Gilbert Achcar on U.S. foreign policy and violence in the Middle East; Jack Miles on Iraqi oil; Syed Saleem Shahzad on Musharraf's predicament; Alain Gresh on America's New Backyard The landscape of the Middle East has been redrawn. This was the objective of Pentagon strategists and the neo-conservatives; but it is doubtful whether the results match their dreams of remodelling the region to secure the lasting hold that the French and British established after the first world war. Western forces are directly involved in ferocious conflicts across the broader Middle East. Afghanistan has collapsed into chaos, dragging US and Nato troops down with it. It will be hard to heal the wounds in Iraq, where religious and ethnic rivalries and resistance to foreign occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties – more, according to some observers, than the Rwandan genocide. Lebanon is mired in a silent civil war between Fuad Siniora’s government and the opposition, centred on Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement; despite a significant UN presence, the war with Israel could resume at any moment. Colonisation and repression have accelerated the geographical and social fragmentation of Palestine, and the possibly irreversible collapse of the national movement. Since Ethiopia’s US-backed intervention in December 2006, Somalia has been called the “new front in the war on terror”. Then there are Darfur, the tensions in Pakistan, a “terrorist threat" in North Africa and the possibility of a new confrontation between Syria and Israel. A self-fulfilling prophecy This dichotomy has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which local forces have exploited for their own ends. Somalia’s transitional federal government – corrupt, incompetent warlords–persuaded the White House that international terrorism was at work (5). The US responded by encouraging Ethiopian military intervention in an attempt to expel the Union of Islamic Courts forces that had seized Mogadishu six months previously (see page 4). Global preconceptions eclipsed the real internal situation. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of its Muslim neighbour served only to enhance the credibility of ultra-radical Islamist groups (6). Lebanon is a fragile entity that depends upon a subtle sectarian alchemy. By deciding to support one side against the other, the US and France made any internal resolution more difficult. Lebanon has become a battleground where the West and its allies can confront Iran and Syria. And any compromise, however necessary, is in danger of being perceived as a victory for the “forces of evil”. As they have multiplied, the conflicts have become interrelated. Weapons, combatants and skills move across porous frontiers, sometimes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into exile by the fighting. Over the past two years combat techniques pioneered in Iraq have spread to Afghanistan – the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against troop transports, and suicide bombings, which were unknown during the Soviet occupation (and which have now also spread to Algeria). This summer, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, hundreds of fighters, many of them foreigners who fought in Iraq, held out for more than three months against the Lebanese army. There are thousands of Arab, Pakistani and central Asian combatants now on the loose, all trained in Iraq. Others, trained by the US and Pakistan to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, migrated to terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as into al-Qaida. All these wars have encouraged a profitable trade: weapons handed out to the Iraqi security forces are now in the hands of Turkish criminals (7).
Read together, these three commentaries suggest how fragile things are becoming in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon, countries which are regarded in decreasing order of importance by U.S. planners. The strategic challenge they are faced with, like the British a century ago in the same region, is maintaining a level of conflict between clients and non-clients that is high enough to prevent broad alliances against foreign influence from forming, but low enough to prevent total chaos.
But as Alain Gresh shows in the above article, U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan (like Soviet-occupied Afghanistan) are becoming magnets for multinational, multiethnic coalitions of pan-Muslim nationalists, many from countries thousands of miles away. The indirect U.S. backing of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, direct U.S. involvement (including air and naval deployments) in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia last winter, the expansion of the Afghan war into Pakistani Waziristan, and threats war against Iran from Republicans and Democrats alike have involved the U.S. in armed conflicts and local struggles from the Horn of Africa to South Asia. (One might add that, with U.S.-Malian and U.S.-Filipino joint military exercises and operations taking place in the last year, the U.S. is at war across the entire Muslim world.)
An excerpt from Gresh's article:
All these conflicts have been subsumed into a US world view that projects a specific meaning on to them. During and after the cold war, the US (like the Soviet Union) viewed any crisis in the light of the East-West conflict. So the issue in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s was not the Sandinista struggle against a brutal dictatorship in an attempt to build a fairer society, but the danger that the country might become part of an “evil empire” (4). This cost the people of Nicaragua a decade of war and destruction. The US is indifferent to the problems of the Palestinians, the crisis in Somalia or the sectarian conflict in Lebanon; it is fixated on a global confrontation between good and evil. And this discourse feeds al-Qaida’s vision of a continuing war against Jews and crusaders.
This sense of overspilling regional violence is confirmed by these news reports:
Dozens feared dead in suicide bomb blasts in Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Fifteen people killed in seven coordinated bomb blasts in Uttar Pradesh, India. The blasts took place near court complexes in three different cities: Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad.
And look at the violence in Iraq from the just the last few days:
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/24/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/23/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/22/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/21/07
Twin Bombings Kill at Least 26 in Iraq
In other news: Human rights organizations call for a halt to the demolition of 3,000 public housing units in New Orleans. The same cynicism and greed that leads rich countries to push liberalization on the poorest ones is also leading developers to see dollar bills in the "whitening" of New Orleans. This is just another example.
Read more!
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Chaos and U.S. Power
Green Capitalism, Climate Change, GMOs
Against all historical evidence, the EU is claiming that rapid liberalization will "help Africa develop." In a new draft agreement on Economic Partnership Agreements with the East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), Brussels is asking the EAC to remove tariffs on 80% of products within 15 years. Kenyan farmers have attempted to file a lawsuit in Kenyan courts to prevent the government from signing the agreement. Facing a Threat to Farming and Food Supply By Rick Weiss Monday, November 19, 2007 Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent. Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago. And those estimates do not count the effects of new plant pests and diseases, which are widely expected to come with climate change and could cancel out the positive "fertilizing" effects that higher carbon dioxide levels may offer some plants. Scenarios like these--and the recognition that even less-affected countries such as the United States will experience significant regional shifts in growing seasons, forcing new and sometimes disruptive changes in crop choices--are providing the impetus for a new "green revolution." It is aimed not simply at boosting production, as the first revolution did with fertilizers, but at creating crops that can handle the heat, suck up the salt, not desiccate in a drought and even grow swimmingly while submerged. The work involves conventional breeding of new varieties as well as genetic engineering to transfer specific traits from more resilient species. As part of those efforts, scientists are also busily preserving seeds from thousands of varieties of the 150 crops that make upmost of the world's agricultural diversity, as well as wild relatives of those crops that may harbor useful but still unidentified genes."For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt," said Ren Wang, director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a network of agricultural research centers. "It's important that we have a wide pool of genetic diversity from which to develop crops with these unique traits."At the same time, scientists are finding that agriculture and related land uses, which today account for about one-third of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, can be conducted in much more climate-friendly ways. But time is of the essence if a worldwide crisis in food security is to be avoided, said William R. Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington-based nonpartisan economic think tanks."You'll have a tripling of world food demand by 2085 because of higher population and bigger economies, and I would not be surprised to see as much as one-third of today's agricultural land devoted to plants for ethanol," Cline said. "So it's going to be a tight race between food supply and demand."The work of developing adaptive plants has begun to pay off. Researchers have discovered ancient varieties of Persian grasses, for example, that have an incredible tolerance for salt water. The scientists are breeding the grasses with commercial varieties of wheat and have found they are growing well in Australia's increasingly salty soils. Other research is building on the recent discovery of a gene that helps plants survive prolonged periods underwater. Even rice, which grows in wet paddies, will die if it is fully submerged for more than three or four days, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. But recent tests on farms in Bangladesh show that a new line of rice containing the flood-resistance gene can live underwater for two weeks. That's going to be important, Zeigler said, because 70 percent of the world's poor live in Asia -- most of them in south Asia -- where rice is the staple. Yet 50 million acres of that region are already subject to seasonal flooding that can temporarily submerge plants under 10 to 12 feet of water. And the problem is predicted to worsen as climate change brings more intense rainfall there."Crops grow in weather, not in climate," Zeigler said, meaning they must be able to survive not only the anticipated average rises in temperature but also the day-to-day extremes that come with climate change. Corn is another staple that is getting gussied up to party with the hardy--in this case in preparation for dry spells, which are predicted to increase in Latin America and other corn-growing regions, with a potential 20 percent drop in production over the next 25 years. Recent tests in South Africa showed that drought-resistant maize plants, created by breeding, produced 30 percent to 50 percent more corn than traditional varieties under arid conditions. But the real test, scientists say, will be to splice in potent drought-resistance genes from plants such as sorghum and millet, which are famously productive even in parched, sub-Saharan Africa. That assumes consumers and regulators will accept such engineered crops, which have been shunned in many countries because of economic and environmental concerns. To the extent that plants cannot adapt to change, farmers will have to. In Uganda, where coffee is an important cash crop but where temperature increases are expected to devastate the plants, researchers are hoping that by planting shade trees, growers can preserve the industry while perhaps even increasing biodiversity. In other parts of Africa, farmers are being taught to add fruit trees to their subsistence farms. The trees can survive droughts and waterlogging better than crops planted annually, and so can serve as an economic bridge across hard times. Farmers in developed countries must also prepare, experts say. A recent study by researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico concluded that wheat growers in North America will have to give up some of their southernmost fields in the next few decades. But they will be able to farm a full 10 degrees north of their current limit, which extends from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Cape Harrison, Labrador. That means amber waves of grain will be growing less than 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and Siberia will become a major notch in the wheat belt. By changing their practices, and not just their crops, farmers can also temper the buildup of greenhouse gases. New technologies that measure soil nutrient levels are allowing farmers to add only as much fertilizer as is really needed--important because the excess nitrogen in those chemicals gets converted in the soil into nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the greenhouse activity of carbon dioxide. Studies also show that by plowing or tilling less frequently -- planting seeds in the stubble of a previous crop, for example --farmers can significantly reduce evaporation in dry areas and also cut the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil (and from the exhaust of their tractors, if they have them). Crops grown this way also trap carbon more effectively, becoming part of the solution instead of adding to the problem. For the truly pessimistic, there is always the "doomsday vault," a seed bank being constructed in a Norwegian mountainside that nations around the world are stocking with every kind of seed imaginable. After all, you never know what kind of plant trait is going to save humanity if the climate makes an unexpected turn, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is leading the effort and who has boasted that the vault will be protected in part by the region's polar bears.That is assuming, of course, that rising temperatures or the newly arrived wheat farmers will not have driven them away.
The greed and cynicism of the EU, which is matched by the US in its dealings with Latin America, Asia and Africa, is all the more striking in the context of climate change. Right now, a bevy of forecasts from NGOs and governments alike are predicting agricultural declines in the southern hemiphere due to climate change; hundreds of millions of farmers could be driven off the land in the next half-century.
But the loudest European and North American voices on the subject of agriculture in the South are the agribusiness lobbies clamoring for easy access to overseas markets, followed by think tanks and research foundations arguing for a "second Green Revolution." The latter claim that genetically engineered drought- and salt-resistant crops will be the answer to climate-induced agricultural declines. But one has to ask whether the forces driving this research are altruism and contrition over past exploitation, or a coalition of "green capitalists," such as those pushing biofuels like jatropha.
The following article, published earlier this week in the Washington Post, makes truly chilling reading on several levels: the genocidal scenarios bandied about like movie plots; the GMO schemes discussed without mention of possible ecosystemic side effects.
