ILO chief: Workers in informal economy face 'utter destitution'

As COVID-19 shutdowns spike unemployment, the labour body's Guy Ryder discusses how governments can protect workers.

23 May 2020 

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we live.

Nearly every country in the world has been affected. There have already been millions of infections, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

And while scientists work on developing a vaccine, governments are focusing on reducing the number of infections through social distancing and other preventive measures.

But these restrictions have brought with them countless financial losses across the globe. The coronavirus recession is considered to be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of 1929.

As COVID-19 measures halt international trade, shut down airports and leave businesses bankrupt, tens of millions of people have lost their jobs. And for many, being unemployed in the middle of a pandemic means not only losing their income but also losing access to healthcare.

So, how can governments protect their workers and rebuild their economies?

The director-general of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Guy Ryder, talks to Al Jazeera.

 The Conspiracy Virus: COVID-19 misinformation in the US How a conspiracy documentary hijacked US social media and fuelled fake news around coronavirus. Plus, schooling in Peru. 23 May 2020 10:24 GMT Media, Coronavirus pandemic, Propaganda, United States, Health

We are eating shrimp in record numbers. But for how much longer?

Shrimpers have a long and proud cultural tradition in the US – one that is now under threat from all sides


Megan Mayhew Bergman Wed 27 May 2020
‘

The decline of the shrimping industry has been death by a thousand cuts.’ Illustration: Good Wives and Warriors

Captain Wynn Gale – a fifth-generation Georgia shrimper – is on the side of the road on an April morning, selling shrimp at the same street corner where his dad sold shrimp.

“How’s the pandemic treating you?” I ask.

“Sales have dropped off by about two-thirds. No out-of-towners coming through on the I-95. No local traffic.” He sighs. “I’m going to tough it out. I can survive with what I’m selling. But that’s all I’m doing. Most shrimpers don’t have 401k retirement plans, you know?”

Gale would rather be out on his boat, a 1953 trawler he had for nine years but recently sold to a man in North Carolina. “It made me good money, but I couldn’t find a crew! You just can’t find anyone who wants to work shrimp boats any more. Most of ’em are on drugs. Give ’em a check and they’re gone.” He has a small boat he can run himself now.

In the past, shrimping was an admirable vocation. Gale first got out on a shrimp boat when he was 12. “Mama wouldn’t let me go any earlier, but from 12 years on out – every weekend I wasn’t in school or summer vacation I was on a shrimp boat.” He spent the next 20 years learning from his dad, who shrimped for 45 years.

“What was an average day like?” I ask.

“I’d leave about 4.30 in the morning and get to the dragging grounds about 6.30, maybe 7am. I’d put out in daylight, make three or four drags that day. The latest I’d be out would be 4pm,” he says. “Look,” he tells me. “What I’m doing right here, right now, selling shrimp on this corner – it sucks. It’s way better out there on the water. It’s where I’ve lived all my life. If I wasn’t in the ocean, I was in the river running trout lines and catching catfish, or fishing for shad in winter.”

•••

Americans eat more shrimp than ever – an average of 4.4lb per person – but not all of America’s shrimpers are thriving. Nearly 90% of America’s shrimp comes from overseas, farmed in Asia and Central America, where working conditions and meat quality can be repugnant. It is increasingly rare for fresh, wild-caught, chemical-free shrimp to reach an American consumer’s plate.


Off the coast of Georgia, fishermen harvested about 2.61m lb of shrimp in 2019, a haul valued more than $11m. Shrimping is deeply ingrained in culture there, but Georgia’s fishermen are facing significant challenges: an ageing workforce, low prices per pound, climate change and black gill disease, leading many to wonder if the industry will survive.

These days, depending on the season, Gale can get $3 to $5.50 per lb of shrimp. “Back in the 1980s and 1990s,” he says, “we were selling the same size shrimp for $8 a pound. We have good years – but most of the time we have bad years now.”

Bryan Fluech, the associate marine extension director at Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, uses the term “graying of the fleet” when talking about the future of shrimping in Georgia.

“Shrimp are the Cheetos of the sea,” Fluech tells me. “Everything eats them. But people need to remember: that shrimp didn’t just show up in a Publix.

“The decline of the shrimping industry has been death by a thousand cuts,” Fluech says. “The cost for maintaining a boat is up, and the boats are getting older. Sustainable fishing practices are expensive to implement. The younger generation doesn’t want to work on a shrimping vessel, and captains tell me they can’t find a reliable workforce. The cost of ice and fuel might rise, but the profit on shrimp doesn’t. Plus, our guys are competing with foreign markets.”

“A lot has changed,” Gale tells me. “We’re losing our infrastructure. Lost our big block ice plant that had given ice since the 1940s. Can’t hardly find anybody to build nets any more.”

Fluech professes enormous respect for the shrimpers still operating in Georgia’s waters. “Let me tell you – MacGyver [the TV adventurer hero] has nothing on Georgia shrimpers. They are so resourceful. You can’t just be a good shrimper any more. You’ve got to be a welder, a businessman and a direct marketer too.”

“People love to say that they’re all about local food,” Fluech adds. “And you’ll see a shrimping boat on every tourism brochure, but commercial waterfronts have changed. People don’t like the look of a working dock. There’s only one left in Brunswick, which means the fishermen have to take those prices or go out on their own. We say we like authentic experiences, but we’re losing them.”

•••


You can see the old reverence for Georgia’s shrimpers in the Blessing of the Fleet ceremonies, which still happen along the coast in towns like Brunswick and Darien at the end of March, as the fleet readies itself for the season.

Ships with beautiful names like the Lady Raven, Flying Cloud, Bernice II, Liberty Bell and Sundown arrive at the ceremony decorated with lights and streamers. A crowd gathers, and a minister – often waving a toilet brush spray-painted gold, and flanked by the Knights of Columbus – offers a blessing into the microphone. Shrimping is a dangerous vocation, after all, and every year there are injuries, drownings and boats that don’t return.

This year’s ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic. The cancellation feels like the latest knock in a long and difficult fight.

Once celebrated, many shrimpers feel vilified as they face mounting regulations aimed at preserving other species, like sea turtles. In the 1980s, before turtle excluder devices (TEDs) were prevalent, shrimp nets were responsible for more than 10,000 sea turtle deaths annually in the south-east. In 1989, when regulations tightened, shrimpers created a 500-boat blockade in the Gulf coast, raising skull and crossbones flags and even ramming Coast Guard ships.

In Georgia, tension between scientists and fishermen is amplified by black gill disease, which affects a shrimp’s respiratory system. The shrimp’s immune response causes the visible blackening of the gills, and results in lethargy, potential death and sometimes the collapse of an entire fishery.

Black gill is an expensive problem. In 2019, the commerce department distributed over $1m to commercial shrimpers and researchers because of the 2013 white shrimp fishery failure.


Black gill is, however, more pervasive than ever. Gale reports that it’s starting earlier in the year, beginning in May instead of August, and continuing throughout fall. Though it has been around since the 1990s, researchers believe the disease is worsening with climate change.

Climate change will continue to wreak further havoc on the industry – changing the salinity of the water, shifting the distribution of shrimp – female shrimp need colder water to spawn. Warmer winters appear to predict a smaller annual shrimp harvest, and may not kill the bacteria responsible for black gill.

Keeping shrimp fisheries healthy, and livelihoods possible, requires intense collaboration between fishermen and scientists. Otherwise, foreign markets with cheap labor and unsustainable practices will take over the market share entirely.

“We have to look for the cooperative path,” Fluech says, emphasizing how helpful it can be when shrimpers help with data collection and reporting. He currently works with five to eight shrimpers each season; the fishermen help report black gill using an online tracking app.


One of the best historical examples of this cooperative path is fisherman Sinkey Boone, who hailed from a long line of shrimpers in Darien. Boone created the first turtle excluder device in the late 1960s, called the Georgia Jumper, which allowed turtles – an oxygen-breathing species – to escape trawler nets so they wouldn’t drown.

Scientists and fishermen may seem at odds, but collaboration is possible, and perhaps imperative.

“Me and the shrimpers may not agree on everything, but I respect the hell out of them,” says Fluech.

•••

Gale agrees with the saying that shrimpers never retire. “We fish till we fall out and die,” he says. “I’ve seen men fish right on until their 80s and 90s. I know an old man right now who’s got to be 85 and he outworks anybody I know – still climbs up in the rigging. Diabetic and still goes.”

I hear stories about poisonous snakes tangled in anchor lines, boats on fire, near-sinkings, and a man in his 70s impaled by his own equipment who hardly survived, but broke out of the hospital to get back on his boat a few days later.


“Once fishing’s in your blood, and you get used to it, you just don’t want to do anything else,” Gale says.

“I’d still work for my daddy,” Gale tells me. “He just knew where the shrimp would be – it was absolutely amazing. He knew the tide cycles, what the weather meant. You could set your watch to it. Another fisherman could make that same pass and miss them.”

In 1979, the government issued 1,471 commercial trawling licenses in Georgia – but only 253 in 2014. If the decline in Georgia’s shrimping continues, the ripple effect will be felt in the local economy, on dinner plates, during seasonal festivals, and on the horizon line, where many are used to seeing early morning trawlers. Frozen foreign shrimp and farmed shrimp – known as aquaculture – are the likely future.

“Do I think there will always be shrimpers in Georgia?” Fluech asks me. “I hope so. You have to be an eternal optimist in this business.”

Seascape: the state of our oceans

Democrats are fueling a corporate counter-revolution against progressivesDavid Sirota

Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount an opposition to Trump. They are actively helping Republicans

Tue 26 May 2020

‘This corporate counterrevolution is easiest to see in Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Republicans’ legislative response to the coronavirus crisis.’ Photograph: Michael Brochstein/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock
These are bleak days for America’s progressive movement. The Democratic primary process handed the party’s nomination to the candidate with the most conservative record. Corporate-friendly politicians like the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, are using the pandemic to brandish their images and install billionaires to run things. Progressive lawmakers in Congress are being steamrolled, even by their own party’s leadership. And a recession is battering the state and local budgets that fund progressive priorities like education and the social safety net.

Joe Biden pushed to embrace radicalism of FDR by scale of economic crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/22/joe-biden-radicalism-fdr-economic-crisis-coronavirus

Perhaps this is a temporary stall-out – a fleeting moment of retreat in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back trajectory. After all, polls continue to show that from workers’ rights to universal healthcare, a majority of Americans support a progressive policy agenda.

The problem, though, is that Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount a strong opposition to Donald Trump – they are actively helping Republicans try to fortify the obstacles to long-term progressive change well after this emergency subsides.

This corporate counter-revolution is easiest to see in Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Republicans’ legislative response to the coronavirus crisis. Democrats’ entire 2018 electoral campaign told America that the opposition party needed to win back Congress in order to block Trump’s regressive agenda. And yet, when the Republicans proposed a bill to let Trump’s appointees dole out government cash to their corporate allies with no strings attached, this same opposition party mustered not a single recorded vote against the package. Not one.

Thanks to that, Trump appointees and the Federal Reserve can now hand out $4tn to politically connected corporations as they lay waste to our economy and steamroll progressive reforms. Private equity firms and fossil fuel companies get new tax breaks as they buy elections and try to lock in permanent climate change.

These bailouts were part of a larger legislative package that included good things like expanded unemployment benefits – and so you could argue that Democrats simply had to swallow a bitter pill and vote yes. Except, they subsequently proposed their own standalone legislation that would further strengthen the corporate opponents of progressive reform.


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For example, there is the Democrats’ push to alter the so-called paycheck protection program (PPP). Those loans were designed to help employees of mom-and-pop enterprises throughout the country. House Democrats’ new stimulus legislation would open up the small business lending program to what they call “small nonprofits”, but their language was crafted to provide the forgivable loans to industry trade associations. Those lobby groups represent the planet’s biggest corporations – and their political action committees have delivered more than $191m of campaign cash to lawmakers in the last two decades.

Democrats have pitched their legislation as a “message” bill that declares their values – and in this case, they are reassuring Washington power-players that money meant for workers at neighborhood restaurants, local shops and other mom-and-pop concerns can be raided by the front groups representing giant drug companies, health insurers and Wall Street firms. If the legislation passes, it would not merely be an epic tale of greed – the new funding stream for corporate lobbying groups would bolster the very forces that make sure federal policy disempowers workers, maximizes private profit and generally protects the ruling class.

The tragedy is we’re already moving in that wrong direction, and chances to change the dynamic don't come around often

It’s an even worse story on healthcare. As 43 million Americans face the prospect of losing private health insurance, Democrats had a huge opportunity. After Trump himself suggested he wanted the government to pay healthcare providers directly for treating uninsured Covid-19 patients, they could have called his bluff and passed existing legislation to expand a Medicare program that provides actual medical care. Instead, House Democrats passed a bill to support lightly regulated private insurance marketplaces and to subsidize existing private insurance plans through a Rube Goldberg machine known as Cobr

Taken together, the spectacle was more confirmation that whatever resistance exists in the nation’s capital, it is so often performance art, rather than anything real.

“Outside groups and House lawmakers need to work together to build a populist bloc – probably inclusive of moderate Democrats and perhaps even an occasional Republican – who will stand united to force votes to ensure that our economy does right by ordinary people,” said David Segal of Demand Progress, pointing to news of a potential Democratic coalition to buck the party’s leadership and support a plan to float businesses’ payrolls through the crisis. “We must make sure that America does not go in the wrong direction and become even more inequitable because we let unemployment soar, compel cities and states to implement austerity, force small businesses to shutter and let large corporations backstopped by the Fed roll them up.”

The tragedy is that we’re already moving in that wrong direction, and chances to change the political dynamic do not come around often. As Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now an investment banker and TV talking head) said more than a decade ago during the financial crisis: “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste – it’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”

Billionaires and corporations are clearly following that advice, aiming to use the pandemic to grow their wealth and political power in previously unfathomable ways. It would be better if the opposition party put up a real fight – or at least refused to be complicit in postponing progress for yet another generation.


David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and Jacobin editor at large who served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter. He also publishes Too Much Information newsletter.

Ancient Roman mosaic floor discovered under vines in Italy

Pristine ‘archaeological treasure’ near Verona may date to 3rd century AD, say experts


Angela Giuffrida 

Rome correspondent THE GUARDIAN

Wed 27 May 2020

The mosaic was found a few metres beneath a row of vines a week after work resumed after the coronavirus lockdown. Photograph: Comune di Negrar di Valpolicella

A perfectly preserved ancient Roman mosaic floor has been discovered near the northern Italian city of Verona.

Archaeologists were astonished by the find as it came almost a century after the remains of a villa, believed to date to the 3rd century AD, were unearthed in a hilly area above the town of Negrar di Valpolicella.

After the discovery in 1922, the site was mostly left abandoned until a team from the Superintendent of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona resumed digging last summer. The team returned to the site in October and again in February before the excavation was suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The mosaic was found a few metres beneath a row of vines a week after work got going again.

“After countless decades of failed attempts, part of the floor and foundations of the Roman villa located north of Verona, discovered by scholars a century ago, has finally been brought to light,” authorities from Negrar di Valpolicella wrote on the town’s Facebook page.

“The superintendent will now liaise with the owners of the area and municipality to identify the most appropriate ways of making this archaeological treasure, which has always been hidden beneath our feet, available and accessible.”

Roberto Grison, the mayor of Negrar di Valpolicella, told the local newspaper L’Arena: “We believe a cultural site of this value deserves attention and should be enhanced. For this reason, together with the superintendent and those in charge of agricultural funds, we will find a way to make this treasure enjoyable.”

Paving stones dating back 2,000 years were also discovered after a sinkhole opened in front of the Pantheon in Rome during the coronavirus lockdown.

The seven travertine slabs were found 2.5 metres beneath Piazza della Rotonda. Although sinkholes are a common problem in Rome, fortunately the usually packed square was empty at the time the pavement collapsed in April.

Italy’s cultural sites are slowly coming back to life, with the archaeological park of Pompeii reopening on Tuesday. The park reopened with security measures in place, including temperature checks, while the entrance price has been reduced to €5.

The Colosseum will reopen on 1 June, with visitors obliged to buy tickets online, wear face masks and have their temperature checked before entering.

Sydney braces for rat ‘plague’ after Covid-19 forces hungry rodents to turn to cannibalism

Suburban rat infestations surge after city-dwelling rodents run out of food

Naaman Zhou THE GUARDIAN Wed 27 May 2020
 

The sudden drop-off in food and rubbish in our cities is exacerbating suburban rat infestations. Photograph: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP via Getty Images

Empty offices and restaurants in the city of Sydney are driving hungry rats into homes and suburbs, and the loosening of restrictions could create “a new rat plague”, according to a leading rat-catcher.

As city centres have closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, suburban rat infestations have spiked, according to Geoff Milton, a Sydney rat-catcher with 35 years’ experience.

Rats naturally seek out houses during winter, and the sudden drop-off in food and rubbish in our cities is exacerbating the problem. Calls about suburban rats have risen 30% compared with the same time last year, Milton told Guardian Australia.In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also warned that New York rats had become more “unusual or aggressive”, and began eating each other due to a lack of food.

Prof Peter Banks, a rodent expert from the University of Sydney, said the same thing had already happened in Australia.

Banks said that cannibalism would have happened “within days” of our restrictions being enacted, as city-dwelling rats ran out of food.

“We locked down and stopped using the city and closed restaurants quite rapidly, and that was quite long ago,” he told Guardian Australia. “The rats have to eat immediately, so this would have happened days after, because the rats are so food stressed.

“They are so dependent on our garbage and our spilt food. The rats we have in the centre of Sydney are the same species as in New York … They are wholly dependent on us. If they produce babies they can’t support, they kill them. Or one of their relatives comes in and kills them.

“They will eat other rats that die, for sure. It’s hard to say whether they will go and kill another rat. They will not let a meal of another rat go by.”

AT LEAST WE DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT RATS

Milton said this had driven rats into new areas.

“They have moved into the suburbs, closer to residential now,” he said. “We are having a big spike in residential rodent control.

“It’s got colder quicker this year as well. It is coming on to winter where they need somewhere warm to sleep. They usually get into roof voids in people’s houses, because they can climb up brick walls or they can leap from overhanging trees above peoples’ houses. They can leap about three or four foot.”

However, Banks said that people should not worry about hordes of rats in their homes, as the overall rat population would have dropped under lockdown.

“Rats are probably the big losers from Covid-19,” he said. “The rat population would have been knocked down a lot. It will probably be a pretty typical winter. There are not going to be waves of rats running across the suburbs trying to get into people’s houses.

“But people will be seeing them in houses now, because that is the only place where there is food. If we leave bins out , they will thrive off that.”

Both he and Milton predicted city rat levels would swiftly rebound once offices and restaurants opened again, and people went back to work.

“They respond to food within days,” Banks said. “If you give them a burst of food, that can turn into babies in three weeks’ time, no worries. They usually go through a winter lull, so that is not normally their breeding time. But if we are out in springtime or late winter, out there spilling food, they will be there to exploit it.”

Milton agreed.

“There will probably be a new plague of rats take over the city,” he said. “But a lot of the ones that are left unattended in suburbia will stay there. They usually eat dog food and all that, because people leave dog kibble out all night. They’ve got ready made meals really.”

Banks said that rats would “be back”.

“What they do is, the adults just stop having babies. The mortality rates will go up, but there will be survivors. There will be some who get by. Those will keep the population going, so once the garbage comes back, those survivors will repopulate the urban rats again. Breeding will go up, they will have bigger litters. They’ll be back.”

'Ban on bushmeat' after Covid-19 but what if alternative is factory farming?

Governments and WHO face pressure to ban commercial trade in wild animals, but experts say this would criminalise a way of life for millions of people

CAPITALISM IS THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT IN FARMING WHICH ELIMINATES THE COMMONS OF THE SMALL FARMER, AND DRIVES THE GROWTH OF CAPITALIST INDUSTRIES IN THE CITIES 
Animals farmed is supported byAbout this content


John Vidal

Tue 26 May 2020 07.15 BSTLast modified on Wed 27 May 2020 12.30 BST




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Jeanne Mwakembe and Bernardette Maselé selling bushmeat (crocodile and antelope) at the Moutuka Nunene market in Lukolela, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Ollivier Girard/CIFOR


Antelope is best, monkey is chewy, bats needs a sauce, forest porcupine is mild, and pangolin – one of the most trafficked animals in the world – tastes great roasted but smells awful. That, at least, was what the Gabonese workers told us.

We were in a Belgian-owned logging camp in Gabon. The day had been spent watching giant trees being felled for the Chinese market but by evening everyone’s thoughts had turned to food.

Most rural Africans and Asians say “bush” or wild meat is healthier, tastier and often cheaper than the bland meat of most farmed animals like chickens or pigs. The joke among the African loggers in the camp that night was that Asians would eat anything alive in the forest but the squeamish Europeans would eat nothing.

‘Mixed with prejudice’: calls for ban on ‘wet’ markets misguided, experts argue
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/15/mixed-with-prejudice-calls-for-ban-on-wet-markets-misguided-experts-argue-coronavirus

Today, as a result of Covid-19 and its suspected origins in a Chinese “wet” market, governments and the World Health Organization are coming under growing pressure from conservationists, vegans, and animal protection, zoo, and welfare groups to not just stop the hunting of all wild animals for food but to end the commercial trade in live animals with a global ban. Now is the time to link human health with biodiversity loss and animal suffering and to close all markets selling live or dead wild animals, they say.Q&A
What is a wet market?Show

A spokeswoman for WWF UK says: “We have called for the closure of illegal and unregulated wildlife markets, primarily in urban areas. What we are concerned about is the illegal consumption of highly threatened wildlife, often seen as a delicacy.”

There is no doubt that wild meat hunting and consumption is heavily impacting the world’s wildlife, giving rise to what is called “the empty forest”, where few large mammals remain. A 2016 Royal Society paper shows that the bushmeat trade is growing fast, with devastating results. “As wildlife populations outside protected areas decline, poaching pressure is increasing in many parks and reserves,” say the authors. “As a consequence many forests, savannahs, grasslands and deserts in the developing world are now becoming ‘empty landscapes’ devoid of harvest-sensitive wild mammals.”

What has changed over 50 years, say scientists, is the scale of the commercial wild meat trade. In the past, local subsistence hunters killed animals in small numbers. Today a high-volume industry supplies fast-expanding Asian and African cities. No longer run by local hunters, it is helped by modern firearms and cellphones, and utilises a vast network of new roads driven deep into forest concessions by the international logging industry. Hunters can strip a forest or wetland in a few nights and access home and export markets for their meat. And as the forests are emptied of their animals, the price of wild meat soars and it becomes a luxury commodity for urban elites.

Dead pangolins seized by authorities in Belawan, North Sumatra. More than 5,500 species of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles are bought and sold on the worldwide animal market. Photograph: Gatha Ginting/AFP via Getty Images

Sue Lieberman, vice-president of international policy at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, says that growing populations in Africa and Asia must switch to eating farmed animals. “People do need other sources of food [than bushmeat]. I am not saying that people should not eat wild animals [but] there is not enough to go round any more. Commercialisation is the problem. The first priority must be to stop the commercial markets. They can’t go on. Practices that originated hundreds of years ago have to stop. The amount it would cost to provide chicken and farmed fish to everyone [in Africa] is negligible compared to what this pandemic is costing.”


But critics of a ban say that the legal wildlife meat trade employs hundreds of thousands of people, provides protein for between 30 million and 70 million people in Africa alone and kills few threatened, or rare animals.


What about the environmental impacts of farming? According to a major 2011 study led by Robert Nasi, director general of the Center for International Forestry Research (Cifor), a switch to cattle to provide protein in place of wild animals would have huge impact.

Hunters, says Nasi, take about 4.5m tonnes of bushmeat a year from forests in the Congo basin and possibly 1.299m tonnes in the Amazon. “We would need to transform large areas of tropical forests or savannas into pasture to replace [this amount of] bushmeat by cattle. For comparison, Brazilian beef production is considered responsible for about 50m hectares [124m acres – twice the size of the UK] of deforestation. If bushmeat consumption in the Congo basin was to be replaced by locally produced beef, an area as large as 25 m hectares might have to be converted to pastures.”

Factory farming has devastating effects on wildlife, says Philip Lymbery, director of UK-based Compassion in World Farming. “It is a main driver of wildlife decline and the destruction of the world’s remaining wild lands,” he says. “It’s about keeping animals caged in sheds, which sounds efficient but you have to devote vast areas of land to grow their feed. It drives encroachment into wild lands and the destruction of habitats.

“It would cause unimaginable suffering to the animals, and even more environmental devastation. It would also create the perfect breeding ground for the next pandemic. Factory farming and pandemics are strongly linked. The main driver of future pandemics will be factory farming.”

Bushmeat on sale at the weekly market in Yangambi, DRC. The animals that are hunted include warthogs, monkeys and Gambia rats. Forests in the area still have plenty of animals although numbers have declined over the past decade. Photograph: Axel Fassio/CIFOR

Many epidemiologists, ecologists, human rights and indigenous peoples’ groups say a knee-jerk global reaction to ban the wild meat trade could be unscientific, counter-productive and culturally offensive.

The western conservation “industry” wants an end to the eating of wild animals because it wants vast new areas of land to be “protected” in the name of increasing biodiversity, says Fiore Longo, advocacy officer of Survival International.

“But this model of ‘fortress conservation’ is dangerous,” she says. “Conservationists have seized the crisis as a chance to criminalise the ways of life of a large part of the world’s population. It reinforces the false divide between people and wildlife, and potentially vastly increases the size of protected areas whatever the human cost may be.

“What happens if we outlaw the trade and consumption of wildlife where there are no other sources of protein available? Do we let more people starve? Is a dependence on industrial food production with all its enormous environmental, health and financial impacts somehow ‘better’ than the sustainable consumption of wild animals?”
In Guyana, bushmeat is sold freely in a variety of places including restaurants, bars, private homes or on the roadside. People hunt and trade wild meat for food, income or just as a hobby. The most commonly traded species include capybara and iguana.
Photograph: Manuel Lopez/CIFOR

“It is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” says John Fa, coordinator of the Bushmeat Research Initiative at Cifor. “Wild meat plays an important role in the nutrition of large populations of humans, accounting for up to 50% of the protein intake of people in central Africa. You can’t just say to people: ‘You can’t do it any more.’”

Wildlife hunting bans mostly fail, says Stephanie Brittain, who spent five years in Cameroon researching bushmeat consumption and now works with Oxford University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science. After the 2013–16 Ebola outbreak in west Africa, she says, bans were brought in by several countries but could not be policed. The result was a marked increase in hunting for wild meat. “There [is] no conclusive evidence that banning the wildlife trade will prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases in the future,” she says. “The legal trade for species that can be safely harvested can facilitate improved hygiene and animal welfare, while complete bans can drive trade underground, resulting in illegal markets with lower hygiene regulation and increased risk of disease transmission.”

As for the idea that disease is more likely to accompany wild meat, experts point out that illnesses like Mers and Sars, BSE, swine and bird flu, E coli, MRSA and salmonella, originated in intensive poultry, pig and livestock farms where the overuse of antibiotics and unhygienic conditions can spread disease quickly. Many are common. According to the OIE, the World Organisation for Animal Health, there are currently more than 25 outbreaks of H5 and H7 avian flu having to be controlled in more than 20 countries, including the US, Germany, India and Saudi Arabia. Any one, if unattended by vets, could develop into an epidemic.


“Intensive farming is an area that must also be looked at”, says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at Liverpool University. “As we select for better milk cows, better beef cows or better egg-laying chickens, we create populations of animals that often live in intensive conditions, but where the genetics are very similar. This creates risks for [the] emergence of diseases, because if these genetically uniform large populations are susceptible, things can spread very quickly.

”
 In Congo, part-time hunters boost their income with bushmeat. A WWF billboard listing protected species at the entrance of a bushmeat market in Mbandaka, DRC.
Photograph: Thomas Nicolon/Reuters

Delia Grace, programme leader for food safety and zoonoses at the International Livestock Research Institute, said: “Wet markets are basically fresh food markets. In the UK we like farmers’ markets with fresh cornfed chickens, farm-sourced meats and nice looking sausages. That’s basically a wet market, though in a different cultural context. They are essential to bring fresh food to urban populations, and provide for the food security of millions of people.

“They do need to be regulated and controlled. They should not be blanket banned, as that is not sensitive to the needs of their clients who depend on them.”

Conservationists are struggling to diminish consumption of wild animals through behaviour campaigns, legislation and law enforcement – especially in urban

Unstoppable': African swine fever deaths to eclipse record 2019 toll

With world’s attention on Covid-19, warnings that lack of measures to contain pandemic could lead to culling of record number of pigs
Animals farmed is supported byAbout this content


Michael Standaert

Wed 27 May 2020
 

A pig is tested for African Swine Fever in Manila, Philippines, during the 2019 outbreak. Photograph: Rolex dela Peña/EPA
The African swine fever (ASF) pandemic will be even worse this year than in 2019, say experts, warning that the spread of the highly contagious virus, which is fatal to pigs, is unrelenting.

With world attention on the human viral pandemic of Covid-19, concern is growing that countries are not focusing enough on halting the spread of ASF through better biosecurity practices, cooperation on intensive vaccine development, or transparency regarding outbreaks.

What is African swine fever and how does it spread?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/24/what-is-african-swine-fever-and-how-does-it-spread

“The ASF virus is a much ‘stronger’ virus [than Covid-19], in that it can survive in the environment or processed meat for weeks and months,” Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of veterinary sciences at City University in Hong Kong and a leading expert on ASF, told the Guardian.

ASF kills almost 100% of the animals it infects, and despite being in circulation for nearly 100 years, there is still no vaccine.

ASF had been a problem for many years, but when it reached China in autumn 2018 the disease exploded and the following year saw huge numbers of deaths. The official count was of around 1.1 million pigs culled in the year after that according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Unofficially, however, China’s numbers were probably closer to 200 million or more pigs culled, slaughtered early or lost to the disease in the first year of the outbreak. Last July the Dutch bank Rabobank estimated that at least 40% of the country’s 360 million pig population could have been lost.

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the UN agency based in Paris which monitors all notifiable animal diseases, told the Guardian it considered this “a reasonable estimate”

A wild boar in woods near Saint-Hubert, Belgium. Recent ASF outbreaks in the country’s wild boar population are now under control. Photograph: Julien Warnand/EPA-EFE

Data from OIE for this year shows that global ASF numbers by the end of April are close to or already above levels for all of 2019. Currently, focal locations of the virus are primarily in China, Vietnam, the Philippines and a wide swath of Eastern Europe.

“The continuing new ASF outbreaks – which are reported through official OIE notifications, as well as picked up informally through media, and tracked through our emergency prevention system – confirm the ever-larger number of affected animals and the unrelenting spread of the disease,” Andriy Rozstalnyy, an animal health officer at the FAO told the Guardian.


Deaths from sickness total more than 100,000, nearly the same as 2019, and the number officially culled stands at 5.4 million compared to the 6.9 million figure from 2019.

The disease has now spread to northern India for the first time, as well as to Papua New Guinea. Recent outbreaks among wild boar populations in Belgium, now under control, have also heightened monitoring in western Europe.

“I think we can call it a pandemic, definitely,” said Timothée Vergne, an associate professor of veterinary public health at the National Veterinary School of Toulouse, France.

“I was expecting to see a significant decrease in the number of reports of ASF outbreaks [due to the Covid-19 crisis], but actually I was kind of amazed to see that it still goes on,” he said.

Overall numbers of reported outbreaks are “far above” what had been reported by the end of May last year, said Vergne, adding that he believes the overall numbers will eclipse 2019 by the end of the year.

There are also concerns that China is underreporting the data for 2020. “We see ASF every week here,” Wayne Johnson, veterinarian at farm services company Enable Agricultural Technology Consulting, who is based in Beijing. “Provinces are told not to report. China does not report anything that would give [an] accurate account.”

Pfeiffer, who had sounded warnings along with Vergne and other researchers in a 2017 paper from Veterinary Record about the potential global impacts of ASF getting into China’s pig population,said China has now gone from culling, to controlling and living with it. “The benefit that the ASF epidemic has had for the financial performance of the mega pig producers in China adds another interesting dimension to the story. They have actually learned to ‘live’ with the disease in the country, and benefit enormously from the high pork price.”

African swine fever destroying small pig farms, as factory farming booms – report
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/11/african-swine-fever-destroying-small-pig-farms-as-factory-farming-booms-report

Profits continue to skyrocket at top Chinese pork producers such as WH Group, Wens and Muyuan. None of these companies would comment when approached by the Guardian to discuss any enhanced biosecurity measures they are implementing at facilities in China.

Meanwhile urgently needed preventive action is being delayed, partly, ironically, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. “In order to protect the pig sector, and the people who rely on it, the only available course is global coordinated actions at all levels – this includes accelerating vaccine research, increasing biosecurity and surveillance, and enforcing policies for safe trade and cross-border movement,” said Rozstalnyy.

“At the same time there are some instances in which political or economic sensitivity could lead to unwillingness to report cases,” he said. “Tackling ASF in a globally coordinated way, where all countries can benefit from stronger multi-sectoral support, will require as much transparency and openness as possible.”

Pfeiffer believes the ASF virus is now almost “unstoppable” and fears are growing among pig producers in the US and Europe that it is only a matter of time before the disease reaches their pig herds from continuing outbreaks in China, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.

“A lot of it is about just a chance event,” Zoe Davies, chief executive at the National Pig Association in the UK, told the Guardian. “I believe it is here already. It’s just whether that chance event would happen, that somebody would go out into the countryside, and either put [contaminated meat] in a bin or chuck something over a hedge that the pigs got access to. The roots are there, it’s just about trying to minimise the risk of that happening.”

Additional research by Jonathan Zhong

Fast fashion: Pakistan garment workers fight for rights amid Covid-19 crisis


Protesters demand wages at factory supplying global fashion brands, as coronavirus leads to layoffs in textile industry

Supported byAbout this content

Sabrina Toppa in Lahore

Wed 27 May 2020
 

Workers at a garments factory in Karachi. The textile industry is the largest manufacturing industry in Pakistan. Photograph: Shahzaib Akber/EPA

Police in Karachi last week allegedly shot at hundreds of unarmed garment workers protesting outside a factory supplying denim for global fashion brands.

Garment workers such as Abdul Basit, 35, claimed to have been charged by police with batons outside a factory which is reported to have fired more than 15,000 workers since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Nasir Mansoor from the National Trade Union Federation. He said some workers had been terminated without written notice.

The workers were chanting slogans demanding better conditions and wages when police arrived. Closures and job losses and the suspension of the normal holiday bonus, which enables rural migrants to travel home before the Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan, had left many of the demonstrators close to despair.

Basit, 35, who works at the factory where the protests took place, told the Guardian he hadn’t been paid since March. “We’re insecure workers and we can be fired at any time,” he said.

Bangladesh garment factories reopen despite coronavirus threat to workers
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/11/bangladesh-garment-factories-reopen-despite-coronavirus-threat-to-workers

Like many workers, Basit doesn’t have a direct contract with the factory, leaving him vulnerable. He helps support a family of seven on his salary of 17,500 rupees (£89) a month, but this Eid he was unable to celebrate with them in Larkana, his hometown, a six-hour journey away. “The price of transportation has gone up, and I am living hand to mouth,” Basit said.

Across Pakistan, thousands of garment workers are battling against forced layoffs and months of unpaid salaries, as the deepening economic crisis caused by Covid-19 hits workers’ ability to support their families in the world’s fifth most populous country. The textile and apparel industry is Pakistan’s second largest employer after agriculture. Nearly 9% of Pakistan’s GDP – and almost 70% of the country’s exports – comes from the industry.

“Most of the textile factory owners are using the coronavirus crisis to lay off workers,” said the labour activist Farooq Tariq. “The crisis was already going on, but the pandemic has only accelerated it.”

In March, Prime Minister Imran Khan urged companies not to fire workers during the lockdown, stressing that millions of labourers were at higher risk of dying from hunger than from Covid-19. Sindh province issued directives prohibiting worker layoffs and creating an emergency fund for labourers.


The pandemic has wreaked havoc on textile exports, which are mostly sent to the US, China, the UK and Germany.

Factory production has slowed dramatically across the country, with global fashion brands reducing or eliminating orders. This has precipitated a devastating crisis for Pakistani suppliers, who are passing the impact along to those least able to weather it: labourers living on meagre wages, campaigners say.

In Lahore, hundreds of garment workers were reported to have organised a strike last week against the non-payment of salaries at multiple factories and activists claim factory owners are treating workers as expendable commodities. Last year, Human Rights Watch censured Pakistan’s garment factories for rampant labour violations, including failing to pay the minimum wage, forcing hours of unpaid overtime, and neglecting to provide medical leave or adequate breaks to workers.

Mansoor said it had been easy for factories to implement forced dismissals because 85% of workers lack a contract: “The factories just tell the gatekeeper: ‘Don’t let this person in,’ and that’s how they know they’re fired,” he said. Few workers have the resources to pursue cases in labour courts.

“They were carrying out these violations before, but it was underground,” said Tariq. “The labour law violations have been exposed more openly during this crisis.”

The coronavirus has laid bare the reality of America's racial caste system   

Generations after Brown v Board of Education, the US is still separate and unequal
Malaika Jabali Wed 27 May 2020


 

‘In the next 66 years, fulfilling the promises of Brown requires we re-imagine and re-think our social structures.’ Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

In the same week civil rights activists celebrated the anniversary of the supreme court’s unanimous decision in Brown v Board of Education, the United States observed another milestone: nearing 100,000 deaths caused by Covid-19. Early data indicates that black Americans comprise a disproportionate number of the victims. Sixty-six years after Brown partially overruled the “separate but equal” doctrine – laying the foundation for black Americans to have equal access to better schools, healthcare, and housing – this pandemic has laid bare a harsh reality: the country is still separate and still unequal.

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At least 20,000 black Americans have died from the virus. Their death rate is nearly 2.5 times higher than whites, and it has never been less than twice that of Latinos and Asians, according to recent data compiled by APM Research Lab. Despite comprising 13% of the country, they make up 25% of Covid-19 deaths.

The Trump administration has placed much of the responsibility for these disparities on victims. Public officials have speculated about the victims’ smoking and drinking habits and made insinuations about their diets and lifestyle choices. There has been no contemplation, however, of the underlying conditions of America’s racial caste system, the one rooted firmly in this country’s soil.

While Brown laid the ground for desegregating the United States, this country was built on a far more entrenched foundation of white supremacy. African Americans have been deemed property longer than we have been considered citizens. Our wealth and resources have been extracted longer than we have been able to accrue or maintain them. The intentional, overt practice of white supremacy has endured longer than it has been unconscious and covert, or talked about in academic circles as microaggressions and racial privilege. It has been 66 years since the highest court in the land asserted that segregation in public schools was inherently unequal – and 400 years of America proving its assertions of liberty and equality are lip service.


Centuries of white supremacy have meant that black workers and white ones do not earn the same wages, buy the same types of houses or have the same nest eggs to pass down to their kids. It has meant private acts of racism and government-sanctioned racism, often in tandem. It has meant less access to quality public schools, higher education, or high-paid jobs that require expensive, advanced degrees. It means more grocery stores in affluent white urban neighborhoods, and fewer healthcare services for the black and dispossessed. It means black Americans rely more heavily on public transit, are less able to work from home, and are over-represented in “essential” jobs. It means more exposure to Covid-19. It means 20,000 deaths.

The disproportionate death rates in some states are astounding, with large margins dotted all over the map. In Washington DC, black people are 44% of the population, yet 80% of coronavirus deaths. In South Carolina, they make up 27% of the state and 56% of its deaths. Black people in Michigan and Missouri are 14% and 11% of the population – and 42% and 39% of Covid-19 deaths, respectively.

More studies are necessary to determine the precise cause of these disparities. Public health research has to assess why certain comorbidities, such as hypertension, may be more present in black Americans than other groups, and move past stereotypical assumptions.

The more difficult assessment, however, is what to do in the future, after the worst cases subside and the pandemic wanes. There must be a commitment not to return to normal, with black workers continuing to be the sacrificial lambs of white American liberties and corporate profiteers.

In the next 66 years, fulfilling the promises of Brown requires we reimagine and rethink our social structures. This reconsideration requires shedding the entrenched individualism that allowed white landowners to equate human suffering with their rights to enslave. It must challenge a culture that permits white liberals to claim they are in favor of integrating high-opportunity neighborhoods while fighting rabidly to prevent it when it hits their doorsteps. It requires ending the fanatical obsession with corporate profits that pushes a disproportionate number of black people to their deaths faster – whether in risky warehouses during a pandemic or the temporary and low-wage jobs that lack health benefits, paid time off and sick leave. It requires governments that provide adequate social services safety nets.

Most of all it requires a fight, because none of this will happen without one. While the Trump White House and Republican legislators loot the country’s treasury for bank and business bailouts, conservative state governments and their rightwing constituents rabidly demand that the country “reopen”. Conservatives’ long-time verbal commitments to being anti-abortion – like commitments to democracy and equality since this country’s founding – have been easily abandoned in the interests of individual convenience. And leaders of the corporate, liberal wing of the two-party system have done relatively little to challenge it.

Twenty-first century concerns about gentrification and displacement complicate the desegregation narrative; people of color in New York City, for instance, have asserted that equal access to opportunities is most important to them, regardless of the racial composition of their neighborhoods. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has clarified the fortitude of America’s racial caste system. Generations after Brown, inequality is still very much the law of the land. But the chance remains to create another precedent.


Malaika Jabali is a freelance writer, activist and attorney