https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJsZsIJYa2I
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Pakistan’s misery continues
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/02/07/pakistans-misery-continues/
Pakistan has a general election on 8 February. It will decide on the next government of the world’s fifth-most populous nation and the governments of its four provinces — Punjab, Singh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Around 128 million people can vote to pick 266 representatives to form the 16th parliament in a first-past-the-post system. They will also vote to elect the legislatures of the country’s four provinces.
In a country of 241 million people, two-thirds are below the age of 30. A citizen becomes eligible to vote at the age of 18. But only a little more than half of Pakistan’s electorate voted last time in the 2018 elections. The previous winner of the 2018 election was former star cricketer turned politician Imran Khan. He was ousted from office in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April 2022. Since then, he has been shot and injured and then locked up for up to 20 years on various charges of corruption and sedition. Thousands of his party members have been arrested and he has been banned from standing. But polls suggest that he would win this election, if the election were ‘fair’.
No Pakistan Prime Minister has ever completed a full term. That’s because ever since the formation of the country, the military has been in control. It is the most powerful institution in the country with a huge 12.5% of the government budget going towards military spending. The military decide the needs of Pakistan’s elite.
Khan fell out with the military when the latter decided to switch sides from leaning on the support of China against its main perceived enemy, India and from relying on Chinese credit to survive. The military switched back to the side of the Americans with bribes of money from Saudi Arabia and the UAE and because of the desperate need to get funds from the IMF, which Khan was reluctant to take because of austere conditions attached. “From a Washington perspective, anyone would be better than Khan,” said Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. In contrast, the likely winner of the election and the candidate backed by the military is perceived as “business-friendly and pro-America.”
The military don’t want to run the country directly, but they are making sure that they get a government that follows their interests. And this is the party of Nawaz Sharif, three-time former Prime Minister, who was previously ousted for corruption in 2017 and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In 2022 he returned to Pakistan with his corruption conviction swiftly quashed and his lifetime ban from politics overturned. His party and the military then ensured the removal of Khan. Sharif’s government is now trying to meet the demands of the IMF and the military to turn the economy around.
And Pakistan’s economy is in deep trouble and in recession. Major floods caused heavy damage to crops and livestock, and with 44% of workers relying on agriculture, this has driven millions into deep poverty. Investment has collapsed. It has been estimated that Pakistan needs more than $16bn to recover from the disaster.
Pakistan’s per capita income and GDP growth are the lowest in the region, bar war-torn Afghanistan. Its unemployment and inflation rates are one of the highest in the region. The Human Development Index, which measures a country’s achievements through three basic dimensions – health, knowledge, and standards of living – placed Pakistan in the 161st position out of 185 countries in 2022. In other words, Pakistan is among the 25 countries with the lowest human development in the world.
Pakistan remains in the grip of a small group of landowners and business families. It is one of the most unequal countries in the world. Just 22 families control 66% of Pakistan’s industrial assets and the richest 20% consume seven times more than the poorest 20%. The top 1% of income earners have the same share of total personal income as the bottom 50% (15.7%) and the top 1% of wealth holders own 26% of all personal wealth while the bottom 50% of Pakistanis have just 4% (World Inequality Lab). Both the names Khan and Sharif mean ‘ruler’ or ‘noble’. Around 45% of all holders of office across Pakistan came from family ‘dynasties’, with their political direction decided by whom the military establishment selects. Most income held by the rich goes into real estate and financial assets (much of it spirited abroad).
Investment by the capitalist sector is just 11% of GDP. This compares with China at 45% or even most less developed countries at over 20%. Exports make up just 7.6% of the country’s GDP. That’s nearly 17 percentage points less than the average for middle-income countries overall. What the country does export tends to be low-value-added products, like textiles, cotton and rice. As a result, Pakistan relies on the flow of remittances from Pakistanis working abroad (and these have been falling) and outside funding.
Remittances $bn
Pakistan depends heavily on imported oil. A constant decline in the value of the country’s currency has resulted in much higher energy costs. Pakistan’s real effective exchange rate, a broad measurement of the strength of a currency, declined from 88.0 in 2022 to 72.0 in 2023, and the Pakistan rupee is down 40% against the US dollar in the last year. The falling currency and rising living costs drove the inflation rate to near 40% (now around 30% a year). Interest rates are at a record high, crushing investment.
This decline in the value of Pakistan’s currency is because of the country’s export failure. Pakistan is essentially running on foreign loans. External debt accounted for 36% of the country’s nominal GDP in 2023, a noticeable increase from the previous year. The government debt-to-GDP ratio reached 89%. By June 2026, Pakistan will have to repay around $80 billion in foreign debt.
Balance of trade PKR m
Of Pakistan’s $126bn external debt and liabilities, 30% is owed to China. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested more than $60bn in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which began in 2015. This connects the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian sea to China’s north-western region of Xinjiang through a network of highways, railways and pipelines. So far, of the numerous projects agreed upon under CPEC, only a few have been completed. Chinese frustration over endless delays in project completion, halting of projects, and security threats to its nationals working in Pakistan has resulted in hesitation to invest in new projects.
The military wants to switch away from Chinese funding to that of the West and the Arab states. In July 2023, the IMF approved an emergency $3bn Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) to avert a complete collapse and debt default. But the IMF wants Pakistan to go further and completely ‘float’ (sink!) its exchange rate, ostensibly to boost exports. And for any further loans that Pakistan wants, the IMF is insisting on the government increasing electricity tariffs and cutting government spending.
The military is now looking to sell off state assets to attract foreign investment. It has established a military dominated body to manage major economic projects in the country — the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC). Comprising the prime minister and army chief, the SIFC has greenlit 28 investment projects to pitch to the Gulf nations. The SIFC is also trying to sell off the Reko Diq mines, one of the world’s largest reserves of gold and copper, to Saudi Arabia. Other plans include outsourcing management of airports to the UAE, privatising the national airline on an accelerated timeline and expediting a free trade agreement with the UAE, referred to as the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Act. With this strategy, the government hopes to get the US to back a further IMF loan.
Meanwhile some 700,000 workers have lost their jobs following the closure of about 1,600, or about one-third, of the country’s textile factories, which contribute 60% of the country’s total export earnings. One textile working family explained how the escalating cost of living was affecting them and their five children. The couple work extra-long hours to feed their three daughters and two sons, none of whom go to school. “We used to somehow manage our daily expenses within 500 Pakistani rupees (£1.40; $1.75) a day. Now things have changed. To cook just one meal, we need 1,500 rupees,” Mr Maseeh said. His wife added: “Our earnings are not enough even to provide a good meal. How can we afford to send our children to school?”
Pakistan’s adults vote today but with no prospect of obtaining an end to the disaster that it is Pakistan capitalism and landlordism and its military rule.
Arizona Court Cancels EPA’s Approval Of Dicamba Pesticide
https://popularresistance.org/arizona-court-cancels-epas-approval-of-dicamba-pesticide/
By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. February 9, 2024
A ‘Vital Victory For Farmers And The Environment.’
In a win for farmers and endangered plants and wildlife, an Arizona district court has revoked the approval of the destructive pesticide dicamba, saying the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law when it allowed it to be on the market.
Dicamba-based weedkillers have been widely used on soybean and cotton crops genetically engineered by Bayer (formerly Monsanto), a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity — who brought the lawsuit — said.
“This is a vital victory for farmers and the environment,” said George Kimbrell, legal director for the Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case, in the press release. “Time and time again, the evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators. The court today resoundingly reaffirmed what we have always maintained: the EPA’s and Monsanto’s claims of dicamba’s safety were irresponsible and unlawful.”
Dicamba has a tendency to drift, damaging millions of acres of wild plants, animals and crops for which it was not intended. The EPA first approved the harmful pesticide in 2017 for use on crops that were genetically engineered to be able to withstand what would be a deadly dose for other plants.
The United States District Court for the District of Arizona’s ruling overturned the reapproval of dicamba by the EPA in 2020, which specified application restrictions that did not prevent damage caused by persistent drifting.
The EPA has estimated that three-fourths of cotton crops and two-thirds of soybean crops — 65 million acres — are resistant to dicamba. Roughly half those acres were actually sprayed with the toxin.
Some farmers have even gone so far as to plant crops “defensively” to avoid drift damage from dicamba.
The district court ruled that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act had been violated by the EPA, saying the breach was “very serious,” since the EPA had previously been ruled against by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for failing to consider the significant risks of excessive dicamba use when issuing the previous registration.
“I hope the court’s emphatic rejection of the EPA’s reckless approval of dicamba will spur the agency to finally stop ignoring the far-reaching harm caused by this dangerous pesticide,” said Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity’s director of environmental health science, in the press release. “Endangered butterflies and bee populations will keep tanking if the EPA keeps twisting itself into a pretzel to approve this product just to appease the pesticide industry.”
Farmers whose crops are unable to withstand dicamba’s intense effects were happy with the ruling.
“Every summer since the approval of dicamba, our farm has suffered significant damage to a wide range of vegetable crops,” said farmer Rob Faux, who is also a communications manager with Pesticide Action Network, in the press release. “Today’s decision provides much needed and overdue protection for farmers and the environment.”
The pesticide threatens endangered species like the rusty patched bumblebee. Beekeepers have reported steep declines in honey production because of dicamba drift, which suppresses the flowering plants bees need to survive.
