Cashing in on global food crisis

The intensification of the global food crisis is bringing misery to millions but profits for investors and entrepreneurs as a massive land grab takes place at the expense of local people.

Just to underline the point, it was revealed this week that China’s Jin Hui Mining Corporation has changed its name to Natural Dairy (NZ) Holdings after buying a bankrupt family-owned New Zealand business using a mixture of cash and convertible bonds. The Crafar family’s empire has land, 30,000 animals, a milk powder production plant, 200 staff and around $200 million of debt.

It was also reported that 1,000 Cambodian villagers rose up against a local business tycoon and politician trying to force them to sell their land to him at a rock-bottom price. It is only the latest in a series of protests as politicians and landowners profit from the Phnom Penh government’s policy of giving concessions to foreign companies. These are mainly from China, Vietnam and South Korea, and are running mines, power plants and farms.

Under capitalism’s business-as-usual vision, rubber-stamped at Copenhagen, demand for food will rise by 50% by 2050 whilst water shortages, rising seawater and desertification, caused by uncontrolled global warming, reduce the amount of arable land.

This nightmare vision makes land look like one of the few safe bets for investors. It, as they say, a no brainer – increased demand + shrinking supply + rising prices = big profits. New investment funds spring up almost daily, bringing private investors into an area previously dominated by farming corporations and sovereign wealth funds of China, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States.

They are buying up thousands of acres of land and turning them over to industrial forms of agriculture. The long-term result will be the same as elsewhere – soil structure destroyed, yields falling, loss of species diversity and increased greenhouse gas emissions as virgin land and forest are broken up, releasing stored CO2.

But investors pay about one tenth of the price per hectare for land in Africa as they would in Argentina or the United States. When the soil fails? Buy elsewhere and move on.

You might think that as the world faces unprecedented famine, governments would be rushing to take control. But the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2008 failed to get even a commitment on the issue. Now the World Bank is drafting a “code of practice” – which will undoubtedly be ignored.

The terrible contradiction is that while profits from food and land are increasing, agriculture itself – the actual foundation of human society – is going backwards. In six of the last eight years, world grain production has fallen short of consumption. In 2008 grain prices climbed to the highest level ever and though they have fallen a little, they remain extremely high.

Historically, the enclosure and privatisation of land was the foundation for capitalist development – it is time to reverse the process, with new forms of common ownership. Preventing famine means overcoming the alienation of human beings from the soil that, in the final analysis, is the source of all our lives. Holding land in common, with farmers’ rights protected, we can use our knowledge to solve organically the problems that herbicides and nitrates have intensified.

Instead of boosting the capitalist market in land, we can revitalise the soil by composting waste on a huge scale and ending the global drive towards grain-fed meat based diets, with a return to more natural, balanced diets. We should advocate a policy of no more land sales to investment banks and sovereign funds and fight to socialise the agri-businesses that dominate the food chain for profit.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

China aids Tamil death toll cover-up

The Tamil people have paid a shocking price in their struggle for self-determination and now the truth about the massacres perpetrated by the Sri Lankan military near the end of the civil war is being covered up. An explanation for this is to be found in the economic and military ambitions of China, Russia, India and the Pacific Rim states of Malaysia and Indonesia.

News has emerged that well over 20,000 Tamil civilians – three times the official UN figure – were killed in the so-called no-fire zone in the north of Sri Lanka during April and May. Earlier, the UN had set the number of civilians killed in the camps during the final clashes between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) at 8,000.

The number of deaths has caused a crisis at the UN, whose Human Rights Council last week issued an unbelievable statement actually praising the Sri Lankan government for its commitment to human rights and humanitarian efforts after its defeat of the Tigers and murder of their leaders. The resolution was tabled by Sri Lanka itself and was seen as an endorsement of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ferocious military campaign against the Tiger movement.

Meanwhile, Times’ reporters have pieced together the true picture of casualties using a range of sources including aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and testimony from independent defence experts. The paper made its calculations using confidential UN documents. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Amalraj who was amongst the Tamil refugees confirmed the figure of 20,000. One UN source told reporters that probably even more had been killed. It also clear that the Colombo regime’s claim that Tiger mortar fire was responsible for the deaths was a bare-faced lie.

The UN estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 people have now died in one of Asia's longest modern wars. Tigers began their fight for a separate state for Sri Lanka's in 1983 after decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese government.

But who underpinned and armed Sri Lanka’s final military push against the Tamils and the extermination programme launched against civilians and fighters alike in the north of the country? Military analysts in the US and India see Chinese neo-imperial ambitions as a major factor. China’s aid to Colombo grew from a few million dollars in 2005 to almost $1 billion in 2008. Other major donors include Iran with a $1 billion soft loan and Libya which is about to lend another $500 million.

China became Sri Lanka’s biggest arms supplier in the 1990s and increased sales significantly in April 2007. It even supplied six F7 jet fighters free of charge last year after a raid by the Tigers destroyed ten military planes in 2007. Apart from financial, military and logistical support, the Chinese government supported Sri Lanka’s resolution last week at the UN alongside Russia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, which cleared Colombo of any wrongdoing.

China’s ambitions are a combination of economic and military strategy. It has begun to build a £660 million port at Hambantota, Sri Lanka’s southern coast. While Beijing claims this is purely for commercial use, Sri Lanka’s position has always been key to transport and control in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Navy used Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s north east coast until 1957 and still shares a naval base in Diego Garcia near Mauritius with the US.

China, along with India, also backs the brutal dictatorship in Burma which is laying waste to ethnic groups like the Karen people and is wreaking havoc throughout Africa as it vies with US and European oil and mineral interests. Countless people in Asia and Africa, as well as the Tamils, face annihilation at the hands of the rising capitalist powers who have picked up where the old imperialist states left off.

Tamil campaigners are appealing for support for Tim Martin, who has joined the round the clock demonstrations outside the House of Commons. Martin, a former aid worker and the Campaign Director of Act Now, began an indefinite hunger strike outside Parliament, on Monday 18th May.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The credit crunch one year on

In the shadows of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, the effects of the slow-motion implosion of the global capitalist economy one year on from the start of the credit crunch are becoming apparent in China. Whilst many factories have been shut, apparently to reduce pollution for the period of the Games, there are questions whether many of them will reopen when the medals have been awarded.

China’s double digit growth rate of recent years, which has driven up world prices for raw materials including metals and oil, has slowed in each of the past four quarters. Six out of 11 economic measures including new orders, export orders and output indexes have seen record lows while 14 out of 20 industries have reported a contraction in output. The recent, rapid decline in the value of the dollar against the Chinese yuan has raised the costs of exports to the US. And profits are falling as Chinese workers press for increases in their ultra-low incomes.

In opening its borders to foreign investment – it surpassed the US as the top destination in 2003 - China provided a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour to globalising corporations. The result was an overabundance of manufactured commodities. The Chinese government was obliged to fund the US foreign debt that enable American consumers to buy from China what they had previously made at home. Now exports to the US and Europe are in decline.

The end of the globalisation boom – which had been interrupted by an accelerating series of global financial crises throughout its 30-plus years – became apparent from 2004 onwards when hard-pressed American consumers reached the limits of their ability to service the spiralling debt. The resultant credit crunch - when banks stopped lending to each other exactly one year ago today - is no more than a sign of a much, much deeper malaise.

In the UK, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee remains paralysed by the crisis, unable to reduce interest rates to stimulate the economy for fear of adding to already spiralling prices. New Labour’s hints of measures to breathe life into the housing market seem likely to have the opposite effect – stopping all activity until the October budget statement makes Alistair Darling’s intentions clear. In the UK, household debt is accelerating whilst house prices have fallen by almost 11% over the last twelve months.

Niall Ferguson, the right-wing and revisionist economic and political historian, is certainly not holding his breath about the future. Writing in the Financial Times credit crunch anniversary number, Ferguson notes that US house prices have fallen faster than any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite capital injections of about $300 billion, shares in at least 40 US banks are down 70% or more and many are set to fail.

“One year on, what began as a US crisis is fast becoming a world crisis. Small wonder only a handful of global equity markets are in positive territory relative to August 2007, while more than half have declined by between 10 and 40 per cent. The US slowdown will also affect many emerging markets less reliant on exports than China. At the same time, the global slowdown is about to kick away the last prop keeping the US recession at bay …. But, as in the 1930s, the critical phase is not the US phase. It is when the crisis goes global that the term ‘credit crunch’ will no longer suffice."

It is not “when” it goes global. Recession is already a global phenomenon beginning to show up in necessarily retrospective statistics. Germany, France and Japan look set to join the lengthening list of economies heading downhill, which already includes the US, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Italy, the UK, the Baltics and New Zealand. As the sub-title of our book A House of Cards, published a few months into the credit crunch, reads, it is a matter of moving “from fantasy finance to global crash”.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Put this Olympic torch out!

Former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq no doubt summed up many people’s feelings after a protester tried to grab the Olympic flame from her yesterday. She valued the Olympic ideals but also condemned the “despicable” nature of the Chinese government’s role in Tibet. The Chinese Olympic organisers may well have lost control of the script for the flame, but they are still in charge of China and will get on with murdering Buddhist monks in Tibet and killing and jailing dissidents at home.

Yesterday’s torch run through London offered a ludicrous spectacle. Constantly surrounded by Chinese minders and British police, it was difficult to even see the flame. The whole exercise cost council taxpayers up to £500,000 plus an additional £2 million for the police “ring of steel”. Free speech also paid a price as police forced demonstrators to take down wholly inoffensive but political placards and made protesters take off their pro-Tibet T-shirts. You got a taste of what the 2012 Games in London will look like.

To suppose that politics and the Olympics don’t go together would be to ignore the history of the modern Games. The idea of a torch relay itself was initiated by the Nazis. The 1936 Berlin games, for example, were a showpiece for Hitler’s regime, even while being undermined by black US runner Jesse Owen’s amazing performance. In the Cold War, the United States, the Soviet Union and former East Germany, also used the Games for political ends. Forty years ago, at the Mexico City 1968 Olympics, American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute on the podium in protest against US racism. Only days earlier, the Mexican authorities had massacred hundreds of students staging a protest.

In today’s world, corporate sponsorship for companies like Coca Cola – who are sponsoring the torch - and big business interests dovetail with the propaganda of authoritarian regimes to make the Games into their plaything. The cost of the London Games has spiralled up from an original £2.4 billion in 2006 to a current budget of £9 billion plus a £2 billion contingency fund. For what? So that land values in Stratford where the Olympics are being held can rocket, or that surveillance on spectators can reach Orwellian heights? Severfield-Rowen, the construction company for the London Olympics, has reported record profits and a doubling of its order book. MoneyWeek writes that “security companies should see good business from the Olympics as well…. These are likely to be the most watched-over games in history”. No wonder that three quarters of the British population and 60% of Londoners don’t think the Olympics will benefit them!

New Labour’s hypocrisy when it comes to human rights in China is breathtaking. For them, business comes first. In any case, the Brown government is hardly a paragon of democracy. The UK’s record on human rights, rendition and its role in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror is, perhaps a bit more subtle than the Chinese kleptocracy, but just as authoritarian.

The Beijing Olympics should indeed be boycotted. In fact, the modern Olympics should be abandoned altogether! Why not simply call off the London Olympics? Even half the money could provide affordable housing in a city where only the rich can pay for somewhere decent to live as well as good, free sporting facilities. The ideals of friendly, international sporting competitions could then be pursued in an entirely new context.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Tibet: Brown puts trade before human rights

While China is desperate to present a benign image to the world in anticipation of the summer Olympics, the brutal crackdown on Tibetans determined to defend their language, religion and culture, betrays the real nature of the authoritarian regime in Beijing.

While a wave of demonstrations and oppression rages inside and outside Tibet, the response in Western capitals is muted to say the least. Concerned more about maintaining trade with China – whose reserves literally prop up the ailing dollar – Bush and Brown do no more than express “concern” while the bloodshed continues.

The Chinese authorities’ attempts to blame Tibetan “attacks” on Han Chinese for the crackdown is disgusting. Chinese troops were sent in last week when a march by 300 monks from the Drepung Monastery outside Lhasa grew rapidly into probably the biggest protest since early 1989. Then, under China’s present president, Hu Jintao, 200 demonstrators were killed. This time, a hail of police fire killed around 100 Tibetans, amongst them boys and girls, according to eyewitnesses. All the reports show that the Tibetan capital, Lhasa has been transformed into a war zone. There are troops on the streets with armoured vehicles warning people to stay off the streets or face lethal force.

By shutting down access to Tibet-related internet sites anywhere in China and curbing mobile coverage, the authorities seek to hide the extent of the killings. But despite the ferocity of the crackdown, Tibetans feel this could be a chance for their cause to resonate around the world. "Total desperation has arrived," said Lhadon Tethong of Students for a Free Tibet. "The people of Tibet are fighting for their religious and cultural survival. With the Beijing Olympics only five months away, many see it as now or never."

The stakes in this confrontation are extremely high on all sides. Chinese rule is reliant on political control by the Communist Party – a Stalinist, bureaucratic organisation which is desperate to cling to power. Party bureaucrats have become monstrously rich by making deals with the global corporations. They are terrified of losing sovereignty in Tibet, because it could signal the unravelling of Chinese control in Taiwan as well as in Xingang in the north. Meanwhile the rest of the capitalist world, particularly the global banking system, is deeply in hock to the Chinese government.

For Tibetans, the struggle goes back to 1950, when Chinese forces invaded Tibet. They have been denied the right to their culture, language and religion for decades. By flooding the area with Han Chinese immigrants, Beijing has hoped to smother Tibet’s own traditions. But in fact, it was Britain’s invasion into Lhasa in 1903-4, which turned the hitherto inaccessible mountain area into a pawn in the struggle for domination between the Russian and British empires. A hundred years later, economic interests are still to the fore, particularly as the international banking system staggers from one crisis to the next.

Campaigners for human rights in Tibet are calling on Brown and foreign secretary Miliband to condemn the Chinese government’s brutal attack on the basic rights of Tibetans. Matt Whitticase of the Free Tibet Campaign denounced Brown’s silence on human rights during his recent trip to China as “shameful”. In the end, however, New Labour puts trade and corporate interests above human rights – both in Tibet and Britain.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win Secretary

Writing on the wall for China's leaders

One thing is certain as the Chinese Communist Party gathers in Beijing for its 17th Congress – a political earthquake is inevitable that will in time sweep the delegates away. The political and social contradictions in the country are glaring and unbearable, starting with the name of the organisation under whose banner the delegates meet. The party is communist in name only, representing as it now does capitalism with Chinese characteristics. For example, present in the hall are the chief executives of state owned enterprises (SOEs).

Some SOEs are privatised and owned by foreign investors and others by local capitalists. In the 1990s, the major SOEs were restructured into joint-stock companies and listed on overseas and domestic stock markets. Then in 1994, China began to allow the big SOEs to retain all their profits. Hence over the past 13 years, none of these SOEs has contributed a single penny to the state coffers for public expenditure. According to official statistics, China's state sector made a total 1.22 trillion yuan (US$157 billion) of profits in 2006, of which 754.7 billion yuan or 62% came from the 155 central SOEs. Not surprisingly, the management have enriched themselves, paying themselves handsome bonuses and buying lavish luxury goods.

So the SOEs’ executives must have smiled to themselves today when President Hu Jintao told the congress that "socialist core values will prevail among the people..." These words are meaningless, Stalinist rhetoric from a leadership that has presided over the transformation of the country into a sweatshop for the transnational corporations. Hu was forced to acknowledge that growing social tensions threatened the country’s future.
"Resolutely punishing and effectively preventing corruption bears on the popular support for the party and on its very survival, and is therefore a major political task the Party must attend to at all times," he said. The reality is quite different.

In a new report from the Carnegie Endowment, Minxin Pei, an expert on economic reform and governance in China, paints a picture of corruption in China, where 10% of government spending, contracts, and transactions is estimated to be used as kickbacks and bribes, or simply stolen. Though the Chinese government has more than 1,200 laws, rules, and directives against corruption, the odds of a corrupt official going to jail are less than 3%, making corruption a high-return, low-risk activity, he finds. Even low-level officials have the opportunity to amass an illicit fortune of tens of millions of yuan. Corruption in China is concentrated in sectors with extensive state involvement. The direct costs of corruption could be as much as $86 billion each year, his report claims.

Significantly, Pei’s report says that corruption sparks tens of thousands of protests each year and contributes to China’s environmental degradation - up to 750,000 people a year die of air pollution - deterioration of social services, and the rising cost of health care, housing, and education. “Corruption has not yet derailed China’s economic rise, sparked a social revolution, or deterred Western investors. But it would be foolish to conclude that the Chinese system has an infinite capacity to absorb the mounting costs of corruption,” writes Pei.

Police were out in force in Beijing for the congress. Dissidents have been detained and thousands of petitioners rounded up to prevent them lobbying officials. One protester was dragged away by security and bundled into a police van in front of a clock on Tiananmen Square counting down to the 2008 Olympics. In 1989, the democracy movement was savagely suppressed by tanks and soldiers in the same square. The leadership’s attempts to impose a brutal form of corrupt capitalism on China since then has only deepened the anger of the masses and ensured that the writing is really on the wall for the delegates inside the Great Hall of the People.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

China fears Burma uprising

While the Buddhist monks and people of Burma heroically defy bullets and batons to continue to march against the military junta, no one should be surprised that world leaders sit on their hands and/or offer up crocodile tears. Some, like the Chinese regime, have a lot to lose in Burma – and we’re not just talking about trade in oil, gas and timber. Beijing’s Stalinist rulers in particular are terrified that the mass movement in Burma could easily spread to China itself and unseat the corrupt bureaucracy ruling the country. The Chinese leadership has turned the country into a paradise for the global corporations – and a nightmare for hundreds of millions of workers and peasants. Countless strikes, riots and demonstrations are reported in the official press – so the real picture must be much worse.

A recent report into China’s toy export industry exposes the super-exploitation. The report describes working conditions as “devastatingly brutal”, with long hours, unsafe workplaces and restricted freedom of association – all in “blatant violation of Chinese and international labour law”. Whole batches of toys were recently recalled because they were unsafe and the report blames the transnational corporations for their “single-minded pursuit of ever lower prices” The Hasbro corporation is a major manufacturer in China. Hasbro reported net revenues of $691.4 million for the second quarter of 2007 – up 31% on a year ago and an operating profit for the period of $55.8 million, up a whopping 171% on the same period last year. The reason for soaring profits is self-evident. The report says: “Short-sighted policies drive corporations like Hasbro to turn a blind eye to safety - and to ignore the labour conditions in their supplier factories, as well. Instead of concentrating on improving product safety and workers’ lives, companies spend their energy creating beautiful pamphlets on social responsibility, disputing critical reports and shifting blame.”

During its investigation, China Labour Watch found that workers often worked for a month without a day off, facing the sack they declined “overtime”. Factories illegally impose fines and fees. The resulting wage is well below the official minimum wage for the region of about $92 per month. Raw materials, work equipments, rubbish, unfinished products and finished products are piled up throughout plants, including the emergency exits. The report concludes: “To multinational toy companies, workers are merely tools to use to build their massive profits.”

As for the so-called European Union sanctions against Burma, these are clearly not worth the paper they are written on. New Labour, which merely calls for “restraint” in Burma, is accused by campaigners of conducting business as usual. "The EU sanctions are pathetic: it's as if they've been designed to miss the mark," said Mark Farmaner, acting director of the Burma Campaign UK. "You have no significant trade sanctions at all; there is a limited investment ban for some named state-owned enterprises including a pineapple company, tailors shops and others. The timber and gas sections where the regime earns most of its revenue were exempt... so it's had no impact at all." Over the past three years, British imports in some categories such as seafood, footwear and handbags, have actually risen. Timbmet, a British wood company, which did £3m of business with Burma last year, says it is now pulling out. Director Mike Packer, says: "So far as we are concerned... there's been no approach to timber importers to say the government doesn't support trade with Burma."


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Beijing the key to Burma protests

All eyes are on how Beijing will react as Burma’s Buddhist monks lead waves of protests against the country’s dictatorship. It is the biggest movement Burma has seen since people rose against the junta in 1988 when 3,000 people were gunned down. Burma’s military junta is utterly dependent on the Chinese regime, which is ruthlessly exploiting the country’s oil and gas reserves. China has sold $2 billion worth of arms to the junta which are used in continuing atrocities against the political opposition as well as ethnic minorities. Beijing’s Stalinist regime is, of course, also deeply involved in propping up the notorious regimes in Zimbabwe and Sudan as it exploits Africa’s resources.

At the weekend the monks were joined by young, pink-robed, shaven-headed nuns as around 20,000 people took part in a march in the former capital Rangoon, often knee-deep in rainwater, calling for an end to the dictatorship. On Saturday, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi of the National League for Democracy (NLD) who has been under house arrest for 11 years, emerged for a tearful moment to pray with the 2,000 monks who had made their way to her house. Yesterday, however, the authorities turned back monks from the road leading to her home.

Elsewhere in the country, soldiers and state-backed militia beat up monks in cities like Pakokku, Mandalay, and in Sittwe, where tear gas was fired and arrests were made. The movement, led by a new group of young monks, the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks, is now a direct challenge to Burma’s military authorities, the State Peace and Development Council (SLORC). A spokesman for the group said they would protect their leaders from arrest.

The present crisis was sparked by an abrupt doubling of petrol and diesel prices on August 15 which triggered protests during which demonstrators and monks were brutally beaten. The anti-junta movement gathered international momentum towards the end of August when actor and comedian Jim Carrey, went on U-tube calling for viewers to join US anti-junta organisations. On September 18, the 19th anniversary of the SLORC military coup, protests were held in 20 countries around the world.

There are presently around 600,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPS) in Burma, with huge refugee camps on its borders in neighbouring Thailand and Laos. A group of US Congressmen is currently calling for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics “unless the Chinese regime stops engaging in serious human rights abuses against its citizens and stops supporting serious human rights abuses by the governments of Sudan, Burma, North Korea against their citizens”. As the junta spends billions on arms and wallows in luxury, one third of the country’s children are malnourished. People scrabble in the streets of the capital for food handouts from the temples. Humanitarian organisations like Medecins Sans Frontieres and disease-fighting specialists have been forced to leave, with even the Red Cross finding it difficult to operate.

Several Buddhist monks have stated they would not end the marches and demonstrations until the dictatorship is “wiped from the land” and there have been chants saying, “Our uprising must succeed.” If the junta decides to crack down, it may well rely on new helicopters supplied by India, containing British and EU parts, to gun down protesters.


Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

The sweatshop Olympics

There will be celebrations in China today to mark the one-year countdown to the start of the 2008 Olympic Games. But it will be business as usual for the hundreds of thousands of workers slaving away in factories making products associated with the games. Research into four of the factories supplying goods under licence for the Beijing Olympics has revealed massive labour rights abuses, including child labour, forced overtime, workers being instructed to lie about wages and conditions to outside inspectors, poor health and safety conditions, excessive hours of work and employers falsifying employment records. These are the findings in a report from the International Textile Garment and Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF) entitled Playfair 2008.

The Beijing Olympics are likely to be the most profitable ever. Adidas paid between $80-100 million for its sponsorship deal. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has signed up 11 main sponsors paying $866m million between them. The official website boasts that Olympic licensing provides successful companies with an opportunity to “gain considerable profit through producing or selling the licensed products” and “enhance brand image and increase market share and sales”. The sale of the mascot alone will bring in more than $300m in profit.

Quite apart from the Olympics, China’s export success is based on paying low wages. Around 250 million Chinese (16.6% of the population), live on less than $1 a day and 700 million (47% of the population), live on less than $2 a day. Chinese workers are not free to form independent trade unions and can only join official organisations that are part of the bureaucracy that rules China on behalf of a corrupt elite.

International brands manufacturing in China claim their “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) policies are the answer. But the CSR audits are in the main meaningless and easily subverted. Neil Kearney, ITGLWF General Secretary, said: “The Olympic Committee must now remedy the abuses that have been uncovered. Child workers must be removed from the workplace and sent to school at the companies’ expense. Workers must be repaid the monies they are owed in respect of underpaid wages and unpaid overtime. And immediate measures must be taken to bring working conditions into line with national legislation and international labour standards, including the payment of the legal minimum wage and respect for laws on working hours.”

But the IOC has consistently rejected all attempts to force it to take responsibility for employment standards for workers employed in Olympic activities. Their sole criteria is to bring in cash to fund the overblown, drugs-polluted, orgy of corporate power the games have become. According to its charter, the goal of the Olympic movement is “to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play”. But the children working in the sweatshops of China are clearly not going to have the chance to experience any of that.

Penny Cole, environment editor