Meanwhile, new social science research suggests a persistent historical correlation between climate, war and population declines. Building on the work of University of Hong Kong geographer David Zhang, Georgia Tech political scientist Peter Brecke and a team of researchers compared a database of 4,500 wars between 1400 and 1900 with climate change records assembled by paleo-climatologists. They found a persistent pattern of turbulence and warfare during colder periods, followed by migration and population declines, and relative calm in warmer periods. But the researchers argue that the effect of climate change could be analogous to temperature declines in the past, as extreme heat, like extreme cold, will disrupt agriculture and increasing migration pressures. I will reserve judgment until I get a chance to read the paper. But their conclusions are interesting.
Read more!
Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture. Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years--along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts-- will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live. India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger. Africa--where four out of five people make their liviing directly from the land--could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
News and Analysis 11/20/07
The FBI has reported that hate crimes in the U.S. rose 8% in 2006. Of 7,720 "single-bias incidents," 51.8% were "racially motivated." Hate crimes are a minor issue, however, compared to the fact that the income gap between blacks and whites has grown in the last 30 years. And it's no surprise: what is sometimes mythologized as a post-civil rights period of ascent towards equality has really been one of retrenchment and backlash. From tax-based school funding to the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush prison boom, the policy of the U.S. government toward black and brown America since the 1970s has been one of racial neoliberalism.
Since Hurricane Katrina, many have warned that white elites will attempt to 'whitewash' New Orleans demographically and politically as well as economically. Well, this is exactly what is happening. The NY Times reports that the New Orleans City Council is now majority white for the first time in two decades.
The death toll from the cyclone in Bangladesh last week, initially calculated at around 1,000, has now been lifted to 3,100. In the most affected districts of the country, according to CBC, up to "70 percent of of homes — mostly made of mud and bamboo — have been partially or completely destroyed, while an estimated 300,000 hectares of crops were lost in the storm." The death toll numbers are probably low, however. From Bangladesh's Daily Star: Pounded Patharghata now a valley of death
The official death count for the upazila, until Saturday, was 307. But even a cursory examination on the ground, witness reports, and simply from the number of mass graves, the death toll is well over 3,000. Cut off from the rest of the country, the upazila was accessible only by air or a long-route by the sea. The approach road was blocked by fallen trees and power-lines, preventing any relief vehicle from entering within a 40-kilometre area.The corpses were found wrapped in paddy sheaves on rice fields, emanating heavy stench of rotting flesh. Most of the bodies were found one or two kilometres from where their homes had been. Some bodies lay tangled on tree branches, some were lining the shore, some unidentified were just left to rot. Sidr rose out of the southern-most village of Patharghata -- Padma. First, it took out a five-kilometre stretch of homes that had been built on the slope of a long mud-baked embankment lining the border of the village. In its wake, a 20-feet tidal surge wiped out the entire community. The tide swept the houses and most of its inhabitants, carrying them two to three kilometres inland. Most of the corpses were found three, sometimes four villages away. In one small pocket, where a 100-metre stretch of the embankment was damaged by a previous flood, the tidal surge wreaked its greatest havoc.The tide broke through the embankment and channelled all of its awesome power through that 100-metre gap razing all of at least 50 homes in one clean sweep.The power of the deadly tidal surge is evident by the vanishing of the big mosque building, made of bricks and concrete, which used to occupy a section of that small pocket."We were about to run to the shelter my mother, my wife, two nephews, and I when we saw the great big wave. I looked up and up and there was no end to it. It swept us up and I grabbed the first tree trunk that I could find," said Delwar, one of the rare survivors from the ill-fated 50 homes. The rest of his family died. At least 135 corpses from that small pocket of Padma village were found till Saturday morning.Similar ghastly stories were found in three other villages along the Baleshwar river, in Rohita, Tangra, and Gouharpur. With at least 400 corpses from Padma village alone, the death toll was rising and no one knew or dared to imagine what it was.
Some 20,000 people protested the School of the Americas at Fort Bening, Georgia yesterday. The School of the Americas, like Philip Morris (now Altria), has renamed itself in an attempt to shed bad publicity. It now calls itself the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Indeed, the SOA is so notorious that 203 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to close it in June, but came up six votes short of the majority.
Run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the SOA has been a major conduit of state terror in Latin America since 1946. SOA graduates include a long rogues' gallery of military dictators and death squad commanders. To name just a few, graduates of the SOA are implicated in atrocities in Argentina (Leopoldo Galtieri, Roberto Viola), Bolivia (Hugo Banzer), Peru (Vladimiro Montesinos), Panama (Omar Torrijos, Manuel Noriega), Guatemala (José Efraín Ríos Montt), Honduras (Policarpo Paz Garcia, Aquilino Sorto Gonzalez, and many others), El Salvador (Roberto D'Aubuisson, Jose Guillermo Garcia, and many others). And this merely scratches the surface, as at least 63,000 Latin American military personnel have been trained in the school, averaging 700-1,000 students a year.
Even the most ardent ex-Cold Warriors, quick to defend all U.S.-backed state repression between 1917 and 1989 as a justifiable counter to "the threat of communism" (the same arguments are now recycled for Uribe, Mubarak, Musharraf, Arroyo...) cannot defend the documented slaughter of 200,000 Mayan indian civilians, the assassination of archbishops and trade unionists, the torture and rape of teenage girls and nuns.
Even if most Americans do not understand the role of the U.S. government in arming, training and funding thugs and killers in other countries, the populations of those countries do. And those on the recieving end of chemical weapons, coups, proxy invasions and nuclear weapons are likely to percieve U.S. foreign policy a bit differently from those who get their news from MSNBC, CNN and FOX.
Similarly, for most Kenyans the phrase "Mau Mau" conjures up savagery of the white British kind, rather than of the black African kind. Read more!
Saturday, November 17, 2007
News and Commentary for 11/17/07
The U.S. Congress has passed the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement. Among the provisions: removal of duties on some 80% of U.S. exports to Peru, including subsidized cotton, corn and wheat (which will drive more Peruvian farmers off the land); expanded rights to drill in the Peruvian Amazon (which is why Occidental Petroleum, for example, has been lobbying hard for the FTA); and the greater opening of Peru's urban commercial sectors to foreign competition (hence the enthusiasm of Wal-Mart, Citibank, and others).
Brazil may purchase a nuclear submarine to "protect" the massive offshore oil reserves recently discovered at Tupi.
Speaking of nukes, the always-perceptive Azmi Bishara has written a good op-ed piece on Hiroshima and the Machiavellian logic of U.S. elites.
A massive cyclone hit Bangladesh on Thursday, killing a reported 1,100 people. Some 650,000 coastal villagers have fled to shelters, and 150 fishing trawlers are unaccounted for. The cyclone caused the power system in much of Bangladesh to collapse, leaving millions without power. This also led to a disruption in piped water supplies, as pumps could not be started.
The water problems in Bangladesh are a reminder of the complex supply chains and interdependencies that make urban life possible. The water crisis in Atlanta is another such reminder.
Climate Change and Water Wars
Tom Engelhardt's points out in this article that severe droughts are simultaneously afflicting the southern and midwestern U.S., North Africa, southeastern Europe, Mexico and Australia. Speculating about the possibility of mass migrations and resource conflicts over water in the U.S., he asks why the topic of water security--and what will happen if drought conditions take hold in major cities like Atlanta--is rarely broached in the U.S. media.
The IPCC impact assessments suggest that, even by conservative projections, there will be reductions in crop production in the most populous rural areas on the planet over the next few decades. But we have no reason to believe in convervative projections: U.S. carbon emissions are not only growing, their rate of growth is accelerating, and is predicted to continue to accelerate.
While there may actually be a boost in food production in parts of the U.S. due to climate change, in much of the farm belt food production will decrease. The IPCC 4th Assesment Report predicts:
"By mid-century, annual average river runoff and water availability are projected to increase by 10-40% at high latitudes and in some wet tropical areas, and decrease by 10-30% over some dry regions at mid-latitudes and in the dry tropics, some of which are presently water-stressed areas. [...] Crop productivity is projected to increase slightly at mid- to high latitudes for local mean temperature increases of up to 1-3°C depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that in some regions. At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2°C), which would increase the risk of hunger. Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase with increases in local average temperature over a range of 1-3°C, but above this it is projected to decrease. [...] Increases in the frequency of droughts and floods are projected to
affect local crop production negatively, especially in subsistence sectors at low latitudes."
Two things need to be noted here: 1) these "subsistence sectors in low latitudes" include the most densely populated parts of coastal Asia, Africa and Latin America; and 2) increases of 1-2°C (under which "crop productivity is projected to decrease" in these regions) are at the low end of moderate IPCC predictions for temperature increases. So a fall in crop productivity in most of the world, most dangerously in the bread baskets of the southern hemisphere, is virtually assured. And this despite the fact that, at current growth rates, world population is expected to "crest" at 9 billion by 2050 . Unequivocally, then, anyone who advocates "business as usual" is advocating mass death.
Unfortunately, in a culture where possessive individualism is exalted by all-pervasive private and state propoganda as the highest collective aim, action on climate change might require its effects being "brought home" to the global north through drought and wildfires. As long there is a perceived geographical split between the greatest per capita carbon emitters and the greatest victims of climate change, it is likely that popular pressures will remain weak.
Read more!
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Bottlenecks, Supply-Demand Crises, and Rising Food and Oil Prices
As Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed out in his 1971 classic The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, all forms of production and consumption are ultimately tributaries of solar energy flow captured through mining, forestry and agriculture. Despite the vast diversity of output in the global economy—from art to artillery—the main inputs are relatively simple: fossil fuels, minerals, timber and food (especially grains).
One of the results of the Industrial Revolution was to tie food production to fossil fuel inputs. The supply-demand dynamics of food and oil (and the distortions of cartels and subsidies) are as inseparable in industrial capitalism as air is from water in the atmosphere. And now the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel inputs since 1750 could reduce yields of rice, wheat and corn by as much as a third in Asia, Africa and Latin America(where the overwhelming majority of subsistence farmers now live).
These news stories from the last few days capture the interrelated dynamics of food production, oil consumption and climate change:
Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate and Fuel Shortages Bite
Rising Food Prices To Hit Consumption
Frenzy in the Markets as Oil Heads for $100 a Barrel
IEA Sounds Alarm Over Huge Energy Demands
High-Prices Oil Adds Volatility to Power Scramble
To see how these interrelationships work, look no further than the U.S. corn industry. As Michael Pollan shows in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the seeming diversity of products in U.S. supermarkets is largely corn-based. Corn-based sweeteners have replaced cane sugar in most U.S. soft drinks; U.S. bacon, eggs, milk and hamburgers (through corn-based pig, chicken and cattle-feed) ultimately come from corn. Corn is used in 2,500 out of 10,000 products sold in the average U.S. supermarket. This dietary monopoly is made possible through obscenely large subsidies ($51.3 billion from 1995 to 2005), about 63% of which go to the top 10% of enterprises, the main suppliers of corporate processors like Cargill and Archer Daniel's Midland. In fact, 3 or 4 corporations control 81% of corn exports in the U.S., 60% of the grain handling facilities, 61% of flour milling, and 49% of ethanol production.
The result (a real irony considering the anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. corn belt) is an export subsidy to the agribusiness giants of over $100 million annually to dump U.S. corn on the Mexican market under the neoliberal NAFTA rules. According to the Mexican government itself, U.S. corn dumping has driven around 2 million Mexican farmers off the land. CAFTA is now bringing this dynamic to Guatemala, Honduras and other signatories with small corn farmers.
Besides fuelling poverty in Latin America and obesity in the U.S., this subsidized corn production is fragile, because it's overwhelmingly oil-based. On average, 10 calories of fossil fuel energy are burned for every 1 calorie of food energy produced in the U.S. The fertilizers, the tractors, the processing equipment, the refrigerated trucks, the plastic packaging and grocery bags: all require oil.
