EU-US trade deal threat to food safety

The launch of EU-US negotiations on a new trade deal should set alarm bells ringing for food producers and consumers throughout Europe. If successful the deal will sweep away environmental, health, privacy and cultural standards.

For decades, these have given a measure of protection to the European food industry from incursion by the predominantly US-based global agri-business corporations.

The talks are intended to promote growth by eliminating all trade tariffs and “harmonising” regulations which act as barriers to trade. The G8 announcement of the July 8 start of talks sees the two parties aiming to sign the deal by the end of 2014.

The launch of the new deal – a second-best attempt at the failed World Trade Organisation’s Doha trade talks – will be seen as a direct response to the mounting anger against profit-driven food production manifested in the two million strong worldwide march against Monsanto in hundreds of cities in 52 countries last month.

The ConDem government, in a coalition with lobbyists for the biotech companies, is spearheading the corporations’ campaign.

Britain’s science minister, David Willetts and environment secretary Owen Paterson are pushing for EU controls on new genetically-modified crops and food to be relaxed. Willetts, who has been heavily lobbied by GM campaigners and scientists funded by the GM industry, insists biotech crops could feed the world.

Eight European governments have banned cultivation of a Monsanto GM maize called MON 810, which is genetically modified to kill pests which feed on it, on the basis it might cause harm to other important insects. The eight are Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg and most recently Poland, while Italy said it plans to follow suit.

As a result, Monsanto says it has effectively given up on lobbying for approval for new GM crops to be grown in Europe, though it is certain to be active in the negotiations for the new bilateral deal.

The ban on the maize and other forms of GM has been made under an EU environmental protection provision known as the “Safeguard Clause”. Even so large quantities of GM soya and maize are imported into Europe, including Britain, entering the food chain as animal feed.  

Monsanto’s bid for domination of the global food chain received a major setback in May, when Japan and parts of South Korea banned US wheat imports after the discovery of a unlicensed genetically-modified crop growing in Oregon. The corporation is now facing a class action lawsuit from farmers in the state.

The company is, however, celebrating its defence of patents – intellectual copyright controls over food - in a court victory against farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman. Having bought Roundup-ready soybean seeds, he had the temerity and ingenuity to find a way, he thought, of bypassing the company’s patent. This would have allowed him to reinstate ancient farming practices and replant the seed he’d grown. No such luck.

But no court action, worldwide protests, nor import bans will be sufficient to stop Monsanto in its tracks. Monsanto, producer of the infamous Roundup herbicide, has been in this sordid business for decades, originally with its manufacture of PCBs and Agent Orange, as well as Bovine Growth Hormone, banned in Europe.

Since 2011 it has been advising US farmers to engage in an arms race to protect their crops, using a cocktail of their pesticides when Roundup resistant “superweed” mutants developed and infested millions of acres of farmland.   

Meanwhile radical alternatives are beginning to emerge. Following a showing of the World According to Monsanto film in a quiet rural Welsh pub, organised by the local Transition Town group, the audience, including farmers, unanimously voted for a proposal to set up a country-wide, not-for-profit seed co-operative. It’s the way to go!

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

A crisis beyond the power of prayer

When the leader of an organisation claiming a billion members decides to write a letter about the “complexity and gravity of the present economic situation” to the G8, the leaders of the world’s richest capitalist countries meeting in Italy, it’s worth considering what he has to say.

In his third encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI delivers a profound, historically-grounded analysis of the causes and consequences of the current crisis, taking in neo-liberalism, corporations, globalisation, the collapse of the Soviet-bloc countries, growing inequality, poverty and mass migration, terrorism associated with religious fanaticism – and points his critical ringed finger at the narrow pursuit of short-term profit. Here’s a sample of his analysis:

The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between states as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems ...Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organisations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers…

When it comes to prescriptions, he’s equally grounded and looking for change:

The human consequences of current tendencies towards a short-term economy — sometimes very short-term — need to be carefully evaluated. This requires further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals, as well as a profound and far-sighted revision of the current model of development, so as to correct its dysfunctions and deviations. This is demanded, in any case, by the earth's state of ecological health.

Warning of the new risks of enslavement and manipulation arising from the “cultural eclecticism” resulting from the "increased commercialisation of cultural exchange”, the Pope gets right to the heart of the matter – calling for a re-evaluation and remodelling of the state, leading to new forms of democracy, “an increase in the new forms of political participation, nationally and internationally, that have come about through the activity of organisations operating in civil society”.

And on the economy, to a degree he even puts himself alongside those calling for forms of common ownership, rejecting the “binary market-plus-state” and suggesting economic initiatives which “aim at a higher goal than the mere logic of the exchange of equivalents, of profit as an end in itself”. The encyclical declares that “there must be room for commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends to take root and express themselves”.

Before you get too excited, just like the many versions of Keynesian new dealers, so-called lefts, reformists and greens, the Pope is, naturally enough for the leader of one of the richest organisations on the planet, in favour of capitalism, albeit in a more civilised form.

When he says that “economic life undoubtedly requires contracts, in order to regulate relations of exchange between goods of equivalent value”, he’s talking about the employment contract. People must have jobs so that when they sell their labour power to employers, profit, rent and interest can be extracted from the value they generate. That’s the essence of capitalism, and until those social relations have been replaced in their entirety there is no way out of the present global meltdown, not even through the power of prayer.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

How to fight job losses

The reinstatement of the sacked 647 Lindsey oil refinery (LOR) workers, with offers of work for the 51 whose redundancies sparked the walk-out at dozen of energy plants around Britain, is a triumph of rank-and-file solidarity over trade union bureaucrats, who have allowed mass unemployment to develop virtually unopposed.

Not far from the LOR plant in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire, are the Corus steelworks in Scunthorpe, Sheffield and Rotherham. Last week, the company announced the loss of another 2,000 jobs on top of the 2,500 made earlier in the year. All that the steel union Community could say was that workers were “devastated” by the news. Of any plan to resist the redundancies, which will destroy communities if they take place, there was not a word. And there won’t be.

As for the position of the union leaders in general, their craven position was summed up by a press release from the Trades Union Congress, which declared “Barber to tell Berlusconi to put jobs first in run up to G8 summit”.
This was a reference to a meeting involving TUC general secretary Barber and the deeply reactionary Italian prime minister, urging the forthcoming G8 summit chair to build “on the positive proposals in the London G20 summit declaration”. Not a spoof press release, simply shocking but true.

The outcome of the LOR strike itself only guarantees work for the 51 who were made redundant for just four weeks on the extension of the refinery owned by the oil corporation. Other details of the deal struck by union officials are not clear. There were reports during the strike that Total and its sub-contractors had broken an agreement made during the winter strikes that there would be no redundancies while Italian and Portuguese workers remained on site.

What is unambiguous, however, is that 25% of workers normally involved in oil refinery construction are out of work and that the dole queue is lengthening hour by hour throughout the country. Warnings that the British economy is lurching towards a deeper crash as the banking crisis intensifies, will lead to even more rapid job losses, short-time working and demands for pay cuts and, as at British Airways, working for nothing at all.

The LOR strike showed that workers will fight back, given half a chance, and that anti-union laws that ban solidarity actions are no deterrence to the rank-and-file, even if they remain sacrosanct as far as the union leaders are concerned (who declined to make the walk-outs official for fear of being taken to court).

Ultimately, however, the cards remain stacked in favour of corporations like Total because they will still decide who works and who doesn’t, based on considerations of profit and nothing else.

Answering that, and to fight unemployment in a serious way, means challenging the ownership and control of the means to work. It requires a plan to transfer economic power into the hands of ordinary people, mobilising those in and outside the trade unions. Then a strategy could be developed to reorganise the economy in such a way that unemployment is eradicated, something that is not possible under capitalism generally and even more so at a time of global slump.

At the centre of this perspective has to be a campaign to remove the discredited and reactionary New Labour government from office now, rather than waiting for a general election and the seemingly inevitable return of the Tories. That would open up important issues about political power itself. Building a movement along these lines would build on the success of the LOR strike rather than waiting for the employers to strike back.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Crisis over? Who are they kidding!

Finance ministers in Italy for this weekend’s annual meeting of the G8 capitalist countries aren’t short of sources to help them interpret economic statistics, and they’re getting plenty of advice about what needs to be done. The trouble is that not only are the statistics contradictory, but so is the advice.

