Picking up the pace of poverty reduction in Nigeria

JONATHAN LAIN
MARTA SCHOCH
TARA VISHWANATH

|MARCH 22, 2022

THE WORLD BANK

Children. Nigeria. Arne Hoel/World Bank

Nigeria aspires to lift all of its people out of poverty by 2030. This is an ambitious target, as even before COVID-19 struck, some 4 in 10 Nigerians lived below the poverty line—about 80 million people. Some of the key drivers of poverty in Nigeria and potential poverty-reducing policies are considered in detail in a new report, A Better Future for All Nigerians: Nigeria Poverty Assessment 2022.

Looking at a snapshot of poverty at a single point in time can only take us so far in developing the policies that Nigeria needs to meet its target. What we really need to know is how poverty has changed in Nigeria over time.

Assessing poverty trends has long proved difficult in Nigeria. The 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey (NLSS) provided the first official estimates of poverty in more than a decade. Yet, given a range of improvements made to the questionnaire—especially on how food consumption was measured—it is difficult to compare this directly with the poverty estimate from the previous official household survey in Nigeria, the 2009/10 Harmonised Nigerian Living Standards Survey (HNLSS).1, 2

Nevertheless, two specialized statistical techniques, summarized in a new paper, can help us construct poverty trends for Nigeria. First, we can “back-cast” Nigeria’s poverty rate, using the 2018/19 NLSS as a springboard in combination with sectoral GDP estimates. Second, we can impute consumption—and, in turn, poverty—into a decade-long survey containing many key non-monetary indicators, the General Household Survey-Panel.

Whichever approach we use, it seems that poverty reduction in Nigeria was at first slow and then stagnated in the decade before COVID-19 (see Figure 1).3 While there was some progress in the first half of the 2010s, this was reversed after the 2016 recession (induced by falling oil prices) hit and population growth started outstripping real GDP growth. This stalling progress on poverty broadly matches the path of non-monetary indicators, including education and access to basic infrastructure, from Nigeria’s Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Subsequent projections suggest that COVID-19 has worsened poverty in Nigeria even further.


1. The 2016 Nigeria Poverty Assessment also identified several anomalies in the 2009/10 HNLSS consumption data.
2. Naively comparing these two surveys would suggest that poverty dropped by more than 17 percentage points in the decade to COVID-19.
3. The fact that back-casting and survey-to-survey imputations—two totally different techniques with totally different underlying assumptions—yield such similar results, adds robustness to these findings.


Figure 2. Stalling poverty reduction in Nigeria in the decade prior to COVID-19
Image


Note: Estimates exclude Borno. Poverty rate calculated using the international poverty line of US$1.90 2011 PPP per person per day. Population estimates taken from the United Nations, via the World Development Indicators. Further details on back-casting and survey-to-survey imputations provided in Lain, Schoch, and Vishwanath (2022). Imputed estimates to be included in the World Bank’s official global poverty measurement. Source: 2018/19 NLSS, GHS, and World Bank estimates.

Moreover, when per capita incomes were growing in the early part of the 2010s, it appears that richer Nigerians benefited more than poorer Nigerians (see Figure 2). Richer Nigerians also lost out more when the 2016 recession struck. Thus, the fortunes of the rich waxed and waned in line with Nigeria’s growth, much more so than the poor. This matches labor market indicators from the same period. When the 2016 recession hit, the shift towards farming as a key coping strategy to try to maintain incomes was more pronounced among Nigerian workers in the top 60% of the consumption distribution than those in the bottom 40%.


Figure 3. Consumption for richer Nigerians is more closely linked to Nigeria’s growth prospects
Image

Note: Estimates exclude Borno. Further details on survey-to-survey imputations provided in Lain, Schoch, and Vishwanath (2022). Source: 2018/19 NLSS, GHS, and World Bank estimates.

These findings chime with global evidence that poverty is becoming clustered in certain regions—such as Nigeria’s poor, largely rural north—in large countries. What is more, poverty in Nigeria is also entrenched in the areas most affected by climate and conflict shocks. Therefore, there is a critical need for policies that can help poorer people in poorer areas.

Given these patterns, what can be done to make growth work for Nigeria’s poor?

In the short-run, three immediate policies can help poor Nigerians recover from the COVID-19 crisis and, since COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality across many dimensions, such policies directly support redistribution. First, distributing vaccines quickly and equitably remains vital for curbing the direct health threat of the virus, especially given uncertainty around new variants. Second, learning losses from school closures still need to be reversed to reduce long-term consequences for human capital; this may involve encouraging children to go back to school when it is safe and adopting low-tech remote learning solutions that work for the poor when needed. Third, social protection should be expanded to offset income losses and prevent households falling into, or further into, poverty; with shocks and uncertainty proliferating, exemplified by the global economic impact of the conflict in Ukraine, this could help build household resilience now and in the future.

Yet Nigeria also needs at least three types of deeper, longer-term reforms to foster and sustain pro-poor growth and help raise people out of poverty. With Nigeria’s young population continuing to grow, the urgency of these reforms cannot be overstated. Now is the time to ensure that the country seizes its potential demographic dividend.

