“It’s very attractive. The earnings are very high and we’ve got hybrid material now. You harvest in the 24th month, and the repayment period is about seven years at the most. For the next 20 years it’ll be laughing yourself all the way to the bank.”

That’s Suriya Moorthy, a consultant for agricultural investments in Malaysia, talking about oil palm investments. The quotation is from the documentary film, ‘Land Grabbing‘.

It’s well worth a watch – if you’re in London, it’s showing at Bertha DocHouse until 11 February.

Director Kurt Langbein visits the scenes of land grabs and talks to farmers, local communities and to the investors behind the schemes.

The documentary team travelled to Cambodia, to investigate a sugar plantation that has taken people’s land. They talk to Venerable Luon Sovath, a Buddhist monk who interviews villagers and documents everything he finds. More than 1,000 families living in the area were violently evicted. Many houses were burned.

Subsidising destruction

The plantation belongs to Phnom Penh Sugar, a company run by Senator Ly Yong Phat. The sugar is exported to the European Union. Under the EU’s ‘Everything but Arms’ treaty with Cambodia, the sugar is exported duty free.

The documentary looks at large-scale industrial agriculture in Romania and contrasts this with small-scale farming there. While small-scale farmers can get small subsidies from the EU, millions of Euros are available for industrial agriculture.

In Ethiopia, we see how tomatoes and peppers are grown in greenhouses for the ‘top of the market’ in the Middle East and Africa. The work is backbreaking and poorly paid. Workers are searched when they leave work to check that they haven’t stolen any tomatoes. It’s enough to make you want to boycott tomatoes.

For me, the most extraordinary part of the film is in Indonesia. We see workers on an oil palm plantation belonging to Cargill. They stand in rows and recite the ‘Hindoli Plantation Employees Pledge’. This includes a list of seven items, starting as follows:

“I’m ashamed of myself:
1. When I don’t follow the rules and I make a mistake;
2. When I don’t use my personal safety equipment.”

‘The injustice could not be clearer’

A bioenergy plant in Sierra Leone is the next stop. Addax Bioenergy earned Africa’s first Rountable on Sustainable Bioenergy certification. But Ibrahim Serie, a village head, describes how villagers gave away their land without understanding the impacts on their livelihoods.

Addax showed the villagers a map and told them how many hectares of land they had. “We didn’t even know what a hectare was”, says Serie.

The biofuel from Addax’s bioenergy plant in Sierra Leone will be exported to Europe, where it will be blended with petrol to be used by cars. ADDAX got a €250 million loan from public funds, including from the Development Bank of Austria.

While there was no violence or evictions to make way for Addax’s sugar plantations, farmers have entered into contracts that result in them losing their land over longer periods of time. While some have benefitted, others are losing out. Water supply has been affected through Addax’s irrigation schemes.

“If Addax won’t help us drill a well, they’re going to kill us”, Serie says. He accuses Addax of mixing chemicals into the water sprayed onto the sugar cane: “Our animals died from eating weeds near the sugar cane fields.” And in the rainy season, the chemicals are washing into the river. “This is a major problem for us. Big, big problem.”

The documentary makes no comment, but none is necessary. The injustice of this destructive ‘development’ model could not be clearer.

 

---

 

The film: ‘Land Grabbing‘ is directed by Kurt Langbein. See here for the full production team.

Chris Lang works on REDD-monitor which looks at the developments in the world of ‘avoided deforestation’.

This review was originally published on REDD-monitor.

 

 

On the southern fringes of the Amazon, in an area of dense rainforest in Mato Grosso do Sul state, a small band of people are on the run.

You probably haven’t heard of them, and they haven’t heard of you, but as one of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth that is unlikely to bother them all that much.

They are known as the Kawahiva, and the increasing encroachment of loggers and other outsiders into their lands threatens to wipe out their society forever.

The smallest amount of contact with outsiders could be deadly for them. A handshake, a hug, a brush with a piece of clothing, any physical proximity could transmit infectious diseases that could decimate the entire tribe.

Without rainforest, they will run out of food, dependent as they are on hunting small game and gathering fruits, nuts and berries in the Amazonian jungle. Their lifestyle is completely sustainable, but without the active intervention of outsiders to protect their rights and their lands it will not be sustained.

The situation is unambiguous and clear; the Kawahiva face genocide and it is time for the world to act.

An avoidable genocide

There is a common misconception that tribal peoples around the world are all doomed. Considering the direction that, say, American or Australian history has taken over the past few centuries, this is unsurprising. Unfortunately it has led to a certain amount of fatalism in the here and now.

Around the world, millions live in tribal societies quite happily, and very viably, with no particular desire to be integrated with what we mistakenly describe as ‘modernity’.

Our industrialised, hyper-accelerated world holds little attraction for tribes like the Kawahiva, but we should not mistake this for a primitive or conservative nature on their part. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles are neither fixed nor restrictive, and are just as viable now as they ever were.

Any attempt to claim that tribespeople are fated to either become ‘modern’ or die out is really an attempt to forcibly impose our way of life upon them.

Many tribal people have absolutely no contact with the outside world. This does not mean that they never have, indeed it is highly probable that many are the descendants of people who quite sensibly fled the ravages of colonial brutality.

They are not ‘pristine’ societies either, whatever that means. They have contact with other tribal neighbours, and through them they may have knowledge of the wider world. Their ways of life are not fixed or inflexible either simply because they are different to ours. They change as and when it is desirable or necessary, and are perfectly capable of determining their own futures.

And the Kawahiva are no exception: they have already had to radically reorganize their society and adapt to their changing environment as a result of violence and the destruction of their forest home.

Old clearings in the forest suggest that several generations ago they probably cultivated corn and manioc and lived a more settled life. But in the last 30 years, they have been forced to flee waves of attacks and invasions and probably became nomads in order to survive. The last garden in their territory was found when a new highway cut through the region over three decades ago.

Now, the Kawahiva have been forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle. They set up temporary camps where they stay for several days, before moving on to evade intruders.

The importance of leaving them be

They are nonetheless highly vulnerable to contact with outsiders. They have no immunity to Afro-Eurasian diseases like flu and the common cold which can kill them, and can easily be targeted by unscrupulous individuals willing to use violence to clear them out of the way.

It is imperative that they are left alone if they choose to remain uncontacted, as they cannot in any sense offer consent to what could be a fatal first contact with the world beyond their borders.

Most of the one hundred or so uncontacted tribes we know of are concentrated in the Amazon and we can formulate guesses as to what their culture and language might be like. In many cases, there is a perceptible desire to remain uncontacted, demonstrated in cautious hostility to outsiders, or a tendency to flee when unfamiliar figures start marching towards them through the jungle.

We also know that in recent history, as in the colonial past, contact has proven catastrophic for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It has brought misery, disease, conflict and exploitation to other Indian groups in Brazil. It is a humanitarian imperative that these people are left alone, and that their right to be left alone is not only respected but enforced in law.

