The House of Commons Science and Technology select committee has just this morning published the results of its inquiry into genetically modified crops and our attitude to them within the EU.

I was one of a number of contributors of evidence to the select committee. I felt compelled to do so, despite my fears (which I made clear at the time along with a number of colleagues), that the stated reasons for conducting the inquiry prejudged the result.

Today’s publication, which is making headline news across the entire press, has sadly shown that these fears were well founded.

The preamble to the terms of reference for the inquiry declares that “GM is one of several technologies necessary to foster a ‘vibrant sector’ in UK agriculture”, but is being held back by EU red tape.

What ought to have been at best a potential conclusion of the research was thus its guiding principle. Instead of an invitation to open and honest discussion of the merits of the EU’s precautious stance, what we got was a call to find ‘scientific’ reasons to prop up foregone and pre-judged economic logic.

Easy not to find what you’re not looking for!

The main bone of contention is the EU’s use of the ‘precautionary principle‘. According to this principle, where practices such as the growing of GM crops carry with them an unknown level of risk (which may be small, but is more than zero) of catastrophic harm, the burden of proof should lie in demonstrating that they are safe, rather than that they are harmful.

There are sound reasons, both ethical and practical, for adopting this stance. If we wait for evidence of harm, it follows that harm – potentially catastrophic – would already have been done before we can step in with legislation.

Given any potential for catastrophe, however small, we ought not to accept this on moral or on prudential grounds. From an economic perspective, the cost of funding research to prove the practice is safe is placed on the corporations who stand to gain from it. This lifts the burden from EU taxpayers who stand to suffer from harm.

The preamble to the select committee inquiry stated that “the ‘precautionary principle’ has been criticized for holding back development of the technology, despite European Commission reports finding no scientific evidence associating GM organisms with higher risks for the environment or food and feed safety.”

This was either a disingenuous misrepresentation of the very concept of the precautionary principle, or merely an expression of premature rejection of the principle before any evidence had been submitted.

It was irrelevant that the Commission thus far had no evidence of harm, because they were not looking for evidence of harm but evidence of safety.

Clear scientific evidence of ‘no more risk’, claims report

Distressingly, deeply-worryingly, the published report now claims that “The scientific evidence is clear that crops developed using genetic modification pose no more risk to humans, animals or the environment than equivalent crops developed using more ‘conventional’ techniques.”

Despite the now much stronger claim, the grounds for this conclusion do not move beyond the lack of evidence of harm already referred to in the preamble.

This was precisely the logical mistake that I warned against in my submitted evidence, in which I brought to the attention of the committee my work on GM and precaution co-authored with Nassim Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan‘.

The bottom line of that work was that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Merely that we arguably haven’t yet seen significant evidence of harm from GM food does nothing to support the claim that the potential for ruinous harm is not there.

And as reported on The Ecologist earlier this week, there is no scientific concensus that GM crops and food are safe, indeed: “The totality of research outcomes in the field of GM crop safety is nuanced; complex; often contradictory or inconclusive; confounded by researchers’ choices, assumptions, and funding sources; and, in general, has raised more questions than it has answered.”

A lack of conclusive evidence that GM poses a risk to us does not mean that we should give the big agro-tech firms free rein, turning Britain or Europe into a giant experiment from which there may be no going back.

A smoking gun?

A useful analogy here is the case of smoking. For years governments were prevented from instituting measures to curtail the sale of cigarettes, because the powerful tobacco companies blocked them at every turn by demanding incontrovertible evidence that cigarettes caused harm.

It took years before the medical profession had collected enough evidence to face up to the highly paid lawyers of the cigarette firms.

Challenges to advertising restrictions and proposals for plain packaging are being mounted even to this day, on the basis of a lack of evidence. Think how many lives could have been saved if we had adopted precautionary reasoning in this case, and required tobacco companies to prove their products were safe before we allowed them onto the market.

Did it ever make much sense to fill one’s lungs repeatedly with a cocktail of smoke and chemicals? Did we really have to wait for proof beyond reasonable doubt that smoking causes lung cancer to justify action to rein in the cigarette companies, their advertising, etc.?

The stakes in the case of GM are even higher. Smoking caused an ‘epidemic’ of mortality and morbidity, but it never threatened to ruin us altogether. Where there is a threat of ruin – where there is a risk to our entire ecosystems and food-systems – then we should not have to wait for the ‘evidence’ to come in before we act. For, by the time it comes in, it would be too late.

This is when precautionary reasoning is decisive: in cases where there is a risk of ruin. This is what Taleb and I have shown. This is what the Select Committee have palpably refused to think about, and set their face against: thus putting us all at risk.

EU pen-pushers standing in the way of British enterprise?

Sadly, the government will now no-doubt use the results of this ‘inquiry’ as a stick with which to beat the EU, and to bolster the Tory narrative of the EU as nothing more than a gang of small-minded foreign pen-pushers standing in the way of the proud British spirit of free enterprise.

Their report’s conclusion that “decisions about access to and use of safe products should be made by national governments on behalf of the populations that elected them, not by the EU”, and their call on the EU “not to unjustifiably restrict the choices available to other elected governments and the citizens whom they represent” are a demand to let GMOs rip without further ado.

We should be glad that for the moment this report has no power actually to influence EU procedure. It is a worrying glimpse of what this country would look like without the modest protection EU legislation currently provides from some of the worst excesses of corporate domination.

The report: ‘EU regulation on GMOs not ‘fit for purpose‘.

Dr. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House, and a regular contributor to The Ecologist and to Resurgence. He is also the Green Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election.

More information: ‘The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam.

The House of Commons Science and Technology select committee has just this morning published the results of its inquiry into genetically modified crops and our attitude to them within the EU.

I was one of a number of contributors of evidence to the select committee. I felt compelled to do so, despite my fears (which I made clear at the time along with a number of colleagues), that the stated reasons for conducting the inquiry prejudged the result.

Today’s publication, which is making headline news across the entire press, has sadly shown that these fears were well founded.

The preamble to the terms of reference for the inquiry declares that “GM is one of several technologies necessary to foster a ‘vibrant sector’ in UK agriculture”, but is being held back by EU red tape.

What ought to have been at best a potential conclusion of the research was thus its guiding principle. Instead of an invitation to open and honest discussion of the merits of the EU’s precautious stance, what we got was a call to find ‘scientific’ reasons to prop up foregone and pre-judged economic logic.

Easy not to find what you’re not looking for!

The main bone of contention is the EU’s use of the ‘precautionary principle‘. According to this principle, where practices such as the growing of GM crops carry with them an unknown level of risk (which may be small, but is more than zero) of catastrophic harm, the burden of proof should lie in demonstrating that they are safe, rather than that they are harmful.

There are sound reasons, both ethical and practical, for adopting this stance. If we wait for evidence of harm, it follows that harm – potentially catastrophic – would already have been done before we can step in with legislation.

Given any potential for catastrophe, however small, we ought not to accept this on moral or on prudential grounds. From an economic perspective, the cost of funding research to prove the practice is safe is placed on the corporations who stand to gain from it. This lifts the burden from EU taxpayers who stand to suffer from harm.

The preamble to the select committee inquiry stated that “the ‘precautionary principle’ has been criticized for holding back development of the technology, despite European Commission reports finding no scientific evidence associating GM organisms with higher risks for the environment or food and feed safety.”

This was either a disingenuous misrepresentation of the very concept of the precautionary principle, or merely an expression of premature rejection of the principle before any evidence had been submitted.

It was irrelevant that the Commission thus far had no evidence of harm, because they were not looking for evidence of harm but evidence of safety.

Clear scientific evidence of ‘no more risk’, claims report

Distressingly, deeply-worryingly, the published report now claims that “The scientific evidence is clear that crops developed using genetic modification pose no more risk to humans, animals or the environment than equivalent crops developed using more ‘conventional’ techniques.”

Despite the now much stronger claim, the grounds for this conclusion do not move beyond the lack of evidence of harm already referred to in the preamble.

This was precisely the logical mistake that I warned against in my submitted evidence, in which I brought to the attention of the committee my work on GM and precaution co-authored with Nassim Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan‘.

The bottom line of that work was that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Merely that we arguably haven’t yet seen significant evidence of harm from GM food does nothing to support the claim that the potential for ruinous harm is not there.

And as reported on The Ecologist earlier this week, there is no scientific concensus that GM crops and food are safe, indeed: “The totality of research outcomes in the field of GM crop safety is nuanced; complex; often contradictory or inconclusive; confounded by researchers’ choices, assumptions, and funding sources; and, in general, has raised more questions than it has answered.”

A lack of conclusive evidence that GM poses a risk to us does not mean that we should give the big agro-tech firms free rein, turning Britain or Europe into a giant experiment from which there may be no going back.

A smoking gun?

A useful analogy here is the case of smoking. For years governments were prevented from instituting measures to curtail the sale of cigarettes, because the powerful tobacco companies blocked them at every turn by demanding incontrovertible evidence that cigarettes caused harm.

It took years before the medical profession had collected enough evidence to face up to the highly paid lawyers of the cigarette firms.

Challenges to advertising restrictions and proposals for plain packaging are being mounted even to this day, on the basis of a lack of evidence. Think how many lives could have been saved if we had adopted precautionary reasoning in this case, and required tobacco companies to prove their products were safe before we allowed them onto the market.

Did it ever make much sense to fill one’s lungs repeatedly with a cocktail of smoke and chemicals? Did we really have to wait for proof beyond reasonable doubt that smoking causes lung cancer to justify action to rein in the cigarette companies, their advertising, etc.?

The stakes in the case of GM are even higher. Smoking caused an ‘epidemic’ of mortality and morbidity, but it never threatened to ruin us altogether. Where there is a threat of ruin – where there is a risk to our entire ecosystems and food-systems – then we should not have to wait for the ‘evidence’ to come in before we act. For, by the time it comes in, it would be too late.

This is when precautionary reasoning is decisive: in cases where there is a risk of ruin. This is what Taleb and I have shown. This is what the Select Committee have palpably refused to think about, and set their face against: thus putting us all at risk.

EU pen-pushers standing in the way of British enterprise?

Sadly, the government will now no-doubt use the results of this ‘inquiry’ as a stick with which to beat the EU, and to bolster the Tory narrative of the EU as nothing more than a gang of small-minded foreign pen-pushers standing in the way of the proud British spirit of free enterprise.

Their report’s conclusion that “decisions about access to and use of safe products should be made by national governments on behalf of the populations that elected them, not by the EU”, and their call on the EU “not to unjustifiably restrict the choices available to other elected governments and the citizens whom they represent” are a demand to let GMOs rip without further ado.

We should be glad that for the moment this report has no power actually to influence EU procedure. It is a worrying glimpse of what this country would look like without the modest protection EU legislation currently provides from some of the worst excesses of corporate domination.

The report: ‘EU regulation on GMOs not ‘fit for purpose‘.

Dr. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House, and a regular contributor to The Ecologist and to Resurgence. He is also the Green Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election.

More information: ‘The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam.

On 13th January, just before the Parliamentary Committee on the Infrastructure Bill was to report back to the House of Commons, I put every single MP in the UK (and more recently, all the Lords with a policy interest in Energy and the Environment) on legal notice.

The point I made in my ‘Letter before Action’ was that if they passed the Bill with the clauses promoting 1. economic recovery of petroleum; and 2. fracking; and if harm ensued thereby, they might find themselves in breach of their moral and legal duty to the nation set out in The Code of Conduct for Members of
Parliament.

Among other obligations it reminds MPs that they “have a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents”, and that they must “take decisions solely in terms of the public interest”, the latter obligation also applying to members of the House of Lords.

As public servants both MPs and Lords are, moreover, “accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office.”

So what about the risks of fracking?

I also sent them the introduction and executive summary of this document detailing the risks and harms of fracking – a document instrumental in New York State’s decision to ban the practice last December.

I sent the 657 letters by recorded delivery (it took the local post office 10 hours to process), so even if the MPs didn’t even look at them, from a legal point of view those letters will have been deemed as read.

Interestingly, a flurry of amendments to the Bill ensued, mitigating the clauses allowing fracking and even calling for a moratorium. Was this a complete coincidence, or did some of our elected representatives check with their lawyers and find that the Code of Conduct for MPs holds weight in a civil court?

I have taken legal advice from a barister and it does, in case you’re wondering.

I received a number of replies from MPs, many saying they had passed the information to my own MP, Neil Carmichael (Conservative), according to “strict Parliamentary protocol”.

This made me wonder: did the industry lobbyists who clearly had a major hand in drafting the Bill also get asked to make contact only via their own MPs? Either way, no MP can now legally deny prior knowledge of the risks and harms of fracking.

The public and national interest trampled underfoot

The Commons proceeded to significantly amend the fracking clauses in the Bill, and if their amendment 21 had stood, fracking would not have been permitted in AONBs, SSSIs, National Parks, under aquifers, etc, and drilling companies would have had to go through a number of procedures in order to frack including individual notification of local residents.

However, the Lords replaced this amendment in short order, doing two things:

• watering down the safeguards proposed by the Commons so as to make them toothless and dependent upon secondary legislation; and
• applying those weakened safeguards only to fracking using over 1,000 cubic metres of fluid, meaning that all exploratory and potentially even medium scale production could escape the safeguards altogether.

The Lords made these replacement amendments at the final ‘ping pong’ stage of the bill, and the Commons were assigned a paltry 1 hour’s discussion to address them. The Commons vote showed that MPs were now strongly divided about fracking (257 in favour of the Lords amendments, 203 against), but the amendments were still passed.

Only Caroline Lucas MP (Green) pointed out the farcical nature of these phantom safeguards, but there was no time to explore further. The following morning on 12th February, with truly unseemly haste, the Bill was made law.

We now have a situation where, by law, drilling companies can frack wherever they like with no special permission, as long as they use less than 1,000 cubic metres of fluid – about the volume of a large municipal swimming pool.

To our knowledge, all fracks carried out to date in the UK have used significantly less. Certainly what this means is that all future drilling that uses less than 1,000 cubic meters of fluid is exempt from all the safeguards drafted.

Goodbye ‘Green and Pleasant Land’

Reading the Hansard scripts of the discussions that took place on this Bill, we don’t think any of those in favour of the Act that was passed have a clue what fracking actually looks like in production. They seem to be chatting about a well or two here or there, nothing to disturb a national park … do they really not know? It requires hundreds of wells, four to every square mile, to make a viable production facility.

This government has an aggressive expansion policy to put in place up to 30,000 wells. Goodbye ‘green and pleasant land’! Use Google Earth to have a look at Texas or North Dakota and you’ll pretty soon get the idea.

Then – health hazards aside – there are the thousands upon thousands of HGV journeys required to service the site. And the disposal of the millions of gallons of toxic waste from the process. This is not easy, cheap, abundant gas and oil. It’s an expensive post-apocalyptic nightmare and an environmental disaster.

Not only that. One clause of the Infrastructure Act remained virtually unchallenged from start to finish, and that is a clause adjusting the Petroleum Act 1998, apparently making it a legal obligation for the Government to “maximise the economic recovery of UK petroleum” and for the relevant Secretary of State to create a strategy for doing this in whatever way he sees fit.

A legal duty to maximize petroleum recovery

This clause is so astonishing that it bears printing in full:

This appears to be no less than a legal mandate to fill the coffers of Halliburton, oil infrastructure supplier par excellence, and other industry players, with a clause to cover the arse of any Secretary of State who implements this.

Our Government has effectively just passed the ‘Support Halliburton’ Act 2015, with a few subsections making it easy to frack, and a bunch of transport, planning and other elements thrown in for infrastructural support and general confusion.

How exactly is this in the ‘national interest’ or that of constutuents? Isn’t the real national interest the health and happiness of the inhabitants of this country and the land we live on? Shouldn’t all economic activity be serving that, not vice versa? Is this not the true legal mandate of anyone in public service?

Anyone in either House who supported this corrupt, dangerous and ridiculously rushed piece of legislation has acted in blatant contravention of their legally-binding Code of Conduct, and failed miserably in their duty of care. We must prepare to sue.

Jojo Mehta is a mother of two young children based in Nympsfield, Gloucestershire, and a campaigner on environmental and democratic issues. Together with Katy Dunne, she is a co-founder of Frack Free Five Valleys.

Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills awoke last Friday to find that 36 olive trees had been cut or seriously damaged during the night, probably by Israeli settlers.

The 25 year-old trees, owned by the Hushiy family from Yatta, were located near the village of Qawawis in the South Hebron Hills, between the Israeli illegal outpost of Mitzpe Yair and the Israeli settlement of Suseya, beside Bypass road 317.

This is the third incident of Israeli settler ‘price tag’ vandalism against the Palestinian inhabitants of the South Hebron Hills in the last two months.

On 9th January 2015, in the same area between the Bypass road 317 and Suseya settlement, Palestinians discovered nearly 200 olive trees cut on their property as well as established almond trees. Some days before, on 31st December, two settlers threw a Molotov cocktail into a Palestinian house in Ad Deirat village.

Palestinian residents of the South Hebron hills have suffered from the presence of Israeli settlers since the 70s. Ongoing settler violence deprives Palestinian families of security in daily life and restricts their freedom of movement. The violence and vandalism is also aimed at undermining the basis of their subsistence on the land.

By occupying Palestinian agricultural lands and destroying Palestinian olive trees, crops and property, Israeli settlers seek to deprive the Palestinians of their main livelihood. Olive trees are also of huge symbolic, cultural and historic significance to Palestinains, and represent their ‘rootedness’ in the land. As reported by Electronic Intifada in 2007:

“Universally regarded as the symbol of peace, the olive tree has become the object of violence. For more than forty years, Israel has uprooted over one million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees in Palestine with terrible economic and ecological consequences for the Palestinian people.

“Their wilful destruction has so threatened Palestinian culture, heritage and identity that the olive tree has now become the symbol of Palestinian steadfastness because of its own rootedness and ability to survive in a land where water is perennially scarce.”

An illegal attack on Palestinian history, culture and livelihood

According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Hague Regulations, the International Court of Justice, and several United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements and outposts in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal, despite Israel’s refusal to accept their application.

Most settlement outposts, including Havat Ma’on (Hill 833), are also considered illegal also under Israeli law, but even these are mostly tolerated by the authorities and protected from attempts by Palestinians to reclaim their land.

The destruction of the olive trees is also a specific violation of Article 54 of the 1977 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare”. It states:

“It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”

In the West Bank an estimated 100,000 Palestinian families depend on olive sales, and the olive harvest provides farmers with 25-50% of their annual income. Indeed for many it is essential to their survival.

Given the olive trees’ cultural value to Palestinians, along with the festivities and communal work that accompanies the olive harvest, their destruction also violates Article 53 of the 1977 Protocol, which prohibits “acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples” and “to make such objects the object of reprisals.”

Despite their international obligations, Israeli police and army personnel rarely intervene when settlers cut down trees or commit other acts of vandalism.

Forbidden to plant olive trees on their own land

Indeed they carry out their own attacks on Palestinian civilians and their international supporters, as they did about a month ago on 23rd January when a group of Palestinians from Susiya village in the South Hebron Hills tried to plant olive trees on a plot of village land between the Israeli army base and the Israeli settlement of Suseya.

First the Israeli army declared the area a ‘closed military zone’ then they attacked the procession of about 150 people as it made its way towards the land, using stun grenades, tear gas, water cannon and physical and verbal violence. During the action, the Israeli forces arrested four Palestinians.

In spite of this most of the demonstrators reached the land and started to plant the olive trees. Immediately, Israeli soldiers and policemen pushed the crowd back towards Susiya village, again deploying stun grenades, tear gas and waer cannon, pushing and attacking the people, and arresting another two Palestinians.

A few days before, on 19th January, soldiers killed a sheep in the Tuba village area, while they were chasing away a flock owned by Palestinians. A day later Israeli soldiers arrested a 14 year-old Palestinian boy while he was grazing a flock near Maghayir Al Abeed village, and demolished four structures in the Ar-Rifa’iyya village.

“Despite attempts by settlers to force them from the area through violence and intimidation, the Palestinian communities of the South Hebron Hills remain strong in their commitment to nonviolent popular resistance against the Israeli occupation”, reports Operation Dove.

Action: Operation Dove has maintained an international presence in At-Tuwani and South Hebron Hills since 2004. It is a project of Italy-based Operazione Colomba, a project open to all people, believers and nonbelievers, who believe that nonviolence is the only way to get a true Peace, based on truth, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation. Its principles are:

• Nonviolence: an active and creative strength which comes to life through various actions such as interposition, accompaniment, mediation, advocacy, protection, reconciliation, animation …
• Sharing life: volunteers share their lives with the victims of both parts of the conflict, no matter the ethnic group, the religion or political view …
• People involvement: the few requirements to be a volunteer are: the will to live in a nonviolent way, the ability to live in a group, to be of age and finally to take part in the training course.

For the right fee David Miliband will have dinner with you. A couple of years ago, that fee seems to have been around £20,000 + (substantial) expenses. These days, it seems he only asks for £10,000 to £15,000.

I raise this because two of the elder Miliband’s predecessors at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have got themselves into a bit of bother, having been caught red handed offering to use the influence bestowed on them by the British electorate to advance the interests of a fictional Chinese firm in exchange for a significant sum of money.

Jack Straw used the same defence as he did when the Guardian put to him serious questions about his involvement in torture: that he had done nothing which was against the law. I am sure this is true.

He may deserve to be in prison for his role in the Iraq War, but he’s not stupid enough to commit more minor offences. Unless you’re a fool, there are plenty of ways to amass a personal fortune from the office time and influence granted to you by your constituents without deviating one iota from the legislation you have a role in writing.

For me, though, these scandals are interesting not because they highlight a few bad apples, but because they are a window into a whole world. There is no suggestion, for example, that any of David Miliband’s dinner engagements have been with anyone particularly unsavoury, but yet they still leave a bad taste in my mouth.

What are you really buying for a £26,000 speech?

I suppose part of my concern is that I’ve seen the man speak. Despite what the papers always said, he’s no more charismatic than his brother – by which I mean, he can tell a joke and string a sentence together, but it’s nothing special. He’s no Brown or Blair.

Given this, why would a company pay more than £26,000 in total to have him at their event? Is it for the jokes, or for something else? Who would they sit him next to during the dinner? What conversation would they have over their starters? What questions would they ask?

Influence is a complex business. It’s about knowing how to put things, and who to put them to. The corridors of power are a maze. Westminster and Whitehall are like the internet without any search engines. With no guide, it’s almost impossible to find what you need. Almost everyone gets lost. How much each of us can influence formal politics depends, therefore, partly on the access we have to those who know parliament best and so can give us a steer.

If you want to know who to talk to about this government policy, or how to get that detail of law changed, then sitting at dinner next to a former foreign secretary would be very useful. Of course, none of this information is secret. There is no reason he shouldn’t tell anyone who asks. It’s just, not everyone has the opportunity to pose their question. Most people can’t pay £20,000 to get to sit next to the former Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.

Snouts in the corporate trough

Of course, it’s unfair to pick on David Miliband. There are huge numbers of current and former politicians who will happily dine at your top table if you write them a vast cheque – Gordon Brown is said to charge £100,000 a night, though his office say (and I don’t doubt) that he doesn’t pocket a penny of it, that it all goes to charity.

And I’ve deliberately chosen the fluffy end of the scale. If we’re looking for deals which stink even more, then we’d be talking about former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn cashing in on his own NHS privatisation schemes; those coalition MPs with connections to private healthcare companies; or the fact that Tory MP and former whip Brian Wiggin is being paid £5k a year by a company which got the contract to run privatised welfare benefits.

But the harder ways in which our democracy is being auctioned off are only a small part of the problem. Because what really matters are the softer mechanisms – the ways in which those with lots of money find guides to navigate the complexities of the British state, the web of gentle influence which quietly ensures that British public policy never crosses certain lines, that the voices heard first, the people whose language MPs become accustomed to speaking, are at a certain end of the income spectrum.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing when each of these stories breaks is that those who have done wrong seem not to understand where or that they have erred. Like toddlers being told off for putting their fingers in the chocolate spread, they simply don’t see what the issue is. This is because the story about Rifkind and Straw isn’t so much a one off scandal as a system. The walls of Westminster are papered with corporate logos.

Whether it’s a black-tie dinner or a seat on an advisory board, if access to power can be bought, the rich will always be at the front of the queue. Oxfam recently predicted that the UK will soon be the most unequal country in the developed world. Should we really be surprised?

Adam Ramsay is the Co-Editor of OurKingdom and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full time campaigner with People & Planet. His e-book ‘42 Reasons to Support Scottish Independence‘ is now available.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/adam-ramsay/it%27s-no-surprise-rifkind-and-straw-don%27t-get-it-westminster%27s-swimming-in-cor

Satellite images obtained by Greenpeace Africa show that more than 3,000 hectares of rainforest bordering the Dja Faunal Reserve in Cameroon’s Southern region have been destroyed.

The cleared forest, until now home to western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees and mandrills, lies inside the Chinese-owned Hevea Sud rubber and palm oil concession.

The land was granted to the company even though it lies next to Dja Faunal Reserve, which is designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. The plantation lies in the home district of Cameroonian president Paul Biya.

UNESCO has previously requested for an inspection to be carried out to assess if any damage has been done to the Dja reserve, but permission was denied by local authorities.

“If proactive strategies to mitigate the effects of large-scale habitat conversion are not soon implemented, we can expect a rapid decline in African primate diversity”, said Dr Joshua Linder, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at James Madison University.

“Agro-industrial developments will soon emerge as a top threat to biodiversity in the African tropical forest zone.”

A growing trend of agro-destruction

The forest clearance is significantly greater than that carried out by US company Herakles Farms for their palm oil project in the country’s South West region that has also deforested vital wildlife habitat and deprived local communities of the forest they depend on for their livelihoods.

A Greenpeace Africa investigation in December revealed that Cameroonian company Azur is also targeting a large area of dense forest in Cameroon’s Littoral region to convert to a palm oil plantation.

A large part of the area at risk is adjacent to the Ebo forest, a proposed national park that is used by forest elephants and many primate species. These include the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee sub-species and the rare and endangered drill.

Greenpeace Africa has twice written to Azur asking they detail their plans and allay environmental concerns over the project, but no response has been provided.

Industrial-scale agricultural concessions, many foreign-owned, are often allocated throughout West and Central Africa without proper land-use planning. This frequently generates social conflicts when forest clearance takes place without prior consent of local communities.

This can result in severe negative ecological impacts and effects on endangered wildlife species as many concessions overlap with forest areas of high biodiversity value.

Headed to extinction if trends continue

The Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee is one of the most endangered primates in the world and faces numerous threats including destruction of habitat from illegal logging, poaching, the bush meat trade and the effects of climate change.

The drill is a rare ape and 80% of the world’s remaining population is in Cameroon and Azur’s plantation project may lead to even more habitat destruction of this already endangered primate

“Governments need to urgently develop a participatory land use planning process prior to the allocation of industrial concessions”, said Filip Verbelen, a senior forest campaigner with Greenpeace Belgium.

“Projects that are being developed without adequate community consultation and are located in areas of high ecological value should not be allowed to proceed and risk further social conflict and environmental damage.”

The Congo Basin is the world’s second largest rainforested area. Its rich and diverse ecosystem provides food, fresh water, shelter and medicine for tens of millions of people. The conservation of these forests is vital in the fight against climate change but the area is increasing under threat from rising global demand for resources, corruption and poor law enforcement.

EuroParl palm oil vote today promises weak reforms

Meanwhile the drive to clear ever more land for palm oil plantations is being driven in part by the EU’s policy to require 10% of transport fuels to come from ‘renewable’ sources such as ethanol from sugar and vegetable oils.

MEPs today voted to reform EU biofuels policy, placing a 6% cap on their use. However as biofuels now account for 4.7% of transport fuel in the EU, this will still drive an increase in their use, and the associated deforestation.

They also voted to require an account to be made of biofuels’ full impact on climate change – but decided to wait five years before it happens, until 2020!

Kenneth Richter, biofuels campaigner at Friends of the Earth said: “MEPs are right to call for changes to the EU’s disastrous biofuels policy, but the proposed reforms don’t go far enough. Current biofuels policy is destroying forests, sending food prices soaring and may even be causing an increase in climate-changing pollution.”

Satellite images: Forest Cover Change Assessment.