First, macroeconomic reforms, including to fiscal, trade, and exchange rate policy, could help diversify the economy, invigorate structural transformation, and create good, productive jobs, especially wage jobs that offer the best pathways out of poverty. Despite crude oil’s vast contributions to exports and government revenues, less than 1% of Nigerians are employed in mining and extractives, underlining the need to allow other, more labor-intensive sectors to flourish. Government spending could also be increased for pro-poor causes, such as health, education, and infrastructure—the main concerns among Nigerians themselves—by improving revenue collection and redirecting spending from expensive subsidies that benefit the rich more than the poor.

Second, structural transformation and the creation of productive wage jobs on a large scale may not happen overnight, so policies to boost the productivity of farm and non-farm household enterprises will be crucial in the meantime. For farms, this includes developing new and more resilient crop varieties, as well as investments in storage, transport, and market access. For non-farm household enterprises, policies that ease credit constraints could be especially important.

Third, for Nigerians to seize the opportunities available to them, the bedrock of infrastructure needs to be strengthened. The correlation between monetary poverty and access to electricity, adequate drinking water, and improved sanitation is extremely high in Nigeria. Yet information and communication technologies, including mobile phones, could also be used to help boost access to jobs and markets and to support the rollout of social protection programs and other redistributive government policies.

The specifics of poverty-reducing policies will depend on redoubling efforts to gather and analyze data regularly. New official household survey data, the collection of which should start later in 2022, will provide far more detailed insights into changes in poverty over time —as well as into key drivers, constraints, and corrective policies—than even the back-casts and imputations discussed above. By investing in data, Nigeria can build trust, accountability, and transparency, taking substantial strides forward along its pathway to poverty reduction.

Nigeria Poverty Assessment 2022: A Better Future for All Nigerians

Gibraltar seized a $75 million superyacht owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch, the local government said

Kate Duffy

Dmitry Pumpyansky's superyacht Axioma. Gerard Bottino/Shutterstock

Gibraltar's government said on Monday it seized a $75 million yacht owned by a Russian oligarch.
The government told Insider that the yacht, Axioma, was owned by the billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky.
Axioma was previously docked in Antigua, in the Caribbean, before it sailed to Gibraltar.

A $75 million superyacht owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch was seized upon docking in Gibraltar, the local government said.

The 240-foot Axioma is owned by the Russian businessperson Dmitry Pumpyansky, the government of Gibraltar, a British overseas territory on Spain's south coast, told Insider.

Pumpyansky, who has an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion, is the owner of Russia's largest steel-pipe-maker, TMK, Forbes reported. His assets were frozen by the UK and the EU as part of sanctions imposed last week over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Axioma is valued by SuperYachtFan at $75 million. It was previously docked in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean, until it set sail on March 3. It arrived in Gibraltar 18 days later, the ship tracker Marine Traffic showed.

Dmitry Pumpyansky. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

In a statement on Monday, Gibraltar's government said Axioma was "confirmed to be the subject of an arrest action by a leading international bank in the Supreme Court of Gibraltar." It added, "The vessel is now subject to arrest by the Admiralty Marshal until further order."

In a later statement to Insider, the Gibraltar government said, "The owner of the yacht is Dmitry Pumpyansky."

Axioma, built in 2013, can host 22 guests and crew members on board, SuperYachtFan said. Axioma also features two big swimming pools, a gym, and a cinema, SuperYachtFan added.

Several superyachts linked to Russian oligarchs have been seized by countries that have sanctioned them as part of efforts to punish Russia and President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine.


Italy has seized a $578 million yacht linked to Andrey Melnichenko; France has impounded a $120 million vessel linked to Igor Sechin; and Spain has detained a $153 million superyacht linked to Sergei Chemezov.

 

When the UK welcomed 250,000 refugees from Belgium fleeing the German army’s advance in the First World War

From Hercule Poirot to a Tyneside factory town, the biggest wave of refugees in British history has left its faint trace

Belgians flee by train after the German invasion in 1914 (Photo: Photo: Branger/Roger Viollet via Getty)

By Leo Cendrowicz

March 22, 2022 

They were mostly women and children, fleeing a cataclysmic conflict that laid waste to their homes. In just a few weeks, some 250,000 refugees had arrived in Britain, clutching their bare necessities.

They hailed from a peaceful, neutral country attacked from the east by an invading force seemingly bent on enslaving their homeland.

This might seem to be referring to the fate of Ukrainians heading to Britain as Russian armies drive them across their borders to a safer place. But it is the tale of Belgians during the First World War, fleeing as the German army rolled across their country in its bid to invade France.

And the Belgian experience in Britain offers pointers to what Ukrainian refugees may find when they arrive.

Some three million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began in February, with almost two million currently in Poland.

Few have yet made it to the UK, in part thanks to the complex visa system, but about 150,000 families in Britain offered homes to refugees in the first hours of the launch of the Homes for Ukraine scheme. If this number is met, it would mark the biggest refugee influx since the Belgians in 1914.

How did it work out then? Much of the fighting on the Western Front during the First World War took place on Belgian territory – in Flanders Fields – with most of the country occupied by the Imperial German Army.

Between August and October 1914, there was an exodus of more than 1.5 million people from Belgium, about one fifth of the population, with a quarter of a million heading for Britain. They arrived at various ports including Dover, Hull, Tilbury, Margate, Harwich and Grimsby. On a single day in October 1914, the Kent port of Folkestone had to cope with 16,000 Belgians.

The refugees elicited huge sympathy when they arrived, with donations of clothes, shoes and toys, while the War Refugee Committee received 100,000 offers for accommodation after a public appeal.

Newspapers at the time hailed King Albert I for refusing to surrender, comparing Belgium’s “Soldier King” to Leonidas of Sparta. The press also presented them as the innocent victims of German brutality, and their country was dubbed poor, gallant, or plucky little Belgium. That mood is echoed in current sentiments about the plight of Ukraine, and its President, Volodymyr Zelensky.

About one in three of the Belgian refugees stayed in London or its environs, with some 38,000 passing through Alexandra Palace: the “People’s Palace” became a sorting centre, with beds filling the Great Hall and Exhibition Hall.

Other refugees were billeted in local communities around Britain, often housed with families who offered rooms or homes. A report in London-based journal The Hospital, published on September 26, 1914, referred to “the homeless Flemish peasants and Walloons” congregated at Alexandra Palace.

“They are simply penniless men, women, and children seeking refuge from a devastated country in a land of whose language and people they are totally ignorant, and are consequently utterly dependent for their food, shelter, and even clothing on the generous hospitality of the strangers to whom they have come in such numbers,” it said.

Elisabethville, in Birtley, Tyneside, was purpose-built for 6,000 new arrivals. Munitions minister David Lloyd George set it up next to two factories making artillery shells, staffed entirely by Belgians working to support the war effort.

Named after Elisabeth, the Belgian Queen, and known by the Belgians as “the Colony”, it was a sovereign Belgian village run on Belgian law. It had its own gendarmes, the Belgian Franc as currency, and Flemish and French were the main languages. Elisabethville also had its own shops, school, a Catholic church, bars, a cinema, prisons, police and even a cemetery.

A similar community of around 6,000 was based in Richmond and East Twickenham, in south-west London, and was also associated with a munitions factory, based in what is now Cleveland Park alongside Richmond Bridge. By 1918, some 30,000 Belgians were working in munition factories, including more than 7,000 women.

Belgians refugees arrive in France after history repeats itself in 1940 during the Second World War (Photo: Getty)

Most Belgians integrated well in Britain. There was a long-time affinity between the two countries – Britain had helped secure Belgian independence in 1831 – and some Belgians already spoke English. There were romances between the guests and their hosts, with some ending in marriage.

Over time, as the war dragged on, public opinion gradually turned into mistrust. Locals grumbled about their sons fighting Belgium’s battles. And there were complaints about Belgians working for lower salaries, undercutting native labour, working longer days and working on Sundays and public holidays.

“The initial hero status was slowly undermined by irritation as the refugees were seen as foreigners,” says Tony Kushner, professor of modern history at the University of Southampton. “At first, the Belgians were the exceptions in wartime atmosphere of strong anti-alienism. But by the end of the war, they were not. All but a few are quickly removed after 1918.”

Although some 140,000 Belgians were still in Britain in 1918, within a year of the armistice, more than 90 per cent had returned home. And while they left few lasting marks on their host country, some remembered them fondly: crime writer Agatha Christie is thought to have based her detective Hercule Poirot on a retired Belgian policeman refugee she nursed in her home town of Torquay.

Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate: 'Not all climate action is climate justice'

 Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate began her activism back in 2019 by staging a solo climate protest at the gates of the Ugandan parliament, before going on to co-found both the Rise Up Movement and Fridays for Future Uganda. She is currently in Paris as part of a delegation of Ugandan and Tanzanian activists who are fighting to drum up opposition to a huge oil pipeline under construction in East Africa. She joined us for Perspective to tell us more about her activism, her hopes for her meeting with Pope Francis and how she feels about being dubbed the African Greta Thunberg.

Toward radical responses to polycrisis: a review of reviews of the Deep Adaptation book

By Jem Bendell, originally published by Jem Bendell blog
March 22, 2022

https://www.resilience.org/

Soon it will be a year since the book I co-edited on ‘Deep Adaptation’ to the coming breakdown of industrial consumer societies, mainly due to environmental stress, was published by Polity. Over that year, the idea of societies breaking down has become a little less taboo within research circles, with the emergence of terms like ‘polycrisis’ to describe the contemporary situation where a variety of societal disruptions are interacting – health, inflation, conflict – to threaten the capability of people, organisations and governments to comprehend and respond. Despite that progress on the fringes of intellectual thought, there is still widespread resistance to even discuss the topic, which was reflected by many of the book reviews of Deep Adaptation. A particular type of negative review has emerged from the Left of British politics, which has been surprising to me given my involvement with the British Labour Party prior to 2018. Such reviews reflect a concern of some left-wing commentators that if we do not believe it possible to reform modern economies to produce a sustainable future of ‘Life as We Know It,’ then we would not find motivation for longterm political organising to gain government power. This concern is something I will focus on in this review of the reviews. But first, I want to begin with a review that also expressed concern for mutual solidarity, and considered the Deep Adaptation agenda more realistic than the mainstream concept of sustainable development, which pretends we can have our capitalism cake and eat it.

In that review in World Literature Today, one criticism of the book is that it is academic and not that accessible to a wider audience. Edited by two academics, we are guilty as accused! Part of that wider accessibility, the reviewer said, would be to show ways that people can respond to their anticipation of societal breakdown, including as citizens and political actors. I think that is an important invitation for people in the Deep Adaptation movement and anyone who no longer believes that we can maintain ‘Life as We Know It’ (in middle class urban societies), as environmental breakdown unfolds.

It is clear that a few years since the start of the Deep Adaptation phenomenon, there is a bifurcation between people who want to focus on emotional support and those who want to connect that to attempting social change at scale. In its first 3 years, the work of the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) has been mostly serving the former tendency, so that attempts at social change are undertaken by participants in the Forum through their various other social activism. Since last year, as an outsider, I have been encouraging the Forum to support more social activism, including more public advocacy on compassionate responses to societal disruptions and perceived vulnerabilities. I do that while knowing that any policy ideas, advocacy and activism can become a form of escapism, and repeat patterns of thought and behaviour that got us into this mess in the first place. Therefore, we need to maintain a focus on emotional processing when doing such work. That is why we began by exploring new ways of engaging in dialogue at the outset of the DAF. It would be a mistake to assume, as some observers have done, that this emphasis on psychology is at the expense of political organising, or for participants in the DA movement to believe that focus should be instead of political organising.

What is already clear is that an anticipation of societal collapse does not mean less social activism, or less radical critiques of how we arrived in this mess. In a public letter at the conclusion of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, over 200 scholars from around the world who anticipate societal disruption and collapse due to climate change, together condemned the corporate capture of climate policy. With the co-editor of the Deep Adaptation book, Dr Rupert Read, we critiqued the corporate takeover of COP26 in an article for Brave New Europe. In our book itself, capitalism was mentioned 16 times as an unhelpful barrier to significant action on mitigation and adaptation. Since we finished that book, I have been researching what various policy ideas might make sense in a world that’s increasingly disrupted by environmental and associated changes. To contrast with the corporate reformist agenda at COP26, I published a series of articles about a bolder policy agenda on both mitigation and adaptation (a #RealGreenRevolution). These included monetary reform, stock market reform, a global carbon tax, breaking up media and tech monopolies, nationalising food reserves, and a range of other necessary and obvious left-of-centre policy ideas.

Although it’s not surprising that such ideas do not appear in the corporate mainstream climate policy agenda, it is unfortunate that supposedly more left-wing or the more devoutly environmental publications and commentators have not been promoting similar ideas. Instead, I witness their policy proposals rely on technological salvation, better management of corporations and more intrusive controls on the general public. Whereas such proposals are sometimes accompanied by people posturing as true radicals, the contents of books like Burnt, show they are reformist, not revolutionary. I also witness some environmentalists continuing to pretend their demands are ‘Beyond Politics’ whereas without massive wealth redistribution, their ideas would have terrible impacts on the low income people in their countries. Such redistribution would require a huge amount of organising to win elections, despite mainstream media and bigtech being fundamentally opposed to any kind of economic radicalism.

Unpacking One Critical Review

Perhaps the lack of a radical comprehensive programme, a sense of political impotence, and a fear of how bad things are becoming, all mix together to produce rather aggressive commentary on the Deep Adaptation book and movement from some commentators on the Left. I will examine one review in particular to highlight this phenomenon. In the Ecologist magazine, a champion of the British Labour Party’s proposals for a Green New Deal to decarbonise the UK economy called the book many bad things, including defeatist, anti-humanist, and primitivist. Why such hostility? That is something I will come back to. But first, I want to address those three accusations.

The argument that to anticipate the collapse of industrial consumer societies is defeatist seems logical to some on the face-of-it. However, the wave of bold activism by people who believe it is too late to avert a catastrophe, and are trying to help societies change to reduce harm and provide more of a chance to each other and future generations, is empirical evidence that apathy is not the response by many people. The book describes a range of actions being undertaken, but perhaps we could have done more to show the global movement that it now is. For instance, the humanitarian action taken by people in the Deep Adaptation group in Southern India, or the efforts at local food production in Hungary. It is only defeatist if one only has one vision of victory, which is maintaining industrial consumer societies. Such a singular vision must ignore worrying interpretations of the latest environmental science, as well as ignore the ecological footprint of greening the economy in the way proposed by ideas like Labour’s proposed Green New Deal – a topic which deserves some serious attention before moving on to the subsequent criticisms in The Ecologist’s review.

In 2021, the UN’s International Energy Agency (IEA) calculated that a global energy transition off fossil fuels would increase demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040. The IEA report noted that there is not the capacity to reach such demand, whereas there are no plans to build enough mines and refineries, and such expansion is unprecedented and would take decades. Therefore, it does not appear to be a solution available to the whole world. The report also noted that the environmental impacts of delivering that level of supply would be massive. Such environmental impacts include not only the devastation from earth removal, but also the toxic and radioactive wastes produced from the mining and refining processes. Worse still, an analysis of where those critical minerals are located, finds they are typically in locations full of people living outside of industrial consumer societies that want the metals from under them. Academics Christos Zografos and Paul Robbins therefore concluded in a study published in the journal One Earth, that “A Green New Deal could put severe pressure on lands held by Indigenous and marginalized communities and reshape their ecologies into “green sacrifice zones.” Such cost shifting risks reproducing a form of climate colonialism in the name of just transition.” For a Green New Deal to work to decarbonise any modern economy means that a country must maintain the unequal global relations that both generate its purchasing power in world markets and enable international corporations to destroy the lands of indigenous and marginalised peoples around the world. By pointing out these contradictions and the potential for new waves of ecological destruction from the capitalist’s fairytale that is a ‘Green New Deal’, one is being both realistic and expressing solidarity with vulnerable people, not being defeatist. In other words, it is not defeatist to wish to defend the lands of indigenous people against the corporations seeking profit from fueling the privileged and unsustainable lifestyles of people on the other side of the world.

One of the other claims in the book review deserves more detailed attention, partly because it led to some furore online, and a specific objection from some contributors to the book. That is the claim that the book and the movement are ‘primitivist.’ In his article Chris Saltmarsh says little about what he means by that term, other than it involves promoting learning from ‘idealised’ indigenous societies. I want to note right away that the book includes some authors who are women of colour and one chapter is co-written by a collective of indigenous scholars. As Skeena’s chapter on relocalisation was quoted as part of Chris’s argument, she spoke out against the use of such language:

“There are deeply meaningful reasons why we would consciously refuse technologies of the west that are not about our ‘lack’ or “primitivism” but instead our abundance of mind, heart and spirit.  When people of non-western and whiteness cultures resist the technologies of the west, often people racialised as white and people programmed in whiteness will use a kind of gaslighting of our ancient cultures – and will make an assumption that what we ‘need’ and want most is the so called ‘progress’ which in reality is often the mal-adaption of the west.”

I have since been told that Chris meant that the book had a theme of ‘anarcho-primitivism’ running throughout it. That made me visit wikipedia to find out what that is all about. Apparently it is an “anarchist critique of civilization that advocates a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization and high technology”.

The Deep Adaptation book does not advocate anarcho-primitivism. The book neither mentions the term nor cites the author who created and promotes the term – an American philosopher called John Zerzan. Instead, the book outlines how Deep Adaptation is an invitation for exploring what to do once we stop pretending we can reform and save industrial consumer societies. Therefore, as a framework, it does not advocate the active destruction of such societies. Conversely, the book includes advocacy of technologies, such as safe forms of geo-engineering like localised Marine Cloud Brightening that uses sea water, and the use of open source software to create local trading networks, ideas that are likely heresy for anarcho-primitivists.

The book critiques both modernity, capitalism, and consumerism in various places. Although anarcho-primitivists do that, so do mainstream environmental groups, Christians, Buddhists, Sufis, and whole swathes of social and political thought, such as post-modernism. The book includes world leading Buddhist scholars, leadership scholars, and educational theorists. It is strange to me how these could all be regarded as closet anarcho-primitivists.

Saltmarsh describes respect for indigenous cultures by Pablo Servigne and colleagues as “promoting an imagined primitive mode of social organisation” and manages to cover over any prejudice by criticising Servigne and friends for not discussing Indigneous struggles. Yet that chapter mentions how “Indigenous communities have been experiencing collapses for centuries…” Chris writes in his review there is a lack of solidarity with indigenous people in a book which has a chapter co-authored by a collective of indigenous scholars and activists. Moreover, that chapter explicitly critiques Western responses to bad climate news that use stories of returning to a pre-modern idyll, which they label as a “romantic” form of denial. In other words, in a chapter written by indigenous scholars in the book, the way Western people might be attracted to anarcho-primitivism is critiqued.

Despite claiming that is what he meant by the term primitivism, Chris does not mention anarcho-primitivism in his book review. If he had, then people with an interest in anarcho-primitivism might have paid attention, and been disappointed not to find any of that in the Deep Adaptation book. Instead, Chris appears to use the term ‘primitivism’ and ‘primitive’ in his article as a negative label, rather than as a label for a political ideology. Therefore, I share the concern of my colleagues about such forms of writing in a key environmental publication in 2022. It should not need to be women of colour or indigenous scholars who call out white writers and editors for their use of racially insensitive language. As Skeena’s co-author, Matthew Slater said in his rather fruity public letter to Chris:

“Given that you, me and the editor of The Ecologist are all white men, we should listen to how such statements come across to people unlike us.”

It would be unfortunate if what is actually happening here is the reviewer avoiding accountability for his pejorative use of the term of primitivism, by invoking – post hoc – a marginal political theoretical idea that not only is not present in the book, but the sentiment of which was actually criticised in that book.

The casual use of negative labels is something that can have real world consequences. In Brazil the current political establishment has a diabolical attitude towards the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. They are struggling against rapacious capitalism, including that which fuels the demand for precious metals for the technologies of the modern world, as I described above. Would someone trying to stop a bulldozer trashing a tropical forest to access the critical mineral to drive Green New Deals in the West be labelled anarcho-primitivist? Or only if they mention that they critique the values of modernity and consumerism that underpin the violence of that bulldozer? Perhaps for some people, anyone that gets in the way of the possible techno-salvation of industrial consumer societies is worthy of any negative label that might stick?

Which brings us to the claim by Mr Saltmarsh that we are ‘anti-humanists’. He does that by quoting me and the co-founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance, Adrian Tait, out of context, to suggest we simply blame the human race for the mess the planet is in, rather than recognising the role of capitalism in driving the predicament. But in his chapter Adrian writes: “The economics of plunder and incursion has fed a set of myths and assumptions – for instance the notion that it is fine to externalise costs – to dump them into the global commons.  These myths and assumptions are denial systemically enshrined; they blind us to the situation or encourage us to accept it as inevitable.” That sounds like a critique of the economic system. If he missed it, then this statement in the book’s introduction was clear enough:  “The deep adaptation perspective sees the pace and scale of dangerous levels of climate change and ecological degradation to be so fast that neither a reform of capitalism or of modern society is realistic.” In sixteen other places in the book there is a criticism of capitalism as a driver of the predicament we are in. However, in every instance, as with Adrian, we go deeper, beneath capitalism, and critique industrialism and consumerism as well. Perhaps that is our real ‘sin’ for the reformist Left in the West – we are too critical of capitalism, including of the systems that prop-up the vested interests who pay their wages.

Maintaining Our Faith in Each other During Disruption and Breakdown

It is disappointing that this question about the reasons for the predicament is so badly addressed in a review in a serious publication like The Ecologist. I see nothing in the article from Chris to suggest he was engaging in philosophical debate about the nature of humanism, and instead was simply implying we have a misanthropic, negative, view of human nature. What Chris and other critics do not recognise is that Deep Adapters are the people who argue against any negativity towards human nature within the ever-wider field of collapse anticipation. We recognise that some people who realise everything is falling apart and the environment has been destroyed can, in their grief and anger, arrive at a form of misanthropy. They can adopt a disdainful attitude towards our own species. That is an important issue to raise and discuss: to recognise the pain from which that attitude arises and then explore why we can choose to have a faith in humanity after all. Part of that process is to recognise what went wrong, and to see how people have been manipulated – and subjugated – by systems that served power. In my past writings I have gone further than Saltmarsh – I have argued that if environmentalists do not have a deeper critique of the oppressive systems that have manipulated and exploited us to harm each other and nature, then we may end up with a misanthropic view which sees humans as having created this mess because of human nature and that we need strict controls on our behaviour for our own good. Although I have mentioned this issue a lot in the past, it doesn’t seem to ‘cut through’. It is probably because I have avoided naming names and using the F word. So I will try to be clearer here…

If the environmental movement doesnt centre itself on a capitalist critique, it will become misanthropic and degrade into ecofascism when situations become really difficult. If the Left in the global North does not recognise it has inadvertently adopted the misanthropic assumptions of managerialism, whereby people must be given stricter rules by expert elites, then it will also descend into ecofascism. And if the lot of us don’t recognise the assumptions and values of modernity that also underpin this mess, we won’t be able to find agendas and narratives suited to an era of things getting materially more challenging for generations to come.

I won’t bore you with more debunking of the other criticisms in either Saltmarsh’s review or others from the British left. Instead, what is a more positive way of responding? It is to realise that all of us, including these critics of Deep Adaptation, are afraid. When afraid, it is normal to lash out. Therefore we can help each other to notice when that is happening through our frantic intellectual story-telling. In the case of some of these commentators from the British left, it might be their anxiety that is motivating them to delegitimize anyone who undermines their current story of salvation from this tragedy. Deep Adapters might therefore be seen as more of an enemy to them than the powers-that-be, as a story of salvation is what keeps them going, for now.

Recentering Freedom in a Politics for the Polycrisis Era

The negativity coming from some commentators on the British left is particularly odd for me, given my previous work with the Labour leader’s office during the General Election of 2017, when we managed to transform the country’s impression of Jeremy Corbyn and remove the government’s majority. The lack of wisdom and radicalism in the criticisms has helped me to see that there is an urgent need for a radical left agenda for an era of climate breakdown. That means going back to first principles. For me, the Left is about collective emancipation from systematic oppression, with an emphasis on people with less power organising together to achieve more. Such systematic oppression involves economic structures, as well as cultural norms associated with gender, ethnicity and class. Therefore, both freedom and fairness are foundational to Leftwing politics, despite the horrors of past decades when the Left became totalitarian, and the more recent decades where the Left in many countries has lost its confidence about its emancipatory character.

Such is the loss of focus on collective emancipation in contemporary mainstream Leftist discourse, when I discuss this topic with people in the West they are often surprised. Reclaiming the idea of freedom as part of the narrative of the Left was why, as communications strategist, I proposed the 2017 UK General Election campaign of the Labour Party use a narrative of freeing people from ‘being held back’ by the effects of the extreme inequality enabled by government policies. When discussing that, often the focus turns to what ‘freedom’ today means for the Left. So, in concluding, I would like to get a bit philosophical…

For me, freedom describes the elusive capability for people to continually re-discover and pursue personal preferences with an awareness of how that pursuit arises from, relates to and impacts, others and nature. That capability is influenced by personal, relational, societal and environmental contexts. Ultimately freedom must include a personal preference to cultivate one’s ability to comprehend how the process of preference-formation arises from attachment to stories of reality and to fears of many kinds, including a fear of suffering and death. It must also include a freedom from the potential tyranny of concepts, by realising that ‘freedom’ is merely a concept pointing in a general direction, and there is no singular and precise phenomenon in reality that constitutes ‘freedom’. A belief in emancipating people stems from a belief in our innate potential to do what is right for ourselves, each other and nature if we are not manipulated, incentivised or forced into destructive behaviours. That means the first instinct of a truly freedom-loving left winger is to identify the impediments to people naturally doing what is of mutual interest. Sadly, many of the commentators and leaders within the Leftwing of politics across the West appear to have forgotten that faith in people, as their ideas are infected by managerialist attitudes that regard the rest of us as needing more oppressive controls on our thoughts and behaviours.

Deliberation on the topic of emancipatory politics during societal breakdown is not something that should be led by me, my friends, or the wider British left. It needs far broader participation from people around the world, many of whom have experienced disruptions in recent memory, and who are less emotionally and economically invested in industrial consumer societies. Where might such a deliberation take place? Perhaps the World Social Forum, which brings together explicitly anti-capitalist civil society organisations from around the world could be a venue for a year long ‘Assembly on Emancipatory Politics for an Era of Polycrisis’. To explore that possibility, some Deep Adapters and signatories to the Scholars Warning will be participating in the 2022 World Social Forum. I look forward to hearing what creative ideas emerge, on both emancipatory policies and praxis in a time of polycrisis.

At some point, I hope that some of the current critics of Deep Adaptation, and anyone who has been misinformed by them, will help grow this emancipatory politics during societal disruption and breakdown. So I end with reflection with words of Skeena, a member of the Holding Group of the Deep Adaptation Forum:

“Let’s become free together. Let’s become safe together and maybe even find our flourishing together, for the very future of humanity and its cousins in the great web of life are depending on this work.  Togetherness and the reunion of the whole human family is the only way – the true acceptance of our many ways of being.  I call this work – Co Liberation.  Come Chris Saltmarsh and friends, come around the fire, let us swap our stories of these ways of being and becoming, let us heal the wounds and tears this paradigm and system has inflicted on us.  Let’s make kinship, let’s belong together and let’s love who we are and what we have left.”

GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE

Pfizer to Sell Up to 4 Million Paxlovid Doses to Poorer Nations

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS

John Lauerman, Bloomberg News

Boxes of Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid antiviral medication in a warehouse in Shoham, Israel, on Jan. 18, 2022. A fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was insufficient to prevent infection with the omicron variant of Covid-19, according to preliminary data from a trial in Israel released Monday. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc. will sell as many as 4 million doses of its Paxlovid pill for Covid-19 to low- and middle-income countries as part of an agreement with Unicef, the global relief organization. 

Terms of the agreement to supply 95 countries with the drug were not released in the statement Tuesday from the New York-based drugmaker. Some upper-middle-income countries in Africa are also included in the deal, Pfizer said, and the company expects supply to be available in April and continue throughout the year. 

Paxlovid cut the risk of hospitalization or death from Covid by almost 90% in clinical trials and promises to play an important role in battling the disease. So far, richer countries have secured about a quarter of Pfizer’s initial supplies, heightening concern about access. 

Pfizer has forged agreements with about three dozen drugmakers in countries around the world to make low-cost versions of Paxlovid, but those may not reach the market until 2023, according to an estimate by analytics firm Airfinity Ltd. 

“Supplying to Unicef is an important part of our comprehensive strategy to accelerate access to Paxlovid to treat Covid-19 infection as quickly as possible and at an affordable price,” Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in the statement. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

TotalEnergies in Talks on Realizing South Africa Gas Development

Paul Burkhardt, Bloomberg News

Signage for TotalEnergies SE at a gas station in Toulouse, France, on Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022. TotalEnergies promised to increase its dividend and buy back more shares after posting a record fourth-quarter profit. Photographer: Matthieu Rondel/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- TotalEnergies SE is working on a plan to develop gas discoveries in South Africa with its partners and the government, according to its managing director in the country. 

The oil major starting in 2019 has made discoveries of gas and condensate -- a light liquid hydrocarbon -- offshore the most industrialized nation in Africa. After overcoming strong offshore currents to drill the wells, the company is now in talks “on how we can make it happen,” Mariam Kane-Garcia, TotalEnergies South Africa managing director said at a conference in Cape Town.

Realizing the development would be a step toward advancing South Africa’s transition away from coal to cleaner energy and potentially revive some fuel-production capacity from a declining number of operating refineries. The country currently lacks significant domestic gas production. 

Africa Oil Corp., one of Total’s partners, has said the group is contemplating a phased development of Block 11B/12B. First production from the field could start by 2027 and supply state-owned PetroSA’s 45,000-barrel-a-day Mossel Bay gas-to-liquids plant and gas-to-power stations, according to IHS Markit.

If a final investment decision “is not taken right now, we would hope to be in a position to take it sooner rather than later,” Kane-Garcia said, without providing further detail. Total hasn’t changed its view on investments based on the recent surge in gas prices, she added.    

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Bondholders Ensnared in Mess at Peru’s State-Run Oil Company

Scott Squires and María Cervantes, Bloomberg News

Customers wait in line to refuel vehicles at a Petroperu gas station in Lima, Peru, on Thursday, March 17, 2022. Petroperu was cut to junk by S&P on Tuesday as the state oil producer becomes further mired in problems related to publishing an audited financial report that is worrying bondholders. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Bonds from Peru’s state-run oil company have become ensnared in a government power struggle that’s delayed a critical audit and led the chief executive officer to quit, sending prices for the securities tumbling.

Petroperu SA’s benchmark notes extended declines Monday following the announcement over the weekend that the CEO had resigned, bringing their losses this year to some 20%. That makes them among the worst performing Latin American corporate bonds in 2022, according to Bloomberg’s Emerging Markets LatAm Index.

The root of Petroperu’s problems stem from a dispute between the company and the government comptroller over completing an audit of its 2021 financial statement. Fallout from the disagreement has led auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers to refuse to sign off on the report, meaning that a May 31 deadline to publish the annual statement won’t be met. Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings have downgraded the company’s debt in response.

Busting the deadline would trigger an event of default under the terms of the bond, so the company has said it intends to reach out to holders to secure a waiver. Petroperu says it’s in talks with international banks to begin the process of getting bondholders to push back the deadline. Investors are largely confident a deal will be reached.

“Petroperu will need to get an audit completed to access the markets, which will take a few months,” said Roger Horn, a senior analyst at SMBC Nikko Securities in New York. “But nobody is going to drive them into a default over the delay.”

Petroperu, President Pedro Castillo and the former CEO, Hugo Chavez, have been named in investigations by prosecutors that allege irregularities focused on tenders to secure supplies of biodiesel that included meetings at the presidential palace. 

Amid the allegations, the comptroller’s office delayed assigning an auditor to the company at the end of last year. The comptroller has re-opened the process to find a new auditor, which could take several weeks.

PwC said in an emailed statement that it decided to not do the audit because it wouldn’t have been possible to complete the work before the deadline, given Petroperu had recently appointed a new head accountant.

Petroperu says other auditors are ready to complete the work. Fernando de la Torre, who was tapped as the interim CEO late Monday, said in a phone interview on March 15 in his capacity as financial manager, that the company is in talks to hire advisers to obtain creditor approvals and will publish the documents by August. 

“We’re going to publish them late, but this is due to something out of Petroperu’s control,” he said.

The issues at the company have become front-page news in the Andean country. After a March 16 shareholder meeting, the Finance Ministry declined to express support for Petroperu’s board or administration. The Energy and Mining Ministry, meanwhile, called for the board’s full support. Even the central bank president got drawn into the situation last week, lamenting the concern bondholders have about a state-run company.

Overblown?

Despite the sell off, some analysts think the dispute has been blown out of proportion. Few investors think the government will allow the company to default and creditors will likely grant waivers to publish the financial report at a later date once a new auditor is hired.

“They should do this in a reasonable time frame, because the company absolutely needs access to financing,” said Victor Diaz, managing director of Credicorp Capital Services in Lima. “If they delay any longer, they could be held in non-compliance, and that cuts off the company’s access to banking and capital markets.”

The chaos at the oil company comes as Peru’s congress attempts to impeach Castillo for the second time since taking office. He’s been summoned to defend himself in front of lawmakers on March 28.

That could further complicate management at the state-owned company, which has become a political football, S&P Global analysts including Gaston Falcone wrote in a report this month when the rating was cut to BB+ from BBB-. 

“We consider this event as a clear sign of Petroperu’s weakening governance,” Falcone wrote. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Libya's Haftar 'to send troops to fight for Russia': Ukraine army

The New Arab Staff
22 March, 2022

The mercenaries will reportedly be transported by the infamous Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organisation that rose to prominence by aiding separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2015.


Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar has reportedly agreed to send troops to Ukraine to fight on behalf of Russia [Getty]

Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar has agreed to send troops to fight for Russia’s invading forces in Ukraine, a Facebook post by Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Sunday.

The post alleges that Haftar made an agreement with the Kremlin during his visit to Moscow earlier this month, in which he promised to send Libyan "volunteers" to Ukraine in order to participate in combat operations on the side of the Russian Federation.”

The mercenaries will reportedly be transported by the infamous Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organisation that rose to prominence by aiding separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2015.

With thousands of members, the paramilitary group is known for entering conflicts around the world on behalf of the Kremlin. Its mercenaries allegedly appeared in Libya in 2019 to fight for Haftar's forces in his assault against the UN-backed government in Tripoli, according to the BBC.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly accused Moscow of recruiting mercenaries to fight in Ukraine.Kyiv's intelligence has said that members of the Wagner Group have entered Ukraine with the aim of assassinating President Zelensky and other top-level officials, according to The Telegraph.