The intimate connection of oil and food inputs at the base of the global economy means that changes in supply and demand affect both. We see this in rising food and oil prices worldwide, reported side by side by the Financial Times today:
To be continued...
Read more!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
What Guides U.S. Latin America Policy
Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates embarked on a five-nation tour of Latin America. His stops included five Bush administration allies with poor human rights records: El Salvador, Colombia, Suriname, Peru and Chile. Gates, unsurprisingly, used his scheduled press conferences to take a few jabs at Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. From Agence-France-Press:
At a joint news conference with Salvadoran President Antonio Saca, Gates called El Salvador "one of the most faithful coalition partners" and praised its "important role in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations worldwide." Gates then warned that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's leftist government was a threat mainly "to the freedom and economic prosperity of the people of Venezuela." Chavez "has been very generous in offering(Venezuela's) resources to people around the world, when perhaps these resources could be better used to alleviate some of the economic problems facing the people of Venezuela," Gates said. Analysts said the goal of Gates's Latin American trip is both to bolster US allies and to counter Chavez's influence in Latin America.
Gates also criticized Venezuela’s arms purchases, but neglected to mention that Chile—his third stop on the trip, where he met with military officials—is undertaking the largest military build-up in Latin America at the moment. Chile has spent $2.8 billion on fighter jets, submarines, tanks and other weaponry since 2000. Although Chile has made the transition from military dictatorship to democracy since the 1980s, the disproportionate budgetary and political power of the military persist. Gates also touted the delivery of aid packages in rural Surinam by U.S. navy personnel, a competitive gesture vis-à-vis the delegations of Cuban and Venezuelan doctors currently working in Surinam.
All of this competition for influence invites a comparison of U.S. allies in the region with Washington’s tropical Axis of Evil: Castro, Chavez, Morales and perhaps Correa. If we undertake such a comparison (even using State Department human rights reports, let alone radical sources), it is obvious that human rights enter policy calculations mainly as public relations tools, and economic and strategic interests are primary. Because it is not merely that economic and strategic interests determine who is and is not supported by the U.S. government and major media outlets; they determine who is not scrutinized for human rights violations. The near-exclusive focus of U.S. government and media criticism on Castro, Chavez and Morales would be inexplicable if this were not the case, because those criticisms apply far more easily (measured by body counts, police/military brutality, corruption scandals) to U.S. allies like Alvaro Uribe, Elias Antonio Saca, Martin Torrijos, Oscar Berger, Alan Garcia, Manuel Zelaya and Nicanor Duarte.
If we rarely see criticisms (or indeed mentions) of these leaders in the U.S. media, this is not a reflection of their superior record, but of their acquiescence to demands from the U.S. and U.S firms and financial institutions.
Below, I will sketch the state of “human rights, democracy and corruption” in the countries of these rarely criticized U.S. allies, and discuss their economic policies. Then, I will compare them with Cuba under Castro, Venezuela under Chavez, and Bolivia under Morales, and consider the validity of criticisms of those leaders in the U.S. media.
El Salvador under Elias Antonio Saca
Elias Antonio Saca is a right-wing media mogul and member of the ARENA party, which “was linked to death-squad killings in the 1980's,” the New York Times notes. The founder of ARENA, Eduardo D’Aubuisson, was found by a United Nations commission to have orchestrated the killing of El Salvador’s Roman Catholic primate, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, in 1980. Romero was guilty of denouncing the violent repression of the military government during his weekly radio sermons.
ARENA, whose colors are red, white and blue, has abandoned the national currency, the colon, and replaced it with the U.S. dollar. There is no property tax in El Salvador, but the sales tax is 13%, and banks take a large cut of the $3 billion in remittances sent home by the 2.5 million Salvadorans living in the United States. Poor Salvadorans and their relatives (mostly indigenous and mestizo) working as landscapers, janitors and dishwashers in the U.S. thus subsidize the primarily white elite in El Salvador with their purchases and remittances. 43% of Salvadorans live below the poverty line, while 1% of landowners control 40% of the arable land. Measures for democratization and redistribution are hampered by official corruption. According to a 2005 report by the University of Central America,
Salvadoran public administration is not transparent and has never tried to be, as proved by the deep-rooted nature of the most pernicious forms of corruption. The successive ARENA governments have tolerated this corruption, largely because the very structure of these governments is conceived to allow its proliferation.
This corruption, moreover, is not simply a matter of low-level graft. Links between ARENA, death squads and organized crime persist. According to Jaime Martinez of the Institute of Comparative Studies in Criminal and Social Science (INECIP), death squads in El Salvador today “are the visible face of organised crime,” and “criminal groups are embedded” in the government security forces. 622 possible cases of death squad killings were documented between January 2001 and August 2005 alone.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Salvadoran government also ignores widespread labor abuses. Abuses are particularly notorious on plantations and in factories that supply U.S. firms like Del Monte, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney and Liz Claiborne, HRW notes.
But none of this is sufficient to warrant criticism of Saca by either U.S. officials or the U.S. media, because Saca has passed CAFTA, the southward extension of NAFTA; privatized water utilities; and provided a stable investment climate for mining and fruit companies, textile manufacturers, and commercial loggers. As in Guatemala and Honduras, CAFTA has produced a trade deficit with the U.S., as U.S. corn, beans and myriad manufactured goods imports have flooded the Salvadoran market, while Salvadoran exports to the U.S. have fallen. As CISPES reports:
All of this was predicted by Salvadoran activists, who had already seen the results of NAFTA in Mexico. They organized widespread protests against CAFTA, which were broken up by riot police.
The Harvard- and Oxford-educated Uribe is the son of wealthy cattle rancher Alberto Uribe, who was connected by marriage to the Ochoa family of the Medellin drug cartel. The elder Uribe was a personal friend of Pablo Escobar, and was wanted by the U.S. government for drug trafficking charges when he was killed in a kidnapping attempt by the FARC in 1983. Santiago Uribe, President Uribe’s brother, was investigated for organizing paramilitary death squads from the family hacienda.
Before being outlawed, the Convivirs displaced some 200,000 campesinos, mostly from the Uraba region.
Expropriation remains a practice of the "demobilized" paramilitaries, as lands belonging to campesinos, indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians are taken by force for oil exploration, mining, palm oil plantations and logging. On the Pacific coast, where Afro-Colombians make up a majority of the population, they are being uprooted by paramilitaries in the pay of plantation companies looking to expand their acreage for palm oil cultivation. Colombian palm planters already sell 35% of their products as biofuels, benefiting from the increasing demand for petroleum alternatives in the U.S. But expanded production has been made possible by land theft, much of it done under the aegis of “resettling” the paramilitaries, for which the U.S. Congress has granted the Uribe government $21 million. In 1998, Afro-Colombian leader Francisco Hurtado was assassinated by the paras for protesting for land rights, and thousands of Afro-Colombians have been pushed into the slums of Colombian cities since then.
Finally, the Uribe government has enthusiastically followed the Washington Consensus recipe of privatization, most recently by selling off a slice of state-owned Ecopetrol to foreign investors. If the proposed Colombian-U.S. free trade agreement is passed, David Bacon of Dollars & Sense estimates that 80,000 small farmers will be forced off the land by competition with U.S. agribusiness. Their likely destination? The slums of Medellin, Cali, Bogota, and myriad smaller cities and towns.
Guatemala has the second-highest murder rate in Latin America, after Colombia. According to the New York Times:
This small country of 12.3 million people has more than 5,000 homicides a year, many of them vigilante killings or gangland murders, human rights advocates say. Arrests are made in only 2 percent of the cases.
This violence pales in comparison to Guatemala’s history of state violence against the indigenous population, stretching from the colonial era to the present. As the NY Times also notes,
Some 200,000 people were killed or went missing in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, mostly Mayan Indian civilians. A United Nations-backed truth commission found that 90 percent of those deaths were caused by the military.
The U.S. was forced to officially suspend arms sales to the Guatemalan military in 1990, when “it was learned that soldiers were involved in the killing of an American named Michael Devine.” 1 American death was evidently worse for public-relations purposes than 200,000 Guatemalan ones, even if they were “mostly Maya Indian civilians.” According to the Arms Sales Monitoring Project of the Federation of American Scientists, the CIA continued to provide Guatemala with $5-7 million annually after 1990. Then, despite ongoing allegations of violence by security forces, the U.S. officially lifted its ban on military aid to Guatemala in 2005.
Adriana Beltrán, an expert on Guatemala with the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institution, said Mr. Berger's government had done very little to stop private groups of gunmen from intimidating and killing people who were working to uncover past and present human rights abuses in Guatemala. Rewarding the government with arms sends the wrong message, she said.
Guatemala is also one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Over 57% of Guatemalans live below the poverty line, and 3.2 million of the 8.2 million people in Guatemala of working age are unemployed. The richest fifth of the population receives 60% of the GNP, and the richest 10% possess about 46% of the wealth. The distribution of land in Guatemala is, also, staggeringly unequal. In 1998, .15% (yes, that’s 1.5%, not 15%!) of landowners had 70% of the arable land, while 96% of landowners had 20%. The distribution is similar to that in South Africa: the land is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a white elite, while indigenous smallholders are relegated to marginal, inferior lands. The maintenance of this essentially colonial structure has, inevitably, led many smallholders to take matters into their own hands by squatting on landowners’ property. In 2004, when the businessman and landowner Oscar Berger came to power, he predictably entered the conflict on the side of landowners, using security forces to evict squatters by whatever means necessary, including the burning of homes. According to the UN Commission for Guatemala:
The change in Administrations [with the election of Berger] also brought with it a troubling increase in forced, sometimes violent, evictions of squatters, a trend that gave the impression of undue deference by the Government to the demands of landowners. Peasant groups mounted nationwide demonstrations and road blockades in June 2004 to demand land and rural development policies and to protest the evictions, which created a serious humanitarian problem for peasant families thrown off properties.
Berger, a wealthy landowner himself, further demonstrated his loyalties by using the military to crush protests against a World Bank mining project in Guatemala city. Troops killed one protestor and injured dozens more. According to the Vox Latina institute, 95% of the people surveyed in the northern towns of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa (which will be most affected by the mine) oppose the project, believing it will damage the local environment. The following video is worth watching in this regard.
What voters are left with for the Nov. 4 runoff is the tired choice between a military strongman and an oligarch, representing two segments of the population largely responsible for the continued destruction of the country.
Honduras under Manuel Zelaya
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, with 65% of the population living on less than $2 a day. Even according to the Honduran government, 46% of Hondurans are “extremely poor.” Nevertheless, the Zelaya administration has cut the minimum wage in the south of Honduras (where most of the “free trade zones” are located) from 74 cents an hour to 57 cents an hour. The justification given has been competition with China, where workers in many export industries are making even less. As always, pursuing “comparative advantage” means racing to the bottom.
Despite some positive steps, government corruption, impunity for violators of the law, and virulent gang violence exacerbated serious human rights problems in the country. The following human rights problems were reported: unlawful killings by members of the police, arbitrary and summary executions committed by vigilantes and former members of the security forces, the disappearance of a former dissident, beatings and other abuse of detainees by security forces, harsh prison conditions, failure to provide due process of law, lengthy pretrial detention, political interference in the judicial system, judicial corruption and institutional weakness, illegal searches, erosion of press freedom, violence and discrimination against women, child prostitution and abuse, trafficking in persons, discrimination against indigenous people, discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation, ineffective enforcement of labor laws, and child labor.
Meanwhile, the Financial Post of Canada reports that some 5,000 street children have been killed by death squads in Honduras since the late 1990s:
Jose Daniel Villed, a senior editor at the leading national daily newspaper La Tribuna, figures police are involved in as many as 40% of the murders. At least 10 officers have been convicted of killing youths in recent years, but Jose Roberto Romero Luna, the national police director, dismisses any suggestions police routinely act as vigilantes. There appear to be several paramilitary units unofficially dedicated to killing gang members and organized crime figures, who control a thriving drug trade that has seen this nation of 7.3 million people become a key transit point for Colombian cocaine en route to North America and Europe. […] Corruption is rampant, more than half [the country’s] people live in poverty and the new government of Manuel Zelaya Rosales is wrestling with massive unemployment -- 28% last year.
Press freedom is a problem in Honduras as well. A small number of business magnates control the nation’s media, and earlier this year Zelaya ordered all radio and television stations to broadcast two hours of government propaganda a day.
Since taking office on Jan. 27, 2006, Zelaya's government has been the target of more than 10 allegations of corruption, including theft of electrical energy by high administration officials, irregularities in tenders for health supplies, the hiring of advisers for nonexistent jobs, waste of resources in the telephone company, influence peddling and the abuse of power in handing out road building and energy generation contracts. The latest scandal broke out in July, when an investigative commission appointed by the president confirmed irregularities in contracts approved by the head of the Road Fund, Ramiro Chaccentsn. But once the commission had reported its findings, Zelaya rewarded Chaccentsn by offering him the post of vice minister in the Secretariat of Public Works, Housing and Transport.
The Honduran Congress passed CAFTA in 2005. The lobbyist website freetradehonduras.org writes enthusiastically:
CAFTA is further harming the agricultural sector of Honduras, which was devastated by Hurricane Mitch.
The most striking physical manifestation is a real estate boom that is transforming the skyline of Panama City, where apartments are being built at twice the rate of those in Miami – to house foreign executives but also with an eye on the growing market of US baby boomers seeking a retirement home in the sun.
Meanwhile, 40% of Panamanians live below the (low) poverty line, and per capita income is $5,000. Wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a small, white elite. Torrijos approved CAFTA, which will force Panamanian farmers to compete with ADM, Tyson and Conagra. The beef and poultry sector, which is very important in Panama, will be particularly vulnerable to U.S. meat imports.
On the police:
On racism:
Mexico under Felipe Calderon
In a trip to Mexico August 2007, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan criticized Felipe Calderon’s human rights record. She told a press conference:
The flaws in the public security and criminal justice system in Mexico currently allow for arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, denial of due process, unfair trials, political interference in the administration of justice, and widespread impunity. The poorest and most vulnerable are often victims of these abuses. […] A lottery of human rights is unacceptable. Oaxaca is a prime example. Following a year of monitoring, extensive field visits to Oaxaca and meetings with officials at state and federal level, survivors of human rights violations and civil society, Amnesty International's report Oaxaca: clamour for justice documents a pattern of police abuse (including, arbitrary arrest, torture and ill-treatment and harassment) committed by state as well as federal officials.
In March 2007, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission documented 1,600 cases of human rights abuse during the police and military repression of the seven-month-long teacher’s protest in Oaxaca. The pattern was repeated during protests in July. According to Amnesty International:
President Duarte is a member of the right-wing Colorado or Red Party, which has ruled Paraguay since 1947. Although the Colorado Party was originally moderate-liberal, it was driven to the extreme right by dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled from 1954 until his removal in a 1989 military coup. Stroessner ordered the deaths of over 900 dissidents and the torture of thousands. His successor, Andres Rodriguez Pedotti, was accused of heroin trafficking; Pedotti’s successor, Juan Carlos Wasmosy, was in turn charged with fraud and sentenced to 4 years in prison. In 2006, when President Duarte announced his plans to alter the Paraguayan constitution in order to run for re-election, 40,000 people protested in the streets of the capital, Asunción.
Just 351 Paraguayan landowners possess 9.7 million hectares (24 million acres), while, according to civil society organizations, there are 350,000 campesina families with little land, or without land altogether. This situation is one of the central causes of starvation and malnutrition in the Paraguayan countryside, where 22.8 percent of the rural population lives in extreme poverty. These families’ average incomes only cover just over 58 percent of the average daily bread basket costs.
Paraguay has, meanwhile, become the largest U.S. military platform in Latin America. There is evidence that U.S. troops have been advising paramilitaries used by soy planters to crush campesino protests.
Peru under Alan Garcia
Alan Garcia’s re-entry into Peruvian politics is a bit remarkable, given the fact that he fled the country on corruption charges before the end of his first term in 1985-1990. He was accused of embezzling millions of dollars from the state. According to Human Rights Watch, under Garcia’s first term Peru had the largest number of forced disappearances of any country in the world. Considering the competition at the time, in Latin America alone, this was quite a grisly accomplishment.
Garcia won the 2006 elections on the strength of not being Ollanta Humala, a perceived Chavista and “loose cannon.” Garcia’s support of an FTA with the United States, moreover, has won him some powerful friends north of the Rio Grande. The trade lobbyist website “Business Roundtable” contains a promotional “issue brief” on the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (PTPA). Business Roundtable argues (how thoughtful of them!) that the PTPA will "level the playing field" for U.S. agribusiness in competition with Peruvian peasants:
In the USA, 25,000 cotton producers receive approximately $3.5 billion per year in subsidies. Of this amount, 80 per cent goes to 10 per cent of the farmers who receive subsidies. Production costs vary from $0.68 to $0.72 per pound. The 28,000 cotton producers of Peru receive no subsidies, but they have a tariff of 12 per cent as protection against sudden drops in international prices. The FTA would eliminate this tariff immediately (zero tariff), causing devastation to production and the livelihoods of farmers. The USA is currently the CAN’s main cotton supplier. Under the trade preference system (currently the ATPDEA), it allowed imports of Peruvian textiles to US markets provided they were manufactured using mainly US cotton. This meant that cotton imports to Peru increased significantly: 45,000 tonnes of subsidised US cotton were imported into the country in 2005 alone. This has led to a radical reduction in cotton production in Peru: 260,000 hectares of cotton were grown in Peru in 1960; in 2004 the figure was barely 89,000 hectares.
So “reciprocal access to U.S. markets” requires the importation of raw or semi-finished U.S. cotton, rather than Peruvian cotton, but U.S. textile producers are not required to import cotton from non-subsidized Peruvian producers. The class of Peruvian investors who Garcia represents, however, will benefit from domestic manufacturers using cheaper U.S. cotton. They don’t care what happens to Indios in the southern highlands.
As Amnesty International points out, part of the official rationale for the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba (like the U.S.-Euro sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s) is that it will increase state repression and, as a result, the likelihood of popular upheaval. As in Iraq, the effect in practice is to punish the population for the refusal of their government to revert to U.S. client status.
Venezuela under Chavez
The most serious human rights violations in Venezuela under Chavez have been committed by rogue elements of the military and police, and contract killers in the pay of large landowners. Human Rights Watch reports that "In April 2006 Attorney General Isaías Rodríguez reported that 6,110 officials were implicated in alleged killings between 2000 and 2005, yet only 760 had been charged, and only 113 convicted." This negligence may be related to the tenuous hold of the Chavez government on the police and military, which contain substantial anti-Chavez elements which supported the 2002 coup attempt, and have clashed with government supporters in street battles on several occasions. In 2005, known arms and drug trafficker Oliver North fumed in an article at the right-wing website Freedom Alliance:
Last week, Mr. Chavez ousted the last five U.S. military advisors from a program that had been in place for 35 years – claiming that the Americans were “waging a campaign in the Venezuelan military…criticizing the president.”
Conversely, the Venezuelan opposition has accused pro-Chavez security forces of violating the rights of anti-government protestors. Reviewing the charges, Amnesty International concludes:
While many opposition supporters took part in legitimate peaceful demonstrations, a significant number of these protests were violent with the use of barricades, stones, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks and, in some cases, firearms. It is the duty of the state to guarantee public order, respecting the rule of law in accordance with international standards. However, the response of the Guardia Nacional and other branches of the security forces frequently involved excessive use of force, apparently contributing to spiralling violence rather than preventing or controlling it.
It might be noted that anti-government protestors using “barricades, stones, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks and, in some cases, firearms” in the streets of Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala or Paraguay (etc.) would probably be shot dead by security forces on the spot. Still, no one doubts that the Venezuelan police and military continue to commit human rights abuses, largely because they retain a degree of vigalantist autonomy from the administration. Poor barrio residents and peasants are far more vulnerable to their depredations than middle-class anti-Chavistas.
In 1998 there were 1,628 primary care physicians for a population of 23.4 million. Today, there are 19,571 for a population of 27 million. […] In 1999, there were 335 HIV patients receiving antiretroviral treatment from the government, compared to 18,538 in 2006.
The coup attempt caps a crescendo of anger and frustration over the economic reforms that have written such a macroeconomic success story but have failed to benefit the lives of most Venezuelans and have embittered many. The rebel troops who for several hours seized the Miraflores government palace and the La Casona presidential residence early yesterday were apparently seeking to take advantage of mounting unrest over price rises and poor public services. The rebels were no doubt emboldened by a poll published last week suggesting 81 per cent of Venezuelans had little or no confidence left in 69-year-old President Carlos Andres Perez.
Although the coup was unsuccessful, Perez was suspended from office in 1993 after being indicted for the misappropriation of $17.2 million. His successor, Rafael Calfera, was elected on an anti-neoliberal platform, but nonetheless followed in Perez’s footsteps. In 1997, Caldera agreed to an IMF agreement to cut federal spending, deregulate the entry of foreign capital, and privatize more public assets. A massive strike was carried out to protest the policies. Deutsche Press-Agentur reported on November 20th, 1997:
Further privatizations of utilities, telecommunications and oil contributed to increasing unrest. The outcome of all of this was the election of Chavez in 1998.
U.S. critics of Morales have not yet been able to find human rights violations committed by his government. They have focussed on his status as an advocate for cocaleros (conflating, falsely, coca growing with cocaine production), and nationalization. It goes without saying that the latter is the issue that matters to the Wall Street Journal.
Like Chavez, Morales has nationalized assets that formerly belonged to the state. Bolivian natural gas had been nationalized in the 1920s, and was only privatized in 1996 by President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Under the privatization (which Lozada had pursued on the recommendation of the IMF and World Bank), royalties owed by oil multinationals to the state were reduced from 50% to 18%. The loss was made particularly significant by a pending deal with Brazil. Prior to the privatization, writes Benjamin Kohl, the Bolivian state oil company (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales de Bolivia, or YPFB) was “on the verge of completing a contract to build a pipeline to connect Bolivian gasfields to Brazilian markets,” which would have increased profits “by at least $50 million a year for 40 years. These earnings, instead, were largely transferred to private firms that borrowed capital from the same international institutions that had previously offered loans to YPFB.” This amounted to “a giveaway that could cost the nation hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars over the next 40 years.”
[...] the price of gas of $5 usd per million cubic feet to Argentina was 40% below the world price –and Brazil’s payment, one year after ‘nationalization’ was still the same $4 dollar—in some instances as low as 1.9 usd—as during the Sanchez de Losado-Mesa period.
Then, in February 2007, Morales announced the re-nationalization of a mineral processing plant owned by the Swiss company Glencore International AG. An Associated Press article at the time noted:
At the same time, Morales has accepted tight budgetary policies, modest social spending and new joint agreements with foreign multinationals in banking, agribusiness, mining and natural gas. In other words, while his speeches have been radical, his policies have been center-left. As a result, he is being criticized from the left as a closet neoliberal and from the right as a puppet of Chavez.