“We are grateful that the court held the EPA and Monsanto accountable for the massive damage from dicamba to farmers, farmworkers and the environment, and halted its use,” said Lisa Griffith, an outreach and communications coordinator with the National Family Farm Coalition. “The pesticide system that Monsanto sells should not be sprayed as it cannot be sprayed safely.”
These Urban Food Forests Do Double Duty
https://popularresistance.org/these-urban-food-forests-do-double-duty/
By Max Graham, Next City. February 9, 2024
From Philadelphia to Tucson, residents are planting trees to provide shade and food.
Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete.
On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change.
The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: Plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”
A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant 1 million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat.
But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees — and the rest of the country’s — didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too?
That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage.
“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)
Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami.
“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.”
There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”
Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”
She pointed to the Philadelphia Orchard Project as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.
Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables — a whole range of things,” Jordan said.
The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.
The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour — a process that requires a big hammer mill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite-pancake cook-off, using the fresh flour.
Merchant is drawing on a model of tree-planting that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster — who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996 — has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more — all plants that have edible parts.
“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.”
The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “living pantry.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats — and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats — is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water — a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert — by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.
Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce — ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons — gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project.
“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not, ‘Leave a dollar, and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple, and eat your apple.”
Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick — and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.
Alert: Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Pro-Genocide Propaganda
https://popularresistance.org/action-alert-friedmans-vermin-analogies-echo-ugly-pro-genocide-propaganda/
By Jim Naureckas, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. February 9, 2024
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a piece in the Point (2/2/24), an online Times feature the paper describes as “conversations and insights about the moment,” that compared the targets of US bombs to vermin. It’s the sort of metaphor that propagandists have historically used to justify genocide.
Friedman’s piece compared the nation of Iran to “a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp,” which (according to Science Daily) “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.” Friedman asks:
Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out.
Is there a better way to describe distinct political movements in four different Mideast nations, each with a social base in a minority or majority population of those countries, than by comparing them to flesh-eating parasites injected by a foreign insect? Well, yeah—lots of them.
But Friedman’s framing of Iranian allies as vermin naturally leads him to call for an eliminationist solution: “We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.”
‘Analogies From The Natural World’
Friedman was not done with his vermin analogies. Hamas is not only a parasitic wasp larva, he wrote, but is also “like the trap-door spider,” since they are “adept at camouflaging the doors of their underground nests, so they are hard to see until they’re opened.” (Elsewhere—New York Times, 12/1/23—Friedman has argued that the war against Hamas has already succeeded, since Israel has made its point that if “you destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more”—a suitable message for the Middle East, he suggested, which “is a Hobbesian jungle…not Scandinavia.”)
Comparing various Muslim political movements to creepy invertebrates was part of Friedman’s musings about how he “sometimes prefer[s] to think about the complex relations between [Mideastern] parties with analogies from the natural world.” Strikingly, however, the comparisons to loathsome arthropods were reserved for nations and militant groups—like Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iranian allies in Iraq and Syria—that US-made bombs are currently falling on.
The US itself appears in the column as an “old lion,” “still the king of the Middle East jungle,” but with “so many scars from so many fights” that “other predators are no longer afraid to test us.”
And Benjamin Netanyahu, who as prime minister of Israel is responsible for killing more than 27,000 people, most of them civilians, and wounding nearly 67,000 more, is compared to a lemur, because he’s “always shifting side to side to stay in power.”
Conceived As Subhuman
The comparison of official enemies to vermin is a hallmark of propaganda in defense of genocide. The group Genocide Watch lists “dehumanization” as the fourth of ten stages of genocide, in which members of a targeted group “are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases” in a process that “overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.”
“It’s very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being,” David Livingstone Smith, author of a book on dehumanization called Less Than Human, told NPR (3/29/11). “When people dehumanize others, they actually conceive of them as subhuman creatures,” Smith said, allowing would-be genocidaires to “exclude the target of aggression from the moral community.”
Thus the Nazis compared Jews to an array of despised creatures, including spiders and parasitic insects. In Rwanda, the radio station RTLM paved the way for mass slaughter by repeatedly referring to the Tutsi minority as “cockroaches” and “snakes” (Atlantic, 4/13/19). In Myanmar, the anti-Rohingya agitator Ashin Wirathu compared Muslims to snakes, dogs and invasive catfish (Daily Beast, 10/13/17).
Surely editors at the New York Times are aware of this history. Given that the International Court of Justice recently ruled that it’s “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (NPR, 1/26/24), shouldn’t the Times avoid echoing the arguments that have historically been used to make genocide more palatable?
Action Alert:
Please ask the New York Times why it allowed Thomas Friedman to use analogies that have repeatedly been used to justify genocide.
Contact:
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
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