The New Imperialism; Accumulation by DISPOSSESSION

[cynical lady]

Peru to vote on divisive land law

 

Promises to revise a controversial land law in Peru have halted widespread protests just days before a vote by congress that might see the legislation repealed.

Alan Garcia, the Peruvian president, passed the law by presidential decree earlier this year as part of free trade negotiations with the US.

It allows for the sale of tribal lands, prompting thousands of indigenous farmers to protest saying they fear the loss of land to foreign companies.

Ahead of Friday's vote, Garcia attempted to garner support for the law, arguing in a televised speech that repealing it would be a "historic mistake".

Sixty-five tribes have mobilised against the law, which they say will speed the loss of their land and force them to migrate.

Late on Wednesday they temporarily ended their 10-day protest after a pledge from the congress president that he would revise the law.

The law allows an indigenous community to approve the sale of tribal lands by simple majority vote - eliminating a provision that had made it nearly impossible to develop communal property.

Garcia said on Wednesday that a repeal would condemn Peru's Indian and rural communities to "another century of ackwardness and misery".

Protesters are threatening to stop the flow of natural gas and oil through two pipelines in the Amazon jungle. Their action threatens energy supplies.

Thousands had clashed on Wednesday with police in the jungle city of Bagua and nine civilians were treated for injuries.

Peru's congress has agreed to vote on the law's possible repeal - on the condition that protesters unblock roads and suspend demonstrations.

 

State of emergency

Garcia decreed the law using special legislative powers he was granted to implement US requirements for a free trade pact between the two nations.

A state of emergency had been imposed when protesters occupied oil and electricity plants in the Amazon basin.

 

Alberto Pizango, leader of the Inter-Ethnic Association of the Peruvian Forest, said: "We're not afraid of the state of emergency."

After talks with Javier Velazquez, the congress president, in Lima on Wednesday, Pizango agreed a 48-hour truce.

About 12,000 indigenous people have been protesting since August 9. Their land is estimated to contain billions of dollars' worth of timber, minerals and oil.

 

On Sunday, clashes between 800 demonstrators and police left at least four people injured.

 

The state of emergency, which lasts for 30 days, covers the eastern provinces of Bagua, Utcubamba and Datem del Maranon and the southern district of Echarate.

[cynical lady]

US exploits Georgia crisis to push through Polish missile deal

 

 

The agreement signed Wednesday by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski to establish a missile defence shield on Polish soil marks a major turning point in international political relations.

 

The deal permits the US to set up a new missile system in the heart of Europe. In addition, Poland will receive 96 Patriot missiles, a permanent garrison of American troops and, most significantly, Washington’s commitment to come to the country’s defence, independently of the NATO alliance.

 

From its inception, the US government has insisted that the proposal to set up a missile defence system in Eastern Europe was strictly of a defensive character. The circumstances under which the deal was rushed through last week—after 18 months of intense negotiations between Washington and Warsaw—only serves to confirm the opposite: the missile system is of an offensive character and is designed for use against Russia.

 

The pact signed by Rice and Sikorski dramatically increases the possibility of a confrontation between the two nations with the world’s biggest arsenals of nuclear weapons—Russia and the US—with central Europe as a primary battlefield.

 

Both Warsaw and Washington have sought to deny that the closing of the deal last week was bound up with the conflict between Georgia and Russia. Following its finalisation last Thursday, the chief US negotiator, John Rood, told the press: “This is not linked to the situation in Georgia”.

 

In Washington, White House spokesperson Dana Perino assured journalists that the timing of the deal was not meant to further antagonise Russia. “In no way is the president’s plan for missile defence aimed at Russia,” she said. “The purpose of missile defence is to protect our European allies from any rogue threats.”

 

Just before signing the missile deal, Rice reiterated that the system was designed to counter threats from Iran and North Korea and told reporters: “It is not aimed in any way at Russia.” Following the signing of the agreement on Wednesday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski again declared that the missile shield was of purely a defensive system and not a threat to its neighbours.

 

None of these claims are credible.

 

The deal was reached between the Polish and US governments last Thursday, just days after the outbreak of hostilities in Georgia and on the heels of a concerted anti-Russian campaign led by the Polish President Lech Kaczynski. Just two days before the finalisation of the missile pact, Kaczynski appeared alongside Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili at an anti-Russian rally in Tbilisi to proclaim, “We are here to take up the fight (against Russia).”

