Memo to Attenborough: Capitalism, not human beings, is the earth’s 'plague'

TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s programmes are usually fascinating and informative but when it comes to his views on population control, he is talking rubbish. Reactionary rubbish at that.

“Human beings are a plague on the earth,” Attenborough says in an interview with the Radio Times. If we don’t limit “the frightening explosion in human numbers, the natural world will do it for us”.

Attenborough (president of the Malthusian Optimum Population Trust) calls for urgent measures to cut population growth in developing countries: “We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves…”

But Ethiopia is actually a classic example of why this is absolute nonsense. If the calories grown in Ethiopia stayed in Ethiopia then there would be no problem feeding the whole population. But the government’s economic plan is dependent on forcing its own citizens off the land and handing it over to global agribusiness to grow crops for export.

Ethiopia has had a consistently high annual growth in GDP throughout the last two decades. In 2011, it was 7%, compared to an overall global growth rate of 3.9% in the same year, and most of this expansion is accounted for by agriculture.

The government has a 10-year plan to double the size of the economy, and this means doubling industrial agriculture and agricultural products such as refined sugar and leather. This is to be achieved by selling or leasing millions of acres of land to global agri-businesses.

The removal of a planned total of 1.5 million rural families to new "model" villages in four regions, including approximately 45,000 households in Gambella province, is well underway. Claims that people are going voluntarily and that jobs and services are waiting for them are a pack of lies.

One group of refugees from Gambella is taking legal action against the British Department for International Development. Britain is one of the biggest contributors to the Protection of Basic Services (PBS) programme which pays for corrupt officials and soldiers and infrastructure for the clearances.

The legal action, undertaken by British law firm Leigh Day, is being launched from the world’s biggest refugee camp at Dadaab in northern Kenya where Ethiopians fled after reaching the “model villages” to find there was nothing there.

The World Bank endorses the Ethiopian government’s desire to get people out of what it calls “overpopulated rural settings”, but it admits that in spite of all this recent growth “the absolute number of poor is almost the same as 15 years ago and a significant proportion of the population remains just above the poverty line and vulnerable to shocks”.

It is true that population of Ethiopia is growing at around 2.1% per year, but that rate of growth is slowing. The fertility rate, i.e. the average number of births per woman, is still relatively high at 5.7, but this is also slowing. The rate of births always increases when early deaths from wars, disease or famine increases. It slows when things are more stable but it takes time for that social change to take hold.

As more and more land is cleared of people or of trees and jungle, and subjected to the intensive farming practices of the global chemical corporations, so desertification and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase. Famine and hunger also rises, as we have seen.

If there was a fair distribution of food, care and support, health and education in Ethiopia and all the countries of the world, and if the people owned the land they farm, there would be no problem feeding people. This approach would also protect the eco-system because it would be sustainable.

People are not the problem, Sir David, global capitalism and its relentless drive for “growth” is. I hope you will be making a programme about that soon!

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Ethiopia evicts farmers as starvation grows

The Ethiopian government is evicting up to 90,000 of its own people from their land to lease to foreign investors to grow crops for export. And they are doing this at a time when 4.5 million Ethiopians in the south-east of the country face starvation.

Survival International has charted the government’s theft of the country's most productive farmland, using so-called “nationalisation of land” to further the interests of a corrupt élite.

Along the Omo River in south west Ethiopia, Malaysian, Italian, Korean and Chinese firms are operating agri-businesses. The government is clearing as much as 245,000 hectares for vast state-owned, sugar-cane plantations. The self-sufficient, and efficient, Omo Valley people who have lived for centuries on small-scale mixed farming - the most sustainable kind of farming - are being forced out. Threats, jailings, beatings and rape are used to silence opposition.

The government deems the Omo valley people 'backward' and in need of modernisation. In other words, from independent farmers they will become landless labourers - either working for foreign interests or building a series of dams. This is an ecological disaster in the making that will deprive the land of its annual irrigation.

Survival International’s Director, Stephen Corry, said: "The Omo Valley tribes people are neither ‘backward’ nor need ‘modernising’ – they are as much a part of the 21st century as the multinationals that seek to appropriate their land. The tragedy is, forcing them to become manual labourers will almost certainly lead to a drastic reduction in their quality of life and condemn them to starvation and destitution like so many of their fellow countrymen."

The Ethiopian Minister for Mines clarified his government's investment policy when he said that the country's deposits of gold, silver, copper and other metals and minerals are "totally open" to foreign investors, with "no restrictions" at all.

China is seizing the opportunities on offer - some might call it a simple buyout. China's trade with Africa will exceed $110bn (£71bn) in 2011 and in Ethiopia they are creating a huge construction boom and increases in food and other exports.

Ethiopia is a capitalist success story, with GDP rising from $6.88bn in 1994 to $28.53bn in 2010. The annual growth rate is 8% but the impoverishment of the majority is the price being paid. Half the country's 72 million people live on less than $1 a day. Children as young as eight labour in government-owned sugar cane plantations, managed by Indian agri-businesses, who pay the equivalent of $0.83 a day. Newly-landless Omo Valley people who don't find work will be forced to move to the capital, Addis Ababa – dubbed “the world's biggest slum city” – in search of work.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi cynically defends these rapacious policies and says those who accuse foreign companies of land grabbing are ill-informed, saying: “We do not want to admire the beauty of our country while we starve.” Zenawi and his EPRDF party are a corrupt élite who stole the 2005 election. In a wave of protests, 30 people were killed and 80,000 students rounded up; many oppositionists are still in jail.

This opposition movement, driven temporarily underground, will re-emerge as Africa's peoples set out to complete their struggle for liberation from colonialism with a struggle for democracy. But to succeed it will need outside assistance and what happens now in Egypt - Africa's second most populous and politically now most advanced country – is absolutely crucial to all of Africa.

The establishment of a popular democracy in Egypt, based on People's Assemblies, could rush aid and support to democratic struggles elsewhere. The future of Africa is not in the hands of the Chinese government, the World Bank or the aid agencies - it is to a very great extent, in the hands of the Egyptian masses.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Famine is not made in Africa

Millions have watched in horror the TV pictures of the famine in Africa. Over 11 million people in the Horn of Africa – Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and parts of Uganda – face starvation, according to the United Nations.

The refusal of the world's governments to act on climate change, and the debt-fuelled financial crisis, have combined to create a human catastrophe. There is enough food to feed everyone in the world, but food prices are at an all-time high.

There have been no real rains since last April and there is little water, pasture or arable land left. There is some food, of course - but at prices that most people cannot afford.

The West denounces the Shabab rebel government for refusing foreign aid until now but forgets their role in undermining one of the ancient cradles of trade and civilisation. British and Italian colonialism began the carve-up then the US invasion of 1993 led to the division of the country. War and conflict have combined with the extreme fragility of the climate to create the current disaster.

In 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that by 2030 the number of climate-related deaths, from disease, malnutrition, flooding and crop failures, would be 10 million. Like global warming, this process is happening faster than anyone predicted and the figure could be more than reached in 2011, almost 20 years earlier than forecast.

Capitalism's great Chinese economic miracle is also proving unsustainable, as the water runs out in the north of the country. Like Somalia, the north China plain has fragile water resources and these have been squandered to develop giant industrial cities, such as Beijing and Tianlin, and “modern” agriculture.

Now many rivers have dried up because of a long drought, with the situation worsened by diverting and damming their natural flow. The industrial cities are using up underground aquifers faster than they can replenish. The original estimate for when they would dry up was 30 years but it's happening even faster and the Chinese authorities have no answers.

And when governments have no answers, watch out for wars over resources.

The UN Security Council met yesterday in Canada to talk about climate change as a security issue. They heard Achim Steiner from the UN Environment Programme telling them climate change will "exponentially" increase the scale of natural disasters.

The crisis in the Horn of Africa, he warned, shows that "our capacity to handle these kinds of events is proving a challenge, particularly if they occur simultaneously and start affecting, for instance, global food markets, regional food security issues, displacing people, creating refugees across borders".

The global market will always give corporations and financial speculators opportunities. For example the Russian wheat crop has recovered this year but in the US and Canada heavy rain delayed planting and as a result prices remain high.

But when big countries appear to profit at the expense of others in a trade war, it isn't long before politicians start to present it as an act of actual war.

Our modern day "four horsemen of the apocalypse" are war, famine, profit-driven capitalism and climate change, with capitalism in the role of the false god that ushers in the other three.

Of course, we have the resources to deal with the crisis in the Horn of Africa. We can tackle climate change. A wealth of research sets out what we need to do in the short, medium and long term. We can grow and distribute enough food. We can overcome war by creating the economic and social conditions for peace. But we can't vanquish climate change, war and famine until we vanquish capitalism and free our shared resources from its grip.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

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

Profit hunger driving world famine

The unchecked surge in the power of global agri-business is bringing the world to the brink of an unprecedented famine. At a world summit on food and agriculture which ended in Rome yesterday, the onus was placed firmly on the governments of developing nations to deliver food security to their people. The G8 countries did not even bother to send representatives.

If they had been there, they might have had to explain why it is that governments in developing countries are consistently unable to feed their populations, even when they are doing everything they can to follow the capitalist, free market development model proposed by the G8, World Bank and IMF.

Take Ethiopia, which is once again in the midst of a famine, in spite of a dramatic economic surge which has transformed the country’s economy. Over the past few years infrastructure development and industry have expanded dramatically. The nostrum is that this kind of profit-driven growth will in the end benefit the population as a whole – and yet people go on starving.

This is the country where the Blue Nile rises, and fertile land is plentiful. The government is now exploiting it according to the capitalist growth model. There is a booming government-backed industry growing flowers for export, with extensive irrigation and application of nitrates. And 300,000 acres of fertile land were sold to an Indian corporation this year for around $1 dollar an acre.

GRAIN, an organisation which campaigns with small farmers has exposed this global land grab. "We're seeing over 40 million hectares of prime farm land being taken over by financial investors and rich states. We're talking about $100 billion that's being mobilised. Essentially financial investors have seen that in the food crisis there's money to be made in farmland and they're buying it up very cheap," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN.

The issue faced by the peoples of the world is not food shortages, but the intense commodification of food and land which is taking place alongside changes brought about by climate change.

Countries which have previously been able to feed their populations, such as Uganda and Paraguay, are now facing hunger. China is buying up land in other countries to try and deal with their own food shortages, caused by climate change and by the capitalist model of development now dominating the Chinese economy.

The food processing industry threatens the existence of farming even in wealthy countries such as the US and Britain. Farmers are no longer producing food, but raw materials which the global food industries process into “alue added” commodities, expanding the potential for profit. For an excellent example of how this process is being presented to people click here to see the latest McCain advert.

The raw materials producers – we call them farmers – are consistently driven down on price, and the global corporations stand between them and their potential market, ensuring that we have to buy our food from supermarkets and not from the producer.

Now this has been extended to the point where the food processing businesses are simply cutting farmers out of the process altogether and taking over the land, so that every scrap of profit goes their way. And the industrial methods they use are creating deserts and intensifying climate change.

While people in developing countries suffer from famine, their exported calories are being consumed in the west, in the form of cheap, high-fat, high-calorie diets, leading to a massive health crisis.

The movement for local food and grow-your-own may be on the right track in addressing an aspect of the problem, but it is viable only in small patches and does nothing to assist people who have no land, no economic resources and no power. That is concentrated in the hands of a handful of agri-corporations and client governments. How to overturn this obscene staten of affairs is what we need to address to prevent a global famine.

Penny Cole
Environment editor