The threats facing tribes like the Kawahiva are not complex. They have almost become cliches of all news that comes out of the Amazon, rhetorical shorthands which are too easily brushed aside. Slash and burn farmers destroy the forests to grow maize, sugar and soya, ranchers create fenced-off grasslands for the meat industry, loggers go to great lengths to rip valuable hardwoods from the forest.

Hope on the horizon

Despite the persistence of these problems we should not be deterred from doing all that we can to prevent them from continuing.

The natural riches of the Amazon, and fellow human beings like the Kawahiva who have successfully conserved them for generations and depend on them for their very existence, cannot be thrown away for the sake of short term economic considerations. ‘Development’ in the Kawahiva’s indigenous territory would be nothing short of genocide.

The situation facing the Kawahiva is far from hopeless. If their right to remain on their land undisturbed is respected, they will be able not only to survive, but to flourish. Since 2013, a decree to make the Kawahiva’s land a designated Indigenous Territory has been sitting on the desk of the Brazilian Minister of Justice. All it requires is his signature (see portrait of justice minister .

Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, is urging him to act to save the Kawahiva from extinction. For the sake not just of the Kawahiva people themselves but for all humanity, it is essential that he acts to prevent an appalling tragedy.

Action: Send an email to Brazil’s Minister of Justice demanding that he save the Last of the Kawahiva by protecting their land.

Lewis Evans is an author, and a campaigner at Survival International.

Learn more about the Kawahiva and to see what you can do to help protect them, visit Survival International’s Kwahiva campaign page.

On the southern fringes of the Amazon, in an area of dense rainforest in Mato Grosso do Sul state, a small band of people are on the run.

You probably haven’t heard of them, and they haven’t heard of you, but as one of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth that is unlikely to bother them all that much.

They are known as the Kawahiva, and the increasing encroachment of loggers and other outsiders into their lands threatens to wipe out their society forever.

The smallest amount of contact with outsiders could be deadly for them. A handshake, a hug, a brush with a piece of clothing, any physical proximity could transmit infectious diseases that could decimate the entire tribe.

Without rainforest, they will run out of food, dependent as they are on hunting small game and gathering fruits, nuts and berries in the Amazonian jungle. Their lifestyle is completely sustainable, but without the active intervention of outsiders to protect their rights and their lands it will not be sustained.

The situation is unambiguous and clear; the Kawahiva face genocide and it is time for the world to act.

An avoidable genocide

There is a common misconception that tribal peoples around the world are all doomed. Considering the direction that, say, American or Australian history has taken over the past few centuries, this is unsurprising. Unfortunately it has led to a certain amount of fatalism in the here and now.

Around the world, millions live in tribal societies quite happily, and very viably, with no particular desire to be integrated with what we mistakenly describe as ‘modernity’.

Our industrialised, hyper-accelerated world holds little attraction for tribes like the Kawahiva, but we should not mistake this for a primitive or conservative nature on their part. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles are neither fixed nor restrictive, and are just as viable now as they ever were.

Any attempt to claim that tribespeople are fated to either become ‘modern’ or die out is really an attempt to forcibly impose our way of life upon them.

Many tribal people have absolutely no contact with the outside world. This does not mean that they never have, indeed it is highly probable that many are the descendants of people who quite sensibly fled the ravages of colonial brutality.

They are not ‘pristine’ societies either, whatever that means. They have contact with other tribal neighbours, and through them they may have knowledge of the wider world. Their ways of life are not fixed or inflexible either simply because they are different to ours. They change as and when it is desirable or necessary, and are perfectly capable of determining their own futures.

And the Kawahiva are no exception: they have already had to radically reorganize their society and adapt to their changing environment as a result of violence and the destruction of their forest home.

Old clearings in the forest suggest that several generations ago they probably cultivated corn and manioc and lived a more settled life. But in the last 30 years, they have been forced to flee waves of attacks and invasions and probably became nomads in order to survive. The last garden in their territory was found when a new highway cut through the region over three decades ago.

Now, the Kawahiva have been forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle. They set up temporary camps where they stay for several days, before moving on to evade intruders.

The importance of leaving them be

They are nonetheless highly vulnerable to contact with outsiders. They have no immunity to Afro-Eurasian diseases like flu and the common cold which can kill them, and can easily be targeted by unscrupulous individuals willing to use violence to clear them out of the way.

It is imperative that they are left alone if they choose to remain uncontacted, as they cannot in any sense offer consent to what could be a fatal first contact with the world beyond their borders.

Most of the one hundred or so uncontacted tribes we know of are concentrated in the Amazon and we can formulate guesses as to what their culture and language might be like. In many cases, there is a perceptible desire to remain uncontacted, demonstrated in cautious hostility to outsiders, or a tendency to flee when unfamiliar figures start marching towards them through the jungle.

We also know that in recent history, as in the colonial past, contact has proven catastrophic for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It has brought misery, disease, conflict and exploitation to other Indian groups in Brazil. It is a humanitarian imperative that these people are left alone, and that their right to be left alone is not only respected but enforced in law.

The threats facing tribes like the Kawahiva are not complex. They have almost become cliches of all news that comes out of the Amazon, rhetorical shorthands which are too easily brushed aside. Slash and burn farmers destroy the forests to grow maize, sugar and soya, ranchers create fenced-off grasslands for the meat industry, loggers go to great lengths to rip valuable hardwoods from the forest.

Hope on the horizon

Despite the persistence of these problems we should not be deterred from doing all that we can to prevent them from continuing.

The natural riches of the Amazon, and fellow human beings like the Kawahiva who have successfully conserved them for generations and depend on them for their very existence, cannot be thrown away for the sake of short term economic considerations. ‘Development’ in the Kawahiva’s indigenous territory would be nothing short of genocide.

The situation facing the Kawahiva is far from hopeless. If their right to remain on their land undisturbed is respected, they will be able not only to survive, but to flourish. Since 2013, a decree to make the Kawahiva’s land a designated Indigenous Territory has been sitting on the desk of the Brazilian Minister of Justice. All it requires is his signature (see portrait of justice minister .

Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, is urging him to act to save the Kawahiva from extinction. For the sake not just of the Kawahiva people themselves but for all humanity, it is essential that he acts to prevent an appalling tragedy.

Action: Send an email to Brazil’s Minister of Justice demanding that he save the Last of the Kawahiva by protecting their land.

Lewis Evans is an author, and a campaigner at Survival International.

Learn more about the Kawahiva and to see what you can do to help protect them, visit Survival International’s Kwahiva campaign page.

Radioactive material has leaked into the groundwater below a nuclear power plant north of New York City, prompting a state investigation on Saturday and condemnation from Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo, a Democrat, ordered an investigation into “alarming levels of radioactivity” found at three monitoring wells at the Indian Point energy center in Buchanan, New York, about 40 miles north of Manhattan.

“Our first concern is for the health and safety of the residents close to the facility and ensuring the groundwater leak does not pose a threat”, Cuomo wrote in a letter that directed health and environmental officials to investigate.

In one location radioactivity levels rose nearly 65,000%, from 12,300 picocuries per liter to over 8,000,000 picocuries per liter.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant level for tritium in drinking water is 20,000 picocuries per liter, though Entergy, the company that owns the plant, emphasized that only groundwater, and not drinking water, were contaminated.

Cuomo: time to close down these hazardous reactors

The Governor’s office said the contamination had not moved offsite. Cuomo has encouraged Entergy to shut down Indian Point, but to keep its other plants further upstate open.

He directed health and environmental officials “to determine the extent of the release, its likely duration, cause and potential impacts to the environment and public health.”

“While elevated tritium in the ground onsite is not in accordance with our standards, there is no health or safety consequence to the public”, Entergy said in a statement released late Saturday. “Releases are more than a thousand times below federal permissible limits. The tritium did not affect any source of drinking water onsite or offsite.”

The plant supplies roughly 30% of the electricity consumed by New York City. Indian Point had three emergency shutdowns in December, prompting the governor’s office to launch, and then expand, an inquiry into operations and safety standards at the facility.

“This latest failure at Indian Point is unacceptable”, Cuomo said in a statement. “This is not the first such release of radioactive water at Indian Point … this failure continues to demonstrate that Indian Point cannot continue to operate in a manner that is protective of public health and the environment.”

Both reactors operating without licences

An astonishing aspect of the matter is that Indian Point units 1 and 2 are both operating without licences from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Unit 2’s licence expired in September 2013, and Unit 3’s licence expired on 12th December 2015. However in both cases the NRC his given permission for the plants to keep on running while Entergy’s renewal applications for 20-year extensions were under way.

Since their licence expiries both reactors have been involved in unauthorized radiation releases, of tritium in particular, and numerous unscheduled closures.

Tritium is a relatively short-lived radioactive hydrogen isotope that cannot penetrate the skin, however it can be consumed in food and water and be taken up in tissues. It is considered a health risk for illnesses, including cancer.

There have been many tritium leaks at the plant in recent years, though Saturday’s leak appears to be the most serious so far. Public Service Commission chair Audrey Zibelman faces a deadline for the results of the pre-existing investigation by President’s Day, 15th February.

The Governor’s office did not immediately respond to request for further comment on the beginning of the leak and its duration. But as Cuomo told reporters last October:

“It is a nuclear power plant that is in the most dense community on the planet. They’re supposed to have an evacuation plan for the entire surrounding area. The surrounding area is New York City. You cannot evacuate New York City. What’s the plan? Jump in the river and swim to New Jersey?”

Sam Thielman covers the business of technology for Guardian US.

Alan Yuhas is a reporter for the Guardian US. You can follow him on Twitter @alanyuhas

This article was originally published by Guardian Environment and is republished here with thanks via the Guardian Environment Network. Some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

Something extremely dangerous is happening before our eyes as we watch British officials and the corporate media respond to yesterday’s ruling of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which found that Julian Assange is being arbitrarily detained in the UK.

A major international institution upholding the rights of political dissidents around the world as they face illegal detention, abuse and torture is being turned into a laughing stock with the enthusiastic connivance of supposedly liberal media outlets like the Guardian and the BBC.

Reporters, columnists and comedians are pouring scorn on the UN group, legal experts who until yesterday were widely respected in the west and seen as a final bulwark against the most oppressive regimes on earth.

In desperate moments, confined and isolated, dissidents like Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia could take solace from the knowledge that a respected UN group stood shoulder to shoulder with them. In some cases, faced the weight of its opinion, regimes preferred to release such dissidents.

Now the UN Working Group’s status and the significance of its decisions are being irreparably undermined. In their desperation to keep Assange reviled, British officials and their collaborators in the media are destroying the last vestiges of protection for political dissidents around the world.

Riddikulus!

The most glaring example of this process, as pointed out by the former UK diplomat Craig Murray, is an outright lie being peddled by the British Foreign Secretary, Phillip Hammond. He says the UN panel is “made up of lay people and not lawyers.”

In reality, the panel consists of distinguished legal experts in the field of international law. You can see their CVs here in Craig Murray’s article, which adds:

“It is worth noting that the UN decision accords very closely with the minority verdicts of the two dissenting UK Supreme Court judges in the deeply split UK Supreme Court decision on the case. So by calling the UN panel ‘ridiculous’, Hammond is saying the same of two UK Supreme Court justices.

“You will not recall much media coverage of the dissenting verdicts in the UK Supreme Court decision. There was almost none. By contrast, the media are showing an obsessive interest in the dissenting Ukrainian member’s opinion in this UN decision.”

Unlike Hammond, who is doubtless looking over his shoulder to the other side of the Atlantic, these are truly independent figures – that is, they are not beholden to the governments of the countries they are from.

And if Mats Andenas, the Norwegian chair of the Working Group for much of its investigation, is to be believed, they are brave too. He says the panel has come under intense pressure from the US and UK to arrive at a decision contrary to the one they actually reached, as Murray reports:

“Norwegian Professor Mats Andenas, the chair of the Working Group who started the work, has today stated that the UK and US put enormous political pressure on the members of the UN working group, which they had resisted courageously. Can anybody think of a reason why the dissenting Ukrainian member might have been less able to resist enormous pressure from the UK and US governments?”

What is this case really about?

We know why the US wanted the panel’s decision to go against Assange – after all, he is in the Ecuadorean embassy precisely because he fears extradition to the US, where a secret Grand Jury is awaiting him.

But one has to wonder why the UK was so keen to overturn the Working Group’s ruling. Doesn’t the UK claim it is simply a “bobby on the beat”, trying to uphold the letter of the law as it spends millions on policing Assange’s detention? If the UN group says Assange should go free, that’s a nice little saving for the British taxpayer, isn’t it?

Hammond’s lie has not been challenged in the British media, even though a quick Google search would prove it is a falsehood. And now Murray informs us, the Foreign Office’s official spokesman has said the government department stands by the lie. In short, Hammond’s lie is no longer simply one politician’s foolish spin, but the official view of the diplomatic service.

The readiness of all sections of the British media to spread this lie and even expand on it is illustrated by a truly despicable piece of journalism from the Guardian’s columnist Marina Hyde. She is not some freelance blogger; she’s one of the most senior staff writers at the newspaper. Her voice can be considered to reflect the prevailing view of the paper’s editors.

Hyde not only echoes Hammond but uses her well-known cutting wit to deride the UN panel. Apparently, these leading experts on international law are really know-nothings:

“I don’t want to go out on too much of a limb here, but my sense is that the finest legal minds are not drawn to UN panels as a career path. … Perhaps UN panellists are like UN goodwill ambassadors, and even Geri Halliwell could be one. …

“As for their almost-amusing diagnosis of ‘house arrest’, the only possible rejoinder, if you’ll forgive the legalese, is: Do. Me. A. Favour. Assange’s bail conditions – I’m sorry if the term is confusing to the panel – saw him placed with an electronic tag in a stately home from which he was free to come and go all day long.”

And so on.

This degraded discourse threatens dissidents everywhere

Similar ridicule has already been heaped on the UN decision by a popular BBC comedy show, slowly settling in the British public’s mind that Assange is a rapist refusing to face the music (even though he has not yet been charged); that the UN’s legal experts are buffoons who cannot hold a candle to our own resolutely independent judges; and that Britain is a disinterested party simply honouring the letter of the law.

The degraded discourse about the UN group’s decision does not just threaten Assange, but endangers vulnerable political dissidents around the world.

The very fact that Hyde and her ilk are so ready to sacrifice these people’s rights in their bid to tar and feather Assange should be warning enough that there is even more at stake here than meets the eye.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. A former Guardian reporter, he now writes for Middle East Eye, CounterPunch and other media. In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

This article was originally published on Jonathan Cook’s website.

“It was 20 years ago today … “ as the song goes – and in many ways the sparkly side-show that is genetically modified food is as lacking in substance as the eternal showmen of Sgt Pepper’s band.

On this day in 1996 the first GM product – a tomato puree made from the Flavr Savr tomato hit UK shops.

The product was produced by Zeneca from tomatoes that were grown and processed in California and genetically engineered to ripen more slowly. It was introduced to the UK by supermarkets Sainsbury’s and Safeway. The paste was competitively priced and clearly labelled and more than 1.8 million cans were sold from 1996 through early 1999.

For a while the GMO tomato paste even out-sold conventional tomato paste at many locations, but sales declined dramatically in 1998 as consumers became more aware of just what was at stake. It was withdrawn from the market in 1999.

The Flavr Savr tomato isn’t just a footnote in GMO history. It was a turning point, which showed that even when a product was sold at a cut rate price, consumers were simply not prepared to gamble with the unknown consequences of eating GM foods.

Although an army of vested interests, rent-a-quote ‘scientists’ and’ bought’ politicians remains as vocal as ever about the promises of genetically modified crops, the reality, two decades on, is that GMOs have consistently failed to deliver.

A damaging, outdated approach to farming

What this anniversary highlights is that genetic engineering of food crops is an outdated approach to food production. It has its roots in a world that still believed in the Green Revolution and the idea that industrialised monoculture chemical-heavy farming was the way to feed the world.

No matter how much money has been thrown at GMOs from government, private investors and corporations, no matter how much PR spin is put on the story, the fact remains that the promises that genetically modified food would revolutionise our world, feed the hungry, boost the yields and therefore the incomes of farmers, cure disease and more recently fight climate change remain spectacularly unfulfilled.

In fact, the original intent of GMOs wasn’t to do any of these things. It was, arguably, more focused on creating a more easily controlled international market of standardised food products. Indeed the issue of climate change had not yet come to the fore when the first GMO crops were being introduced.

This factory farming paradigm, which is rooted in the notion that yield is the most important measurement of success and that perceived agricultural problems arise as a result of some genetic flaw in nature, is a worn out concept and GM technology is increasingly looking like a relic of a bygone age.

Continuing to promote it as solution to current and future problems is rather like trying to walk forward whilst looking backwards.

20 years of failure documented

For our launch late in 2014 Beyond GM produced The Letter from America – a plea from US citizens to citizens of the UK and EU not to embrace GMOs the way the Americas have.

The fully referenced letter detailed 20 years of failure and we urge everyone who wants a quick primer in GMOs to read it (it is now available in eight languages) and we urge US citizens to continue to sign it and UK citizens to send a copy to their MPs from the site.

The Letter showed that in that time GMO crops have, in fact, increased pesticide use. The US Government’s own data shows that herbicide use has increased dramatically over the last decade and that total volumes of glyphosate applied to the three biggest GM crops in the US – maize, cotton and soybean – have increased tenfold.

They have also failed to consistently increase yields. They haven’t reduced costs to farmers nor increased profits. They haven’t created an international market – most of the world rejected GMO crops and a recent UN report even suggested that GMOs were responsible for a rise in trade disputes (when shipments of grain are found to be contaminated with GMOs).

Embracing the GMO agenda has had direct consequences, in that it both supports and accelerates an outmoded factory farm mentality, and indirect consequences, in terms of environment, health and culture but also science and democracy.

GM Nation?

In 2002/2003, long after the Flavr Savr had been forgotten, the Labour party conducted the only really comprehensive investigation into GMOs in the UK, GM Nation.

That suite of investigations included public debates and research into consumer attitudes, it included an economic analysis (which included looking at liability for economic and environmental damage) and an environmental analysis.

The economic review concluded there was no benefit to UK plc from growing GM crops; the environmental review found severe damage to the countryside and biodiversity; and the public debate showed was widespread mistrust of government and multinational companies, with participants expressing a very strong interest to be ‘better informed’ about GM issues.

In fact, only 2% of the more than 30,000 people who took part in the consultation said they would be happy with GM foods in any circumstances. A staggering 93% thought that GM technology was “driven by profit rather than the public good.”

Since that time no government, no regulator and very few scientists, has asked the really important question about GM crops and foods:

• Not just who benefits from the technology, but who loses?
• What new facts have emerged about the environmental and health consequences?
• What productive and sustainable alternatives have fallen by the wayside in the push for GMOs?
• How does the technology affect what we are producing and how we are producing it – and to whose needs does it respond?
• What are the social goals and ethical criteria that guides research?
• What are the social and agronomic goals?

A world in need of repair

Some people may not like it, but we know most of the answers about whether GMOs are worth it already.

As the current Conservative government pushes ahead with its irrational, anti-science, pro-GM agenda we would argue that any party that wishes to be influential in the future, needs to have a rational sustainable food policy which acknowledges that, from an agricultural point of view, we are living in a damaged world in need of deep repair.

It is a world that is facing challenges that could not have been anticipated 20 years ago when GM technology first entered the marketplace and many these challenges are the result of our own short-termism and greed.

In order to begin the process of repair several things urgently need to be done. We believe that these things are best addressed in the space of a continuing moratorium on the planting of GM crops in the UK.

Changing the framework

Most urgently, the regulatory framework by which GMO crops and the chemicals used on them and GM foods are assessed its completely inadequate:

• There is a lack of transparency with regard to the decisions taken around GMOs
• There is no requirement for independent testing
• There is a lack of post marketing surveillance

There are new challenges too in that biotechnology companies are lobbying to have newer forms of plant breeding technologies, which clearly fall under the heading of GMOs, regulated as non-GM.

The problem of co-existence and environmental contamination and degradation have never been adequately addressed. There is still a complete lack of laws covering environmental and economic liability. These have to be addressed with more than just bland reassurances before crops are planted.

There is a better way

In spite of its promises of drought tolerant and salt tolerant crops – neither of which has materialised – or food crops that will contain extra nutrients – again none exist commercially – it has dismally failed to anticipate and to paint a compelling picture of what our farming and food future should be.

Other people, scientists and farmers, have painted that picture though. The 2008 IAASTD Report which was sponsored by a number of major international organisations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, and UNESCO concluded that industrial farming was too dependent on cheap oil and too damaging to the wider environment and was not a suitable technology for alleviating hunger because it does not benefit small and subsistence farmers, and it is these farmers that provide 70% of the world’s food.

The 2010 UN report into Agroecology and the Right to Food concluded that organic and sustainable small scale farming could double food production in the parts of the world where hunger is the biggest issue.

Rebuilding public trust in food and farming

In the space of the de facto moratorium on GMOs which has been in effect over the last two decades the government could usefully and effectively have directed funds into studies and projects around agroecological methods of farming.

It could have engaged the public at the level that it did in 2003 on the issue of GMOs – because the public are important stakeholders in this issue. A continuing moratorium would allow space to get it right the second-time around.

Public trust in our food system is at an all-time low. None of us should have to live in a world where words like ‘poison’, ‘scare’, ‘insecurity’, ‘crisis’ and ‘waste’ are consistently being paired with the word ‘food’. And yet that is the world that is being created by a bull-headed adherence to the myth that GMOs and techno-farming will save the world.

Public concerns on every level, not just about the science but about the ethics, and the ‘rightness’ of GMOs are legitimate and deeply felt, rooted in rational science, and should be taken seriously.

Why not make this anniversary of the GMO Flavr Savr tomato a turning point where we can begin to get beyond the GM paradigm and onto a more positive and productive way of thinking about food?

Pat Thomas is a director of the campaigning group Beyond GM, founder of GM-free Me, and a former editor of The Ecologist. This article first appeared on the Beyond GM website. 

In spite of the failure of Bt brinjal in its first two years of cultivation in Bangladesh, a third round of cultivation is under way.

Very few of the farmers who previously cultivated the GM brinjal (aubergine / eggplant) are interested in doing so again, so new farmers have had to be recruited.

No report has been published on the research findings of the first two rounds of field cultivation of Bt brinjal, apart from some propaganda news articles.

The website of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), which is responsible for managing the project in Bangladesh, is silent on the subject.

In the second round of cultivation, Bt brinjal seedlings were given to 108 farmers, 79 of whom were interviewed by Unnayan Bikalper Nitinirdharoni Gobeshona, the Policy Research for Development Alternatives (UBINIG) staff and found to have experienced massive crop failures.

This is in spite of claims made by the BBC programme Panorama that the crop had been a 90% success.

The originator of the Bt brinjal venture, Cornell University’s Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII), has avoided reporting the facts on the ground, confining itself to generalized statements about the project’s background and partners.

Even the GMO industry group, the International Service for the Acquisition for Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), has not published any project updates since their report in 2014.

37 of 40 farmers ‘not interested’ in Bt brinjal after failed harvests

Given the miserable failure of Bt brinjal, one would expect the project to be abandoned, however in the third year of field cultivation, BARI expanded the project to 200 farmers, adding two extra Bt brinjal varieties. Interestingly, very few farmers from the second round were included.

Had Bt brinjal been successful, there would have been a demand from the farmers, as well as from BARI and the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), to continue with the same farmers who had gained knowledge and experience and who had helped to establish the supposed ‘success’ of the crop.

In January 2016, UBINIG contacted 40 farmers in 9 districts and found that 37 farmers had not been contacted by the DAE or BARI, nor were they themselves interested in growing Bt brinjal. The reason was the massive failure of the previous harvests. One farmer in the district, Sakhawat, did not cultivate Bt brinjal as he could not sell them in the market after becoming too hard and did not look edible.

Three farmers in three districts cultivated Bt brinjal again on smaller size plots at the request of the authorities. However, the entire management of the cultivation was done by officials, not the farmers.

In Pabna, a showcase farmer called Peyara Amzad was the only one who received Bt brinjal in all three rounds, and was given two varieties in the third year. The fruits have yet to come out fully but the few that have, are again showing evidence of pest attack.

Most farmers who previously grew the GM crop are now growing local non-GM brinjals this year and are happy with the productivity as yields have been higher and they have not needed any pesticide application.

This is in stark contrast to their previous year’s harvest where 35 different pesticides were sprayed several times on the GM brinjal crops after falling victim to a number of pests and diseases despite being touted as the ‘no-pest brinjal’.

Now GM potato introduced for new trials

While the failures of Bt brinjal continue, the authorities are introducing GM crops one after the other. The latest addition to the list is a GM potato, claimed to resist late blight. BARI introduced this GM crop in the current season as a ‘regulatory trial’ – the last requirement prior to seeking approval for commercialisation.

Breeders involved in developing the GM potato since 2006 at BARI said the blight-resistant gene was taken from wild potato varieties and was engineered into a potato variety called Katahdin in the United States. It has been crossed with Diamant and Cardinal – two popular potato varieties in Bangladesh.

Brinjal and potato are important vegetable crops for the people of Bangladesh and are consumed on a large scale. Yet the Bt brinjal project has set a miserable precedent.

Despite crop failures, a dearth of scientific validation, and a lack of acceptability at farmer level, Cornell’s ABSPII project and its partner BARI continue to play games with the lives and livelihoods of the people of this country.

If they are so sure that Bt brinjal is a safe and beneficial crop and that it saves the crops from pests (if not from pesticides), then they must at least label the GM brinjals, in line with Bangladesh’s biosafety requirements.

Farida Akhter is director of the policy research organization UBINIG.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

Also on The Ecologist:

• ‘GMO propaganda over facts? BBC Panorama and Bt brinjal‘ by Claire Robinson.
• ‘Bangladesh – farmers say no to GM vegetables‘ by Mae-Wan Ho.

84. The question that was posed to the Working Group is whether the current situation of Mr. Assange corresponds to any of the five categories of arbitrary detention applied by the Working Group in the consideration of the cases brought to its attention.

85. At the outset, the Working Group notes with concern that Mr. Assange has been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty ever since 7 December 2010 to this date as a result of both the actions and the inactions of the State of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

86. Firstly, Mr. Assange was held in isolation in the Wandsworth prison in London for 10 days, from 7 December to 16 December 2010 and this was not challenged by any of the two Respondent States.

In this regard, the Working Group expresses its concern that he was detained in isolation at the very beginning of the episode that lasted longer than 5 years. The arbitrariness is inherent in this form of deprivation of liberty, if the individual is left outside the cloak of legal protection, including the access to legal assistance.

Such a practice of law in general corresponds to the violations of both rules proscribing arbitrary detention and ensuring the right to a fair trial, as guaranteed by articles 9 and 10 of the UDHR and articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the ICCPR.

87. That initial deprivation of liberty then continued in the form of house arrest for some 550 days. This again was not contested by any of the two States.

During this prolonged period of house arrest, Mr. Assange had been subjected to various forms of harsh restrictions, including monitoring using an electric tag, an obligation to report to the police every day and a bar on being outside of his place of residence at night.

In this regard, the Working Group has no choice but to query what has prohibited the unfolding of judicial management of any kind in a reasonable manner from occurring for such extended period of time.

88. It is during that period that he has sought refuge at the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London. Despite the fact that the Republic of Ecuador has granted him asylum in August 2012, his newly acquired status has not been recognized by neither Sweden nor the UK.

Mr. Assange has been subjected to extensive surveillance by the British police during his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy to this date.

89. In view of the foregoing, the Working Group considers that, in violation of articles 9 and 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and articles 9 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Mr. Assange has not been guaranteed the international norms of due process and the guarantees to a fair trial during these three different moments: the detention in isolation in Wandsworth Prison, the 550 days under house arrest, and the continuation of the deprivation of liberty in the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London, United Kingdom.

90. The Working Group also views that Mr. Assange’s stay at the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London to this date should be considered as a prolongation of the already continued deprivation of liberty that had been conducted in breach of the principles of reasonableness, necessity and proportionality.

91. The Working Group, in its Deliberation No. 9, had already confirmed its position on the definition of arbitrary detention. What matters in the expression ‘arbitrary detention’ is essentially the word ‘arbitrary’, i.e., the elimination, in all its forms, of arbitrariness, whatever the phase of deprivation of liberty concerned (para. 56).

Placing individuals in temporary custody in stations, ports and airports or any other facilities where they remain under constant surveillance may not only amount to restrictions to personal freedom of movement, but also constitute a de facto deprivation of liberty (para. 59).

The notion of ‘arbitrary’ stricto sensu includes both the requirement that a particular form of deprivation of liberty is taken in accordance with the applicable law and procedure and that it is proportional to the aim sought, reasonable and necessary (para. 61).

92. The Human Rights Committee, in its General Comment No. 35 on Article 9 also stated that “An arrest or detention may be authorized by domestic law and nonetheless be arbitrary. The notion of ‘arbitrariness’ is not to be equated with ‘against law’, but must be interpreted more broadly to include elements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law, as well as elements of reasonableness, necessity, and proportionality.”

93. The Working Group is concerned that the only basis of the deprivation of liberty of Mr. Assange appears to be the European Arrest Warrant issued by the Swedish prosecution based on a criminal allegation.

Until the date of the adoption of this Opinion, Mr. Assange has never been formally indicted in Sweden. The European Arrest Warrant was issued for the purpose of conducting preliminary investigation in order to determine whether it will lead to an indictment or not.

94. In its reply, the Swedish Government indicated that according to Swedish law, a suspect is entitled to examine all the investigation material upon which the allegation is based. The Working Group notes in this regard that Mr. Assange has not been granted access to any material of such which is in violation of article 14 of ICCPR.

95. At this point, it is noteworthy that the Working Group, while examining the essential safeguards for the prevention of torture, stressed that prompt and regular access should be given to independent medical personnel and lawyers and, under appropriate supervision when the legitimate purpose of the detention so requires, to family members (para. 58, the Deliberation No. 9).

The right to personal security in article 9, paragraph 1 of the ICCPR, is relevant to the treatment of both detained and non-detained persons. The appropriateness of the conditions prevailing in detention to the purpose of detention is sometimes a factor in determining whether detention is arbitrary within the meaning of article 9 of the ICCPR. Certain conditions of detention (such as access to counsel and family) may result in procedural violations of paragraphs 3 and 4 of article 9 (para. 59, the Deliberation 9).

96. With regard to the application of the principle of proportionality, it is also worth mentioning that Lord Reed of the UK Supreme Court (Bank Mellat v Her Majesty’s Treasury [2013] UKSC 39, per Lord Reeds, para. 74) set out that it is necessary to determine:
(1) whether the objective of the measure is sufficiently important to justify the limitation of a protected rights;
(2) whether the measure is rationally connected to the objective;
(3) whether a less intrusive measure could have been used without unacceptably compromising the achievement of the objective;
(4) whether, balancing the severity of the measure’s effects on the rights of the persons to whom it apples against the importance of the objective, to the extent that the measure will contribute to its achievement, the former outweighs the latter.

97. The Working Group also views that there has been a substantial failure to exercise due diligence on the part of the concerned States with regard to the performance of the criminal administration, given the following factual elements:
(1) in the case of Mr. Assange, after more than five years’ of time lapse, he is still left even before the stage of preliminary investigation with no predictability as to whether and when a formal process of any judicial dealing would commence;
(2) despite that it is left to the initial choice of the Swedish prosecution as to what mode of investigation would best suit the purpose of criminal justice, the exercise and implementation of the investigation method should be conducted in compliance with the rule of proportionality, including undertaking to explore alternative ways of administering justice;
(3) unlike other suspects in general whose whereabouts are either unknown or unidentifiable and whose spirit of cooperation is non-existent, Mr. Assange, while staying under constant and highly intrusive surveillance, has continued to express his willingness to participate in the criminal investigation;
(4) as a consequence, his situation now has become both excessive and unnecessary. From a time perspective, it is worse than if he had appeared in Sweden for questioning and possible legal proceeding when first summoned to do so;
(5) irrespective of whether the grant of the asylum by the Republic of Ecuador to Mr. Assange should be acknowledged by the concerned States and whether the concerned States could have endorsed the decision and wish of the Republic of Ecuador, as they had previously done on the humanitarian grounds, the grant itself and the fear of persecution on the part of Mr. Assange based on the possibility of extradition, should have been given fuller consideration in the determination and the exercise of criminal administration, instead of being subjected to a sweeping judgment as defining either merely hypothetical or irrelevant;
(6) it defeats the purpose and efficiency of justice and the interest of the concerned victims to put this matter of investigation to a state of indefinite procrastination .

98. The Working Group is convinced once again that, among others, the current situation of Mr. Assange staying within the confines of the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London, United Kingdom, has become a state of an arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The factual elements and the totality of the circumstances that have led to this conclusion include the followings:
(1) Mr. Assange has been denied the opportunity to provide a statement, which is a fundamental aspect of the audi alteram partem principle, the access to exculpatory evidence, and thus the opportunity to defend himself against the allegations;
(2) the duration of such detention is ipso facto incompatible with the presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has been denied the right to contest the continued necessity and proportionality of the arrest warrant in light of the length of this detention, i.e. his confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy;
(3) the indefinite nature of this detention, and the absence of an effective form of judicial review or remedy concerning the prolonged confinement and the highly intrusive surveillance, to which Mr. Assange has been subjected;
(4) the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London is not and far less than a house or detention centre equipped for prolonged pre-trial detention and lacks appropriate and necessary medical equipment or facilities. It is valid to assume, after 5 years of deprivation of liberty, Mr. Assange’s health could have been deteriorated to a level that anything more than a superficial illness would put his health at a serious risk and he was denied his access to a medical institution for a proper diagnosis, including taking a MRI test;
(5) with regard to the legality of the EAW, since the final decision by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Mr. Assange’s case, UK domestic law on the determinative issues had been drastically changed, including as a result of perceived abuses raised by Sweden’s EAW, so that if requested, Mr. Assange’s extradition would not have been permitted by the UK. Nevertheless, the Government of the United Kingdom has stated in relation to Mr. Assange that these changes are “not retrospective” and so may not benefit him.

A position is maintained in which his confinement within the Ecuadorian Embassy is likely to continue indefinitely. The corrective UK legislation addressed the court’s inability to conduct a proportionality assessment of the Swedish prosecutor’s international arrest warrant (corrected by s. 157 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, in force since July 2014). The corrective legislation also barred extradition where no decision to bring a person to trial had been made (s. 156).

The deprivation of liberty of Mr. Assange is arbitrary and in contravention of Articles 9 and 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

99. In the light of the foregoing, the Working Group renders the following opinion:

The deprivation of liberty of Mr. Assange is arbitrary and in contravention of articles 9 and 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It falls within category III of the categories applicable to the consideration of the cases submitted to the Working Group.

100. Consequent upon the opinion rendered, the Working Group requests the Government of Sweden and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to assess the situation of Mr. Assange, to ensure his safety and physical integrity, to facilitate the exercise of his right to freedom of movement in an expedient manner, and to ensure the full enjoyment of his rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention.

101. The Working Group considers that, taking into account all the circumstances of the case, the adequate remedy would be to ensure the right of free movement of Mr. Assange and accord him an enforceable right to compensation, in accordance with article 9(5) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The full ruling: ‘Opinion No. 54/2015 concerning Julian Assange (Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland‘ (DOCX file). Including the dissenting opinion of Mr Tochilovsky.

Press release: ‘Julian Assange arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the UK, UN expert panel finds‘.

Members of the Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention: Mr. Seong-Phil Hong (Republic of Korea) is the Chairman-Rapporteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Other members of the Working Group are Ms. Leigh Toomey (Australia); Mr. José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez (Mexico); Mr. Roland Adjovi Sètondji (Benin) and Mr. Vladimir Tochilovsky (Ukraine).

The UN Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

• The Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of ‘core forest’ – remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive wildlife and ecological processes – are vanishing even faster.

Core forests are disappearing because a tsunami of new roads, dams, power lines, pipelines and other infrastructure is rapidly slicing into the world’s last wild places, opening them up like a flayed fish to deforestation, fragmentation, poaching and other destructive activities.

Most vulnerable of all are forests in the tropics. These forests sustain the planet’s most biologically rich and environmentally important habitats.

The collapse of the world’s forests isn’t going to stop until we start to say ‘no’ to environmentally destructive projects.

Damn the dams

Those who criticise new infrastructure projects are often accused of opposing direly needed economic development, or – if they hail from industrial nations – of being hypocrites.

But when one begins to look in detail at the proposed projects, an intriguing pattern appears: Many are either poorly justified or will have far greater costs than benefits.

For example, in a recent essay in the journal Science, Amazon expert Philip Fearnside argues that many of the 330-odd hydroelectric dams planned or under construction in the Amazon will be more trouble than they’re worth.

Many of these dams will have huge environmental impacts, argues Fearnside, and will dramatically increase forest loss in remote regions.

This happens both because the Amazon is quite flat, requiring large areas of forest to be flooded, and because dams and their power lines require road networks that open up the forest to other human impacts. For instance, the 12 dams planned for Brazil’s Tapajós River are expected to increase Amazon deforestation by almost 1 million hectares.

Furthermore, Fearnside argues, much of the electricity the Amazon dams produce will be used for smelting aluminium, which provides relatively little local employment.

Fearnside asserts that mega-dams planned for the Congo Basin and Mekong River will also cause big problems, with limited or questionable benefits.

Roads to ruin

The explosive expansion of roads into the world’s last wild places is an even more serious problem. Indeed, Eneas Salati, one of Brazil’s most respected scientists, once quipped that “the best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.”

Current projections suggest that by 2050, we’ll have nearly 25 million kilometres of additional paved roads – enough to encircle the Earth more than 600 times.

I have led three major studies of planned road expansion, for the entire planet and for the Brazilian Amazon and sub-Saharan Africa. All three show that many planned roads would have massive impacts on biodiversity and vital ecosystem services while providing only sparse socioeconomic benefits.

In Africa, for example, our analyses reveal that 33 planned ‘development corridors’ would total over 53,000 kilometers in length while crisscrossing the continent and cutting into many remote, wild areas. Of these, we ranked only six as ‘promising’ whereas the remainder were ‘inadvisable’ or ‘marginal’.

Progress at any price?

There is a very active coalition of pro-growth advocates – including corporate lobbyists, climate-change deniers, and die-hard proponents of ‘economic growth’ – that immediately decry any effort to oppose new developments.

Added to this are those who argue reasonably for economic development to combat poverty and disparity in developing nations. Such advocates often assert that an added bonus of development is greater sustainability, because impoverished people can be highly destructive environmentally. The denuded nation of Haiti is one such example.

Yet the on-the-ground reality is often far more complex. For instance, the heavy exploitation and export of natural resources, such as minerals, fossil fuels or timber, can cause nations to suffer ‘Dutch Disease‘ – an economic syndrome characterised by rising currency values, economic inflation and the weakening of other economic sectors, such as tourism, education and manufacturing.

Dutch Disease tends to increase economic disparity, because the poor are impacted most heavily by rising food and living costs. Further, the national economy becomes more vulnerable to economic shocks from fluctuating natural-resource prices or depletion. The Solomon Islands – which relies heavily on timber exports that are collapsing from overexploitation – is a poster-child for Dutch Disease.

On top of this is the toxic odour of corruption that pervades many big infrastructure projects. One would need an abacus just to keep track of the allegations.

To cite just two recent examples: in Malaysia, an independent investigation has concluded that nearly US$4 billion was misappropriated from a state-owned fund set up to attract international property, infrastructure and energy investments. And in Brazil, the granting of contracts for major Amazon dams has been drowning in allegations of corruption.

In both nations, public coffers needed for education, health and other vital services appear to have been hugely defrauded.

Just say ‘no’

The bottom line is that many big infrastructure projects are being pushed by powerful corporations, individuals or interests that have much to gain themselves, but often at great cost to the environment and developing societies.

Globally, the path we’re currently following isn’t just unsustainable. It’s leading to an astonishingly rapid loss of forests, wildlife and wilderness. From 2000 to 2012, an area of forest two and half times the size of Texas was destroyed, while a tenth of all core forests vanished.

If we’re going to have any wild places left for our children and grandchildren, we simply can’t say ‘yes’ to every proposed development project.

For those that will have serious environmental and social consequences, we need to start saying ‘no’ a lot more often.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

So-called ‘free trade’ agreements are continually advertised as creators of jobs, yet jobs are lost and wages decline once they go into effect.

As representatives of the 12 countries participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership gather today in New Zealand to sign the agreement, the usual unsubstantiated claims are being put forth.

Why is this so? I mean beyond the obvious answer that such claims are propaganda in the service of corporate elites and financiers.

Corporate-funded ‘think tanks’ that pump out a steady barrage of papers making grandiose claims for ‘free trade’ deals that are relied on by the political leaders who push these deals require some data, no matter how massaged.

One organization prominent in this process is the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which has issued rosy reports in expectation of deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement – for example, it predicted 170,000 new jobs would be created in the US alone in 1995 and that the Mexican economy would grow by four to five percent annually under NAFTA.

A pocketful of mumbles

One way to look at this is that the Peterson Institute is to ‘free trade’ agreements as the Heartland Institute is to global warming. Heartland began as a Big Tobacco outfit issuing reports denying links between smoking and cancer.

As late as 1998, Heartland President Joe Bast claimed that there were “few, if any, adverse health effects“ associated with smoking and boasted to a Phillip Morris executive that “Heartland does many things that benefit Philip Morris’s bottom line, things that no other organization does.”

Heartland later began specializing in global-warming denial, receiving $676,500 from Exxon Mobil alone between 1996 and 2006; after which it stopped identifying its contributors. Mr. Bast seems to have no shame, writing that “Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate” in an article describing global warming as a “scam”. In fact, 97% of climate scientists agree that human activity is behind global warming.

It is this same attitude toward the truth that pervades papers predicting wondrous results from ‘free trade’ agreements. In contrast to the Peterson Institute’s rosy projections, the first 20 years of NAFTA proved to be a lose-lose-lose proposition for Canada, Mexico and the United States:

• Almost 5 million Mexican farmers have been displaced with inflation-adjusted wages in Mexico barely above the level of 1980;
• US food prices have risen 67% since NAFTA took effect and two-thirds of displaced manufacturing workers in the US have been forced to take work with reduced wages;
• and Canadians suffered drastic cuts in government benefits while their environmental laws were reversed in the wake of corporate challenges.

Rosy reports rest on ideology, not real world

The Peterson Institute is at it again, first claiming the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will result in gains of US$1.9 trillion, and in a new report once again making extravagant claims even if scaled back. In its latest report, the Institute claims there will be no net job losses, while annual income in the US would increase by $131 billion.

These sorts of predictions are routine, and not the product of any single corporate organization. How is it that, all actual experience to the contrary, these sorts of calculations are presented with a straight face?

The political economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, in his book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance, and Alternatives, writes that economic models that presume wondrous benefits from ‘free trade’ agreements assume, inter alia:

• There are only two inputs, capital and labor, which are able to move instantaneously but never cross national borders.
• Total aggregate expenditures in each economy will be sufficient, and automatically adjust, to ensure full use of all resources.
• Flexible exchange rates will prevent lowered tariffs from causing changes in trade balances.

Thanks to these starting points, Professor Hart-Landsberg writes, “this kind of modeling assumes a world in which liberalization cannot, by assumption, cause or worsen unemployment, capital flight or trade imbalances. Thanks to these assumptions, if a country drops its trade restrictions, market forces will quickly and effortlessly lead capital and labor to shift into new, more productive uses.

“And since trade always remains in balance, this restructuring will generate a dollar’s worth of new exports for every dollar of new imports. Given these assumptions, it is no wonder that mainstream economic studies always produce results supporting ratification of free trade agreements.”

Given the strong biases in favor of ‘free trade’ agreements, all the more skeptical of the TPP we may be when we see the tiny gains forecast by the World Bank. Vietnam is expected to see the biggest boost among the 12 TPP countries, according to the World Bank forecast – a 10% gain in gross domestic product cumulative through 2030. In other words, less than one percent per year. As a TechDirt summation of this report noted:

“So according to the World Bank’s figures, the US will gain an extra 0.04% GDP per year on average, as a result of TPP; Australia an extra 0.07% annually, and Canada a boost of 0.12% per year.”

If this is the best that promoters of corporate hegemony can come up with for the TPP, its likely effect will surely be dismal.

The vanishing ‘gains’

Jane Kelsey, a New Zealand law professor who has long sounded the alarm on the TPP, notes that even the slightly larger gain forecast for that country would actually constitute a statistical blip that may or may not actually exist. She writes:

“[The] National [government]’s glitzy new ‘TPP fact’ page is bad wine repackaged in new bottles. Here’s a few facts they don’t tell you. The projected economic gains of 0.9% of GDP by 2030 are within their own margin of error, even before costs are factored in and disregarding unrealistic modelling.”

A more balanced investigation conducted by Tufts University researchers Jeronim Capaldo and Alex Izurieta led to the conclusion that the TPP, if enacted, would result in the loss of three-quarters of a million jobs through 2025, including 448,000 jobs to be lost in the US alone. Canada, Mexico, Japan and Australia would each suffer jobs losses in the tens of thousands. The Tufts report concludes:

“The TPP would lead to higher inequality, with a lower labor share of national income. We expect competitive pressures on labor incomes, combined with employment losses, to push labor shares of national income further down, redistributing income from labor to capital in all countries. In the USA, this would exacerbate a multi-decade trend.”

Working people in the 11 other TPP countries would get to experience the stagnant wages and declining living standards that United Statesians have been treated to during the past three decades.

More than 330,000 manufacturing jobs are expected to be lost in the US alone if TPP is passed, according to a separate calculation by the United Steelworkers, and Unifor estimates that 20,000 Canadian jobs in auto manufacturing alone are at risk.

If no gain, there will be pain for you

Underlying all this further tilting of the scales already heavily weighted toward corporate money and power is the ‘investor-state dispute settlement‘ provision, whereby multi-national corporations can sue governments to overturn laws and regulations they don’t like under the excuse that measures to protect safety, health or the environment constitute a ‘taking’ of their expected profits – not even actual profits.

The secret tribunal that will hear corporate complaints (the same as the one used under NAFTA) must assume the corporation’s claim is true under some circumstances.

Canada, because it has higher standards than do the US or Mexico, is most frequently sued under NAFTA, although the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada has committed the latest outrage, suing the US government for $15 billion because the Obama administration declined to permit the Keystone XL pipeline. TransCanada is suing for $15 billion even though it has spent $2.4 billion on the pipeline.

Although the governments of the 12 TPP countries are ‘signing’ the agreement today, that is a formality: The deal must still be approved by legislatures and implementing legal changes enacted.

The TPP would enter into force 60 days after all 12 signatories ratify it or, if that doesn’t happen within two years, in April 2018 if at least six of the 12 countries accounting for 85% of the combined gross domestic product of the original signatories have ratified the agreement.

That 85% can’t be reached without the US or Japan, effectively giving those countries a veto and thus placing extra responsibility on opponents in both those countries. It also can’t be reached if Canada, Australia and Mexico each fail to ratify, so opponents there can also stop it.

The TPP, even more so that previous deals, has very little to do with trade and much to do with solidifying corporate control over life, arguably the most significant erosion of what is left of formal democracy yet. Regardless of where you live, the TPP can be defeated if we continue to organize.

And once the TPP is sent to the trash heap, it will be time to go on the offensive to roll back existing trade pacts.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, will be published by Zero Books in February 2016.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Never mind today’s signing charade: TPP is heading for the rocks‘ by Sam Cossar-Gilbert.