amazonas by shrinking rural settlements by 16%, just over 2,000 square miles, between 2015 and 2020. Large ranches are now absorbing that land. Similar downsizing of public land has affected Amazonia’s national parks.
Other countries have helped Brazil with billions of dollars to protect the Amazon for the good of the climate, but in the end, the land belongs to Brazil. Outsiders have limited power to influence its use.
At the U.N. climate summit in 2021, 141 countries – including Brazil – signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. This pledge holds potential because, unlike past ones, the private sector has committed $7.2 billion to reduce agriculture’s impact on the forest. In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is longstanding.
We’ve polluted the air, water, land, and seas so deeply that our very futures are in grave danger, and unless we act soon, the cumulative impacts of our chemical addictions may reach a tipping point beyond which lies a very bleak future indeed, warns a stunning new report from an international panel of scientists.
And we continue to invent new compounds, many of them so-called “forever chemicals,” creations immune to breakdown and certain to remain in our environment for millennia to come.
Central to the crisis confronting us is the usual suspect, rampant, rapacious capitalism, eager to wring new profits from creating patented compounds unleashed on an unsuspecting world without rigorous and costly testing, thanks to connivance of government officials swayed by lavish corporate campaign funding.
In 1935, America’s premiere chemical company began a major advertising push that would continue for for 47 years, a campaign we well remember thanks to thousands of advertising exposures in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television while we were growing up in the 1950s:
[Former company president Irénée du Pont, coincidentally, was named by retired MarineCorps Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler as a leader of a foiled 1933 fascist-inspired, business-led coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt.]
There can be no doubt that chemical corporations have a long history of environmental pollution, and we spent several years during our time at the Berkeley Daily Planet documenting the sad historyof chemical pollution by Big Chemistry on the shores of San Francisco Bay.
In a global economy dominated by fossil fuel corporations, Big Tech and all its highly toxic compnents, and Big Agra [now largely owned by chemical companies], mountains of cash are funneled to politicians who fight regulatory efforts, the road ahead is fraught with peril.
But unless we gain control of these corporate monsters, the world our children and grandchildren will inherit will be a grim and ravaged place.
Safe planetary boundary for pollutants, including plastics, exceeded, say researchers
OUT OF CONTROL: For the first time, an international team of researchers has assessed the impact on the stability of the Earth system of the cocktail of synthetic chemicals and other “novel entities” flooding the environment.
The 14 scientists conclude in the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology that humanity has exceeded a planetary boundary related to environmental pollutants including plastics.
“There has been a 50-fold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950. This is projected to triple again by 2050,” says co-author Patricia Villarubia-Gómez from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Plastic production alone increased 79% between 2000 and 2015, the team reports.
The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals and other novel entities into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.
Fills important gap in research
There are an estimated 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals on the global market. These include plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals, chemicals in consumer products, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. These are all wholly novel entities, created by human activities with largely unknown effects on the Earth system. Significant volumes of these novel entities enter the environment each year.
“The rate at which these pollutants are appearing in the environment far exceeds the capacity of governments to assess global and regional risks, let alone control any potential problems,” says co-author Bethanie Carney Almroth from the University of Gothenburg.
The research fills an important gap in analysis of “planetary boundaries”.
In 2009, an international team of researchers identified nine planetary boundaries that demarcate the remarkably stable state Earth has remained within for 10,000 years – since the dawn of civilization. These boundaries include greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone layer, forests, freshwater and biodiversity. The researchers quantified the boundaries that influence Earth’s stability, and concluded in 2015 that four boundaries have been breached. But the boundary for novel entities was one of two boundaries that remained unquantified.
This new research takes this a step further.
Overwhelming evidence
The researchers say there are many ways that chemicals and plastics have negative effects on planetary health, from mining, fracking and drilling to extract raw materials to production and waste management.
“Some of these pollutants can be found globally, from the Arctic to Antarctica, and can be extremely persistent. We have overwhelming evidence of negative impacts on Earth systems, including biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles,” says Carney Almroth.
Global production and consumption of novel entities is set to continue to grow. The total mass of plastics on the planet is now over twice the mass of all living mammals, and roughly 80% of all plastics ever produced remain in the environment.
Plastics contain over 10,000 other chemicals, so their environmental degradation creates new combinations of materials – and unprecedented environmental hazards. Production of plastics is set to increase and predictions indicate that the release of plastic pollution to the environment will rise too, despite huge efforts in many countries to reduce waste.
Shifting to circular economy
The researchers conclude that current increasing trends of chemical production and release put the health of the Earth system at risk. The authors call for actions to reduce the production and release of pollutants.
“We need to be working towards implementing a fixed cap on chemical production and release,” says Carney Almroth.
“And shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused not wasted, designing chemicals and products for recycling, and much better screening of chemicals for their safety and sustainability along their whole impact pathway in the Earth system”, adds Sarah Cornell from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
During our years reporting for the Berkeley Daily Planet, we covered the sellout of the crown jewel of the University of California system to BP [formerly British Petroleum, and before that Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (AIOC)] in exchange for $500 million to fund the Energy Biosciences Institute [EBI] [previously], a research center folks were told would create a new, cheap energy source by creating genetically engineered microbes to turn plant cellulose into clean-burning fuel for planes, trains, cars, trucks, generators, and anything else that uses combustion to power internal combustion engines.
AOIC, by the way, was majority-owned by the British government, which called for help from the U.S.’s newly created Central Intelligence Agency in overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the head of Iran’s first civilian government, in 1953, to replace him with the despotic monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after Iran nationalized AOIC’s Iranian assets.
The EBI joined BP, the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois into what Berkeley officials dubbed a new Manhattan Project that would usher in an era of low-carbon emission power and a bonanza for corporate backers.
Many of those same academic backers had already become become multimillionaires through corporations they owned to develop patented GMOs, and entertained dreams of getting even richer by leveraging their professorships to attract rich investors for their private ventures.
One prominent EBI backer and UC Berkeley professor, Jay Keasling, created a spinoff to produce a GMO-sourced antimalarial drug, His company spun off the drug business and went into agrofuel research. While Keasling grew rich from selling his shares, his company, Amyris [previously], now headed by John Melo, the former BP executive who headed the EBI program, tried its hand at fuels, only to fail in its efforts.
As Melo explained to Forbes recently, “Fuels are the hardest thing to bioengineer for because of the cost,” Melo says. “By going after the hardest [thing] first we were able to push the technology and develop breakthroughs that no one has done.”
So what is the company making, and with no profits to show for its work after more than a decade? Chemicals for the skin care industry, although they’re also exploring creation of synthetic THC [the chemical that gives marijuana it’s mind-altering kick] and COVID vaccines.
But their is a deeper problem with the agrofuel mania. The business of growing crops for chemicals has proven devastating to the nations where the crops have are grown. In the U.S., much of the nation’s corn crop is used to make ethanol, rather that for food for people or livestock, and the use of land for fuel is growing in the rest of the world, resulting is massive deforestation and the plowing under of vast tracts of previously undeveloped land in Latin America, precisely as predicted by a former Berkeley professor who was one of the leading critics of the EBI project.
And that brings us to a fascinating review of agrofuel madness published in The Conversation, an open access scientific journal written in conversational English by John M. DeCicco, Ph.D., Research Professor Emeritus retired from the University of Michigan:
The US biofuel mandate helps farmers, but does little for energy security and harms the environment
If you’ve pumped gas at a U.S. service station over the past decade, you’ve put biofuel in your tank. Thanks to the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, almost all gasoline sold nationwide is required to contain 10% ethanol – a fuel made from plant sources, mainly corn.
Enacted in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the RFS promised to enhance energy security, cut carbon dioxide emissions and boost income for rural America. The program has certainly raised profits for portions of the agricultural industry, but in my view it has failed to fulfill its other promises. Indeed, studies by some scientists, including me, find that biofuel use has increased rather than decreased CO2 emissions to date.
Current law sets a target of producing and using 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 as part of the roughly 200 billion gallons of motor fuel that U.S. motor vehicles burn each year. As of 2019, drivers were using only 20 billion gallons of renewable fuels yearly – mainly corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel. Usage declined in 2020 because of the pandemic, as did most energy use. Although the 2021 tally is not yet complete, the program remains far from its 36 billion-gallon goal. I believe the time is ripe to repeal the RFS, or at least greatly scale it back.
Higher profits for many farmers
The RFS’s clearest success has been boosting income for corn and soybean farmers and related agricultural firms. It also has built up a sizable domestic biofuel industry.
The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for the biofuels industry, estimates that the RFS has generated over 300,000 jobs in recent years. Two-thirds of these jobs are in the top ethanol-producing states: Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana and South Dakota. Given Iowa’s key role in presidential primaries, most politicians with national ambitions find it prudent to embrace biofuels.
For consumers, biofuel use has had a varying, but overall small, effect on pump prices. Renewable fuel policy has little leverage in the world oil market, where the biofuel mandate’s penny-level effects are no match for oil’s dollar-scale volatility.
Biofuels are not carbon-neutral
The idea that biofuels are good for the environment rests on the assumption that they are inherently carbon neutral – meaning that the CO2 emitted when biofuels are burned is fully offset by the CO2 that feedstocks like corn and soybeans absorb as they grow. This assumption is coded into computer models used to evaluate fuels.
Leading up to passage of the RFS, such modeling found modest CO2 reductions for corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel. It promised greater benefits from cellulosic ethanol – a more advanced type of biofuel that would be made from nonfood sources, such as crop residues and energy crops like willow and switchgrass.
One big factor is that making biofuels amplifies land-use change. As harvests are diverted from feeding humans and livestock to produce fuel, additional farmland is needed to compensate. That means forests are cut down and prairies are plowed up to carve out new acres for crop production, triggering very large CO2 releases.
When Congress expanded the biofuel mandate in 2007, a key factor that induced legislators from states outside the Midwest to support it was the belief that a coming generation of cellulosic ethanol would produce even greater environmental, energy and economic benefits. Biofuel proponents claimed that cellulosic fuels were close to becoming commercially viable.
Almost 15 years later, in spite of the mandate and billions of dollars in federal support, cellulosic ethanol has flopped. Total production of liquid cellulosic biofuels has recently hovered around 10 million gallons per year – a tiny fraction of the 16 billion gallons that the RFS calls for producing in 2022. Technical challenges have proved to be more daunting than proponents claimed.
Environmentally speaking, I see the cellulosic failure as a relief. If the technology were to succeed, I believe it would likely unleash an even more aggressive global expansion of industrial agriculture – large-scale farms that raise only one or two crops and rely on highly mechanized methods with intensive chemical fertilizer and pesticide use. Some such risk remains as petroleum refiners invest in bio-based diesel production and producers modify corn ethanol facilities to produce biojet fuel.
Ripple effects on lands and Indigenous people
Today the vast majority of biofuels are made from crops like corn and soybeans that also are used for food and animal feed. Global markets for major commodity crops are closely coupled, so increased demand for biofuel production drives up their prices globally.
Some researchers have found that adverse effects of biofuel production on land use, crop prices and climate are much smaller than previously estimated. Nevertheless, the uncertainties surrounding land use change and net effects on CO2 emissions are enormous. The complex modeling of biofuel-related commodity markets and land utilization is impossible to verify, as it extrapolates effects across the globe and into the future.
Rather than biofuels, a much better way to address transportation-related CO2 emissions is through improving efficiency, particularly raising gasoline vehicle fuel economy while electric cars continue to advance.
A stool with two weak legs
What can we conclude from 16 years of the RFS? As I see it, two of its three policy legs are now quite wobbly: Its energy security rationale is largely moot, and its climate rationale has proved false.
Nevertheless, key agricultural interests strongly support the program and may be able to prop it up indefinitely. Indeed, as some commentators have observed, the biofuel mandate has become another agribusiness entitlement. Taxpayers probably would have to pay dearly in a deal to repeal the RFS. For the sake of the planet, it would be a cost worth paying.
As with ao much else in life, agriculture, perhaps most revolutionary force in the evolution of modern civilization, is now controlled by a handful of corporate giants.
A handful of corporations control our food from farm to fork. Their unbridled power grants them increasing political influence over the rules that govern our food system and allows them to manipulate the marketplace – pushing down the prices paid to family farmers and driving them out of business. For eaters, extreme consolidation leaves fewer choices in the grocery aisle and higher prices, while corporate-written policies are sparking growing food safety concerns and less transparency in the marketplace. In sum, our corporate controlled food system damages rural communities, local economies, public health and the soil and water needed to sustain food production.
U.S. agriculture suffers from abnormally high levels of concentration, meaning just a handful of corporations control nearly all of our food production, processing, and distribution In a healthy economy, multiple firms can sell their goods to multiple buyers in an open, competitive market.
Most sectors of the U.S. economy have concentration ratios around 40%, meaning that the top four firms in the industry control 40% of the market. If the concentration ratio is above 40%, economists believe competition is threatened and market abuses are more likely to occur: the higher the number, the bigger the threat. Almost every sector in agriculture is well above these levels.
Unchecked corporate power distorts markets and leaves farmers and ranchers vulnerable to abuse and unfair practices. Because farmers rely on both buyers and sellers for their business, concentrated markets squeeze them at both ends.
Big Agra’s power destroys lives
For years, Monsanto was America’s premiere agricultural multinational, a creator a, among other things, Agent Orange, the carcinogenic, birth defect-inducing weed killers the U.S. military sprayed over Vietnam to deny ground cover to insurgents fighting the American-backed government of South Vietnam.
But the bulk of the profit came form creating crop genetically engineered to resist patented Monsanto herbicides that killed everything else to ensure weed-free fields.
Ignacio Chapela, photograph by esnl.
Research by UC Berkeley microbiologist [and friend of the blog] Ignacio Chapela [previously] and David Quist, established that genes inserted in corn seeds by profit-hungry corporations could spread to the native cultivars, the fountain from which all modern varieties of maize have sprung.
But publication of those findings resulted in a campaign of ad hominem attacks on Chapela and Quist backed by covert Monsanto funding led to an unprecedented retraction by Nature of their published findings, followed by the rejection of tenure for Chapela, despite the overwhelming endorsement of his fellow faculty.
After protests that we covered while reporting for the Berkeley Daily Planet and a subsequent lawsuit, Chapela gained tenure. And it is now widely accepted in plant biology that genes can jump from genetically engineered crops across species lines into other plants — a phenomenon resulting in rapid spread of so-called superweeds resistant to the same herbicides the GMO crops were designed to withstand.
Roundup, the Monsanto herbicide most of Monsanto’s genetically modified crops were designed to resist, was initially touted as safe, though it’s since been linked to some cancers, drawing fierce backlash in the U.S. and Europe as well as costly lawsuits.
Monsanto, one of America’s oldest companies, threw in the towel in 2018, selling itself to German giant Bayer for $63 in addition to an agreement to pay over $12 billion dollars in litigation damages incurred by suits over the controversial plant killer.
A deep look at corporate agricultural power
Early in life I learned there were three basic requisites of life in affition to the air we breather and the waterwe drink: Food, clothing, and shelter, always taught in that order.
Food is the stuff of life, and the earliest form of sacrifice to the gods.
Without it, we can live only a few weeks.
And while early humans ate from the bounty of nature, the discovery of agriculture changed the way we live, leading to the rise of villages, cities, states, and formal government.
But agriculture changed with the first the adoptiion of slavery, and later with the instruments and machines produced y the Industrial Revolution, enabling the creation of massive corporations devoted to both supplying the tools and seeds for farming and buying, processing, and marketing the crops farms produced.
Monsanto was just one example of the corporate Big Agra, a cartel comprising a handful of corporations controlling much of the world’s foods.
In an examination of Big Agra for the plain language, open access academic journal The Conversation, Philip H. Howard, Associate Professor of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University, and Mary Hendrickson, Associate Professor of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia, loo at 21st Century corporate agriculture and its costs to us, we who live off its bounty:
Corporate concentration in the US food system makes food more expensive and less accessible for many Americans
Agribusiness executives and government policymakers often praise the U.S. food system for producing abundant and affordable food. In fact, however, food costs are rising, and shoppers in many parts of the U.S. have limited access to fresh, healthy products.
This isn’t just an academic argument. Even before the current pandemic, millions of people in the U.S. went hungry. In 2019 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that over 35 million people were “food insecure,” meaning they did not have reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. Now food banks are struggling to feed people who have lost jobs and income thanks to COVID-19.
As rural sociologists, we study changes in food systems and sustainability. We’ve closely followed corporate consolidation of food production, processing and distribution in the U.S. over the past 40 years. In our view, this process is making food less available or affordable for many Americans.
Fewer, larger companies
Consolidation has placed key decisions about our nation’s food system in the hands of a few large companies, giving them outsized influence to lobby policymakers, direct food and industry research and influence media coverage. These corporations also have enormous power to make decisions about what food is produced how, where and by whom, and who gets to eat it. We’ve tracked this trend across the globe.
Between 1996 and 2013 Monsanto acquired more than 70 seed companies, before the firm was itself acquired by competing seed/chemical firm Bayer in 2018. Click on the image to enlarge.
Some corporate leaders have abused their power – for example, by allying with their few competitors to fix prices. In 2020 Christopher Lischewski, the former president and CEO of Bumblebee Foods, was convicted of conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined US$100,000.
In the same year, chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges and was fined $110.5 million. Meatpacking company JBS settled a $24.5 million pork price-fixing lawsuit, and farmers won a class action settlement against peanut-shelling companies Olam and Birdsong.
Industry consolidation is hard to track. Many subsidiary firms often are controlled by one parent corporation and engage in “contract packing,” in which a single processing plant produces identical foods that are then sold under dozens of different brands – including labels that compete directly against each other.
Recalls ordered in response to food-borne disease outbreaks have revealed the broad scope of contracting relationships. Shutdowns at meatpacking plants due to COVID-19 infections among workers have shown how much of the U.S. food supply flows through a small number of facilities.
With consolidation, large supermarket chains have closed many urban and rural stores. This process has left numerous communities with limited food selections and high prices – especially neighborhoods with many low-income, Black or Latino households.
In 2006, the Community Grocery Store in the small town of Walsh, Colorado, avoided going out of business by selling stock to residents. The store is still in business in 2021.
Widespread hunger
As unemployment has risen during the pandemic, so has the number of hungry Americans. Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, estimates that up to 50 million people – including 17 million children – may currently be experiencing food insecurity. Nationwide, demand at food banks grew by over 48% during the first half of 2020.
Simultaneously, disruptions in food supply chains forced farmers to dump milk down the drain, leave produce rotting in fields and euthanize livestock that could not be processed at slaughterhouses. We estimate that between March and May of 2020, farmers disposed of somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 hogs and 2 million chickens – more than 30,000 tons of meat.
Consolidation makes it easier for any industry to maintain high prices. With few players, companies simply match each other’s price increases rather than competing with them. Concentration in the U.S. food system has raised the costs of everything from breakfast cereal and coffee to beer.
The combined share of sales for the top four firms (CR4) for selected U.S. commodities, food processing/manufacturing and distribution/retail channels. Family Farm Action Alliance, CC BY-ND
As the pandemic roiled the nation’s food system through 2020, consumer food costs rose by 3.4%, compared to 0.4% in 2018 and 0.9% in 2019. We expect retail prices to remain high because they are “sticky,” with a tendency to increase rapidly but to decline more slowly and only partially.
We also believe there could be further supply disruptions. A few months into the pandemic, meat shelves in some U.S. stores sat empty, while some of the nation’s largest processors were exporting record amounts of meat to China. U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., cited this imbalance as evidence of the need to crack down on what they called “monopolistic practices” by Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and Smithfield, which dominate the U.S. meatpacking industry.
Tyson Foods responded that a large portion of its exports were “cuts of meat or portions of the animal that are not desired by” Americans. Store shelves are no longer empty for most cuts of meat, but processing plants remain overbooked, with many scheduling well into 2021.
Toward a more equitable food system
In our view, a resilient food system that feeds everyone can be achieved only through a more equitable distribution of power. This in turn will require action in areas ranging from contract law and antitrust policy to workers’ rights and economic development. Farmers, workers, elected officials and communities will have to work together to fashion alternatives and change policies.
The goal should be to produce more locally sourced food with shorter and less-centralized supply chains. Detroit offers an example. Over the past 50 years, food producers there have established more than 1,900 urban farms and gardens. A planned community-owned food co-op will serve the city’s North End, whose residents are predominantly low- and moderate-income and African American.
In our view, the best solutions will come from listening to and working with the people most affected: sustainable farmers, farm and food service workers, entrepreneurs and cooperators – and ultimately, the people whom they feed.
As COVID burns its way through the world, there’s more bad news: Food prices are soaring
From the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, two charts the trends.
First up, trends across food categories compared with years past:
Nest, a look at specific categories and their recent price trends:
More from the FAO report [emphasis added], with the greatest rise in the price of cereals [and they’re not what you might think]:
The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 113.3 points in January 2021, 4.7 points (4.3 percent) higher than in December 2020, not only marking the eighth month of consecutive rise but also registering its highest monthly average since July 2014. The latest increase reflected strong gains in the sugar, cereals and vegetable oils sub-indices, while meat and dairy values were also up but to a lesser extent.
The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 124.2 points in January, marking a sharp increase of 8.3 points (7.1 percent) from December and the seventh consecutive monthly rise. International maize prices increased significantly, surging by 11.2 percent in January, up 42.3 percent above their January 2020 level, reflecting increasingly tight global supply with lower-than-earlier-expected production and stock estimates in the United States of America and substantial purchases by China. Concerns over dryness in South America and a temporary suspension of maize export registrations in Argentina added support, pushing international maize prices up to their highest level since mid-2013. Among other coarse grains, barley prices also increased in January, by 6.9 percent, supported by firmer demand and price rises for maize, wheat and soybeans, while sorghum prices remained stable. Wheat prices also registered strong increases in January, up by 6.8 percent, influenced by the strength in maize prices as well as strong global demand and expectations of reduced sales by the Russian Federation from March 2021, when the wheat export duty will double. As for rice, robust demand from Asian and African buyers, combined with tight supplies in Thailand and Viet Nam, continued to underpin export prices in January.
The spike in cereal prices is especially troublesome, given that cereals are the basis of diets of most of the world’s poorest.
Since a massive protests against new agricultural “reform” laws began 9 August, moire than 100,000 farmers have left their lands to converge on the national capital in what is perhaps India’s longest continuous protest.
The Hindu nationalist regime of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been following the usual neoliberal tactics, handing over more and more of India’s economy to the ravages of multinational corporations.
Modi’s particularly agitated over Tweets supporting the farmers, and has taken action.
First up, threats to Twitter
Just as in the U.S., social media have been a major driver of protests, and the Indian government has struck back at Twitter, reports BuzzFeed:
India’s government has threatened to punish employees at Twitter with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for restoring hundreds of accounts it has ordered the company to block. Most accounts were critical of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
On Monday, Twitter complied with the government’s order and prevented people in India from viewing more than 250 accounts belonging to activists, political commentators, a movie star, and the Caravan, an investigative news magazine. Most accounts had criticized Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, and his government. But the company restored the accounts approximately six hours later after a Twitter lawyer met with IT ministry officials, and argued that the tweets and accounts constituted free speech and were newsworthy.
India’s government disagreed. On Tuesday, the IT ministry sent a notice to Twitter, ordering it to block the accounts once again. It also threatened people who work at Twitter’s Indian arm with legal consequences, which could include a fine or a jail term of up to seven years.
“This is really problematic,” said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama, a technology policy website, and an internet activist. “I don’t see why the government of India should wade into this territory of trying to censor tweets when they have much bigger problems to deal with.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
Celebrities add to Modi’s headache; action follows
The digital has deepened of late, with some pointed comments from international celebrities.
It took just one tweet from pop star Rihanna to anger the Indian government and supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. “Why aren’t we talking about this?!” the singer wrote, with a link to a news story on the massive farmer protests that have gripped India for more than two months.
Now, senior Indian government ministers, celebrities and even the foreign ministry are urging people to come together and denounce outsiders who they say are trying to destabilize the country.
“It is unfortunate to see vested interest groups trying to enforce their agenda on these protests, and derail them,” India’s foreign ministry said in a rare statement Wednesday, without naming Rihanna and others who followed her example.
But it was another celebrity, a young Swede, who really got Modi’s blood boiling.
The creators of an Indian farmers’ protest “toolkit” shared by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg will be investigated by police, authorities said, claiming it was designed to “encourage disaffection and ill-will” against the government.
<snip>
Police in the capital New Delhi, where a farmers’ tractor rally last week turned into a deadly rampage where one person died and hundreds of police officers were injured, said they had filed a complaint against the toolkit’s makers.
The complaint does not name Thunberg.
“Preliminary enquiry has revealed that the ‘toolkit’ in question appears to have been created by a pro-Khalistani Organisation ‘Poetic Justice Foundation’,” police said in a statement, citing Sikh separatists who want to create a homeland of Khalistan in India’s northern Punjab state.
Many of the protesting farmers hail from Punjab.
Police said the toolkit creators appeared to “create disharmony among various social, religious and cultural groups and encourage disaffection and ill-will against the (government) of India”.
Police in New Delhi on Thursday registered a case against the creators of a “toolkit” that was previously shared online by climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Swedish environmental crusader responded to the backlash by the police saying that despite the “hate”, she still supports the widespread farmers’ protest in India. She tweeted:
“No amount of hate, threats or violations of human rights will ever change that.”
The “toolkit” document shared by Thunberg encourages people to sign a petition which condemns the “state violence” against the protesters. It also urges the Indian government to listen to the protestors rather than mock them. The toolkit also mentions different hashtags to use on Twitter to support the farmers’ protests. Additionally, it asks for people worldwide to organize protests near Indian embassies or local government offices on the 13th and 14th February.
,snip>
Indian news channels initially reported that a police case has been filed against Greta Thunberg. News channel reported that the police complaint included charges of sedition, an overseas “conspiracy” and an attempt to “promote enmity between groups.” However, the police was later quoted as saying that its case does not name the climate activist.
Why farmers are striking, and why it matters
Bhavani Shankar, Professorial Research Fellow in Food Systems and Health at University of Sheffield examines the roots of the massive protest in an article for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in everyday English:
Why Indian farmers are so angry about the Modi government’s agricultural reforms
India’s farmers have been protesting since the autumn, with a growing intensity that culminated in a violent breaching of barriers in the Red Fort in Delhi during India’s Republic Day celebrations on January 26.
The protests were spurred by the passing of a set of agricultural reform bills in parliament in September 2020 that aimed to fundamentally transform the way in which farm produce is marketed in the country. India’s farming population of more than 100 million is comprised largely of small farmers who fear that the reforms will add considerable uncertainty to their already meagre livelihoods.
India has historically had a strongly regulated marketing system for agricultural produce, originally devised to enable farmers to sell to the market but at the same time to protect the small, often poor farmers from the vagaries of the open market.
Such regulation is a state-level responsibility in India’s federal governance structure. Accordingly, each state devised a system wherein the initial purchase and sale of agricultural products had to be conducted at state-regulated wholesale markets called mandis. These mandis had licensed middlemen and traders who could be regulated by the government to ensure that farmers were not exploited.
The broader legislative framework also acted to limit private sector storage of key food products (to prevent hoarding) and discourage direct contracting between private agribusiness and farmers. There were important variations in regulations across states, and legislation has changed over time, but the broad intention was to protect farmers by limiting the power of agribusiness.
However, the regulatory system did not always work as intended in practice, and deficiencies became apparent over time. Despite the idea of monitoring, traders and middlemen in wholesale markets were found to often collude to the disadvantage of the farmer. Pricing practices were opaque and farmers too often received a very low share of the price.
Variations in regulations across states also hindered interstate trade opportunities. As the Indian economy was liberalised, private enterprise and agribusiness was growing, but found itself shackled by the regulatory framework. Many commentators agreed that reform was needed.
The three bills
A set of three complementary bills was rushed through parliament by the Modi government in September 2020. The first seeks to erode the role of the regulated mandis in marketing farm produce by allowing parallel trade, including electronic trading, outside the mandi system within and across states.
The second loosens the restrictions on private sector storage and stocking of produce, allowing restrictions only in case of strong price spikes when hoarding becomes a strong concern.
The third bill sets up a framework for direct formal contracting between farmers and the agribusinesses that buy from them.
Taken together, these bills are a radical departure from the tightly regulated system for marketing agricultural produce that existed before. The bills would curb the regulatory power of states, allowing the central government to set the agenda more firmly.
The reforms provide a significant fillip to the operation of private enterprise, especially large agribusiness in India. The expectation of the government is that the strengthening of these parallel market channels will create competition for the farmers’ produce from both within and across states, leading to improved remuneration for farmers.
What are the farmers unhappy about?
Although the reforms are ostensibly about empowering farmers, there is deep concern that they will largely boost private agribusiness to the detriment of the livelihoods of small farmers. The bills propose new market channels that are largely unregulated, potentially leaving farmers at the mercy of powerful private sector players.
A related concern is that the emergence of these parallel channels will undermine the longstanding regulated mandi system that farmers understand and are used to operating in, despite its numerous flaws.
Contract farming, which would become more commonplace if the bills become law, theoretically offers farmers the option of cutting out middlemen and their fees to deal directly with a downstream buyer. But experience from India and around the world shows that large buyers often prefer to deal with larger farmers located in well-developed regions who can supply assured large volumes with minimal friction. Thus small farmers from less developed areas with poor infrastructure may find themselves frozen out of such channels.
These serious concerns have led protesting farmers to demand not just alterations to the new bills, but their complete repeal. The direction of travel of the bills – towards private sector entry and government withdrawal – has also left farmers worrying about the future of other government policies that have long supported their livelihoods, such as Minimum Support Prices (MSPs).
MSPs are minimum prices announced periodically by the government for certain essential farm products, and used when the government buys these crops from the farmers for distribution to poor consumers. The MSPs help provide a measure of stability and certainty to prices received by farmers, and the protesting farmers want MSPs to be legally guaranteed in the future. This and a set of other demands, ranging from the cancellation of penalties for crop residue burning that contributes to air pollution, to enhancements to energy subsidies, have now also been added to the farmers’ core demand to cancel reforms.
Republic Day, held annually on 26 January, is celebrated in the India’s capital with a major military parade marking the birth of the nation as a constitutional republic in 1950.
But this year, all eyes are on another Republic Day parade, a caravan of thousands of tractors, driven by farmers protesting agricultural “reform” laws [previously] passed by the government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Tens of thousands of farmers gathered on the outskirts of India’s capital New Delhi on Tuesday, ahead of a tractor procession aimed at protesting a controversial set of agricultural laws.
Growers, angry at what they see as laws that help large, private buyers at the expense of producers, have been camped outside Delhi for almost two months.
Thousands more, on tractors decorated with the flags of India and farm unions, have been streaming into the capital from neighbouring states for several days ahead of the rally that coincides with India’s Republic Day.
“We will follow the instructions of our leaders and conduct a peaceful march,” said Sukhjinder Singh, a 30-year-old protestor from Punjab at Singhu, one of the main protest sites.
Tens of thousands of tractors carrying groups of farmers travelled to the city in the past few days, in addition to thousands that have already been blocking several entrance points of the city for more than a month.
Police have allowed farmers to rally along pre-approved routes on the outskirts of Delhi on Tuesday.
But the tractor march threatens to overshadow the annual Republic Day military parade in the centre of the capital, held to mark the anniversary of the introduction of India’s Constitution in 1950.
“They (farmers) could have chosen any other day instead of January 26 but they have announced now,” India’s Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar told local media on Monday.
“Conducting the rally peacefully without any accident would be the concern for farmers as well as police administration.”
While the protestors are deeply serious about their goals since launching their protest 26 November, that’s no not say that the protesters don’t enjoy some levity, as exemplified in this clip from midday India:
Farmers dance to tribal music at Azad Maidan during protest rally
Program notes:
Despite traveling for long hours, some of the farmers and their families danced to tribal music before calling it a night at Azad Maidan on 24th January. Using traditional musical instruments, men and women gathered in circles as they played songs and danced to the music. Watch this video to find out more.
As the oceans warm and the seas rise, changing global weather patterns threaten some of the world’s poorest and most populous regions in Southern Asia and Latin America with catastrophic changes to critical agricultural regions, portending food shortages and famine in the coming years.
And, we suspect, the resulting pressure will fuel massive migration, raising the specter of still more inflammatory far-Right extremism as the 21st Century unfolds.
UCI researchers: Climate change will alter the position of the Earth’s tropical rain belt
Future climate change will cause a regionally uneven shifting of the tropical rain belt – a narrow band of heavy precipitation near the equator – according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions. This development may threaten food security for billions of people.
In a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change [$8.99 for non-subscribers], the interdisciplinary team of environmental engineers, Earth system scientists and data science experts stressed that not all parts of the tropics will be affected equally. For instance, the rain belt will move north in parts of the Eastern Hemisphere but will move south in areas in the Western Hemisphere.
According to the study, a northward shift of the tropical rain belt over the eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean will result in future increases of drought stress in southeastern Africa and Madagascar, in addition to intensified flooding in southern India. A southward creeping of the rain belt over the eastern Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean will cause greater drought stress in Central America.
“Our work shows that climate change will cause the position of Earth’s tropical rain belt to move in opposite directions in two longitudinal sectors that cover almost two thirds of the globe, a process that will have cascading effects on water availability and food production around the world,” said lead author Antonios Mamalakis, who recently received a Ph.D. in civil & environmental engineering in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.
The team made the assessment by examining computer simulations from 27 state-of-the-art climate models and measuring the tropical rain belt’s response to a future scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise through the end of the current century.
Mamalakis said the sweeping shift detected in his work was disguised in previous modelling studies that provided a global average of the influence of climate change on the tropical rain belt. Only by isolating the response in the Eastern and Western Hemisphere zones was his team able to highlight the drastic alterations to come over future decades.
Co-author James Randerson, UCI’s Ralph J. & Carol M. Cicerone Chair in Earth System Science, explained that climate change causes the atmosphere to heat up by different amounts over Asia and the North Atlantic Ocean.
“In Asia, projected reductions in aerosol emissions, glacier melting in the Himalayas and loss of snow cover in northern areas brought on by climate change will cause the atmosphere to heat up faster than in other regions,” he said. “We know that the rain belt shifts toward this heating, and that its northward movement in the Eastern Hemisphere is consistent with these expected impacts of climate change.”
He added that the weakening of the Gulf Stream current and deep-water formation in the North Atlantic is likely to have the opposite effect, causing a southward shift in the tropical rain belt across the Western Hemisphere.
“The complexity of the Earth system is daunting, with dependencies and feedback loops across many processes and scales,” said corresponding author Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, UCI Distinguished Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Henry Samueli Endowed Chair in Engineering. “This study combines the engineering approach of system’s thinking with data analytics and climate science to reveal subtle and previously unrecognized manifestations of global warming on regional precipitation dynamics and extremes.”
Foufoula-Georgiou said that a next step is to translate those changes to impacts on the ground, in terms of flooding, droughts, infrastructure and ecosystem change to guide adaptation, policy and management.
Other collaborators of this study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, included Jin-Yi Yu, Gudrun Magnusdottir and Michael Pritchard and Padhraic Smyth at UCI; Paul Levine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Sungduk Yu at Yale University.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a legal rebuke when the nation’s Supreme Court struck down the trio of laws the farmers say would destroy their livelihoods.
But it’s a mixed victory, given that the ruling allows the government to fix procedural errors made in passing the laws.
The farmers have been on strike and massing in the national capital in protest of legislation they believe will strip them of protections and open the way to predatory Big Agra payments for their crops.
India’s top court on Tuesday temporarily put on hold the implementation of agricultural reform laws and ordered the creation of an independent committee of experts to negotiate with farmers who have been protesting against the legislation.
The Supreme Court’s ruling came a day after it heard petitions filed by farmers challenging the legislation. It said the laws were passed without enough consultation and that it was disappointed with the way talks were proceeding between representatives of the government and farmers.
Tens of thousands of farmers protesting against the legislation have been blocking half a dozen major highways on the outskirts of New Delhi for more than 45 days. Farmers say they won’t leave until the government repeals the laws.
They say the legislation passed by Parliament in September will lead to the cartelization and commercialization of agriculture, make farmers vulnerable to corporate greed and devastate their earnings.
One in three large American rivers has changed color over the last 36 years, shifting from shades of blue to green and yellow, raising concerns about the health of U.S. waterways, according to an analysis of nearly 235,000 satellite images published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The research examined satellite images covering 67,000 miles of large rivers (measuring more than 197-feet-wide) taken from 1984 to 2018 by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. It found that 56 percent of rivers appeared yellow instead of blue, and 38 percent appeared green. In one-third of the rivers examined, the color shift from blue to green or yellow was a long-term change, not tied to seasonal variation. Just 8 percent of the satellite images showed rivers as blue.
“Most of the rivers are changing gradually and not noticeable to the human eye,” lead author John Gardner, a postdoctoral researcher in the global hydrology lab at University of North Carolina, told Live Science. “But areas that are the fastest changing are more likely to be man-made.”
A yellow hue is likely due to a higher sediment load in the water, which can be caused by human activity, such as dredging or construction, or natural causes, such as heavy rainfall. Rivers appear green when there are large amounts of algae, often the result of fertilizer runoff from farms.
“If things are becoming more green, that’s a problem,” said study lead author John Gardner, a University of Pittsburgh geology and environmental sciences professor. Although some green tint to rivers can be normal, Gardener said, it often means large algae blooms that cause oxygen loss and can produce toxins.
The chief causes of color changes are farm fertilizer run-off, dams, efforts to fight soil erosion and man-made climate change, which increases water temperature and rain-related run-off, the study authors said.
“We change our rivers a lot. A lot of that has to do with human activity,” said study co-author Tamlin Pavelsky, a professor of global hydrology at the University of North Carolina.
Excess fertilizer runoff has been the cause of major outbreaks of toxic algae creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, fed by runoff from U.S. farmlands feeding into the Mississippi River.
Nebraska’s Republican governor, the son of a racist Wall Street billionaire, has just sentenced scores of his fellow Nebraskans to death by COVID.
And he’s done it by ordering that no COVID vaccinations be given to non-documented workers at the state’s massive meat-packing industry.
And why is that so terrible?
Consider this from a study reported in July in the prestigious British Medical Journal [open access}:
Slaughterhouses and meat processing plants are favourable environments for SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The virus thrives in lower temperatures and very high or very low relative humidity. Metallic surfaces retain live viruses for longer than other environments. A dense production of aerosols combining dust, feathers, and faeces is produced in the plants, and intense water use carries materials extensively over surfaces. Workers must speak loudly or shout over the noise, releasing more droplets and spreading them further. Workplaces are crowded, and social distancing is difficult.
<snip>
The meat industry is highly profitable globally and a major driver of both antimicrobial resistance and climate breakdown. People may come to reflect on how they get their meat, what they are prepared to pay for it, and what conditions they expect the animals and the workers to endure so they can have it.
And then there’s this, from a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and published late last month, focusing on the U.S. packing industry [emphasis added]:
We estimate the total excess COVID-19 cases and deaths associated with proximity to livestock plants to be 236,000 to 310,000 (6 to 8% of all US cases) and 4,300 to 5,200 (3 to 4% of all US deaths), respectively, as of July 21, 2020, with the vast majority likely related to community spread outside these plants. The association is found primarily among large processing facilities and large meatpacking companies. In addition, we find evidence that plant closures attenuated county-wide cases and that plants that received permission from the US Department of Agriculture to increase their production-line speeds saw more county-wide cases. Ensuring both public health and robust essential supply chains may require an increase in meatpacking oversight and potentially a shift toward more decentralized, smaller-scale meat production.
Even Trump’s own administration acknowledges the link.
Two-week moving average of new daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population since March 1, 2020, in nonmetro counties with 20 percent or more employment in meatpacking compared to all other rural counties in the United States
There also another surge erupting, and a new, much faster-spreading variant here in the U.S., and a third even more contagious variety already spreading through Europe and certain to arrive here.
Now toss in the fact that Nebraska is the nation’s largest producer of beef, with all the slaughterhouses and packing plants that entails.
States with a heavy presence of meatpacking facilities such as South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota now have among the highest concentration of new cases by population.
Undocumented immigrants in Nebraska will not be eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccines, Governor Pete Ricketts announced Monday.
Ricketts, the son of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, was asked at a press conference if undocumented persons would be included when vaccines become available to meatpacking plant workers.
‘Illegal immigrants are not permitted to work in those facilities, so I don’t think that will be a problem,’ the governor replied without further explanation.
In reality the issue is much more complicated, as undocumented workers make up a large section of Nebraska’s meatpacking industry – which is the largest in the US with roughly 26,600 workers in total.
According to recent data from the Migration Policy Institute, some 66 percent of the state’s meatpacking workers are immigrants, and varying estimates suggest that anywhere between 14 percent to almost all of them are undocumented.
The American Immigration Council estimated that in 2016, Nebraska was home to 60,000 immigrants, 41 percent of them undocumented, rendering Rickett’s claims absurd.
And by ordering no vaccines for undocumented workers in meat plants, Rickett has passed a death sentence on his friends and neighbors.
Ricketts, the school-slasher with a bigoted billionaire daddy
When he’s not ensuring another COVID surge, Gov. Ricketts has been busy cutting school funding, and for the obvious neocon reason, cutting taxes at the very moment the state is struggling with a pandemic.
Gov. Pete Ricketts made it clear Friday that he’s not done pushing for lower property taxes.
Ricketts, during a press briefing on the state’s COVID-19 response, said he will be pursuing legislation to place limits on local school spending during the 2021 session, which begins Jan. 6.
Slowing the growth of K-12 school spending was one thing that was left out of a property tax relief bill passed earlier this year, the governor said, and he will be asking state lawmakers to rectify that.
“That will be a big priority,” he said. “That’s the next step in what we have to do to continue to get that property tax relief for Nebraskans.”
He’s also, with his dad and three siblings, co-owner of a baseball team in another meat-packing town, the Chicago Cubs.
And his billionaire daddy, whose business is headquartered in Omaha, is also a a racist, a truth revealed when someone leaked his emails, complete with gems like these:
● “good one” – a joke about how Iranians, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians and Pakistanis won’t exist in the future
● “very good” – a joke about a “Mexican family of six,” an “Islamic group of welfare cheats,” and “6 LA, Hispanic, Gang Bangers, & ex-cons” dying in an apartment fire that didn’t kill a white couple because they were at work
● “tired of Political Correct, Multicultural and Diversity aspects of our culture” – a story about how former Congressman Allen West fired a gun at the crotch of an Iraqi prisoner (note: West actually fired the gun near his head) in an interrogation, which led led to West’s retirement from the military
● “great laugh” – a joke with a punchline revolving around a white man agreeing to not call his black wife the n-word
● “WOW! I’m sending on” – a video titled “Is Barack Obama really a Saudi/Muslim plant in the White House?”
● “I like this” – a forward of a speech tied to disgraced Seinfeld actor Michael Richards about racism against white people in America that ends with “Be proud to be white! It’s not a crime yet … but getting very close!”
Looks like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Tyson Foods Inc. said it fired seven managers of an Iowa meatpacking plant following the company’s investigation into allegations that they had wagered on Covid-19 infections among employees.
Tyson announced the investigation in November, after a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of a deceased Tyson worker claimed that managers of the company’s Waterloo, Iowa, pork-processing facility organized a betting pool around how many employees would contract the coronavirus and pressured sick employees to stay on the job.
Since 9 August, hundreds of thousands of Indian peasant farmers have been gathered around the nation’s Capital, leaving their plows and sickles behind to challenge the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new agrarian laws which they fear will lead to a predatory market, dominated by multinational corporations [previously].
The action began on 9 August, and there’s no sign of a letup.
Although the farmers and government have agreed on some points, the key issue of the farm lies remains unresolved.
And now the farmers are vowing to escalate their action unless the government backs down.
From the Indian Express:
With the government still to decide on two of their four key demands, farmer unions opposed to the new agriculture laws Saturday threatened to lead a tractor rally into Delhi on January 26 if the demands are not met by then.
The government and farmer unions are scheduled to meet again on January 4 to decide on demands to repeal the three newly enacted farm laws and provision of legal guarantee on the minimum support price for procurement — farmer unions are pressing for the enactment of a central MSP Act, covering 23 crops grown in the country.
<snip>
The Samyukt Kisan Union, the umbrella body of farmer unions camping at the gates of Delhi to press their demands, told the press Saturday that if all their demands are not met by January 26 – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to be chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations this year – the farmers shall “peacefully and non-violently” lead a tractor parade into Delhi, and across the country.
Farmer makes the ultimate protest
A second story from the Indian Express reports on a dramatic protests at one of the encampments surrounding the Indian Capital:
A farmer in his 70s from Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur district killed himself Saturday morning at the Ghazipur protest site near the Delhi-UP border. In a purported suicide note, he wrote that he was taking the step “to oppose the farm bills”.
According to the Ghaziabad Police, Kashmir Singh Dass, from Pashiapur village in Rampur, was founded hanging from the ceiling inside a toilet at Ghazipur, where farmers have been protesting since November 28. “We received information that a person had died at the protest site in the morning, following which a police vehicle was sent. He was declared dead on arrival at the nearest hospital,” said SP, City II Ghaziabad, Gyanendra Kumar.
In his ‘suicide note’, Singh wrote that his death would be his contribution to the agitation. “I have come to Delhi because the three farm laws… are not in favour of farmers. These are not beneficial to all farmers of India. Farmers want the government to take these bills back. The government is not repealing them. More than 50 farmers from Punjab have already died in this agitation. But no farmer from UP and Uttarakhand has given their lives… (so) I am sacrificing my body to oppose the three farm bills,” read the note, written in Gurmukhi script.
From the San Francisco Chronicle, a graphic depiction of the vast destruction done by six years of raging wildfires in the heart of one of the world’s richest rich production centers:
More from the Chronicle:
California’s famed Wine Country has been buffeted by flames for more than five years now. Since 2015, fires have blackened more than 60% of Lake County, wiped out whole neighborhoods in Sonoma County and ruined wineries and resorts in the Napa Valley, repeatedly turning one of the country’s prized destinations into a siren-filled disaster scene.
The 2020 fire season has been particularly severe, as the impact of climate change grows ever clearer. In the past two months alone, major wildfires in Napa, Sonoma, Lake and other nearby counties have killed six people, destroyed more than 3,000 buildings and torched an area 14 times larger than San Francisco.
But the man the farmers really want to talk to, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won’t be there.
And meanwhile Indian farmers have flooded roads around the Indian Capital as their two-month-long protest continues with no sign of a letup. [Previous coverage.]
Leaders of Indian farmers’ unions have agreed to meet ministers on Tuesday, possibly paving the way for a seventh round of talks with the government which has so far failed to mollify growers who say three new agricultural laws threaten their livelihoods.
Worried over farmers’ round-the-clock sit-ins on the outskirts of New Delhi, the government of Prime Minister Narendra had on Thursday invited protest leaders to further talks.
Farmers’ unions still insist they want the laws repealed, a coalition of unions called Samyukta Kisan Morcha said on Saturday in a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare.
The government says the laws, which came into force in September, will unshackle farmers from having to sell their produce only at regulated wholesale markets. It argues farmers will gain if large traders, retailers and food processors can buy directly from producers, bypassing antiquated wholesale markets.
But tens of thousands of farmers have camped out on national highways demanding the government withdraw the laws that they fear will eventually dismantle regulated markets and stop the government buying rice and wheat at guaranteed prices.
Protesting Indian farmers blocking road into New Delhi. Wikipedia.
The Indian farmer protest that has brought tens of thousands to New Delhi continues, nearing the end of its second month. In addition to the massive turnout in the Capital, they’re also called for a 26 December strike against and boycott of against big business.
The farmers are protesting three new laws they say will leave them prey to Agribiz giants, a huge issue in a country where most of workforce is employed in growing and transporting crops.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a token Christmas Day show of it, holding a virtual meeting with some farmers, as ABC News reports:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi held virtual talks with Indian farmers Friday and asked them to explain how the government’s agricultural policies have benefited them, a month into massive farmer protests that have rattled his administration.
Modi’s talks with supporters of the legislation come while his government is making multiple efforts to placate tens of thousands of farmers who are blocking key highways on the outskirts of the capital in protests against new agricultural laws. The protesting farmers say the laws will dismantle regulated markets, favor big corporations, and make family-owned farms unviable, eventually leaving them landless.
Protesting farmers fear the government will stop buying grain at minimum guaranteed prices and corporations will then push down prices. The government says the three laws approved by Parliament in September will enable farmers to market their produce and boost production through private investment.
“Through these agricultural reforms, we have given better options to the farmers,” Modi said in his live address. He reiterated that the laws were a much-needed reform that would benefit farmers and accused opposition parties of spreading fears of farmers’ exploitation by corporations. “Those making big speeches today did nothing for farmers when they were in power,” Modi said.
A token show for the wrong audience
But it wasn’t the striking farms Modi addressed, reports the Dakha Tribune:
Instead, he spoke via video conferencing to seven farmers from different states, asking them how they had benefited from ‘PM Kisan’ – a cash transfer scheme his government launched in February, 2019, under which farmers get minimum income support.
The farmers Modi spoke with on Friday praised his scheme – but none were among the thousands who have been protesting.
At the protest, solidarity prevails
A remarkable report in The Hindu describes a amiable solidarity at the Capital protests, a recreation of village culture in a rich web of social and material support:
It was exactly a month ago when scores of farmers reached the borders of Delhi and made it their home. In just 30 days, their resolve seems to have only grown, and going back appears to be a distant dream.
When the farmers parked their trucks and trolleys in the last week of November, they had come with sacks of wheat, rice, flour and vegetables. Now, the trucks also have toothpaste, kneecaps, blankets, and desi geysers, among many essentials.
<snip>
All day, some of the elderly are also on duty taking care of their tractors and trolleys while the youngsters spend time at the site. Sucha Singh, 75, says that he wakes up at 4 a.m., bathes, prays, and then spends time around the stage for a few hours, after which he goes back to take care of the trolley.
A month later now, there are also a few people who are not missing home anymore. “We’ve met so many people here who’ve become family. We also spend good time strolling here, sometimes, it feels it’s better than home,” said Tarsem Singh from Mohali.
And a gesture of support from Congress
No, not the once-mighty Congress Party of India, now relegated to the back benches.
A group of seven influential US lawmakers, including Indian- American Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, have written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging him to raise the issue of farmers’ protest in India with his Indian counterpart.
India has called the remarks by foreign leaders and politicians on protests by farmers as “ill-informed” and “unwarranted,” asserting that the matter pertains to the internal affairs of a democratic country.
<snip>
This is an issue of particular concern to Sikh Americans linked to Punjab, although it also heavily impacts the Indian Americans belonging to other Indian states, the lawmakers said in their letter to Pompeo dated December 23.
“Many Indian Americans are directly affected as they have family members and ancestral land in Punjab and are concerned for the well-being of their families in India. In view of this serious situation, we urge you to contact your Indian counterpart to reinforce the United States’ commitment to the freedom of political speech abroad,” they said.
Two charts from Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistical division, chart the impacts of two “green” policies in the European union.
Our first chart comes from Eurostat’s energy page and reveals the extent of renewable electricity developed by Europe’s nations. Most notable is the fact that two countries, Iceland and Norway, now generate more than renewable electricity to power all their nations’ electric needs:
Our second graphic, from a new report wrapping up statistics on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, shows the increasing amounts of agricultural land devoted to organic agriculture, with gains in every country except Poland, the U.K., and Norway. The figures are in hectares, with each hectare equivalent to 2.47 acres:
More of the world’s living things will driven to the brink of extinction in coming decades as vast swathes of “undeveloped” land are converted to farmland to feed the world’s rising population, according to a new study just published in one the world’s leading scientific journals.
Just how vast is the threat to global biodiversity?
One set of maps from the report spells it out:
At the very least, the loss of millions of acres of natural habitat to an agriculture dominated by a few giant multinationals and devoted to intensive monocrop cultivation heavily dependent on genetically modified crops and intensive use of fertilizers, herbicides, and insectides spells disaster for many species,
Current food production systems could mean far-reaching habitat loss
Findings published in Nature Sustainability show that the world’s food system will need to be transformed to prevent habitat loss across the globe.
The international research team, led by the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford, found that what we eat and how it is produced will need to change rapidly and dramatically to prevent widespread and severe biodiversity losses.
He said: “We estimated how agricultural expansion to feed an increasingly wealthy global population is likely to affect about 20,000 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians.
“Our research suggests that without big changes to food systems, millions of square kilometres of natural habitats could be lost by 2050.
“Nearly 1,300 species are likely to lose at least a quarter of their remaining habitat, and hundreds could lose at least half. This makes them far more likely to go extinct.
“Ultimately, we need to change what we eat and how it is produced if we’re going to save wildlife on a global scale. We need to alter both our diets and food production methods.”
Modelling agricultural expansion
The study estimated how food systems would affect biodiversity at a finer land scale than previous research (2.25 km2), making the results more relevant to conservation action by highlighting exactly which species and landscapes are likely to be threatened.
It did so by linking projections of how much agricultural land each country will need with a new model that estimates where agricultural expansion and abandonment are most likely to occur.
By looking at whether individual animal species can survive in farmland or not, the researchers could then estimate changes in habitat, finding that losses were particularly severe in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of Central and South America.
Many of the species that are likely to be most affected are not listed as threatened with extinction, and so are unlikely to be currently targeted by conservationists.
He said: “As international biodiversity targets are set to be updated in 2021, these results highlight the importance of proactive efforts to safeguard biodiversity by reducing demand for agricultural land.
“Discussions on slowing and reversing biodiversity often focus on conventional conservation actions, such as establishing new protected areas or species-specific legislation for threatened species. These are absolutely needed, and have been effective at conserving biodiversity.
“However, our research emphasises the importance of also reducing the ultimate stresses to biodiversity—such as agricultural expansion.
“The good news is that if we make ambitious changes to the food system, then we can prevent almost all these habitat losses.”
Reducing biodiversity loss
The study examined the potential impact of making these ambitious changes, modelling whether transitions to healthy diets, reductions in food loss and waste, increases in crop yields, and international land-use planning could reduce future biodiversity losses.
This approach enables policy makers and conservationist to identify which changes are likely to have the largest benefit in their country or region.
For example, raising agricultural yields would likely bring huge benefits to biodiversity in Sub-Saharan Africa, but do very little in North America where yields are already high.
In contrast, shifting to healthier diets would have big benefits in North America, but is less likely to have a large benefit in regions where meat consumption is low and food insecurity is high.
Dr Clark added: “Importantly, we need to do all of these things. No one approach is sufficient on its own.
“But, with global coordination and rapid action, it should be possible to provide healthy diets for the global population in 2050 without major habitat losses.”
eats shoots 'n leaves 
