Issue 64 Vol III, May 31, 2008

T H I S  O U R  N O R T H  A M E R I C A

A deadly food crises stares the world
Khushwant Toor writes from Toronto

BASIC food item prices such as for flour, rice, cereals, dairy, meat, sugar and oils have gone up by 50% in most parts of the world. A normal bag of flour previously priced at $10 a bag now cots $15 the same, similar is the case with rice and most other daily need items. A full cart of grocery which used to cost about $80 now totals up to around $150 in the stores. With the North American economy in recession consumers have started to feel the pinch of the soaring food prices.

It is estimated that last year, the food import bill of developing countries rose by 25 percent as food prices rose to levels not seen in a generation. Corn doubled in price over the last two years. Wheat reached its highest price in 28 years.

Earlier this year President of the World Bank warned that 33 nations are at risk of social unrest because of the rising prices of food. “For countries where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption, there is no margin for survival,” he said.

Among the other factors accelerating the food prices; growth of middle class in China and India is heavily being blamed for higher food prices around the world. As the middle class in China and India is becoming rich for the first time; their eating habits are becoming similar to the meat eating westerners, as a result demand for animal products and protein has increased, which requires large amounts of grain.

Bad luck and bad weather has also played a part in the world food crises. Australia which is considered as a wheat exporter due to three years in drought had to import wheat itself.

However, higher energy cost is the major factor fueling the food prices. The skyrocketing price of oil has hit the global economy hard. Food is transported all around the world mostly via trucks and ships that require diesel fuel, which has hit records highs. In the U.S. alone a gallon of diesel costs $4 and over. It has become vastly more expensive to transport food. Due to this the cost of rice, for example, has seen an explosive increase of 75% in just last two months. Due to some countries imposing an export ban on their food products; stores in importing countries have started to limit the distribution of food products per person.

Concept of biofuels promoted by the rich countries is the other largest single factor contributing to high food prices. The International Monetary Fund estimates that corn ethanol production in the United States accounted for at least half the rise in world corn demand in each of the past three years. This elevated corn prices. Feed prices rose. So did prices of other crops — mainly soybeans — as farmers switched their fields to corn.

Advocacy by the developed nation companies promoting biofuels as green fuel being better for the environment is turning out to be a scam run by these companies. According to a report by the world bank it takes 528 pounds of corn to fill the tank of one SUV. This same amount could feed one person for a year. On top generating one gallon of bio fuel puts more pollutants in the atmosphere than the conventional fuel production.

With the food crises growing in several parts of the world, since the beginning of this year there had been many food riots around the world. In Cameroon, 24 people have been killed in food riots since February of 2008, while in Haiti, protesters chanting, "We're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign. There have been food riots in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Madagascar.

United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon is concerned about the threat of a world food shortage, saying action must be taken quickly, otherwise there will be unrest on an unprecedented scale. The UN wants extra money to buy food for the needy and it is setting up a special food crisis task force to tackle the problem and feed the hungry.

He warned that if nations don't give the money they have already committed, the world will face a crisis unlike anything it has previously seen. "We risk the spectre of wider-spread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale," he said.

The U.N. estimates that over 100 million people are estimated to have been pushed into poverty over the last two years. Farmers in developing countries are planting less, producing less, due to the escalating cost of fertiliser and energy.

U.N. is optimistic that the food problem gripping the world is solvable. However, several emergency steps have to be taken- the first of course, being the emergency funding - $755 million for the world food program just to feed people who are starving. The other step the U.N. proposes is to look to the future and farming methods and providing farmers with low cost feeds and fertilizer and looking at the issue of export tariffs which create bottlenecks in the food system.

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Guantanamo Bay detainee: blow to Canadian prime minister
Khushwant Toor

CANADIAN Supreme Court on May 23 has come top the rescue of Omar Khadr stating that the Canadian agents acted illegally when they interrogated Guantanamo Bay detainee and handed that intelligence to U.S. authorities. It also damned the Bush administration's treatment of foreign terrorism suspects. The unanimous decision asked  the federal government to hand over documents pertaining to those 2003 interrogations by agents with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Foreign Affairs Department, since Canada participated in a process that was contrary to international law.

The ruling delivers a blow to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government which has been unwavering in its support of the U.S. war crimes prosecution of Khadr despite mounting domestic and international pressure. In making its findings about the legality of Guantanamo, the court justices relied on two key U.S. Supreme Court cases that previously ruled that the indefinite detention of foreign terrorism suspects and the Pentagon's first war crimes trials were illegal. The Supreme Court did limit the scope of material that should be provided to Khadr's lawyers. Only information concerning Canada's interrogations of Khadr or subsequent material turned over the U.S. can be disclosed.

The torturers in the infamous jail did not even bother about the US Federal Agents and their protests.

This ruling like some rulings in America is strongest indictment of Canada’s treatment of Khadr and could exert increased pressure on the government to intervene. "The violations of human rights identified by the United States Supreme Court are sufficient to permit us to conclude that the regime providing for the detention and trial of Mr. Khadr at the time of the CSIS interviews constituted a clear violation of fundamental human rights protected by international law," states the unanimous ruling.

Khadr's Canadian lawyers Nate Whitling and Dennis Edney have fought for years to get documents from the federal government concerning Khadr's case. They argued that the material was essential in preparing his defence and providing him the constitutional right to a fair trial. Government lawyers had countered that they did not have an obligation to disclose documents for a U.S. trial.

Toronto-born Khadr was 15 when he was shot and captured following a July 27, 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. Now 21 and the sole Western detainee remaining at the offshore U.S. prison, Khadr is expected to go on trial later this year.  He is charged under a 2006 military law with five war crimes, including murder for the death of U.S. Delta Force solider Christopher Speer.

Although he had been kept incommunicado with the exception of interrogations for his first two years of detention, Khadr does now receive visits from his lawyers and a Canadian consular official. Next month Khadr will appear again before a military judge in Guantanamo as his case moves into the next stage of pre-trial hearings.

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World Bank model in tatters
Gobind Thukral

AFTER touting for decades that the model worked out by the capitalist world lead by America and supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund has the answers to poverty and injustice, it wants to change the tack. It could also ensure human welfare in all its aspects. In short the market and globalisation has solutions for all the ills. Now it lies in tatters. It has, of course, added to more exploitation, bloodshed and poverty. Disparities have increased manifold in all these countries.

America and its other capitalist countries from Europe may be more worried along with some emerging neo capitalist economies of China, India and other countries about the inflation and some slow down. What is at stake is the very model. Even W B admits that it has no solutions to offer and globalisation was not working well.  The emphasis all along of multilateral aid agencies and bilateral donors over the past many years has been on globalisation. The recipient countries were told that once they dismantled their barriers against imports from the rich countries all their economic woes would disappear and poverty would vanish from their midst.

Now a United Nations report on world economy finds it "teetering on the brink" of a severe downturn and is expected to grow only 1.8 percent in 2008.  The United Nations said in its mid-year economic projections last fortnight that the global growth rate of 3.8 percent in 2007 is on the downturn. It is expected to continue with only a slightly higher growth of 2.1 percent in 2009. The mid-year update of the U.N. World Economic Situation and Prospects 2008 blamed the downturn on further deterioration in the U.S. housing and financial sectors in the first quarter, which is expected to "continue to be a major drag for the world economy extending into 2009."

This assessment, however, touches the fringe of the real issue and fails to answer the elementary question; why this downturn.

We are told that Britain and many other countries like America could go into recession. It was "quite possible" the economy would go into the red late this year and early next.  Families would be hard hit by soaring energy bills, food prices and dearer imports. There would be fewer jobs to chase. Rising unemployment, falling incomes and highly visible disparities in income are sure recipe for social tensions and violence.

Contrary to its previous declarations and policies  a new  World Bank report on agriculture has called for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries and stressed that the sector should get extra priority if goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized.

This is nothing new. This argument has been there for long time, only this Bank was suggesting that it would work unless poor countries opened their doors to food imports and accepted globalisation.  We all know that 75 per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas.  Growth in agriculture is four times more effective in reducing poverty than growth originating in other sectors. And, we also know that agriculture offers way out of poverty if efforts are made to increase productivity in the staple foods sector, connect small-holders to rapidly expanding high-value horticulture, poultry, aquaculture and dairy markets, and generate jobs in the rural non-farm economy? And World Bank and IMF, handmaidens of the imperial powers could not see how agricultural growth has successfully reduced rural poverty in East Asia over the past 15 years.

These multilateral aid agencies and bilateral donors over the last 20 years has been on globalisation and subverting economies as we know from t Latin America and playing havoc with their political system. It was touted as magic wand that once the recipient countries dismantled their barriers against imports from the rich countries all their economic woes would disappear.  Poverty would be a thing of the past. Yet this globalisation rhetoric apart, the rich countries continued erecting ever higher walls against imports from developing countries and heavily subsidised their farm sectors. This not only constrained the export potential of developing countries but virtually destroyed their agricultural sector. World Bank now admits lending for agriculture declined in the 1980s and 1990s. The report also concedes that the policies of the rich countries harmed the poor countries. It agrees that in the emerging area of biofuels, the problem is both restrictive tariffs and heavy subsidies in rich countries, which drive up food prices and limit export opportunities for developing country producers.

Are the rich nations listening to their own institution?

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Bush's former spokesperson tells a tale

FORMER White House press secretary Scott McClellan is the latest to join those who accuses his former colleagues in the Bush administration of not being "open and forthright on Iraq," arguing that they engaged in a "political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people." President Bush "signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest," writes McClellan, "not employing out-and-out deception but by shading the truth." McClellan, who is "the first longtime Bush aide to put such harsh criticism between hard covers," also claims in his book that former Bush adviser Karl Rove and former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney Scooter Libby "allowed" and even "encouraged" him to "repeat a lie" about their involvement in the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. In one shocking revelation, McClellan "suggests that Libby and Rove secretly colluded to get their stories straight at a time when federal investigators were hot on the Plame case."

The White House naturally reacted with indignation , calling McClellan "disgruntled about his experience at the White House." Bush "didn't recognize the same Scott McClellan that he hired and worked with for so many years." On background, White House aides were even blunter, telling that McClellan is a "traitor."

According Progress America, Washington based respected group of thinkers,  McClellan is experiencing the same automatic smear response the White House deploys against former allies who dare to criticize the administration, including former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former head of faith-based initiatives John DiIulio2004, when Bush's first Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said publicly that "the Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days" after Bush took office, White House aides pushed back hard with personal attacks. One senior official told CNN that "we didn't listen to [O'Neill's] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now."

Last year, Bush's former chief campaign strategist Matthew Dowd publicly broke with the President by claiming that Bush had "become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in." Bartlett dismissed Dowd's criticisms by saying Dowd had been "going through a lot of personal turmoil." Ironically, before he published his own criticisms, McClellan was often the one responding to critical books as the White House's top spokesperson. In 2004, when former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote a book charging that President Bush had "ignored terrorism for months" before 9/11, McClellan led the White House counter-charge, claiming that Clarke was a bitter ex-employee who "wanted to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department." What a change , friends.

Some of the same language now being used to trash McClellan he himself used to trash previous administration authors." For instance, when Clarke published his tell-all book, McClellan claimed he was doing it for money because "he has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book." But McClellan's credibility challenge goes beyond the fact that he once attacked people in his current position.

McClellan charges the White House with not being "open and forthright on Iraq," which is a drastic shift from his past rhetoric regarding the war. As a White House spokesperson, McClellan repeatedly defended the conduct of the war, justified the case that was made to launch it, and defended Bush's handling of the war. "There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration, suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. That was flat-out false," said McClellan in a 2006 press briefing. "We've been very straightforward about where we are, in terms of the theater in Iraq," he claimed in another. In 2004, he insisted, "This President is someone I think the American people recognize as a straight shooter."

Yellow Press

Add to this murky business of White House to the corporate houses’ chilling business of controlling information and tailoring it to suit the Bush administration. Jessica Yellin, a CNN journalist who covered the White House for ABC News in 2002 and 2003, said that during the lead-up to the Iraq war, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives" to present the war in a way "that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings." She said that "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives." "They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes," Yellin added. Last September, Katie Couric said she felt "corporate pressure" from NBC executives to "not rock the boat," particularly after a tough interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Former MSNBC pundit Phil Donahue, on last year's award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, said, "Our producers were instructed to have two conservatives for every liberal." Salon's Glenn Greenwald emphasizes that, though there was in fact a vigorous debate about the war in 2002 and 2003, journalists "ignored it and silenced it because their jobs didn't permit them to highlight those questions."

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