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

Pension funds in global farmland grab

Public sector pensions from across the globe are helping to drive up food prices by buying up farmland in poor countries as investments. And at least one local government pension fund in Britain is reportedly considering a similar move.

As hundreds of thousands of teachers, lecturers and civil servants strike today in defence of their pensions, the issue of what happens to their contributions is worth considering. A new report from GRAIN, the organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements, is extremely critical of some funds. GRAIN says:

Large scale agricultural land acquisitions are generating conflicts and controversies around the world. A growing body of reports show that these projects are bad for local communities and that they promote the wrong kind of agriculture for a world in the grips of serious food and environmental crises. Yet funds continue to flow to overseas farmland like iron to a magnet. Why? Because of the financial returns. And some of the biggest players looking to profit from farmland are pension funds, with billions of dollars invested.

The big picture shows that:

• the largest institutional investors are planning to double their portfolio holdings in agricultural commodities, including farmland;
• they are reportedly going to do it very soon;
• the new surge in money will push up global food prices;
• high food prices will hit poor, rural and working-class communities hard.

GRAIN estimates that pension funds have $23 trillion in assets, of which some US$100 billion are believed to be invested in commodities. Of this money in commodities, some $5–15 billion are reportedly going into farmland acquisitions. By 2015, these commodity and farmland investments are expected to double.

Pension fund managers see farmland as “a big attraction” for them with what they call . good "fundamentals". In this case, rising demand is driven by an increasing world population needing to be fed, and the resources to feed these people being finite.

“They see long-term pay-offs from the rising value of farmland and the cash flow that will in the meantime come from crop sales, dairy herds or meat production,” says GRAIN.

Pension funds in Britain are increasingly looking at getting involved in the farmland grab. According to reports, this includes the Merseyside Pension Fund which covers local government workers in the region. And it’s not as if the fund’s current investments are fine and dandy. The last published accounts reveal substantial investments in such corporations as tax-dodging Vodafone, notorious oil giants Shell and BP and a couple of major pharmaceuticals.

GRAIN wants trade unions to get involved campaigns for disinvestment in farmland and other agricultural commodities, saying: “Pension funds are supposed to be working for workers, helping to keep their retirement savings safe until a later date. For this reason alone, there should be a level of public or other accountability involved when it comes to investment strategies and decisions.”

But there are other questions and issues too. It is a paradox that workers’ contributions to pension funds are used to prop up capitalist corporations through share ownership. At the end of 2008, the latest figures available, show that pension funds owned nearly 13% of shares on the London stock market with funds of £150 billion (insurance companies used customers’ premiums to buy up another 13% by the way). A survey earlier this year showed that UK pension assets now amount to 76% of national income.

Using these funds and assets for social purposes, with new arrangements to ensure that the value of pensions is protected, instead of for profit or speculation in farmland, is surely an aspiration worth fighting for.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor