Earthquake in Turkey exposes gap between seismic knowledge and action – but it is possible to prepare

Worst-hit areas in Turkey were reduced to rubble. 

Erhan Sevenler/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

THE CONVERSATION
Published: February 14, 2023 

Two days after a devastating earthquake struck, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited one of the worst affected areas and declared that it was “not possible to be prepared for such a disaster.”

Certainly the scale of the destruction was unforeseen. The death toll from the earthquakes of Feb. 6, 2023, that struck Turkey and northern Syria is still climbing. But one week on, it has been documented that over 35,000 people were killed, with more than 50,000 injured and over 1,000,000 receiving aid for survival in bitter cold conditions. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit while many were sleeping in the town of Pazarcık in Kahramanmaraş, southern Turkey – the epicenter of the quake. It was followed nine hours later by a major aftershock in Elbistan, a town about 50 miles from the initial quake, sending buildings weakened in the first shock to total collapse.

The final death tolls are likely to place these two successive earthquakes among the worst natural disasters that have been witnessed in the world.

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The sobering question to us, as disaster mitigation scholars, is whether this enormous loss of lives, homes and livelihoods could have been avoided. There is no way to prevent an earthquake from occurring, but what can be prevented – or at least curtailed – is the scale of the calamity caused by these inevitable tremors.

In our view, any suggestion that a country cannot “be prepared” for an earthquake of the magnitude that hit Turkey and northern Syria is a political statement – that is, it reflects the political choices that were made rather than the science. In Turkey, the lack of preparedness contrasts sharply with the known conditions of seismic risk that the country faces.

Missed opportunities

According to the Turkey Earthquake Hazard Map, which was revised and published in 2018, nearly all of Turkey is vulnerable to seismic risk, with two significant fault lines – the East Anatolian Fault zone and the North Anatolian Fault zone – crisscrossing the country.

The North Anatolian Fault, 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) long, runs east to west across the northern half of the country, menacing the major cities of Ankara, the country’s capital, and Istanbul, and threatening the most industrialized section of the country. The East Anatolian Fault, about 620 miles (nearly 1,000 kilometers) in length, runs diagonally across the southeastern part of the country. It covers an area of smaller cities and villages, but millions of people are at risk in the region.

Turkey has made repeated efforts to address this fundamental seismic risk. In 1959, the Turkish parliament passed Disaster Law 7269, establishing a plan to institute disaster preparedness regulations at national, provincial and municipal levels. The law raised awareness to some degree, but five significant earthquakes in the 1990s shattered any expectations that existing preparedness measures were sufficient to protect the growing population from death and destruction.

After the devastating 1999 earthquakes in the Marmara region of northwestern Turkey – in which more than 17,000 died – the Turkish government instituted a major program of recovery and rebuilding intended to strengthen building codes and improve cross-jurisdictional coordination. Yet, this ambitious program was hampered by chronic corruption and weak implementation of the building codes.

The Turkish government also levied an “earthquake tax” after the 1999 disaster, purportedly to raise funds to better prepare the country for future quakes. Since it was passed, an estimated US$4.6 billion has been raised through the levy. But there are serious questions over how the money has been spent.

The destruction caused by Turkey’s 1999 earthquake. Manoocher Deghati/AFP via Getty Image

Then in 2009, Turkey instituted a National Disaster and Emergency Management Authority to build capacity for disaster risk reduction and management.

AFAD’s mission was to organize disaster preparedness training for provincial and municipal officials and to conduct disaster preparedness training exercises for communities at risk. The approach was to decentralize and reverse the top-down governance approach, enabling local communities to strengthen their own capacity for managing disaster risk.

In a further bid to strengthen Turkey’s preparedness, the country introduced a National Disaster Response Plan in 2014. It set out the role of government institutions in case of a disaster under sections such as nutrition group, emergency sheltering group and communication group.

After the Soma mine accident of 2014, in which 301 miners were killed in an underground fire, the Turkish government initiated a review of the national plan. It appointed an international advisory committee that included participants from Japan, the U.S. and Europe to review the existing law and make recommendations for change.

The resulting recommendations included regular monitoring of risk, improved training of emergency personnel and updated technologies for interagency communication. The plan was presented to Turkey’s political leadership, which approved the changes in principle with a view to begin implementation in January 2015.

But the fully revised National Disaster Management Plan was never implemented. In early 2015, the national government changed the leadership of the National Disaster and Emergency Management Authority. In the process, experienced personnel who had advocated for better training, advanced communications technology and updated equipment for local governments were replaced. From our observation, this shift had the effect of reducing the capacity of local governments to take immediate action when hazards occur, as funds for training, new equipment and additional personnel were not granted. Although the plan was in place, little action was taken.

Lessons from Japan, California

The nonimplementation of the revised disaster plan reflects the gap between knowledge and action in managing Turkey’s seismic risk. It is not possible to stop the earthquakes, but it is possible to construct buildings that do not collapse and kill their residents on a massive scale – as both Japan and California have managed to do.

Turkey has designed and approved building codes that are the equivalent of the rigorous codes implemented in seismically challenged California. And there are approximately 150,000 civil engineers in Turkey who have the knowledge and skills to construct buildings, roads and dams that may suffer strain from seismic events but not fail.

But the cost of upgrading existing subpar buildings causes the effort to proceed at a glacially slow pace. While the building design regulation introduced in 2000 is implemented well in major cities, its state-of-the art requirements are poorly understood by engineers in the rest of the country.

A building construction supervision system has been in place since 2010, but its coverage is still too narrow to monitor the country’s 16 million buildings.
The way forward

Turkey again is at a crossroads and this latest disaster creates an urgent call for national action. Short-term solutions – rebuilding the same style of flawed housing and infrastructure – will only increase the chance of future tragedies.

But there is another course. Turkey’s current generation of engineers, economists, policy analysts and leaders can opt for bold action: redesigning their built environment to live with seismic risk, and engaging the whole population of Turkey in an ongoing experiment to create a society that recognizes earthquakes as a continuing threat that can be managed.

Authors

Louise K. Comfort
Louise K. Comfort is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Public and International Affairs, former Director of the Center for Disaster Management, University of Pittsburgh

Burcak Basbug Erkan
Associate Professor at Department of Statistics, Middle East Technical University

Polat Gulkan
Professor of Earthquake Structural Engineering, Başkent University

Disclosure statement

Louise K. Comfort has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Quick Response grant program at the Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of Pittsburgh for three previous reconnaissance studies of earthquakes in Turkey.

Burcak Erkan is affiliated with Gelecek Partisi (Future Party) in Turkey.

Capitalism in Black and Blue

John Parker
08 Feb 2023 

Policing is inextricably linked to racism and to capitalism.

Policing is inextricably linked to racism and to capitalism.

There are two very frightening realities faced by the capitalist ruling class - their smaller numbers in relation to the majority, and their inability to derive profit without exploited human labor. Since they are the sole owners of the means of production (the factories, land and machines) – with an essential armed force to protect that ownership – they have irreconcilable differences with the majority of people who, instead of owning those means, are exploited by them. We can’t even decide how the profits created by our labor, which turns into the wealth of the nation, gets used. Only the capitalist class gets to decide that with their bought and paid for politicians in Washington.

So, the problem for the ruling class is how to hide that reality from the human labor they depend on for profit. How do you keep the majority from understanding that their misery is based on their not owning the means of production and having no role in how the wealth produced from those means is spent? Should it go towards endless wars, WWIII, more police, joyrides to space? Or, for healthcare, jobs and housing?

And, more importantly, how do you hide from this class of people that they reside in the same boat sharing a reality of economic exploitation, increasing with every utility gas hike, deteriorating social services or diminishing wages?

That is the role of racism, to keep those in the boat from recognizing each other’s similarity. Like a magician’s use of misdirection, they hide that truth by defining the parameters of difference for us, then giving those who meet the preferred parameters of the ruling class more. They get more in terms of quality of life, allowing them the tools and opportunities to develop a fantasy of superiority. However, even with all those benefits the preferred in that boat are still simply the human labor necessary to develop profit for those owners of the means of production - the ruling class. They will continue to have no say so in how the wealth they create is used, and eventually their benefits will hit up against austerity - losing their pensions, jobs and quality of life to maintain the profits of the ruling class - forcing even the “preferred” to react. This is when the wealth founded on their labor is ironically used to pay for the police or military now taking aim at them.

Let’s get back to that racism thing.

Racism is a tool to weaken our working class through division in general. It’s specifically used as a whip that inflicts pain to the oppressed for the purpose of maintaining the system of Capitalism and it’s neocolonial relationships. In order to attempt to feel less of that pain some cowardly people of color will willingly lend themselves as the lash of that whip, hoping to divert their pain onto another’s back.

They will lend themselves as mercenaries for the ruling class, but they must meet the higher standards of allegiance to their white masters by frequently having to prove a willingness to match the psychopathic violence of their white supremacist peers. They are traitors for sure.

Sometimes they serve as presidents or legislators serving their imperial masters at Lockheed, Raytheon and the various financial and oil monopolies making up the ruling class. They willingly participate by commanding drone assassinations even on the continent of Africa. And many of them are found wearing a uniform they should never adorn – the Blue one.

But no matter who has transformed into the lash of that whip, they are all under strict orders to aim their greatest violence towards the oppressed, wielded for a ruling class desperate to maintain and enforce the ideology of white supremacy.

That ideology had its primary beginnings in the 17th Century when it became clear that the numerous slave revolts consisting of a combination of enslaved Africans, Indigenous and poor and indentured whites jeopardized not only the slave owners and the monarchy, but the developing capitalist class.

In order to break up that unified struggle, slavery, where it had its greatest institutional development in the Americas, had to begin to be defined for an exclusive few using skin color and African and Indigenous ethnicity. However, the greatest emphasis - in regards to maintaining a continued supply of this free labor – was reserved for those from the African continent. This meant that Europeans would soon no longer be considered for slavery (as some were in the 17th and earlier centuries) and only as indentured. And, even if indentured, would be morphed into overseers, or slave catchers for runaway slaves; eventually given the title of police shortly after Reconstruction targeting Black people in the South using ¨legality.” The Southern ruling class created laws designed to justify imprisonment for the purpose of continuing the slave labor they were economically addicted to.

Racism also aims at the mental health of the oppressed. It’s used as a means to destroy its targets from the inside with self-loathing and self-doubt and a general belief of inferiority. This also is sometimes a motivation for Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples to put on that blood-drenched uniform of Blue: to become something different. But, even if by ignorance people of color join U.S. police forces, they will quickly learn the genocidal role of their employer and either quit or remain with a clear understanding that they are an enemy of their own ethnicity and class.

Those murdering cops who killed Tyre Nichols, just like their peers who killed George Floyd knew the role they were playing in protecting, not us, but a racist murderous system of Capitalism. The only color that mattered in those incidents and the multiple incidents this year set to create another record of police killings, was the color of their uniforms.

As the U.S. economy sinks further into crisis of overproduction, inflation and war economy - austerity will continue to increase and generalize the want that oppressed people in this country have always endured. This is when racism is of utmost importance, whether it's used here or in Ukraine (with different parameters – Russian ethnicity is part of the subhuman race as defined by Nazi Germany and the current neo-Nazis leading a significant portion of the government and military in Ukraine). Racism is an integral part also of fascism and it will do us no good to deny its existence.  It exists for Black and Brown people on a daily basis when we are treated horribly by those receiving more in society and when we apply for a job not meant for us or come home to communities occupied by military forces of the ruling class. How can we be told that our rage against prejudice, disrespect and the targeting of our children by police is simply a reaction to a phantom? We cannot disconnect the gun from the bullet as if they exist independently. Capitalism and Imperialism and Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism depend upon their bullet of racism - and they cannot exist for very long without each other.

John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center For Social Justice In Los Angeles  and a leading member of the Socialist Unity Party . He accompanied former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on many anti-war delegations abroad. Parker was only 18 when he organized his first union election--at a small steel plant in New Jersey. Having authored a $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2014, his organizing efforts helped to push the city to act on the minimum wage increase proposals in Los Angeles. John Parker is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. 

Why The Rage Against The War Machine Rally Is #AntiWarSoWhite

Jacqueline Luqman
08 Feb 2023



Leftists, especially the Black left, do not share common cause with everyone who wants to end U.S involvement in Ukraine. The politics of some who call themselves anti-war cannot be ignored.

I’m looking at this Rage Against The War Machine rally that is being organized by the Libertarian Party and I am genuinely confused about how folks on the left are involved in this at all. Oh, I understand the need to revive and mobilize a strong not just anti-war movement, but an anti–imperialist and people-centered human rights movement, so sure, sometimes we’re going to have to organize with people we don’t agree 100% on everything with. But THESE people?

And look, on the surface, if one would look at the list of demands on the Rage Against The War Machine webpage - and I do take offense at their play on the name of the band Rage Against The Machine - one easily agrees with not sending one more penny to Ukraine, to slashing the Pentagon budget, to abolishing war and empire, to disbanding NATO, and to freeing Julian Assange, among others reasonable sounding demands and think, “Well this is great, I agree with all of these things, so of course I’ll support/align with them!”

But, if you compare those nice-sounding words to the actual ideology of today’s Libertarian Party, and particularly of the Mises Caucus that has gained control of it, something starts to smell funny. So let me hip you to who these people are and why I’m now calling this and the support from too many white so-called leftists in the anti-war movement, #AntiWarSoWhite.

Back in May of 2022 Reason Magazine published an article examining the takeover of the Libertarian Party by the Mises Caucus which happened when the Caucus got their candidate Angela McCardle elected to chair the national party with 69% of the voting delegates. The article points out that while McArdle was the Mises Caucus candidate, the behind-the-scenes mastermind of its victory was caucus founder and leader Michael Heise.

The caucus's official platform is typical libertarian stuff - personal liberty, little to no federal government oversight or no federal government for that matter, no “unconstitutional” war, no federal regulation on guns, the primacy of private property - which has always screamed capitalist greed and a host of other problems including racism, since racists have taken the libertarian creed of freedom to associate with no federal oversight on freedom to exclude people of color. But the key to understanding the danger of the Mises Caucus isn’t in what their platform says; it is in what their members have said and have done. Because even old-guard libertarians say that too many of the Caucus members are obnoxious bullies, and are also often racist.

The Reason Magazine article cites the example of the New Hampshire L.P., a powerful vector of Mises Caucus messaging, tweeting on Martin Luther King Day that "Black people in America get special access to essential drugs, receive special federal funding due to race, and are first-in-line for every college and every job. America isn't in debt to black people. If anything it's the other way around."

Aside from the assertions that Black people get preferential anything in this country being typical racist drivel and patently false, the racist imaginary grievances were a response to Nicole Hannah Jones tweeting not her sentiments, but the words of Dr. Martin Luthe King, Jr. when he said in the oft miscontextualized “I Have A Dream” speech: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds…” But sure, we get preferential essential drug and job and college admittance treatment at a time when economic inequality between Black and white persists , with whatever meager gains the so-called Black middle class has achieved not translating to increased economic stability for the Black masses, and all Black households are far behind white households in income and assets, including the much-celebrated Black petit bourgeoisie.

Then there’s the influential member of the Caucus Jeremy Kauffman who tweeted that transgender people should be killed to achieve a more moral world, as long as it doesn’t incur additional taxes. These tweets were deleted after pressure to do so, but you know twitter is forever and thank goodness it is so that we have evidence to back up the reasons for actual leftists to steer clear of these #AntiWarSoWhite people.

Let Mises Caucus Libertarians tell it, though, they are merely carrying on Ron Paul’s Revolution. But more evidence of their true ideology can be seen when they succeeded in deleting the line from the Libertarian Party’s long-time platform plank condemning bigotry as “irrational and repugnant.” Heise says that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he called a "woke," or "cultural Marxist" agenda. He said, "What is happening nowadays with the 'wokeism' is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends," says Heise. "So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It's the same ideology that's happening now, but they're pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever." Look at that, it’s the old communist gay/trans collectivist agenda trope!

And although they added a new line stating in their party’s plank stating that the party would "uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity," it hard to see how that can be done when the Mises Caucus is shaping the L.P. environment to drown out discussions about people’s identity and how policies impact them differently from the majority. Amazing how allegedly freedom-loving Libertarians sound hauntingly like rights-stripping bigoted Republicans.

Then there’s the fact that The Mises Caucus also succeeded in removing the party's pro-choice plank, which McArdle said was called for because abortion represents "an irreconcilable difference" within the libertarian movement and they didn’t want to keep alienating Trump and socially conservative voters. "We tend to push out people who are a little bit more socially conservative," says McArdle. "And I think that there's room in the party for people who are libertine and socially conservative. And I would like them to feel that way."

Let me get this straight…there’s enough room in the party to protect women’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy and enough room for the people who want to take it away from them? What’s the floor plan in that big tent look like because I’m not seeing how you arrange enough room for both. You’re going to inevitably drive one group out, and that will always be the group that feels threatened, that IS threatened, by the other.

And old guard Libertarians agree, which is why many of them have been very vocal in their opposition to the Mises Caucus and its takeover of the L.P. One old-guard Libertarian elected official who quit her post in protest to the Mises Caucus takeover in New Hampshire said, "...we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims.."

If a Libertarian can understand that there is no unity to be had between people who are fighting for their rights and people who want to deny them, what is wrong with so-called white Leftists who don’t get this? I know the answer, but I’ll get to that in a minute, because there is more to consider when examining why this #AntiWarSoWhite rally is such a problem.

There’s the fact that if the Libertarian Party and anyone else who sponsored and organized this event were serious about building the “anti-war movement,” why didn’t they reach out to the very visible and very active Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations and invite their representatives to speak? As many white leftists, or at least anti-war activists, are really dollar store Latte Leftists peddling vapid and narrow anti-war rhetoric without actually dealing with imperialism have told me, “...we all need to come together to stop this war in Ukraine because it presents an existential crisis for all of us!! ALL OF US WILL DIE FROM NUCLEAR WAAAARRRRR!!!!” they scream.

True enough. But considering the people most impacted by US imperialism and imperialist war have been organizing against it long before these Mises people came along, why haven’t I seen most of these white Latte Leftists engaged in organizing with us? I mean, Black, queer, trans, disabled, Global South, African people will certainly all die should there be a nuclear war, so why not include representatives of ALL OF THE PEOPLE who would be impacted if this war is not stopped on your platform?

And the organizers of this rally didn’t even have to reach out to real anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist organizations like the Black Alliance for Peace or ANSWER Coalition or the like. They could have been less obviously racist had they reached out to even a liberal formation like the Poor People’s Campaign.

But nope! The organizers looked at their speaker’s lineup and nobody said, “Dang this is mighty white up in here we need to get some legit Black anti-war speakers and really build a solid anti-war coalition.” But since that’s not who they want to build their base with, they didn’t.

And I’m not making this up. The new Mises Caucus-backed chair of the L.P. McArdle made it clear who the party wants to grow their base with in another Reason Magazine article where she says, “Mises Caucus supporters say they want to ‘make the Libertarian Party libertarian again,’ that it should no longer be concerned about offending progressives or Beltway types and shouldn't be afraid to reach out to the coalition that elected former President Donald Trump.” That’s right, their bold action to rejuvenate the Libertarian Party is not to reach out to the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist (they would never because private-property-loving Libertarians are NOT anti-capitalists) formations and activists, but to the right and alt-right young podcast edgelord personality-loving Trump voter. And to get unprincipled white Latte Leftists to give them public legitimacy by speaking at their opportunistic recruitment event they call an anti-war rally, or course, which too many are happy to oblige.

And despite how much some of the speakers now publicly whine about some others backing out because they succumbed to “the woke mob” or favored an LGBTQ+ agenda over participating in their little #AntiWarSoWhite rally, the truth is that people probably hadn’t looked into what the Libertarian Party has become with the Mises Caucus now leading it, and when they found out decided it wasn’t worth damaging their formations’ reputation associating with them, and ultimately decided that betraying the marginalized people within their formations and coalitions was also not worth the limited visibility their participation would have given them. Especially when you factor in that for the Libertarian Party, the purpose of this rally is really to seize the political moment to raise their flailing political party’s profile and gain some legitimacy from the speakers they invited.

Because it is worth noting that the money is drying up for the Libertarian Party because of this rightward shift the Caucus has created. Long-time significant donors to the L.P. have said that the Mises turn made them stop funding L.P. candidates. At the time the Reason article was published in March 2022, the number of active donors to the LP including several major ones, had been falling for seven straight months following the four-year battle for control of the party between the old-guard Libertarians and the Mises Caucus. And now that the Mises Caucus has won, this rally is part of their strategy to win and expand their party’s political power.

And here I have to go back to the folks who choose still after all that has come to light about the Libertarian Party and the Mises Caucus. I wonder if they are asking themselves what the Mises Caucus-led Libertarian Party will do with the political power they win if they are able to cash in on the legitimacy they are looking for with this event. And if they are asking themselves that, who do they think they would wield that political power against?

Of course, they will use that power against the people they have already told us with their own words and actions that they want to use it against, to disenfranchise the marginalized the way the GOP that they are actively courting to grow their ranks are already attacking. The Libertarian Party under Mises Caucus control will help the GOP do it, and what will these white Latte Leftists do then? Despite the delusional assurances of some who have engaged me, they will not change the minds of these people because the L.P. is not interested in changing their ideology. And these white Latte Leftists are not demanding that they do.

Among many of the white alleged leftists who challenged my analysis of this L.P.-backed #AntiWarSoWhite rally, I seem to recall none of them engaging with other anti-imperialist groups for nationwide protests against a potential war in Ukraine as far back as the beginning of February 2022. Facebook reminded me that I was at such a rally. You see, we anti-imperialists have been protesting imperialism, war, and THIS war in particular for quite some time, even before this war with Russia using Ukraine began. We saw it coming and were protesting against the possibility, if not the inevitability of the US/EU/NATO coalition pushing it. But let these alleged white veterans of the anti-war movement tell it, a real powerful anti-war coalition couldn’t have been built until the L.P. rally came along, so if we value our lives we’d better hop on that bandwagon.

The truth is, however, that if they ever valued our lives, they would have been organizing with us all along, but too many white so-called anti-war veterans have not been, and that’s why much of what is considered the anti-war movement - as much of it as there is left - is also an #AntiWarSoWhite formation.

Because I must point out that much of this discourse around defending these bigots and transphobes in the new Libertarian Party among white anti-war veterans looks, sounds, and feels like plain ol’ liberal racism, where the allegedly nice white people gaslight us for pointing out that the people they want to do business with would just as soon see us wiped out, so we cannot - for our own safety and that of our comrades - align with those forces and people. In response, the allegedly nice white people dismiss our concerns, tell us that we’re making too much of nothing like we always do, and that we’re the reason no change can happen because we don’t want to work with anybody. We’re too stuck on “ideological purity” or worse, “identity politics” rather than building a broad coalition. That’s racist gaslighting y’all and there is really no other way to call that. Especially when they try to support their flimsy arguments against us by using quotes by Frederick Douglass or the example of the original Rainbow Coalition led by the Black Panther Party to prove to us that we should unite with racist white people. Except that they, once again, remove all context from their examples, and have not done anything close to what those freedom fighters did to challenge racist domination. Hell, these white leftists won’t even ADMIT that the folks organizing this rally have a bigotry problem, let alone require them to repudiate it as the Black Panther Party did with the members of the Young Patriots who may have been racist, as Frederick Douglass did in challenging the system of white supremacist domination. No, these white Latte Leftists are not making ANY demands of the organizers of this event for their party’s bigotry and that of some of the speakers aligned with their party, but they are making all the demands of US to capitulate to them, So the misuse of our own history against us is an additional racist insult committed by the #AntiWarSoWhite crowd on the so-called left.

Further, there is also the very uncomfortable truth that too many white people on the so-called left do not want to be in coalition with people who aren’t like them. They don’t want to have to deal with conversations about their racism and white supremacist tendencies, their patriarchy, their homophobia and transphobia, their ableism, their superior attitude as if they know All Things Organizing, and their resistance to being led by nonwhite non-men. They want to organize with people who only want to talk about how war and maybe capitalism affect our class as a whole, but they do not want to talk about the additional oppressions that are heaped on those of our class because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. There, I said it out loud for you - too many so-called white people on the so-called left who claim to be anti-war do not want to be led by people of color because they’re tired of talking about racism, and they want to continue to call the shots.

And look where that’s gotten us, a bunch of people who claim to be anti-war activists tripping over themselves to give a bunch of bigots legitimacy because western chauvinism and American exceptionalism has them really believing that a movement ain’t right unless it’s led by whites. The resistance to focusing the anti-war effort on the people who are and always have been most impacted by imperialist warmongering is something they refuse to confront, struggle with and overcome. So they don’t want a real anti-imperialist coalition, they want their own #AntiWarSoWhite movement.

My observations here are less of a condemnation of any of these groups - organizers or participants - and more an honest analysis of the factors that lead me to see this Rage Against The War Machine rally of the L.P. as a dangerous distraction from true anti-imperialist coalition building and organizing. People and formations must make decisions about who they align with based on their own principles of unity and shared interests, but there should also be principles of solidarity with the most marginalized to bring no harm to them with the alliances we make.

I just know that the interests of the working class, poor, oppressed, and colonized people who are marginalized additionally by racial oppression, gender oppression, ableist exclusion and other intersectional points of struggle are not served by aligning with people who would continue those oppressions should they ever win enough power to be able to do it.

We cannot afford to lend those groups legitimacy now, only so they can win the power to use it against us later. It is a grave betrayal of our humanity to demand that we do.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation , an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here  and here ) and on Facebook ; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary” .

How Black Americans view the path to overcoming inequality


By: Diane Duenez
Posted Feb 14, 2023

Black Americans have long articulated a clear vision for the kind of social change that would improve their lives.

The Pew Research Center recently explored Black Americans’ views about how to overcome racial inequality. The 2022 report found Black Americans “have a clear vision for reducing racism but little hope it will happen.”

“Most African Americans know their history,” said Spelman College professor Cynthia Neil Spence. “We know that from the stories that our grandparents have told us, our great-grandparents have told us. And those stories have always, in fact, been centered around the disenfranchisement of us based on who we are and based on how we were born.”

That same Pew report stated nearly 70% of Black adults see racial discrimination today as the primary obstacle to success.

“We still have the highest maternal mortality rates. We still have the highest rates of poverty,” Spence said.

“The systems that we currently have in place are not developed in a way that would meet the needs of most Black business owners and entrepreneurs in this country," said Alex Camardelle, vice president of policy and research at the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative.

The Pew report stated that after George Floyd’s death in 2020, more than half of Black adults said the increased attention on racial equality would lead to meaningful change. In a survey one year later, nearly two-thirds said it hadn’t led to change.

“America is having to really just take an inventory of itself and look in the mirror and decide how are we going to be equitable and equal moving forward," said
Kyle Walcott, president of the Emerging 100 of Atlanta.

“I’m really a bit tired of hearing what the problems are. We have a George Floyd bill that yet has not been approved. We have a John Lewis Voting Rights Act that has not been approved. We have individuals who are serving at the federal government and the state governmental level, who have demonstrated behaviors that suggest that they don’t really care," Spence adds.

According to the Pew report, just 13% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is very likely.

“It’s difficult, you know, as a Black person to think about, ‘When is that change going to come?’” Walcott said. “Things don’t happen overnight, and so how long are we going to wait, you know, on the government, the structures, the leaders who are in charge? We need the people that are in charge of the changing, the regulatory frameworks and the policies to be on the front lines.”

“I’m born and raised in the South. So, I’m in a community that’s hard-wired to believe that things won’t change or that the pace is just going to outlive me," Camardelle said.

“It’s time now for us to sit around tables and to build out sustainable strategies for addressing inequalities in our society,” Spence added. “This is what works, and let’s do it. Let’s make a difference.”

Biden to name Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard as new head of National Economic Council: source

BYCHRISTOPHER RUGABER, JOSH BOAK AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 14, 2023

Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard.
AP PHOTO/SUSAN WALSH, FILE

President Joe Biden plans on Tuesday to name Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard as the new director of his National Economic Council, making the Ph.D. economist a key point person for coordinating policy, talking with business leaders and negotiating with Congress.

Biden also plans to nominate longtime adviser Jared Bernstein to be chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, according to a government official familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because there has been no public announcement.

Brainard and Bernstein would be moving into top spots at a crucial juncture for the U.S. economy. Unemployment is at 3.4%, near a 54-year low, but inflation remains persistently high at 6.4% and has contributed to fears of a coming recession.

Brainard would be succeeding Brian Deese, who helped handle several key legislative wins for Biden, including coronavirus relief, infrastructure spending and investments in computer chip production.

Brainard, 61, holds a doctoral degree in economics from Harvard University. During the Clinton administration, she worked as a deputy director for the National Economic Council. She was also under secretary for international affairs at Treasury during Barack Obama’s presidency. Brainard joined the Fed in 2014 as a governor and Biden nominated her to become vice chair.

She also forms half of an administration power couple, with her husband, Kurt Campbell, serving on the National Security Council as the administration’s “Asian czar.”

Bernstein is already a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, where he would succeed current chair Cecilia Rouse, who is returning to Princeton University. With an interest in labor markets and income inequality, Bernstein worked as a vice presidential aide for Biden during Obama’s presidency.

Brainard’s departure from the Fed comes at a fraught time, as the central bank seeks to balance its fight against inflation without going so far as to cause a worse recession than necessary. Brainard has been a leading “dovish” voice, meaning she typically supports lower interest rates to bolster employment. (“Hawks” are more likely to push for higher rates to combat inflation).

In a speech last month, Brainard argued that taming inflation might not require the job market “pain,” in the form of widespread layoffs, that other Fed officials, including Fed Chair Jerome Powell, have warned about. Instead, she said that companies may be forced to reduce prices and cut their profit margins as consumer demand slows, which would help bring down inflation.

However, President Biden has appointed three other members of the Fed’s governing board, so Brainard’s departure will not deprive the central bank of dovish voices.

Brainard has also supported tougher financial regulations than Powell. When Randal Quarles was the Fed’s top financial regulator — appointed by President Donald Trump — Brainard cast about 20 dissenting votes on regulatory issues.

She has also expressed support for the idea that the Fed could do more to push banks to consider the risks posed by climate change to their financial health. Climate activists warn that increased damage to homes, commercial buildings, and other property will impose greater financial losses on banks and should be considered when evaluating their safety and soundness.

Under Powell, who is not a trained economist, the Fed vice chair has typically been someone with a deep background in monetary economics, such as Richard Clarida, Brainard’s predecessor. Clarida was an economics professor at Columbia University and an adviser to PIMCO, a bond trading firm.

New York lawmakers want to write Palestinians out of history

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 14 February 2023


Congressman Ritchie Torres and nine Republican US representatives

from New York have blasted an exam that shows maps depicting the

loss of Palestinian land. Tom Williams CQ Roll Call

Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York, an anti-Palestinian stalwart, has taken a page from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his war against Black American history.

Torres is waging his own war on Palestinian history.

He is seeking to dictate to the New York Board of Regents wording around how Israel – and Palestine – is presented to students in the state of New York.

The goal is to diminish the historical reality of the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the Israeli seizure of Palestinian land. For Torres, unpleasant history related to Israel’s founding – which included massacres of Palestinians – can simply be rewritten.

The New York Democrat wrote on 1 February in a complaint to New York Board of Regents chancellor Lester W. Young Jr. after learning of exam questions he disliked. The next day, US Congressman Mike Lawler, who also harbors anti-Palestinian views, led eight other Republican representatives in writing to the governor of New York with their own concerns.

Dov Hikind, a former New York state assemblyman and ongoing supporter of genocidal anti-Palestinian Meir Kahane, thanked Lawler for writing to the governor. Lawler condemns as “anti-Semitic” members of the US Congress who support freedom and equal rights for Palestinians. In 2022, Lawler accepted a campaign donation from Carl Paladino, a serial bigot and frequently unsuccessful New York political candidate who has praised Adolf Hitler.

Torres, for his part, complained that the exam “features several maps of Israel’s changing borders without mentioning the critical context in which those changes arose: as a consequence of defensive, rather than aggressive, wars.”

The congressman omits that by mid-May 1948, when Israel declared its statehood and Arab states declared war, “half of the total number of Palestinian refugees had already been forcefully expelled from their country.”

That is not a defensive war. Nor was Israel’s 1967 attack on Egypt and Syria defensive when it seized the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights and then the West Bank when Jordan subsequently engaged.

Torres added, “Beneath the map itself is a seemingly innocuous but insidious question portraying the state of Israel as a response to the Holocaust, essentially ignoring Zionism as a national movement that long predates the Holocaust. The implication that Jewish self-determination has no rationale apart from the Holocaust is as ahistorical as it is offensive; it belongs nowhere on a Regents exam.”

The exam did not say Zionism wasn’t a factor. It just indicated that of the four answers provided, the Holocaust was the most appropriate response.

The implication of the letter is, however, very serious as Torres appears to be seeking a broader examination of what is said about Zionism in New York schools. That raises the question of whether the relationship of Zionism to the dispossession of Palestinians will be sufficiently addressed or simply whitewashed when anti-Palestinian politicians get involved and pressure educators to alter what students are taught.

Torres concluded his letter by calling on the Board of Regents to “convene a meeting with institutional leaders in the Jewish community in order to confront its own role in miseducating students about the historical origins and development of Israel as a Jewish state.”

This simply writes Palestinians and the Palestinian American community out of the equation and comes dangerously close to implying that the Jewish community is monolithic on these matters with “institutional leaders in the Jewish community” who can readily handle the matter.

Are Palestinian Americans not worthy of inclusion in these discussions promoted by Torres? His words certainly indicate that Palestinians need not be included.

And will any negative attention go to Israel as a “Jewish state”? This is an exclusivist construct rightly no longer tolerated in the US following decades of Jim Crow segregation and allying with apartheid South Africa.

Torres did not respond to questions from The Electronic Intifada about his anti-Palestinian stance.

He did tell Jewish Insider that he regards the exam as “insidiously anti-Israel.”

Torres added, “I worry that these poorly contextualized maps, which give the impression of having been drawn by [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] propagandists, play into the character assassination of Israel as an aggressor with ever-expanding borders, the settler-colonialist caricature.”
Republican take

The Republicans writing Governor Kathy Hochul expressed “grave concern with the abhorrent, anti-Semitic question included in this winter’s NYS Regents exam in global history and geography.” They said nothing about the exam not explicitly raising the dispossession of Palestinians displayed by the map.

That dispossession is not of interest to them. Nor did they note that none of the three maps notes that Israel occupied the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. The term occupied isn’t employed at all.

Instead, the Republican lawmakers conflate Israel with all Jews when they write, “It is simply beyond comprehension that anyone at the New York State Education Department would approve a question on a statewide exam that blatantly promotes hateful anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric which only fan the flames of anti-Semitism in our schools.”

What the maps portray Israel as doing between 1947 and 2017 is the responsibility of Israel and not of all Jews. Saying otherwise, as the members of Congress appear to suggest, is, in fact, anti-Semitic.

The Republican writers then make a remarkable claim: “For centuries, the state of Israel, one of our nation’s greatest allies, and Jews have fought for their right to exist. This question attempts to cast doubt on that very notion and rewrite history by erasing the struggle for independence that the state of Israel faced.”

But the modern-day state of Israel and its support from the US has only been a reality for a little more than 70 years – not centuries. Furthermore, the Republicans have nothing to say about Palestinians’ struggle for independence or even for equal rights between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

These aren’t historians.

They’re ill-informed ideologues attempting to wrangle educators to do their political will and seeking the jobs of those responsible for the exam questions. As they say: “There must be a thorough examination into this abject failure and the individuals responsible must be held accountable.”

The nine Republicans and Torres have no more standing to write Palestinians out of the history books than Ron DeSantis does to write out Black Americans.

An asteroid will just miss us in 2029. Scientists are making the most of a rare opportunity


Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Lance Benner, Paul Chodas and Mark Haynes are studying the 1,100-foot wide asteroid Apophis, which will come within viewing distance of Earth on April 13, 2029.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

BY CORINNE PURTILL

STAFF WRITER 

FEB. 14, 2023 

To be clear: The asteroid is not going to hit us.

There was a while there when it seemed like it could. Suffice to say those were heady days in the asteroid-tracking community. But as of March 2021, NASA has confirmed that there is absolutely zero chance the space rock known as 99942 Apophis will strike this planet for at least 100 years. So, phew. Cross that particular doomsday scenario off the list.

What remains true, however, is that on Friday, April 13, 2029, an asteroid wider than three football fields will pass closer to Earth than anything its size has come in recorded history.

An asteroid strike is a disaster; an asteroid flyby, an opportunity. And Apophis offers one of the best chances science has ever had to learn how the Earth came to be — and how we might one day prevent its destruction.

In the movies, incoming asteroids appear without warning from the depths of space and speed directly toward us until missiles or Bruce Willis heroically destroy them.

In real life, asteroids orbit the sun on elliptical paths. They are often spotted years, if not decades, before a potential collision — which is not great for dramatic tension but better for planetary survival.

Apophis was discovered in 2004. After calculating its potential orbits, astronomers were startled to realize it had a 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2029. In a nod to its horrifying potential, they named it Apophis, an Egyptian god of chaos.

“We were shocked,” said Paul Chodas, who manages NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge. “That is very serious and, actually, a very unexpected and rare event.”

Astronomers use a color-coded warning system called the Torino Scale to gauge the degree of danger an asteroid or comet presents to Earth in the next 100 years. Since the scale’s creation in 1995, none of the roughly 30,000 near-Earth objects known to exist in the solar system had ranked higher than 1 on the zero-to-10 scale.

Apophis was a 4.

The longer astronomers track an asteroid, the more clearly defined its orbit becomes. Within a few months, scientists were able to rule out the possibility of a 2029 strike. Within a few years, they were able to dismiss the even smaller chance of a hit in 2036.


Images of the asteroid Apophis, captured in 2012, allowed scientists to determine that it will not strike Earth during a close flyby in 2036.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)

And in 2021, radar observations confirmed that Apophis will not strike when it passes us in 2068, leaving Earth in the clear for at least a century.

With humanity’s safety assured — from this threat, at least — the coast was clear to geek out on some asteroid science.

“We’ve never seen something that large get that close,” said Lance Benner, a principal scientist at JPL.




“Close,” in the space world, is a relative term. At its nearest, Apophis will pass roughly 19,000 miles (31,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. That’s about one-10th the distance to the moon.

No one on the ground will be tempted to duck, and it will not appear as a fireball swooshing across the heavens.


On the big night, Apophis will be visible with the naked eye from parts of Europe and Africa. (In Los Angeles, experienced stargazers might be able to spot it with binoculars around 3:30 a.m. on April 13.)

The asteroid close encounter presents “an unprecedented opportunity to study its physical properties and to help us learn things that we’ve never been able to learn before,” Benner said.



An approach this close from an asteroid this big occurs at most every few thousand years, said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL.

“It’s something that almost never happens, and yet we get to witness it in our lifetime,” Farnocchia said. “We usually send spacecraft out there to visit asteroids and find out about them. In this case, it’s nature doing the flyby for us.”

From the ground, Apophis will resemble a star traversing the night sky, as bright as the constellation Cassiopeia and slower than a satellite. Though it may appear far away for those of us down here, it will in fact be near enough for NASA to reach out and touch it.

OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft currently ferrying home samples from the surface of an asteroid called Bennu, will rendezvous with Apophis in 2029. Shortly after April 13, the craft — by then renamed OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer, or OSIRIS-APEX — will steer toward the asteroid until it is drawn into its orbit, eventually getting close enough to collect a sample from its surface.

Apophis is shaped like a peanut shell, a form astronomers call a “contact binary.” The hunk of nickel, iron and silicate is a relic from the earliest days of the solar system, a byproduct of the massive cloud of gas and dust that formed 4.6 billion years ago and eventually led to us.

“These asteroids are primordial samples,” Chodas said. “Learning about the composition will help us understand the history of the solar system and where these things came from.”

The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory spotted Apophis during the approach to Earth on Jan. 5 and 6, 2013. The image shows the asteroid in three wavelengths.
(European Space Agency )

Given the proximity, researchers will also be able to study Apophis with ground-based tools that have never been deployed for an object this size.

On Dec. 27, researchers at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska, sent a low-frequency radio signal to an asteroid called 2010 XC15. It was part of a test to see if radio waves could penetrate an asteroid and send back data on its interior structure, said Mark Haynes, the JPL radar systems engineer who led the project.

Knowing an asteroid’s internal mass distribution would be extremely helpful if we needed to knock it out of our way.

Hundreds of space rocks hit Earth every year, and most are harmless. A big one, though, can wreak havoc far beyond its initial impact site.

The massive Chicxulub asteroid that 66 million years ago slammed into what is now the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico released an estimated 420 zettajoules of energy. (For context, the world’s collective electricity output in 2021 was about 0.5 zettajoules.)

The resulting heat pulse vaporized rock and sparked wildfires across much of the planet, followed by a years-long impact winter as a choking cloud of particulate matter blocked out the sun. By the time it was over, 75% of species were gone for good, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

The Chicxulub asteroid measured 7 miles across, the same as the city of Paris. Apophis is as long as the Eiffel Tower. A collision with an object that size would be less catastrophic but could still cause serious damage.


OPINION
Op-Ed: Good news for a change — NASA proves there’s a defense against killer asteroids

NASA is working on a plan to deal with that. Last year, its Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft deliberately crashed into a rock 7 million miles away to see whether humans could change the trajectory of a celestial object. (Good news: We can.)

If we ever did have to deflect an incoming asteroid, that’s how we’d do it: not with a grand, Death Star-style explosion but with a speedy projectile strong enough to knock it ever-so-slightly off course.

“That mission was spectacularly successful and showed that that technique works,” Benner said. “Don’t send Bruce Willis and a bunch of oil drillers up there to blast it to smithereens.”

Qatar donates World Cup mobile homes to Turkey earthquake survivors


One of a batch of mobile home cabins that Qatar has allocated to be transferred to Turkey as part of relief efforts in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake is transported in Hamad Port, Qatar, February 12, 2023.

The Associated Press
Published: 14 February ,2023

Qatar plans to send 10,000 cabins and caravans from last year’s World Cup to provide shelter for survivors of the Turkish earthquakes, officials said.

The Gulf nation says it had always planned to donate the mobile homes. They were needed to help house some of the 1.4 million fans who descended on the small country during soccer’s biggest tournament.

For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.


An initial batch of 350 structures was shipped out on Sunday, the Qatar Fund for Development said.

The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes that struck nine hours apart on February 6 killed more than 35,000 people in southeastern Turkey and war-torn northern Syria. The toll is expected to climb even further as search and rescue teams find more bodies.

Tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, leaving millions homeless. As shelters filled up in the days after the quake many were forced to sleep outside in wet, wintry weather.

Qatar and other wealthy Gulf countries have joined the global effort to send rescuers and aid to the stricken region. The United Arab Emirates has pledged $100 million for relief efforts. Saudi Arabia has dispatched eight planes loaded with supplies to Turkey and Syria.

Russia says over 300 troops sent to Syria to help with earthquake relief


Russian military personnel involved in a search and rescue operation after a devastating earthquake in the region of Latakia, Syria, in this image taken from handout footage released February 7, 2023. (Reuters)

Reuters
Published: 14 February ,2023

More than 300 Russian servicemen and 60 units of special military equipment are helping Syria in its response to a devastating earthquake that struck more than a week ago, Russia’s defense ministry said on Tuesday.

The 7.8 magnitude Feb. 6 quake and aftershocks killed more than 37,000 in Turkey and Syria and the death toll looked set to keep rising with almost no chances of rescuers finding any more survivors in the rubble.

“Servicemen of the Russian group of forces continue to carry out activities to clear rubble and eliminate the consequences of earthquakes,” the defense ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app, referring to Russian forces stationed in Syria.

“More than 300 servicemen and 60 units of military and special equipment have been involved in the work.”

Food packages and disinfectants as well as other essentials had also been delivered to humanitarian aid points in the northwestern city of Aleppo, the ministry added.

The Kremlin said on Monday that it was in contact with Syrian authorities over providing relief to areas affected.

Russia, which backs Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, has been a dominant military force in Syria since launching air strikes and ground operations there in 2015. It further asserted its presence after the United States pulled out its forces in 2019.

 

Improving working conditions in Japan’s agriculture sector

14 February 2023

Author: Yusaku Yoshikawa, JIN Corporation

In 2019, the Japanese government introduced the Work Style Reform Law which sought to increase diversity in the workplace and improve working conditions. But reform has not been sufficiently discussed in one of the industries that needs it the most — agriculture.

The agriculture industry in Japan has suffered a dramatic decrease in labour, with the number of farmers decreasing by 50,000 per year. The majority of them are small-scale farmers with side jobs, who are also ageing at an advanced stage.

It has been a challenge for the sector to attract young farmers. In 2021, 52,300 farmers joined but nearly two-thirds of them were over 50 years old. The turnover rate of agricultural workers is also higher than in other sectors. The most common reasons for changing jobs are discontentment with working conditions, long labour hours and low incomes.

Despite some efforts being made to improve the working conditions of agricultural workers, such as discussions by the Exploratory Committee on Work Style Reform in Agriculture organised by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), there is still a long way to go in extending the reforms.

Agriculture in Japan has long been considered a ‘family business’, with a blurred boundary between work and life. The 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry compiled by MAFF reported that 96 per cent of agricultural management bodies in Japan were still family-owned. On the contrary, employed workers have conventionally not been very common. Because farming activities are mostly seasonal, workers are usually employed only during the busy harvest season. Yet, Japan’s Labour Standards Act only applies to employed workers and excludes family workers engaged in agriculture.

Government statistics and laws related to employed workers in the agricultural sector are often different from those in other sectors. For example, the MAFF Census classification of employed agricultural workers — as employees that work more than seven months per year — does not match the commonly used distinction of regular and non-regular employment.

The Labour Standards Act stipulates that extra wages for overtime and holiday work do not apply to agriculture. The law also excludes the industry from regulations concerning the minimum requirement for break time and holidays for farmers, based on the understanding that agricultural work is subject to seasonal and climate conditions.

But employed workers in agriculture have become more common, especially for newcomers. 22.1 per cent of new farmers in 2021 were employed workers. For new farmers below 49 years old, 8,540 were employed workers, outnumbering the 7,190 self-employed farmers. Still, there is a lot of room to improve farmers’ working conditions further. In 2021, MAFF’s Policy Research Institute reported that 27 per cent of men and 17 per cent of women regularly employed in the agricultural sector worked over 300 days a year.

According to the report, the annual income of regularly employed workers in the sector is low compared to other industries. The average annual income for men working in the agricultural sector was 3.1 million yen (US$22,100) in 2017, compared to 5.2 million yen (US$37,200) for other industries. Women agricultural workers earned only 1.9 million yen (US$14,000) compared to an average annual income of 3.3 million yen (US$23,700). This income gap only widens as the workers’ age increases.

The working conditions for non-regular employees including part-time workers are even more challenging. In the agricultural sector, 46.8 per cent of male workers and 77.8 per cent of female workers were not regularly employed in 2017. Since they were hired for short-term contracts, their annual income was only 2 million yen (US$28,000) for men and 800,000 yen (US$6,000) for women.

Part of the reason for this low income is that agricultural management entities are having trouble securing profit out of the business which has suffered from low market prices of products and an increase in agricultural input costs such as fertiliser.

Foreign workers, such as the Technical Intern Training Program trainees, are also in vulnerable positions. The Program originally aimed to develop the capacity of trainees from countries like Vietnam and the Philippines but many criticise that it has become a means to secure cheap labour in the agriculture industry. The trainees cannot change their workplaces and often suffer from mistreatment, such as violations of security standards. Still, some good practices are balancing pleasant working environments with productivity. In these practices, comfortable working conditions have successfully attracted workers.

As the proportion of employed workers increases, agriculture is becoming less of a ‘family business’ in Japan and transforming into a more ordinary industry in terms of its working style. If this situation continues, improved working conditions for agricultural workers will eventually sustain the industry by contributing to solving challenges such as labour shortages.

Yusaku Yoshikawa is an aid consultant at JIN Corporation.