 

For its part, the conservative Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, which welcomes the missile system, pointed candidly to the direct link between the deal and the conflict in the Caucasus: “Contrary to the official version presented by Prime Minister Tusk and the US State Department, the war in Georgia played a key role in accelerating the Polish-American negotiations on the defence shield. It is the war that has prompted Tusk to give the go-ahead for the signing of the agreement.”

 

In fact, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has himself made it clear that the US pledge to back Warsaw in the event of Russian aggression was decisive in winning Polish acceptance of the deal. Tusk declared that he only agreed to host the US defence shield on the condition that the US augment Poland’s defences with Patriot missiles, which are intended to combat any threat from Russia. At one time touted as possible alternatives to the rabidly nationalist Polish President Kaczynski, Prime Minister Tusk and Foreign Minister Sikorski have revealed themselves to be politicians of the same stripe.

 

 

Increased danger of nuclear confrontation

 

The American State Department has always insisted that the 10 interceptor missiles that are to be installed at a base in Poland, just 115 miles from Russia’s westernmost frontier, are aimed at countering potential missile attacks from so called “rogue states” such as Iran and North Korea. Washington has already reached an agreement with Prague to place the second component of the missile defence shield, a radar tracking system, in the Czech Republic to Poland’s south-west.

 

US claims that the missiles system is directed at Iran were recently debunked in an article published in the Blätter für deutsche and internationale Politik, Germany’s most widely read political and foreign policy journal.

 

In a section of his essay entitled “The strategic logic of the missile shield,” author Hauke Ritz stresses that the stationing of the system in Poland and the Czech Republic “is not at all designed to intercept Iranian missiles”.

 

Ritz points out that the Iranian military lacks any missiles with a range capable of reaching Europe and that it would require a long period of time to develop and build them. He also notes that the US State Department ruled out a Russian proposal for setting up a joint US-Russian anti-missile system in Azerbaijan, which could intercept and destroy any Iranian missile at the start of its flight path.

 

The author concludes: “The fact that the US ruled out this compromise proposal permits only one conclusion: that the missile shield is directed first and foremost not against Iran, but against Russia. This is underlined by the fact that the other bases for the missile system are also located in border regions to Russia, for example Alaska.”

 

In describing the role of the missile system, the article establishes that it is intended not as a deterrent against nuclear attack—along the lines of the Cold War build-up of a system of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) - but rather as an essential component of a US first-strike strategy.

 

“The strategic significance of the system consists of intercepting those few dozen missiles Moscow is capable of launching following an American first strike,” Ritz writes. “The missile system is therefore a crucial element in the attempt to develop a nuclear first strike capacity against Russia. The original plan is for the stationing of just ten interceptor missiles in Poland. But once the system is established, their number could be easily increased.”

 

Finally, the author refers to an article in the US magazine Foreign Affairs in 2006 entitled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” which argues that the US currently has unique advantages in conducting nuclear war. Ritz concludes: “This article makes very clear the actual function of the missile system: it is to guarantee the US the capacity to carry out nuclear war without the risk of a counter-strike. If this capacity can be achieved then it can be employed as a geopolitical argument, in order to implement national interests.”

 

Ritz’s analysis of the missile shield system as an essential component of a first-strike strategy underscores the enormous and growing danger that the escalating conflict between the US and Russia could unleash a nuclear conflagration.

 

Leading Russian military figures and politicians have reacted furiously to the missile shield agreement. Last Friday, General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the Russian armed forces’ deputy chief of staff, described the pact as an act of aggression against Russia and warned Poland that it was leaving itself open to retaliation—and possibly even a nuclear attack. “Poland, by deploying [the system] is exposing itself to a strike—100 per cent,” he said.

 

In his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last Friday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev repeated the charge that the Polish missile deployment “has the Russian Federation as its target”.

 

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Washington has followed a policy of systematically encroaching on former Soviet territory to establish a string of military bases and governments friendly to the US. The purpose of this policy was to undermine the influence of Russia in the energy-rich regions of central Asia, while seeking to divide and weaken Europe.

 

The consequences of Washington’s intervention in the former Soviet bloc have included the installation of a number of authoritarian regimes which lack any genuine broad popular base such as those of Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia and Viktor Yushchenko in the Ukraine, as well as the regime in Poland. The most common characteristics of these administrations are rabid anti-communism, national chauvinism, contempt for genuine democratic processes and an unwavering adherence to the precepts of the free market.

 

Such regimes are inherently unstable, both internally and in relation to their neighbours. Now, the US administration has agreed to install a new weapons system in Poland directed against its biggest neighbour, while at the same time guaranteeing to come to the military assistance of the Polish government when necessary. This is a recipe for new conflict and war. Nothing could more clearly express the utter recklessness of US foreign policy.

 

The dramatic increase of tensions in Eastern Europe eerily recalls the build up to the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s, the German dictator Adolf Hitler professed his peaceful intentions while at the same time undertaking a series of provocations as part of his plan to fundamentally redraw the map of Europe in Germany’s interests. It was precisely in Poland where a global war that would claim over 70 million lives broke out in September 1939.

 

Prior to leaving for Brussels for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers on Tuesday, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, wagged her finger and warned that Russia was playing a “dangerous game” in Georgia. The US and its NATO allies would not allow Russia to draw a “new line” through Europe, she declared.

 

Then, following the summit on Tuesday, Rice returned to the theme and declared with reference to Russia’s military presence in Georgia that there would not be a new line between “those who want to be within and those outside the Atlantic structure.”

 

Such comments are utterly hypocritical. Russia’s intervention over the past two decades in the states of the former Soviet Union - as in its brutal war in Chechnya—have been of a reactionary character and should be condemned, but there cannot be the least doubt that the main power intent on establishing new power blocs and spheres of influence in the region is the US. This is the significance of the network of military bases and installations established in Eastern and Central Europe by successive US administrations since 1991 with the aim of encircling Russia.

 

Moreover, it was Rice’s colleague, former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who in 2003 sought to draw a dividing line between “old” and “new” Europe, on the basis of which European countries were prepared to support the US in its war against Iraq. Now in its missile deal with Poland, it is the US which has agreed to a clause that subverts the traditional structures of the NATO alliance in order to further Washington’s unilateral militarist policy in the region.

 

The increasingly aggressive penetration of the US into central and eastern Europe is causing alarm in Paris, Berlin and Rome. At the same time, Washington is only able to press ahead with its reckless offensive because of the cowardly stance adopted by the European bourgeoisie, which watches as tensions on the continent escalate to boiling point, but is not prepared to challenge the US administration.

[cynical lady]

Morales' peasant revolution in the balance as Bolivians vote

 

Bolivia's socialist leader, Evo Morales, was hoping last night that the desperate gamble of a referendum on his leadership will finally kick-start his attempt to redistribute wealth and land in the bitterly divided nation.

 

 

Draped with garlands of coca leaves and flowers as he cast his vote yesterday, the country's first indigenous leader denounced his opponents as separatists and people only out to advance their own economic interests.

 

Early results and exit polls predicted he would win the recall election by a comfortable margin, with around 60 per cent of the vote, although only a small number of votes had been tallied. "From tomorrow, there will be a great meeting of our peoples, to continue to deepen the process of change," he said after voting in a village in the coca-growing Chapare region. But many Bolivians and international observers were not so sure, and opposition leaders have warned that the results will breed only more division.

 

As well as the President, eight of Bolivia's nine regional governors – all but two of whom have rejected Mr Morales's reform agenda – are also facing a vote, and the earliest predictions from partial counts in those races suggested that three of his opponents could be forced out.

 

The President has courted popularity with cash handouts to schoolchildren and to the elderly, funded by nationalising the natural gas industry, where profits have boomed thanks to sky-high global commodities prices.

 

And he still has strong support among the indigenous peoples, who make up more than 60 per cent of Bolivia's 9.5 million population. "We want change. That's why we're voting for Evo," said Daniel Ibanez, a mechanic, lining up to vote in a school yard in the slum city of El Alto, near La Paz. "You can really feel the change. The right-wing governors won't let him govern."

 

On the shore of Lake Titicaca, Aymara Indians were steadfast in their support of the President. "For more than 500 years we've lived in slavery," said Rolando Choque, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher in Achacachi. "Change doesn't come overnight. It's a long road."

 

Plans for a new constitution that will enshrine land reform and a redistribution of proceeds from natural gas-rich regions have stalled in the face of increasingly violent opposition. Victory in the recall election would be an opportunity to smite his enemies and give new impetus to the introduction of a new constitution .

 

Residents in the resource-rich lowlands have chafed against Mr Morales's efforts to seize control of the natural gas industry, and European-descended elites and middle classes have feared the President will turn Bolivia into an international pariah with his courtship of the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, from whom Bolivia receives economic and military aid.

 

"The government is a satellite of Hugo Chavez ... and wants to impose a constitution that centralises, destroys institutions and the economy," said the former president Jorge Quiroga, who heads the rightist opposition party Podemos. "The President needs to divorce Chavez and marry Bolivia."

 

Fury over Mr Morales's reform plans is so high in some areas that four regions have passed symbolic votes declaring autonomy from the central government. Percy Fernandez, the Mayor of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest and most prosperous city, recently went as far as calling for a coup. "This government has not learnt how to govern, and for that reason I ask the armed forces to overthrow the President," he said.

 

Opposition to Mr Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism in these areas is such that last week, security concerns obliged Mr Morales to hold the Independence Day celebrations in his power base of La Paz rather than Sucre, the constitutional capital that is run by the opposition. He was also unable to visit the central town of Trinidad, where protesters prevented his plane from landing. At least two people have been killed in clashes and Mr Morales had to abandon plans for an energy summit with Mr Chavez after demonstrations in the gas-rich Tarija province.

 

On the other side, pro-Morales groups have staged anti-American demonstrations. "They'll remain deadlocked and each side will use it to become more deeply entrenched in their positions," said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network.

 

Early reports from international observers suggest the poll is running smoothly, with reports of stolen ballot papers in one pro-Morales town apparently being an isolated incident.

 

But there are fears that some opposition-controlled regions may not recognise the poll results. Even the rules of the recall election are in dispute. The outcome could trigger a legal showdown because of rules that make it easier to unseat the governors than the President. To unseat him, opponents of Mr Morales have to claim more than 53.7 per cent of the vote, more than the percentage of his victory in the 2005 election landslide. Ousting governors requires no more than 50 per cent.

 

Farmers' champion

 

Evo Morales' landslide victory in 2005 was a decisive moment for Bolivia's impoverished indigenous population, which – unusually in South America – is a majority in the country, but which has long been dominated by a richer elite descended from European settlers.

 

Mr Morales is an Aymara Indian from a poor family, born in 1959 in the highlands of Orinoca Oruro, where only two of his six siblings survived.

 

In his youth, he was a llama herder, a baker and a trumpet player, and a farmer of coca, the raw material for cocaine and the bane of US relations with Bolivia. As union leader and now President, Mr Morales has championed coca farmers, highlighting the plant's legal medicinal and ritual uses.

 

His election – at the second attempt – promised sweeping reforms that could lift Bolivia's poor, redistributing land to peasant farmers and ensuring a more equitable distribution of proceeds from gas and minerals.

 

The agenda puts him in the same orbit as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, of whom he is an admirer. But while Mr Morales had promised consensus, middle-class supporters have peeled away.

[Koora-Tuunshe]

Good articles, thanks Cynical-lady

[cynical lady]

After six years of rapid growth, Argentina’s economy is at a familiar turning-point, in which the president’s refusal to change course threatens to make it poorer

 

EVER since Argentina began its recovery in mid-2002 from a devastating financial collapse, it has seemed to defy economic gravity. The country’s left-wing government, first led by Néstor Kirchner and then this year by his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has violated many standard economic prescriptions: it has shunned the IMF and shafted private bondholders; kicked out foreign companies and set up new state-owned ones; imposed price controls; and even doctored the inflation figure. Yet over the past six years, Argentina’s economy has grown at an annual average rate of 8.3%—faster than any other big economy except China.

 

At last a turning point seems to have been reached. A slowdown, long predicted by the Kirchners’ opponents, is at hand. When compared with the same period last year, retail sales (measured by volume) are down 10% to 15%. On Calle Florida, Buenos Aires’s main shopping street, almost every block has at least one vacant shopfront. Employment in the private sector is still growing, but at half last year’s rate, according to Nicolás Bridger of Prefinex, a consultancy. Meanwhile, inflation has taken off. Almost nobody believes the official index, which shows prices having increased by 9% over the 12 months to July. Credible unofficial estimates put the figure at 25%. By underestimating inflation, the official figures may also overstate economic growth.

 

Throw in the recent fall of up to a quarter in world prices for the country’s farm commodities, and the markets have suddenly become rattled. After years in which it bought dollars to stop the peso from appreciating, the Central Bank has been selling them to boost the currency. On August 11th Standard & Poor’s, a ratings agency, downgraded Argentina’s credit rating. The risk premium on Argentine public debt has soared to 670 basis points above the interest rate paid by American Treasury bonds. The equivalent figure for Brazilian debt is just 240 basis points.

 

Fears of another economic collapse of the kind that Argentina has made its speciality are, in fact, overblown. Most forecasters expect the economy to carry on growing, but at a more moderate rate of 4-5% in 2009. “Argentina’s hyper-growth period is over,” says Miguel Bein, an economic consultant. The country still enjoys budget and trade surpluses. But by common consent, maintaining these surpluses and engineering a soft landing requires policy changes. And therein lies the doubt.

 

Two things have underpinned the growth spurt. The first was the depth of the preceding collapse. In 2001-02 the economy shrank by 15%, unemployment climbed to 21% and poverty engulfed 56% of Argentines. The government defaulted on debts of $80 billion and devalued the peso, which sank to less than a third of its previous value. When growth resumed, idle plant and workers could easily be brought back into action. The second boost was the surge in world commodity prices, and thus in the value of Argentina’s exports (and the taxes on them).

 

The government supercharged growth, stimulating demand with wage increases, price controls, an undervalued peso and public works. This formula worked for much longer than the critics expected. But it has generated big distortions. Inflation has cut into the real value of wages and profits, pushing up poverty again.

 

The government’s energy and farming policies have caused particular problems. It kept energy tariffs frozen at their 2002 level, deterring investment and prompting blackouts last year. Winter has been milder this year, and tariffs have recently risen. But uncertainty about energy supply is another discouragement to investors.

 

The Kirchners have relied on taxing farm exports to fund public spending. This originally had some justification, since farmers benefited hugely from the cheap peso. But Ms Fernández pushed the policy too far, raising farm taxes in March. After months of protests by farmers, Congress voted down the tax increase. The conflict paralysed parts of the economy, and undermined confidence.

 

The economy’s slowdown puts Ms Fernández in an awkward financial position. Energy and transport subsidies now cost 3.5% of GDP, according to Ecolatina, a consultancy. And Ms Fernández wants to spend money on renationalising an airline and on building a high-speed train. To boost its primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments), the government now includes in its accounts revenue from the Central Bank and the pension system. It has also held back payments to provincial governments. But the president, who has become deeply unpopular, has lost the confidence of much of her Peronist party, making that harder.

 

At 55% of GDP, Argentina’s public debt is still large. But the cost of servicing it has been low, partly because of the tough restructuring Mr Kirchner imposed on bondholders. Even so, to service its debts, the government needs to find an extra $2.5 billion or so next year. It cannot tap the international capital markets, because it has still not settled with some bondholders nor its sovereign creditors in the Paris Club. Instead, it is relying on Hugo Chávez. This month Venezuela’s president bought another $1 billion in Argentine bonds (taking his total purchases to $7 billion). The latest bonds pay interest of 15%—the same rate agreed by Domingo Cavallo, a former finance minister, in a notorious bond swap in 2001 on the eve of the collapse.

 

This time the government has plenty of policy tools with which to stabilise the economy. Start with energy, for which Argentines still pay a third less than their neighbours. Further hikes in energy tariffs would improve the public finances, and attract investment. Settling with the Paris Club and the bondholders would enable Argentina to secure financing from the markets on relatively favourable terms. Many economists reckon that these measures would be enough to keep the country growing at a still-healthy annual rate of 4% or so for several years.

 

“These problems should not be difficult to solve,” says Javier González Fraga, a former Central Bank governor. “But no one seems to want to do so yet.” By delaying the necessary adjustments, the government has already made them more painful. And the Kirchners, who govern as a couple, have made their defiance of the IMF, the Paris Club and the bondholders a point of pride. Unless they now swallow that pride, it will be followed by a fall.

[cynical lady]

Dependent territory

 

The war in Georgia puts energy security back on Europe’s agenda

 

 

OFFICIALLY, the European Union is no more worried about the closure of two oil pipelines running through Georgia than are the world’s oil traders, who have so far shrugged off the news. After all, less than 3% of Europe’s oil imports come from Azerbaijan via Georgia, according to the European Commission, and none of its gas. The commission plans to do no more than “monitor the situation closely”.

 

Yet the Eurocrats, complains one European diplomat, are not looking at recent events in the Caucasus “with their energy spectacles on”. Some of his colleagues certainly suspect that a principal Russian motive for invading Georgia was to highlight its vulnerability as a transit route for oil and gas. European countries have long dreamt of securing access to gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan through a pipeline that crosses Georgia. That route would bypass Russia, which controls all the existing pipelines between Central Asia and the EU, and so leave less of Europe’s gas supply at Russia’s mercy. At the very least, the war in Georgia has highlighted the region’s instability, and thus the difficulty of this plan.

 

Russia is easily the biggest supplier of oil and gas to the EU. It provided 38% of gas imports and 33% of oil imports last year. Some European countries—especially former Soviet republics and satellites—rely on Russia for virtually all their energy. The EU’s dependence will only grow, as its own production declines, along with that of its second-biggest supplier, Norway. By 2030, predicts the International Energy Agency, a watchdog for big energy consumers, Europe’s gas imports will have doubled—with much of the extra supply coming from Russia.

 

Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use oil and gas for political purposes on several occasions. In early 2006 it cut off the gas to Ukraine, which in turn siphoned off some supplies intended for countries such as Hungary and Italy. Russia has also cut off supplies of oil to Lithuania and gas to Belarus and Georgia. More recently, it cut by half the amount of oil it sends to the Czech Republic through the “Friendship” pipeline, in what many have interpreted as punishment for the Czechs’ willingness to host a radar base for America’s planned missile defences.

 

Despite much high-minded talk, Europe has responded to these events with indecision and division. Big energy firms in France, Germany and Italy, to name but three, have rushed to sign long-term contracts with Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant, so as to secure their own supplies. There is also unseemly competition to sign up to Gazprom’s various pipeline schemes, while plans for alternatives that circumvent Russia languish.

 

Iran and Iraq both have gas to spare, but the EU is reluctant to do business with the first, because of its nuclear ambitions, and unable to do business with the second, because of its instability. It does not help that pipelines from either place, or from the Caspian, would have to cross Turkey, with whom Europe’s relations are getting frostier and Russia’s are getting warmer.

 

The commission would like to reduce individual countries’ vulnerability to supply interruptions by getting them to build more links between Europe’s largely separate national gas grids. To overcome the big gas companies’ reluctance to invest in pipelines that would expose them to more competition, the commission has suggested forcing them to sell their distribution networks. European governments hammered out a compromise, whereby firms could continue to own the network and sell the gas, as long as the two businesses are separately run. But the European Parliament has rejected this plan, leaving “unbundling” in limbo.

 

There is also talk of increasing imports of liquefied gas from farther afield. But the cost of building the necessary infrastructure has risen dramatically, and many proposed plants have run into planning problems. European governments might dust off such ideas again after the war in Georgia. In recent pow-wows, some observers have detected somewhat greater unity and resolve over Russia than before. There is also the comforting thought that the Soviet Union never cut supplies of gas to Europe throughout the cold war. Russia, after all, is almost as much at the mercy of the pipelines as the EU, in that it cannot easily send its gas anywhere else.

 

 

The Economist

[cynical lady]

Rich Countries Once Used

Gunboats To Seize Food.

Now They Use Trade Deals

 

By George Monbiot

 

n his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Niño, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravagances, "the most colossal and expensive meal in world history", between 12 million and 29 million people died. Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.

 

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty that will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world's poorest people.

 

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population that ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; about two-thirds of these workers are women. Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal's stocks.

 

The EU has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won't confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to west Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal's marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country's waters fell from 95,000 tonnes to 45,000 tonnes. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.

 

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families that once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements. In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted.

 

The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen - mostly from Spain and France - have found ways round the ban. They have been registering their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and transferring catches at sea from local boats. These practices mean that they can continue to take the country's fish, and have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profits are kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe.

 

Mandelson's office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be legalised.

 

The UN's Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU's negotiations as "not sufficiently inclusive". They suffer from a "lack of transparency" and from the African countries' lack of capacity to handle the legal complexities. ActionAid shows that Mandelson's office has ignored these problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and "moved ahead in the negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] could handle". If these agreements are forced on west Africa, Lord Mandelson will be responsible for another imperial famine.

 

This is one instance of the food colonialism that is again coming to govern the relations between rich and poor counties. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK's indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food. We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus valley, which contains most of Pakistan's best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley's aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan.

 

Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over "the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on". Through "secretive bilateral agreements", the paper reports, "the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis".

 

Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of hectares. This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically transforms other people's property into foreign exchange. But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such famines.

 

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but - in the short term, at any rate - we will hardly notice. The rich world's governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.