The International Monetary Fund has revised its previous 2010 global growth forecast of 1.9 per cent sharply upwards to 2.4 per cent, because it thinks the wave of government intervention – which it encouraged – is going to bear fruit. The Chinese government, for example, has implemented a $585 billion stimulus package in fixed assets like apartment buildings and roads. One result is that China’s oil refineries have returned to production on a grand scale.

In the real world, however, things are sharply different. China’s exports - a key measure of the health of the global economy – fell by a worse-than-expected 26.4 percent from May 2008, while imports plunged by a quarter. This is the seventh month in a row that they have both fallen, and the pace accelerated from April.

Nevertheless, in a new round of hyped confidence in the prospects for profit, stock markets around the world are roaring ahead. The price of oil is soaring and there is even talk that the “recession is over”. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is happening is that the meltdown of the global economy is taking place at a slower pace – but it’s still melting.

The World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) provides grants and loans to the world’s 78 poorest countries, and already this year the IDA has received a record number of requests for help. It now says that the world economy will shrink by 3% this year - much more than its previous forecast of 1.75%. "Most developing country economies will contract this year and face increasingly bleak prospects," World Bank president Robert Zoellick said.

Despite its optimistic forecast, the IMF has warned that there could still be another $3 trillion in losses for the financial sector as a whole before the crisis is over. Interest rates are beginning to move upwards on both sides of the Atlantic as buyers of government debt take fright at the prospects for inflation contained within the phenomenal printing of money that has kept the financial system on life support.

Some analysts are now weighing the prospects of a new, more catastrophic financial collapse starting in Eastern Europe. Latvia is truly facing economic catastrophe – output is shrinking at a rate of 20% a year – and, with massive credit provided by Swedish banks, some say threatening to take the rest of Europe down with it.

Latvia’s parliament is today considering emergency measures to its 2009 budget to attract funds from the IMF and European Union. The measures include a 10 percent lower old age pension, a savage 70 percent cut in the pensions of pensioners who still work and a 20 percent cut in state sector salaries, with allowances for parents reduced by 10 percent. "Yes, with yesterday's decisions the state has really been saved from bankruptcy," Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis claimed.

Meanwhile, all the major parties in Britain are considering where the axe will fall in order to stave off state bankruptcy in the coming period. And the crisis is over? Who are they kidding! The costs of saving the Latvian state or any of the capitalist states and the global capitalist system are unsustainable for the majority of the world’s population. For us, the future lies in replacing production for profit with production for need.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Let them eat cake

Few gatherings of world leaders can have shown greater political impotence alongside callous indifference than those currently gathered in Hokkaido, Japan, for the annual G8 summit. Protected from protestors as usual by a massive display of force, they are truly the leaders of the new world disorder.

Yesterday they discussed famine in Africa and rising food prices. But organisations like Oxfam had already sounded the alarm bells about whether commitments made at Gleneagles as long ago as 2005 will actually be adhered to. As to even earlier promises, Oxfam declared: “The Millennium Development Goals that were set out in 2000 were chosen because they were ambitious, but also because they were realistic and achievable. The current delays in meeting these commitments are a disgrace.”

But are the G8 leaders really bothered about the world’s poor and hungry? Judging by the lavish feast for Bush, Brown and company laid on by the Japanese hosts, the answer is a resounding ‘No’. While the prime minister was urging Britons to tighten their belts and stop wasting food, he and the other G8 leaders sat down to replenish themselves with an eight-course, 19-dish dinner prepared by 25 chefs. Perhaps the fact that there had only been four courses and wine for lunch had merely whetted their appetite.

Billed as a "world food shortages summit" – which is costing £238 million to stage - there was no sign of that at the banquet at the luxury Windsor hotel. The starter alone included caviar, sea urchin, smoked salmon, hot onion tart and winter lily bulb. Hairy crab Kegani bisque-style soup was another feature in a meal prepared by the Michelin chef Katsuhiro Nakamura. Other dishes included milk-fed lamb, roasted lamb and black truffle.

Marie Antoinette reputedly told starving French peasants to go and eat cake if they couldn’t afford bread. And we know what happened to her as a result. But that’s rushing ahead. What about the G8’s capacity for getting to grips with the world economic crisis and accelerating climate change by showing some political leadership? Not much doing on that front either, I’m afraid.

A statement released today could only say: “We remain positive about the long-term resilience of our economies and future global economic growth.” As to rising oil and food prices, the G8 leaders were only concerned that they posed a “serious challenge to stable growth worldwide”. Then it was back to insisting there was no alternative to the market economy and that “globalisation is a key driver for global economic growth and strong, prosperous economies”.

This is simply unreal. The corporate-driven globalised economy is facing its biggest crisis since 1929. A seemingly insoluble credit crunch is linked to falling output, rising prices, sharply increasing unemployment (especially in housebuilding where sales have slumped) and a loss of confidence. By all accounts, the Chinese economy is also coming off the rails at a rapid rate.

The G8 communiqué simply poured oil on troubled water and was followed this morning by a further crash in shares in London, with troubled lender Bradford & Bingley heading for total meltdown. The British Chambers of Commerce's (BCC) quarterly report didn’t help. A survey of almost 5,000 small, medium and large businesses suggested that the UK is facing a serious risk of recession within months.

As for cutting carbon emissions, the G8’s fine words cut no ice with environmental campaigners. “This is a complete failure of responsibility. They haven't moved forward at all. They've ducked the responsibility of adopting clear midterm targets and even the 2050 target is not a single thing more than what we got in Heiligendamm," said Daniel Mittler, political adviser for Greenpeace International, referring to the German town where last year's G8 was held.

So back to Marie Antoinette. Just like her, the G8 leaders are promoting a failing economic and political system at the expense of the masses. A movement in the spirit of the French Revolution of 1789 would be the best response.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

'Citizens must lead' on climate chaos

The upcoming G8+5 summit in Japan has climate change high on the agenda, apparently. The original eight countries have been widened to an unprecedented extent to include other major economies, no doubt in an attempt to pass the buck or find new reasons for the G8's failure to take action.

For according to a study published yesterday, none of the G8 countries are implementing enough measures to be considered in line with the target to keep the rise in global temperature below 2°C. The "G8 Climate Scorecards", compiled by environmental group WWF and insurance group Allianz, said even the best performers - Britain, France and Germany - had not taken adequate action to back the goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The US, Canada and Russia had simply failed the test altogether. Their joint appeal to the G8 for action was that it made “the best business sense in the long run”.

The same message about making money out of tackling climate change came from business consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers. A new PWC report called on politicians to stop talking and start acting. Richard Gledhill, head of climate change services at PWC, said: "Governments in all major economies must demonstrate their political will to establish a well functioning global carbon market that puts a price on carbon emissions. That will send the right economic signals to investors and consumers to deliver the new technologies and changes in behaviour required to combat global warming." [emphasis added]

The fundamental problem with both reports is that the corporations themselves have driven climate change to its crisis point today. The sharp rise in emissions over the last 30 years coincides precisely with corporate-driven globalisation, with its ravaging of resources and growth mania.

Some people like eminent climate scientist James Hansen are clear about the reasons for inaction. In a 20h anniversary presentation of his 1988 warning to the US Congress he puts it plainly:

“Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming. CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” He added: “If politicians remain at loggerheads, citizens must lead.”

But, having shone the spotlight on profit-hungry corporations, Hansen’s chess-board proposal for “blocking” fossil fuel corporations with a carbon tax with 100% of the income to be shared amongst the population lets the guilty parties off the hook. That’s because his application of the scientific method doesn’t stretch to the economy. If it did, he’d soon find that the system behind the dynamic of corporate growth drove the lies about global warming and drives the agenda at the G8 which will once again yield no concrete action.

Citizens must undoubtedly lead, but that leadership must be guided by a conscious understanding of the essence of the crisis: the failing global system of resource-hungry, environmentally-destructive capitalist corporations. What’s so urgently needed is the greatest social change since the dawn of civilisation. The shift to local production that must accompany the reduction in energy consumption needed to limit climate change means eliminating the profit from production, taking all fossil fuels into social ownership and switching from resource exploitation to careful stewardship.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor