Sunday, January 19, 2020

Human-caused biodiversity decline started millions of years ago

by University of Gothenburg JANUARY 17, 2020

The human-caused biodiversity decline started much earlier than researchers used to believe. According to a new study published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters the process was not started by our own species but by some of our ancestors.

The work was done by an international team of scientists from Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The researchers point out in the study that the ongoing biological diversity crisis is not a new phenomenon, but represents an acceleration of a process that human ancestors began millions of years ago.

"The extinctions that we see in the fossils are often explained as the results of climatic changes but the changes in Africa within the last few million years were relative minor and our analyses show that climatic changes were not the main cause of the observed extinctions," explains Søren Faurby, researcher at Gothenburg University and the main author of the study.

"Our analyses show that the best explanation for the extinction of carnivores in East Africa is instead that they are caused by direct competition for food with our extinct ancestors," adds Daniele Silvestro, computational biologist and co-author of the study.

Carnivores disappeared

Our ancestors have been common throughout eastern Africa for several million years and during this time there were multiple extinctions according to Lars Werdelin, co-author and expert on African fossils.

– By investigating the African fossils, we can see a drastic reduction in the number of large carnivores, a decrease that started about 4 million years ago. About the same time, our ancestors may have started using a new technology to get food called kleptoparasitism, he explains.

Kleptoparasitism means stealing recently killed animals from other predators. For example, when a lion steals a dead antelope from a cheetah.

The researchers are now proposing, based on fossil evidence, that human ancestors stole recently killed animals from other predators. This would lead to starvation of the individual animals and over time to extinction of their entire species.

"This may be the reason why most large carnivores in Africa have developed strategies to defend their prey. For example, by picking up the prey in a tree that we see leopards doing. Other carnivores have instead evolved social behavior as we see in lions, who among other things work together to defend their prey," explains Søren Faurby.

Humans today affect the world and the species that live in it more than ever before.

"But this does not mean that we previously lived in harmony with nature. Monopolization of resources is a skill we and our ancestors have had for millions of years, but only now are we able to understand and change our behavior and strive for a sustainable future. "If you are very strong, you must also be very kind,'" concludes Søren Faurby, quoting Astrid Lindgrens' book about Pippi Longstocking.

Competition from the ancestors of cats drove the extinction of many species of ancient dogs

More information: Søren Faurby et al. Brain expansion in early hominins predicts carnivore extinctions in East Africa, Ecology Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1111/ele.13451

Journal information: Ecology Letter

Provided by University of Gothenburg

Study verifies a missing piece to urban air quality puzzle

by Ellis Robinson, Carnegie Mellon University Materials Science and Engineering

JANUARY 18, 2020

Study verifies a missing piece to urban air quality puzzle — CMU and NOAA mobile laboratories, collecting data in downtown Pittsburgh. Credit: CMU College of Engineering

Despite the prominent health threat posed by fine particulate pollution, fundamental aspects of its formation and evolution continue to elude scientists.

This is true especially for the organic fraction of fine particles (also called aerosol), much of which forms as organic gases are oxidized by the atmosphere. Computer models under-predict this so-called "secondary" organic aerosol (SOA) in comparison to field measurements, indicating that the models are either missing some important sources or failing to describe the physical processes that lead to SOA formation.

New research from Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sheds light on an under-appreciated source of SOA that may help close this model-measurement gap. Published in Environmental Science & Technology, the study shows that volatile organic compounds (VOCs) not traditionally considered may contribute as much or more to urban SOA as long-accounted for sources like vehicle emissions and respired gases from tree leaves.

"Our experiment shows that, in areas where you have a lot of people, you can only explain about half of the SOA seen in the field with the traditional emissions from vehicles and trees," said Albert Presto, a professor in mechanical engineering and the study's corresponding author. "We attribute that other half to these non-traditional VOCs."

In 2018, researchers from NOAA made a splash in the journal Science when they detailed how non-traditional VOCs represent half of all VOCs in the urban atmosphere in U.S. cities. Non-traditional VOCs originate from a slew of different chemicals, industries, and household products, including pesticides, coatings and paints, cleaning agents, and even personal care products like deodorants. Such products typically contain organic solvents whose evaporation leads to substantial atmospheric emissions of VOCs.

"It's a lot of everyday stuff that we use," said Presto. "Anything you use that is scented contains organic molecules, which can get out into the atmosphere and react" where it can form SOA.

The prevalence of these VOCs represents a paradigm shift in the urban SOA picture. The transportation sector had long been the dominant source of VOCs in urban air, but vehicle emissions in the U.S. have decreased drastically (up to 90%) due to tailpipe regulations in recent decades, even as fuel consumption has risen. As transportation-related VOCs have faded in prominence, non-traditional VOCs have begun to make up a greater relative contribution to the urban atmosphere. While NOAA's research alerted to atmospheric science community to the magnitude of non-traditional VOCs in urban environments, they could only hypothesize that these gases were likely important for SOA formation; the idea still needed to be tested.

Testing how much SOA forms from these is not an easy task, however. SOA formation in the atmosphere plays out over the course of several days, making it difficult to track the journey of emitted gases as they are dispersed by winds and begin reacting with sunlight and other oxidants.

Rishabh Shah, a graduate student who studied with Presto and now works at NOAA, constructed a reactor to evaluate the full potential for SOA formation within a sample of air without having to track that air over time.

"The reactor is kind of like an app on your smartphone for SOA formation," said Shah. "You take your picture and the app shows you what you would look like a decade from now."

The reactor accelerates the meandering journey a gas takes by bombarding it with oxidants at much higher concentrations than are found in the atmosphere. This physically simulates in just a few seconds all of the reactions a gas molecule is subject to in the atmosphere over the course of a week. In just a moment's time, Shah's reactor can evaluate the full potential of the air it samples to form SOA.

The team mounted their reactor in a van, creating a mobile platform from which they could access air from different settings containing varying levels of non-traditional VOCs. These locations included sites downwind from a large industrial facility, next to a construction site, within the deep 'street canyons' created by the skyscrapers of a city center, and among low-rise buildings of an urban neighborhood.

In places with large amounts of non-traditional VOCs, the reactor formed large amounts of SOA. These locations included both downtown street-canyons and amongst the urban low-rises, both places where evaporation of consumer products like deodorants and conditioners are high, especially in the morning. Advanced gas-analyzers aboard the mobile platform allowed the team to detect the presence of many of these non-traditional VOCs.

Importantly, in these locations the standard state-of-the-art computer models could not predict the full amount of SOA they observed in their reactor. However, in other environments with fewer non-traditional VOCs, the model was able to accurately predict how much SOA formed in the reactor.

Together, these pieces of evidence form a compelling argument that non-traditional VOC emissions are responsible for a significant amount of urban SOA. Presto estimates that these non-traditional emissions have roughly the same contribution as transportation and biosphere emissions combined, in line with the hypothesis put forward by NOAA.

"Traditionally, we've focused a lot on power plants and vehicles for air quality, which have gotten way cleaner in the U.S.." said Presto. "What that means is that now, a substantial amount of the SOA is coming from this other 'everyday, everywhere' category that hasn't really been considered until recently."

Explore further

A fundamental shortcoming in air pollution models

More information: Rishabh U. Shah et al. Urban Oxidation Flow Reactor Measurements Reveal Significant Secondary Organic Aerosol Contributions from Volatile Emissions of Emerging Importance, Environmental Science & Technology (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b06531

Journal information: Environmental Science & Technology

What is an endangered species?

by John Vucetich, Michigan Technological University JANUARY 17, 2020

What makes for an endangered species classification isn't always obvious.

Lions and leopards are endangered species. Robins and raccoons clearly are not. The distinction seems simple until one ponders a question such as: How many lions would there have to be and how many of their former haunts would they have to inhabit before we'd agree they are no longer endangered?

To put a fine point on it, what is an endangered species? The quick answer: An endangered species is at risk of extinction. Fine, except questions about risk always come in shades and degrees, more risk and less risk.

Extinction risk increases as a species is driven to extinction from portions of its natural range. Most mammal species have been driven to extinction from half or more of their historic range because of human activities.

The query "What is an endangered species?" is quickly transformed into a far tougher question: How much loss should a species endure before we agree that the species deserves special protections and concerted effort for its betterment? My colleagues and I put a very similar question to nearly 1,000 (representatively sampled) Americans after giving them the information in the previous paragraph. The results, "What is an endangered species?: judgments about acceptable risk," are published today in Environmental Research Letters.

Three-quarters of those surveyed said a species deserves special protections if it had been driven to extinction from any more than 30% of its historic range. Not everyone was in perfect agreement. Some were more accepting of losses. The survey results indicate that people more accepting of loss were less knowledgeable about the environment and self-identify as advocates for the rights of gun and land owners. Still, three-quarters of people from the group of people who were more accepting of loss thought special protections were warranted if a species had been lost from more than 41% of their former range.

These attitudes of the American public are aligned with the language of the U.S. Endangered Species Act—the law for preventing species endangerment in the U.S. That law defines an endangered species as one that is "in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range."

But There Might Be A Problem

Government decision-makers have tended to agree with the scientists they consult in judging what counts as acceptable risk and loss. These scientists express the trigger point for endangerment in very different terms. They tend to say a species is endangered if its risk of total and complete extinction exceeds 5% over 100 years.

Before human activities began elevating extinction risk, a typical vertebrate species would have experienced an extinction risk of 1% over a 10,000-year period. The extinction risk that decision-makers and their consultant experts have tended to consider acceptable (5% over 100 years) corresponds to an extinction risk many times greater that the extinction risk we currently impose on biodiversity! Experts and decision-makers—using a law designed to mitigate the biodiversity crisis—tend to allow for stunningly high levels of risk. But the law and the general public seem accepting of only lower risk that would greatly mitigate the biodiversity crisis. What's going on?

One possibility is that experts and decision-makers are more accepting of the risks and losses because they believe greater protection would be impossibly expensive. If so, the American public may be getting it right, not the experts and decision-makers. Why? Because the law allows for two separate judgements. The first judgement is, is the species endangered and therefore deserving of protection? The second judgment is, can the American people afford that protection? Keeping those judgements separate is vital because making a case that more funding and effort is required to solve the biodiversity crisis is not helped by experts and decision-makers when they grossly understate the problem—as they do when they judge endangerment to entail such extraordinarily high levels of risk and loss.

Facts and Values

Another possible explanation for the judgments of experts and decision-makers was uncovered in an earlier paper led by Jeremy Bruskotter of Ohio State University (also a collaborator on this paper). They showed that experts tended to offer judgments about grizzly bear endangerment—based not so much their own independent expert judgement—but on basis of what they think (rightly or wrongly) their peers' judgement would be.

Regardless of the explanation, a good answer to the question, "What an endangered species?" is an inescapable synthesis of facts and values. Experts on endangered species have a better handle on the facts than the general public. However, there is cause for concern when decision-makers do not reflect the broadly held values of their constituents. An important possible explanation for this discrepancy in values is the influence of special interests on decision-makers and experts charged with caring for biodiversity.

Getting the answer right is of grave importance. If we do not know well enough what an endangered species is, then we cannot know well enough what it means to conserve nature, because conserving nature is largely—either directly or indirectly—about giving special care to endangered species until they no longer deserve that label.

Report: 58% of Europe's native trees face extinction threat

More information: Tom Offer-Westort et al, What is an endangered species?: judgments about acceptable risk, Environmental Research Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ab5cc8

Saturday, January 18, 2020

France's art of the protest: the Louvre falls victim to pension reform strike

Industrial action over planned pension reforms is in its 44th day here in France. Workers forced the closure of the world's most visited museum, the Louvre. Some voiced their frustration - and one critic has become the focus of attention on social media. Plus, Eminem ignites controversy with a new song referencing the Manchester bombing that killed 22 people.

Dancing, singing and disrobing: France's unusual pension reform protests

Issued on: 17/01/2020

Striking ballerinas perform a free public show in Paris on

December 24, 2019. © FRANCE 24
Text by:FRANCE 24Video by:Sam BALL

From dancing ballerinas to disrobing lawyers, French workers protesting the current pension reforms and other grievances have been finding innovative and eye-catching ways to show their discontent.

France has been hit by strikes and protests for the past six weeks, driven by anger over government plans to streamline the country’s complex pension system. But numbers at demonstrations have been dwindling in recent days amid signs the movement is running out of steam.

Some, however, have turned to alternative forms of protest to express their discontent at the reforms and other grievances in often eye-catching and innovative ways.

The trend began on December 24 last year when striking ballet dancers performed a free show on the steps of the famed Palais Garnier opera house in Paris. A week later, members of the Paris Opera orchestra followed suit with their own public performance.

Others have been using the tools of their trades to get their point across, including lawyers symbolically ditching their robes at the feet of the country’s justice minister, doctors discarding their white coats and teachers jettisoning their textbooks.

Further innovative forms of protest have seen firefighters turn their hoses on government buildings, flashmob dance routines spring up and striking forensics police staging grisly crime scenes.

Dozens of protesters tried to enter a Paris theatre on Friday where French President Emmanuel Macron was spending the evening with his wife Brigitte.

Around thirty opponents of Macron’s pension reform gathered in front of Paris’s Bouffes du Nord theatre early Friday evening, according to the presidential couple's entourage. After trying to enter the theatre, the demonstrators were moved back by police.

The head of state, who was attending a performance at the time, was "secured" for a few minutes before being able to return to see the play until the end.

The Paris Police headquarters confirmed that the demonstrators had not managed to enter.

The Macrons were attending a performance of "La Mouche" when the activist journalist Taha Bouhafs, sitting three rows behind, tweeted photos that prompted activists to come and disrupt the show, according to a relative of the president.

Protesters storm the theatre #BouffesDuNord after #Macron was reported to be inside by Journaliste #TahaBouhafs, last night#greve18janvier #GiletsJaunes pic.twitter.com/2pZLLqsUAP
— Ian56 (@Ian56789) January 18, 2020

"We were at Paris 7 University for a people's university, someone got a message that Macron was there, so we came to show that we're here, that there's a protest against pension reform, but not only that," said Arthur Knight, one of the protesters.

Bouhafs then asked his tens of thousands of followers whether he should throw his shoes at the president, following the famous gesture of an Iraqi journalist against US President George W. Bush in 2008.

"I'm kidding (...) the security is looking at me weirdly right now," Bouhafs said.

Bouhafs was later arrested and taken into police custody overnight on the grounds he had acted to incite both damage to property and violence.

Je suis actuellement au théâtre des bouffes du Nord (Métro La Chapelle)
3 rangées derrière le président de la république.
Des militants sont quelque part dans le coin et appelle tout le monde à rappliquer.
Quelque chose se prépare... la soirée risque d’être mouvementée. pic.twitter.com/0mfwQPwdzr
— Taha Bouhafs (@T_Bouhafs) January 17, 2020

The president "will continue to go to theatrical performances as usual”, said his entourage. “He will be careful to defend creative freedom so that it is not disrupted by violent political actions.”

The French president has not been seen in public since his appearance in Amiens on 21 and 22 November, before protests against his controversial pension reform kicked off on December 5.

Friday marked the 44th day of a record-breaking transport strike where protesters also targeted the headquarters of the CFDT union, which supports the universal points-based retirement system, and blocked the entrance to the Louvre.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)

Paris Opera musicians serenade public in pension reform protest

Issued on: 18/01/2020

Musicians perform in front of the Palais Garnier during a demonstration of striking employees of the Opera Garnier and the Comedie Francaise, against the French government's plan to overhaul the country's retirement system in Paris, on January 18, 2020. © Stéphane de Sakutin, AFP

Striking musicians and singers of the Paris Opera staged an open-air concert on Saturday in front of the city's historic opera house in protest against a pension reform that seeks to end their special retirement scheme.

Orchestra members and singers performed well-known airs by Verdi and Bizet in a half-hour event outside the Opera Garnier building, ending with a rendition of the Marseillaise.

Magique ! #reformesdesretraites #operadeparis #greve pic.twitter.com/Y6hX1Ab7J2— Unsa Ferroviaire Traction CNU (@CnuUnsa) January 18, 2020

The musicians were cheered on by colleagues including ballerinas who last month performed scenes from Swan Lake at the same spot in a similar protest over the proposed pensions overhaul.

The event drew applause from passers-by on a sunny winter's afternoon in the French capital, where performances by the Paris Opera have been cancelled for the past month due to the strike by artists who want to preserve centuries-old retirement provisions.

"We're so unhappy about not being able to give our shows that we're performing in a different way, in the street, to show the public that we're not on holiday," Fabien Wallerand, a tuba player in the Paris Opera's orchestra, told Reuters.

L’Opera de Paris en grève, la Comédie Française en grève. Concert de l’orchestre sur le parvis de l’Opera et défilé des salariés devant les applaudissements du public. « La culture en danger » #Greve18janvier pic.twitter.com/7LedhqVYrZ— Romain Lescurieux (@RLescurieux) January 18, 2020

Protesters clash with police elsewhere in Paris

Elsewhere in Paris, thousands of demonstrators, including “Yellow Vests”, took to the streets shouting slogans against police brutality, President Emmanuel Macron and his pension reforms. They were greeted with tear gas by French police on Saturday, which also arrested several people.

Police said 15 people were arrested after authorities tried to disperse a bloc at the head of the protest in northern Paris, before coming under a hail of projectiles, AFP reporters witnessed.

This was the latest of the weekly demonstrations held every Saturday by the "Yellow Vest" movement since November 2018, which have joined the opposition to the pension reforms.

"We're suffocating with this government who wants to put us on our knees," Annie Moukam, a 58-year-old teacher, said.

"It's out of the question that he (Macron) touches our pensions. We have worked all our lives to be able to leave with a dignified retirement," she said. "It's exactly that that he is challenging."

Saturday’s rallies also came on the 45th day of a strike that has hit train and metro traffic and caused misery for millions of commuters in Paris especially.

Trains are becoming more frequent however, and Paris's metro drivers voted to suspend their action from Monday, their union Unsa announce Saturday.

Under an arrangement dating back to 1698 and the reign of Louis XIV, Paris Opera dancers can retire on a full pension at the age of 42, singers at 57 and musicians at 60.

President Emmanuel Macron's plan to merge France's various pension schemes into a single system has triggered more than a month of strikes, particularly in public transport. However, concessions by the government, notably a delay to a move to raise the age at which workers can claim a full pension from 62 to 64, have contributed to a waning in strikes.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)

Hundreds of US police departments using 'dystopian' face recognition app — report

A new report in US media has people worried about their privacy as more police forces sign on to use the program. Clearview AI offers facial recognition software that can identify a person even in poor-quality images.

An explosive new US media report published on Saturday revealed that a secretive company has been selling the world's most advanced known facial recognition software to local law enforcement agencies for at least 2 years. Clearview AI searches through public images on social media and can identify an individual even if their face is obscured or not entirely visible.

According to The New York Times, although Clearview has been selling its technology to police forces since 2017, it only really came to public attention at the end of 2019 when its name came up in court documents in a Florida robbery case.

Company knows who police search for

What would become Clearview began in 2016, when Australian entrepreneur Hoan Ton-That met Richard Schwartz, a former aide to President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, when the latter was mayor of New York. The pair hired engineers and went to work on their app, but it was only when they hit upon the idea to sell the technology to US police forces that they attracted the attention of major investors.

One of these investors was Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who famously funded a lawsuit that bankrupted the media blog Gawker, which had run a story about Thiel that he allegedly did not like.

The Times reported that the first attempts to reach out to Clearview were murky, as the company's website listed an address in New York City that did not exist. Furthermore, shortly after a reporter asked someone in law enforcement to run their picture, the officer was contacted by Clearview and questioned about whether they were speaking to the media. This likely means that the company is keeping tabs as police watch suspects.

When Ton-That finally spoke to the media, he acknowledged that there was code in his program that would allow police to wear augmented-reality glasses and be able to tell the name, job and acquaintances of anyone they saw on the street. However, he denied plans to actually sell this technology to anyone.

'Facebook knows'

Pressed to answer whether he was violating Facebook's terms of service by taking their images without consent, Ton-That replied: "A lot of people are doing it. Facebook knows."

The company claims that its software has been used to solve child sexual abuse cases, identify a John Doe and solve identity-fraud cases at banks, though there did not appear to be any proof of this.

The app reportedly has about 75% accuracy.

These revelations immediately sparked fears about what the software means for privacy, with many social media users calling the news "scary" and "dystopian."

In authoritarian China, high-level facial recognition software is already in widespread government use. Since December, a new law requires everyone who buys a SIM card to submit facial recognition scans that are registered with their phone. Throughout China, these kinds of apps are already in use in schools, on public transportation and in places like concert venues.

In the US, less advanced types of facial recognition have been in use for decades. Recently, Britain, France and Russia have all embraced it as well, though they do not yet have access to programs as high-tech as Clearview's.

Germany, famously critical of surveillance and having one of the lowest numbers of CCTV cameras in the developed world, still has no legal framework for such technology, although pilot projects have been tested on very small scales.

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The Indian government is preparing to install a nationwide facial recognition system, but the plan draws criticism from rights activists and tech experts who warn of the risks to privacy and from increased surveillance. (07.11.2019)

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Surveillance cameras at train stations and in public places have long become a well-established part of everyday life. Facial recognition software, however, is not. In Germany, that could soon change. (24.10.2019)

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British Police use Facial Recognition

Women's March: Thousands protest against Donald Trump

Thousands of women have slammed the US president's assault on reproductive rights, climate change and immigration. One protester called Trump the "biggest bully in the world."

Thousands of women gathered for an annual march in Washington and more than 180 other cities to protest US President Donald Trump's targeting of women's rights.

"I am even more outraged than I was three years ago," said a placard carried by a 40-year-old Washington resident. "We all knew that Trump was going to be horrible, and he has been even more horrible than we realize."

Despite the drop in numbers, with only a few thousand participants on the streets of Washington, activists remained hopeful about the power to organize.

"It is a cold day and it does not matter if its 10 people or 100 people or 1,000 people if our voices are strong," said a 50-year-old woman who said she regularly attends the march that started in 2017. "We are powerful together — that's the most important thing."

The 2017 Women's March drew nearly 1 million people to the streets of Washington, DC, and hundreds of thousands in other US cities one day after Trump's inauguration.

Hot on the heels of the beginning to Trump's impeachment in the Senate, protesters made jabs at the US president

Assault on women's rights

Many of the protesters cited Trump's hard-line policy on women's reproductive rights, climate change and refugees as major motivators for joining the march.

"Look what's he's doing to Greta Thunberg," said a 70-year-old climate activist, referring to the teenage Swedish activist who launched the Fridays for Future school strikes to draw attention to the man-made destabilization of earth's climate. She was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2019.

Protesters were critical of the Trump administration's attempts to restrict women's reproductive rights

'Biggest bully'

Trump has regularly targeted Thunberg on Twitter and lamented climate change as a ploy "created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive."

"He's the biggest bully in the world," added the 70-year-old activist.

Other protests took place in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities across the US.

Some men joined the march in solidarity

Local criticism

But not everyone was thrilled with the Women's March in Washington. DC-based activists criticized organizers for going forward with the march, saying they undermined efforts to highlight local issues.

"Local DC is a domestic colony and the actions of national organizers have to recognize that," said Black Lives Matter DC in a letter for the Women's March organizers.

"Here in DC, these unstrategic mass mobilizations distract from local organizing, often overlook the black people who actually live here and even result in tougher laws against demonstration being passed locally."

Protesters drew attention to marginalized communities, including people of color and the LGBT+ community

National Archive: 'We apologize'

The march was held the same day the US National Archives apologized for blurring anti-Trump signs in a promotional image for a women's suffrage exhibition.

"We made a mistake," said the National Archives. "As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration."

"We have removed the current display and will replace it as soon as possible with one that uses the unaltered image," it added. "We apologize."

GERMANY
Explainer: What are Germany's farmers so angry about?

Thousands of farmers have taken to the streets in cities across Germany to protest new environmental regulations. They're demanding more dialogue to address the increasing challenges facing the agriculture sector.

GERMAN FARMERS AND ACTIVISTS PROTEST DURING GREEN WEEK IN BERLIN
German environmentalists are 'fed up'

Around 27,000 people protested Saturday in Berlin for environmentally friendly agriculture policy, according to organizers. The protests, planned by the coalition "wir haben es satt!" (we're fed up), coincide with International Green Week, a major agriculture and food fair that started on Friday.

1 2 3 4 5 6

Farmers brought out hundreds of tractors to block the streets of Berlin and several other cities in northern Germany this weekend, the culmination of months of protests to coincide with the start of International Green Week — a major agriculture and food fair in the German capital.

But what do the farmers want, and what can the government do?

Who is organizing the protest?

This weekend's demonstrations are different from previous farmers' demos, as they have been organized by a grassroots movement rather than the official agricultural industry association. Land schafft Verbindung (LsV) ("Country Creates Connection"), as the movement is called, was born of a Facebook group last October and now claims a social media network of 100,000 farmers and agricultural workers. It has organization teams in at least seven of Germany's 16 states.

Read more: German farmers: 'Over-regulation is the last thing we need'

Farmers sue German government over climate change

What's the problem?

German farmers are at the mercy of supermarkets and the food industry in general because they have little recourse when retailers drive down prices to compete with each other. This has had real social consequences: LsV calculates that the average agricultural worker in Germany earns just €22,000 ($24,000), and that more than half of German farmers have shut down their businesses in the last few years.

This economic pressure, according to LsV, has been exacerbated by new government regulations restricting the use of fertilizer, manure and insecticides. Germany has seen a catastrophic crash in insect populations in recent years, while nitrate levels in the water table are a growing concern. The LsV says measures, hashed out by Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner and Environment Minister Svenja Schulze last year, were agreed without consulting farmers, and they will drive even more farms out of business.

What are the farmers demanding?

The LsV says the restrictive measures will drive up costs, which means supermarkets will look to cheap imports. They say this will end up damaging the environment: food imports are responsible for more carbon emissions through extra transport, and there is no way to influence ecological or social standards in the countries of origin. "And so our regional food production, which is constantly being demanded in society, will be weakened even further," the LsV says on its website.

The farmers' demands include:
A new scientific study into the insect depopulation, which will look beyond agriculture at other possible causes like telecommunications infrastructure, LED lighting and changing weather patterns
An "objective investigation" of the nitrate measuring stations, in order to "distinguish between agricultural and non-agricultural causes," and an expansion of the measuring networks, to gain more data
Regulations mandating that imported food meets German standards, or new labels marking food as having been "produced below legal German standards." Farmers have also called for labels identifying regional products

Farming and climate change

What has been the government response?

Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner has argued that environmental measures — delayed for many years — are necessary to avoid punitive fines from the European Union: up to €800,000 per day in taxpayers' money. At the same time, in an interview published Friday by news portal t-online, Klöckner said she is sympathetic to the LsV's demands for more transparency in nitrate measuring systems.

Klöckner also said German consumers need to be prepared to pay more for food. "There is a difference between cheap food and the offer of agricultural products at absolute dumping prices," she said. "The fact is that within the EU, Germany is at the bottom end when it comes to the proportion of food in consumer costs: it's below 10%. There's a lot more that people can afford. It's about priorities. There's often enough money for the latest smartphone."

What's the view of the opposition parties?

In a debate with LsV spokesperson Dirk Andresen in the Tagesspiegel, the Green party's parliamentary leader Anton Hofreiter pointed out that, contrary to LsV's assertions, insect depopulation and the decline of animal diversity has been proven to be related to industrial-scale farming. Green agricultural policy spokesman Friedrich Ostendorff also said society was simply no longer willing to "accept the high costs for the environment, animals and the climate associated with the industrialized agricultural system."

Kirsten Tackmann of the socialist Left party blamed the crisis on the government's failure to tackle market inequalities. "The market power of large retail companies blackmails all the local agricultural businesses who create their wealth," she told t-online. "Without fair production prices the ecological problems in agricultural problems won't be solvable either. Unfair market rules, adverts with dumping prices for food and land speculation need to be stopped."

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment