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Peak Food: Blaming the Victims

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By Nafeez Ahmed | I’ve already written about this in previous posts under the ‘hidden holocaust’ theme, but am prompted to re-address this issue given the way it’s been dealt with by mainstream media and associated ‘experts’.

In today’s Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what is described as a series of “global food shortages”, a new “government-backed report” shows that “the British public” annually throws away “4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded” — adding up to “a record £10b” every year.

And that’s just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word “overconsumption” seem like a gross understatement.

But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I’m increasingly concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: “… millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines.”

So the food crisis comes down to three things:

1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor)

2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can’t do much about)

3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels.

Indeed, according to the British government’s new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago:

“price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. ‘The agriculture industry needs to
double its food production, using less water than today.’”

So again, population and economic growth in the ‘developing nations’, plus climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and purposes, but we’ll come back to that). It’s Them again — too many of Them, wanting More.

As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that:

“Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world’s population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years’ time. ‘How are we going to feed everybody?’ he asked.”

Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t’ya folks, but ‘feeding everybody’ has never really been one of the state’s major concerns. That’s why “Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie, it is dumped)”, thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern investors and consumers.

But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it’s clear that the cause of the problem is “their” population growth.

Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running out. He again emphasises the question of food production: “I am only nine weeks into the job, so don’t yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of land is critical.”

According to Beddington, food security is the “elephant in the room” that politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the “elephant in the room” goes far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington’s observations show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one, “science and research” in order to maximise “efficiency” so we can produce faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen. Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it.

From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing ‘market incentives’ (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production.

Obviously, none of these ’solutions’ seems to really offer a way out for the food crisis — and that’s because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It’s not completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a false diagnosis of what’s actually gone wrong. The result is that the institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It’s the developing nations, who just won’t stop breeding, dammit. It’s us Western consumers, who won’t stop eating and throwing a third of our food away. It’s everyone except the state-corporate complex that controls the food industry.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation.

Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today’s Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won’t they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:

“Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year… An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government’s waste-reduction programme as ‘unambitious and lacking urgency’. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report’s publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was ‘ludicrous’ that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.

Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary ’solutions to food waste’ in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. ‘The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous,’ said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.

The 18-month study, which found that ‘too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable’, said Wrap should adopt a ‘more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste’…

A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price.”

So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s waste reduction programme completely ignores the warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don’t need, a third of which they dump in turn. Instead, the government simply blames consumers. Period.

Don’t penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People.

The corporate-biased law doesn’t help either, because: “The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality.” In other words, we don’t even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing — here’s an example: “In the past 10 months, the government’s food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices.”

So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry.

Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.

Most of the Earth’s fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that “there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.” One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: “The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?” Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food?

It’s not that the Earth can’t produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can’t produce the food. In fact, as I’ve warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits.

For us to keep eating, it’s true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That’s why real solutions aren’t being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it’s not so bad…

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The Challenge Of Modern Slavery

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By Loretta Napoleoni | Slavery is in our refrigerators. From fruit to beef, from sugar to coffee, slave labor brings food to our tables. “Miguel,” a Mexican slave freed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a US human-rights organization, may have harvested the apples we eat at breakfast. Miguel picked fruit under guard in the United States. He had traveled to el norte to earn the money to pay for treatment for his six-year-old son who has cancer; instead, his employer enslaved him.

The cocoa we drink while reading the newspaper or watching the morning news shows may come from the Ivory Coast, which supplies half the world market. Children and adolescents from even poorer neighboring countries, such as Mali, trek all the way to the cocoa plantations to earn a subsistence salary. Often, they end up working as slaves in remote farms. “Nineteen-year-old Drissa was one such young man. When he was freed in 2000, he had just gone through a ‘breaking-in’ period as his master accustomed him to enslavement. His back was laced with scars and wounds from being whipped.”

Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering. We know very little about these economic secrets because modern consumers live inside the market matrix.

The first thought that comes to mind when we discover that our hot chocolate comes directly from slave labor suggests that we boycott Ivory Coast cocoa. But this decision would not help free thousands of young slaves like Drissa. On the contrary, it could make their lives much worse and harm honest farmers as well. “Africa is like a body infested with parasites. One has to be careful not to kill the body to get rid of the parasites,” summarized Rico Carish. Millions of people depend for their sustenance on this parasitic rogue economy. The alternative could impoverish them further, if it does not put them at risk of death.

Often, western intervention, even when willing and well intentioned, achieves very little. In the case of many African commodities, Western companies have no direct contact with farmers. Trade occurs through local intermediaries, middlemen, and shippers. The profits of slavery are collected at the farm gate, a practice that effectively incorporates them in the price of the product. Often the intermediaries do not even know or care that slave labor is involved in the production of the goods they trade. This explains why halting imports from the Ivory Coast will not end slavery but force thousands of honest farmers and their families into poverty. To eradicate the problem, one must attack the root causes, a task that only local governments can accomplish. But good governance also proves a rare commodity on the African continent.

Even more shocking is the discovery that in the twenty-first century, slavery is booming on a global scale. According to the United Nations, slavery is growing at an unprecedented rate. Figures put global slavery at 27 million persons, a generation of modern slaves that, according to the International Labor Organization, produces yearly profits of around $31 billion. Population explosion and great migrations coupled with globalization have boosted the slave trade. “The increase in slavery is linked to globalization,” concurs Kevin Bales, author of Ending Slavery: How We Will Free Today’s Slaves. “But this is not about sweat-shop workers existing on misery wages. Slaves are under the complete, violent control of another person; they are economically exploited and get only enough food and shelter to stay alive. For millions of victims, their experience differs little in hardship from that of slaves hundreds of years ago.”

Slavery’s resurgence exerts a direct effect on its cost, which has now fallen for decades. Bates calculated that, while over the past 3,000 years the average price of a slave has ranged from $20,000 to $80,000 (adjusted to current dollar value) now people can be bought and sold for a tenth of these prices. After World War II, we witnessed a sudden surge in the supply of slave labor, pushing prices down. Ironically, this phenomenon began as a consequence of decolonization, which shifted slave ownership from colonizers to countrymen. Today’s slaves are predominantly enslaved by their national peers and not by foreign powers. Like other commodity markets, slavery operates by the law of supply and demand, and today supply proves plentiful among the millions living on a dollar to two dollars a day.

Consumers remain blissfully ignorant of these facts. The market matrix, a complex maze of smoke and mirrors, hides the exploitative nature of trade and commerce. The shelves of Western supermarkets are stacked with items produced by people in developing countries who earn a miniscule fraction of their value. Consumers, if they ever chose to think about it, might be shocked to learn who pockets most of the profits of their daily grocery shopping.

Loretta Napoleoni: An expert on financing of terrorism, Loretta advises several governments on counter-terrorism. She is senior partner of G Risk, a London based risk agency. - She is a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics..

To review further articles and listen to podcasts by Loretta Napoleoni, you are invited to visit her website: http://www.lorettanapoleoni.org

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Ex-MI5 chief warns over detention

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

BBC News | MPs should work together to agree a detention limit for terror suspects and ensure the matter is not a political football, a former MI5 chief has said. Ministers want to be able to hold suspects without charge for 42 days, rather than the current 28-days.

The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and many Labour MPs oppose the change.

Dame Stella Rimington called it “a huge pity” the debate had become a political issue, saying security “was too serious a thing to play party politics with”.

For this reason, she told BBC Radio Nottingham, she would not express an opinion on the present limit, or proposed extensions to 42 or even 60 days.

“But I do think they should try and achieve some kind of consensus,” she added.

Police ‘backing’

A Commons vote is expected in mid-June on the matter, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown favouring a 42-day period.

He has said the change was needed to accommodate questioning after any “substantial terrorist incident” on British soil.

He has argued that this extension was backed by Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London and the most senior policeman in the UK.

But Conservative leader David Cameron has accused Mr Brown of trying to push through the extension to appear “tough on terror”, rather than because he believes in it.

Last week Mr Cameron claimed he had been sent a report which detailed the concerns of some Labour MPs on the issue, and suggested there might be a backbench rebellion when the vote was held.

The Liberal Democrats also oppose extending the 28 day limit. Enough Labour MPs appear to oppose the extension to suggest the government could be defeated.

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Abuse Claims Mount Against Pentagon, Contractors

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By William Fisher | As human rights groups demanded the release of a report on a long-running investigation of the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, new torture claims were leveled at two U.S. military contractors by a former Abu Ghraib “ghost” detainee who was wrongly imprisoned and later released without charge.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act request this week with the Departments of Justice and Defense demanding release of a report by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which the group says has been completed for months but blocked by the Defense Department.

The OIG investigation was initiated in 2005 after the ACLU obtained documents in which FBI agents described interrogations that they had witnessed at Guantánamo Bay.

While the documents were most notable for their description of illegal interrogation methods used by military interrogators, they also raised serious questions about the FBI’s participation in abusive interrogations, the actions of FBI personnel who witnessed abusive interrogations, and the response of FBI officials to reports of abuse.

Testifying before a congressional committee last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller denied that the FBI participated in any of the interrogations. The Defense Department has said the OIG’s report must be reviewed and redacted to eliminate classified information before it can be made public.

The OIG report and all documents related to this investigation is part of a broader effort to uncover information about the George W. Bush administration’s torture policies. To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU’s lawsuit enforcing the request – including the Bush administration’s 2003 “torture memo” written by John Yoo when he was a deputy at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.

This week, Yoo – under threat of subpoena – agreed to testify voluntarily before a congressional committee investigating the legal basis used to justify the Bush administration’s torture policies.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told IPS, “The inspector general completed this report many months ago. The problem is with the Defense Department, which is using its classification review as a pretext for delaying the report’s release. In this case as in many others, the Defense Department is misusing its classification authority to suppress information about the abuse and torture of prisoners.”

“There’s no good reason why the report should be withheld from the public,” Jaffer said. “It’s being withheld not for legitimate security reasons, but in order to protect high-level government officials from embarrassment, criticism, and possibly even criminal prosecution.”

In related developments, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), an advocacy group, leveled new torture claims against two U.S. military contractors by a former Abu Ghraib “ghost” detainee, and labeled as “wholly inadequate” a single page unclassified summary of the OIG’s report released on the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian rendition victim “rendered” by U.S. authorities to be tortured in Syria for 10 months more than five years ago.

In a letter to the OIG, CCR lawyers contrasted the one-page summary with the Canadian public inquiry, which released two public reports after a two-year investigation. The Canadian Government issued a formal apology to Arar and paid him $10 million. It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that provided U.S. authorities with information that Arar was a suspected terrorist.

Arar attempted to sue the U.S. government, but his case was dismissed after the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege,” which bars from the courts information that would compromise national security. The letter charges that the delay of the OIG report’s release has been reportedly “due to efforts by very senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials to suppress it” because it would expose “serious misconduct.”

It added that “the continued delay in releasing report calls into serious question the independence of the DHS OIG.”

Arar said, “By suppressing the report and issuing one page of publicly available information, this U.S. administration adds insult to injury. This ’summary’ raises more questions than answers about the government’s behavior, and does not answer the central question – why I was sent to Syria to be tortured.”

The suit against the contractors, filed last week in Los Angeles federal court on behalf of Emad al-Janabi, a 43-year-old Iraqi blacksmith, alleges that Janabi was wrongly imprisoned, beaten, and forced from his home by people in U.S. military uniforms and civilian clothing in September 2003. He was released from Abu Ghraib without charge in July 2004.

The defendants are contractors CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, of San Diego, Calif.; and former CACI contractor Steven Stefanowicz, a Los Angeles resident known at Abu Ghraib as “Big Steve.”

The suit charges that the contractors subjected Janabi to physical and mental torture in sessions where the defendants acted as interrogators and translators. It alleges the contractors transported him to a detainee site in a wooden box and covered with a hood; scarred his face when his eyes were clawed by an interrogator; exposed him to a mock execution of his brother and nephew; hung him upside down with his feet chained to the steel slats of a bunk bed until he lost consciousness; and repeatedly deprived him of food and sleep and threatened him with dogs.

In October 2003, during a surprise inspection of Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross discovered Janabi naked, chained, and bruised in a cell in the “hard site” of the prison. He was a so-called “ghost detainee” who was intentionally hidden from the Red Cross on subsequent inspections and held without appearing on the prisoner lists.

The lawsuit – which alleges multiple violations of U.S. law, including torture, war crimes, and civil conspiracy – notes that CACI provided interrogators used at Abu Ghraib and that L-3 employed all translators used there. Stefanowicz was linked to Abu Ghraib abuses in military court martial proceedings and was said to have directed low-level U.S. military personnel in detainee interrogations.

The lawsuit also alleges that a newly published book, Our Good Name, by CACI Chairman J.P. (Jack) London, reveals that CACI’s internal investigation failed to include any interviews of detainees or of a former employee whistleblower. According to the lawsuit, “CACI has repeatedly made, and continues to make, knowingly false statements to the effect that none of its employees was involved in torturing prisoners.”

In fact, co-conspirators have admitted that Big Steve and several other corporate employees “were involved in the torture,” and at least one publicly released Abu Ghraib photograph shows a former CACI employee interrogating a prisoner in a dangerous and harmful stress position not authorized by relevant military regulations governing interrogation.

In the U.S. Congress, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted last week to limit Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogators to techniques approved by the military, which would effectively bar them from waterboarding prisoners, congressional officials said.

The vote on an amendment by Sen. Diane Feinstein, a Democrat from California, taken behind closed doors as the committee debated legislation to authorize money for intelligence operations in 2009, marks at least the second attempt by intelligence overseers in Congress to regulate CIA questioning of detainees.

President Bush vetoed the 2008 intelligence authorization bill in March because it included the same curbs on questioning techniques. This interrogation provision, if passed by the full Senate and House, would likely face the same fate.

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Britain throws away £10bn of food every year

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By Martin Hickman | Global food shortages, soaring prices and alarm over the environment. But every day, Britain throws away 220,000 loaves of bread, 1.6m bananas, 550,000 chickens, 5.1m potatoes, 660,000 eggs, 1.2m sausages and 1.3m yoghurts.

A new study has exposed the staggering amount of food thrown away every day by the British public, calculating that the annual total of wasted products adds up to a record £10bn.

Each day, according to the government-backed report, Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded.

The roll call of daily waste costs an average home more than £420 a year but for a family with children the annual cost rises to £610.

The Government’s waste campaign Wrap (Waste & Resources Action Programme) revealed the extent of Britain’s throwaway food culture after sifting through the dustbins of 2,138 people who signed up to an audit of food detritus. Other items on the daily list included 1.2 million sausages, 710,000 packs of chocolate or sweets, 260,000 packs of cheese, 50,000 milkshake bottles and 25,000 cooking sauces.

The study is published as millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines. Last month India halted the export of non-basmati rice to ensure its poor can eat, while Vietnam, the second-biggest rice exporter, is considering a similar measure after Cyclone Nargis ripped through Burma’s rice-producing Irrawaddy delta.

In Britain yesterday, it emerged that food prices had risen by 4.7 per cent in the past month. The soaring cost of wheat has increased food prices in the UK by up to 11 per cent in the past year, putting more pressure on domestic budgets already struggling to cope with higher mortgage costs and council tax and energy bills.

Wrap suggested households seeking to balance their finances could save money by following basic tips to prevent food waste, such as planning shopping trips better and keeping a closer check on use-by dates. It also pointed out that many people do not know the difference between a “best before date”, which has no implications for food safety, and use-by data, which must be followed.

The Environment minister, Joan Ruddock, said: “These findings are staggering in their own right, but at a time when global food shortages are in the headlines this kind of wastefulness becomes even more shocking. This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don’t eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates. And there are climate- change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin. Preventing waste in the first place has to remain a top priority.”

Eliminating the huge level of food waste would have significant environmental consequences. Local authorities spend £1bn a year disposing of food waste, which leads to the release of methane, a potent climate-change gas. Wrap calculated that stopping the waste of good food could reduce the annual emission of carbon dioxide by 18 million tonnes – the same effect as taking one in five cars off the roads.

Food experts said the study should serve as a wake-up call to British consumers. As well as an individual “Victorian moral” effort, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, called for the Government to take action to improve the efficiency of the food system to face up to the challenges of climate change, rising oil costs and water shortages. Describing modern supermarkets as “cathedrals of waste”, he said: “The British food economy is one of the most wasteful it would be conceivable to design. We have to create a new set of criteria on what we want the food economy to address; it’s time for politicians to catch up.”

Previously, Wrap’s Love Food, Hate Waste campaign put the financial cost of the 6.7 million tonnes of food discarded annually in the UK at £8bn. After interviewing 2,715 households – and then analysing the contents of most of their bins – researchers found that people were throwing away a greater proportion of edible, unused products. Rather than half new food and half peelings and scrapings from plates, the proportion of entirely unused products was 60 per cent by weight and 70 per cent by value.

Overall, that meant the total level of waste was £2bn higher, at £10bn, with the untouched products discarded worth £6bn. Of those, products worth £1bn were still “in date”, Wrap found.

Launching The Food We Waste report, Wrap’s chief executive, Liz Goodwin, described its findings – which mean that one in three shopping bags is dumped straight in the bin – as “shocking”.

She said: “People aren’t really aware that we are wasting so much food; do we think it’s acceptable to throw so much away when people around the world are starving? But also with the economic situation here purse strings are getting tighter yet the average family with children is wasting more than £600 a year on food waste. It begs some questions which we all need to ask ourselves. As individuals we are all wasting food. By class or age, there isn’t much difference in how much we waste.”

‘I chuck out a lot because I live on my own’

Andrew Small, 46, from London

I waste a lot of stuff which goes way over its sell-by date. If you don’t shop that often like me there is a danger of things like milk and fruit and vegetables going off in the fridge.

Estimated waste per month: £30

Andreia Augusto, 35, from Portugal

I mostly waste salads and vegetables from the fridge; and things like HP sauce, plus beans and lentils tend to get chucked out. It can happen almost without you noticing.

Estimated waste per month: £50

Lisa Jennings, 26, from London

I throw away a lot because I live on my own and I like to cook each night instead of eating ready-made meals. I struggle with vegetables because I tend to buy them in big packets.

Estimated waste per month: £20

Alaria Alongi, 40, Italian, lives in London

I recycle everything and do my own compost. When I make a surplus I tend to eat leftovers. I look forward to a day when you use your own large containers for buying rice and pasta.

Estimated waste per month: £0

Alan Young, 58, from London

I try to avoid throwing any food away, despite eating mainly at home. I was brought up by parentswho came from a wargeneration in which waste was a sin.

Estimated waste per month: £5-10

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Does Organic Really Mean Organic?

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By David Gutierrez | The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has renewed its approval for 46 non-organically produced substances to be used in foods and beverages that are labeled “organic.” At the same time, the agency withdrew its approval for a type of food coloring and a food additive.

Under the Organic Foods Production Act, the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board is required to renew approval every five years for any non-organic ingredients that are allowed into organic foods.

The products renewed include five agricultural non-organic products and 41 non-agricultural, non-organic products. The agricultural produced products are corn starch, kelp, pectin, unbleached lecithin and water extracted gums. Some of these are not individual products, but categories; water-extracted gums, for example, include arabic, carob bean, guar and locust bean gums. Kelp may only be used as a thickener or a dietary supplement.

The 41 allowed non-agricultural products include common ingredients such as citric and lactic acid; calcium carbonate; calcium chloride; carnauba wax; bakers, brewers or nutritional yeast; dairy cultures; flavors; sodium carbonate; glycerin; mono- and diglycerides; and xanthan gum.

The USDA withdrew its approval, however, for colors derived from non-synthetic sources and for potassium tartrate derived from tartaric acid.

The organic industry is the fastest-growing agriculture sector in the United States, currently accounting for 3 percent of all food and beverage sales. Retail revenues have risen 20 to 24 percent each year since 1990, from $1 billion to nearly $17 billion in 2006. They are expected to reach nearly $24 billion by 2010.

At the same time, acreage of organic agriculture operations more than doubled from 2001 to 2005, to a current 4.05 million acres. The number of organic operations increased by more than 18 percent in the same period, to a 2005 value of 8.500 crop and livestock operations and 2,900 handling operations.

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The New Whopper: Burger with a Side of Spies

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

PR Watch | Author Eric Schlosser editorializes about “the growing threat to civil liberties posed by corporate spying,” citing Burger King Corporation’s spying on the Student/Farmworker Alliance and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, through Cara Schaffer and her private security firm, Diplomatic Tactical Services.

“The Bill of Rights was adopted to protect Americans from the abusive power of their government. I’ve come to believe that we now need a similar set of restrictions to defend against irresponsible corporate power. Today companies like Wal-Mart and ExxonMobil have annual revenues larger than the entire budgets of some states, and they employ former agents from the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the Secret Service to do security work,” Schlosser writes. “John Chidsey, the chief executive of Burger King, knew about the use of Diplomatic Tactical Services. Mr. Chidsey should get a chance to raise his right hand and tell members of Congress why he thinks this sort of behavior is acceptable.”

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US/IRAQ: Pressure to Cut Costs, Troops Strains “Surge”

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By Jim Lobe | Growing impatience in Congress over the enormous costs being racked up by the Iraq war, as well as the Pentagon’s belief that it needs more troops in Afghanistan to fight insurgents there, is putting the vaunted success of the George W. Bush administration’s “surge” strategy to the test.

Although the House of Representatives appears poised to approve an additional 163 billion dollars Thursday for military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan through the end of the year, most observers believe that Congress will impose unprecedented conditions on Iraq-related spending. This could include requirements that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pay substantially more in reconstruction and related costs than it has to date.

The argument that Baghdad must bear more of the burden gained momentum last week when the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reported that Iraq’s oil revenue in 2008 should exceed 70 billion dollars, twice as much as had been forecast just a few months before.

That report, which comes amid growing concern here over the weak domestic economy, has fueled efforts by a bipartisan group of senators to halt virtually all U.S. funding for major reconstruction and infrastructure projects in Iraq.

Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted unanimously last week to approve a bill that would ban the Pentagon from funding any reconstruction or infrastructure project in Iraq that costs more than two million dollars. Similar legislation is expected to be taken up by the House.

“This is the first significant bipartisan change in our policy toward Iraq,” declared Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the sponsors of the legislation after last week’s vote, while the committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin said Iraq’s failure to pay reconstruction costs was “unconscionable (and) inexcusable” given the windfall it has received from the stunning rise in world oil prices.

Another provision of the same bill would require Iraq’s government to pay the salaries and training costs of the predominantly Sunni militias, or so-called “sahwa” or “Awakening” councils, on which the U.S. has been spending roughly 27 million dollars a month.

Despite U.S. pressure, the al-Maliki government has strongly resisted integrating the vast majority of the estimated 90,000 members of these militias — most of which were previously part of the Sunni insurgency — into the army or police for fear that they will eventually turn their guns on the regime.

The result has been growing frustration on the part of the militias, frustration that reportedly was significantly enhanced last month after al-Maliki enlisted thousands of members of the Badr Organisation into the government’s security forces during fighting with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra and Sadr City in Baghdad. The Badr Organisation is the armed wing of the Shi’a Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), the strongest party in the coalition.

Both the intra-Shi’a conflict between the Sadrists and the government and the growing anger of the sahwa militias — most recently dramatised by a series of strikes and public protests and by an increasing number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in al-Anbar province and other Sunni strongholds where the militias have kept the peace for most of the past year — have resulted in a sharp rise in both Iraqi and U.S. casualties over the past two months, threatening the security gains made by the surge.

The surge, which was initiated in February 2007, was aimed at pacifying both al-Anbar province and the capital by adding some 30,000 U.S. troops to the 140,000 already deployed to Iraq to stop and reverse the drift to sectarian civil war between Sunnis and the various Shi’a militias. Its strategic aim was to foster a climate of peace and stability that would encourage all factions to make the political compromises necessary for national reconciliation.

While the surge made substantial headway in achieving its tactical goals of improving security — with the critical help of the sahwa militias which had mostly broken with al Qaeda in Iraq and allied themselves with the U.S. even before the surge got underway — its strategic goal of political reconciliation has been far more elusive.

Moreover, the surge’s tactical success has failed to translate into additional popular or Congressional support for the war at home. As a result, the Bush administration, which promised months ago to withdraw the 30,000 surge troops by the end of July, is adhering to its pledge, leaving fewer troops to ensure that a new round of violence does not break out.

At the same time, the Pentagon leadership is pressing the White House to continue the drawdown from Iraq beyond July so that it can deploy the three brigades — between 10,000 and 12,000 troops — it says it needs to cope with the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan. While Bush has announced that there will be at least a 45-day pause to assess the impact of the surge withdrawal after July, the pressure on him to resume the process — not only from the Pentagon, but from Republican candidates in the November elections — is expected to be intense.

Republican backing for the Armed Services Committee bill banning additional spending on major reconstruction projects and support for the sahwa militias is clearly seen by both the administration and the promoters of the surge as a worrisome portent, and not only for maintaining the relative — albeit fragile — peace that has prevailed for much of the past year.

One of the surge’s architects, Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said that legislation would “do catastrophic damage to our image in the world, particularly the Muslim world…The argument that Iraq should use its oil revenues to pay the United States sounds like the ultimate proof that we invaded Iraq for mercenary reasons.”

Ending U.S. funding for the sahwa militias, in particular, will pose a critical — and long overdue — test of the surge strategy, according to a number of observers, who see Maliki’s failure to integrate them as a critical stumbling block to national reconciliation.

“If the Awakenings are not integrated into the national security forces, then there is little hope for political accommodation or for lasting security and the U.S. is effectively trapped,” according to Marc Lynch, an expert at George Washington University whose blog, abuaardvark.com, is widely read here. “Since all other forms of persuasion seem to have failed, it’s time to give Maliki an ultimatum…If he gives in, then there may finally be some hope for political accommodation…”

“The downside is that if Maliki doesn’t go along…then things may well get ugly. But all signs suggests that they will get ugly anyway — and better that they get ugly while the U.S. is at the highest troop levels it will ever have,” Lynch wrote.

“If Maliki won’t do this now, when U.S. troop levels are high and security is relatively better, with the shadow of a new president who likely will not continue to offer an open-ended commitment, then he never will…and everyone should know this.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

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Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By Marjorie Cohn | What does torture have in common with genocide, slavery, and wars of aggression? They are all jus cogens. Jus cogens is Latin for “higher law” or “compelling law.” This means that no country can ever pass a law that allows torture. There can be no immunity from criminal liability for violation of a jus cogens prohibition.

The United States has always prohibited the use of torture in our Constitution, laws executive statements and judicial decisions. We have ratified three treaties that all outlaw torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. When the United States ratifies a treaty, it becomes part of the Supreme Law of the Land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, says, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”

Whether someone is a POW or not, he must always be treated humanely; there are no gaps in the Geneva Conventions. He must be protected against torture, mutilation, cruel treatment, and outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment under, Common Article 3.

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s argument that Common Article 3 doesn’t cover the prisoners at Guantánamo. Justice Kennedy wrote that violations of Common Article 3 are war crimes.

We have federal laws that criminalize torture.

The War Crimes Act punishes any grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, as well as any violation of Common Article 3. That includes torture, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and inhuman, humiliating or degrading treatment.

The Torture Statute provides for life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies, for anyone who commits, attempts, or conspires to commit torture outside the United States.

The U.S. Army Field Manual’s provisions governing intelligence interrogations prohibit the “use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind.” Brainwashing, mental torture, or any other form of mental coercion, including the use of drugs, are also prohibited. Military personnel who mistreat prisoners can be prosecuted by court-martial under provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. These include conspiracy, cruelty and maltreatment, murder, manslaughter, maiming, sodomy, and assault.

In Filartiga v. Peña-Irala, the Second Circuit declared the prohibition against torture is universal, obligatory, specific and definable. Since then, every U.S. circuit court has reaffirmed that torture violates universal and customary international law. In the Paquete Habana, the Supreme Court held that customary international law is part of U.S. law.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to make the laws and the President the duty to carry them out. Yet on February 7, 2002, President Bush, relying on memos by lawyers including John Yoo, announced that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to alleged Taliban and Al Qaeda members. Bush said, however,

“As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

But torture is never allowed under our laws.

Lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote memos at the request of high-ranking government officials in order to insulate them from future prosecution for subjecting detainees to torture. In memos dated August 1, 2002 and March 18, 2003, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo (Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, signed the 2002 memo), advised the Bush administration that the Department of Justice would not enforce the U.S. criminal laws against torture, assault, maiming and stalking, in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.

The federal maiming statute makes it a crime for someone “with the intent to torture, maim, or disfigure” to “cut, bite, or slit the nose, ear or lip, or cut out or disable the tongue, or put out or destroy an eye, or cut off or disable a limb or any member of another person.” It further prohibits individuals from “throwing or pouring upon another person any scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance” with like intent.

Yoo said in an interview in Esquire that “just because the statute says — that doesn’t mean you have to do it.” In a debate with Notre Dame Professor Doug Cassell, Yoo said there is no treaty that prohibits the President from torturing someone by crushing the testicles of the person’s child. In Yoo’s view, it depends on the President’s motive, notwithstanding the absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances.

The Torture Convention defines torture as the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. The U.S. attached an “understanding” to its ratification of the Torture Convention, which added the requirement that the torturer “specifically” intend to inflict the severe physical or mental pain or suffering. This is a distinction without a difference for three reasons.

First, under well-established principles of criminal law, a person specifically intends to cause a result when he either consciously desires that result or when he knows the result is practically certain to follow.

Second, unlike a “reservation” to a treaty provision, an “understanding” cannot change an international legal obligation.

Third, under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, an “understanding” that violates the object and purpose of a treaty is void. The claim that treatment of prisoners which would amount to torture under the Torture Convention does not constitute torture under the U.S. “understanding” violates the object and purpose of the Convention, which is to ensure that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The U.S. “understanding” that adds the specific intent requirement is embodied in the U.S. Torture Statute.

Nevertheless, Yoo twisted the law and redefined torture much more narrowly than the definitions in the Convention Against Torture and the Torture Statute. Under Yoo’s definition, the victim must experience intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result.

Yoo wrote that self-defense or necessity could be used as a defense to war crimes prosecutions for torture, notwithstanding the Torture Convention’s absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances. There can be no justification for torture.

After the exposure of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and the publication of the August 1, 2002 memo, the Department of Justice knew the memo could not be legally defended. That memo was withdrawn as of June 1, 2004. A new opinion, authored by Daniel Levin, Acting Assistant Attorney General Office of Legal Counsel, is dated December 30, 2004. It specifically rejects Yoo’s definition of torture, and admits that a defendant’s motives to protect national security will not shield him from a torture prosecution. The rescission of the August 2002 memo constitutes an admission by the Justice Department that the legal reasoning in that memo was wrong. But for 22 months, it was in effect, which sanctioned and led to the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody.

John Yoo admitted the coercive interrogation “policies were part of a common, unifying approach to the war on terrorism.” Yoo and other Department of Justice lawyers, including Jay Bybee, David Addington, William Haynes and Alberto Gonzalez, were part of a common plan to violate U.S. and international laws outlawing torture. It was reasonably foreseeable that the advice they gave would result in great physical or mental harm or death to many detainees. Indeed, more than 100 have died, many from torture.

ABC News reported last month that the National Security Council Principals Committee consisting of Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft met in the White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding. Bush admitted, “Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

These top U.S. officials are liable for war crimes under the U.S. War Crimes Act and torture under the Torture Statute. They ordered the torture that was carried out by the interrogators. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, used at Nuremberg and enshrined in the Army Field Manual, commanders, all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief, can be liable for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them, and they did nothing to stop or prevent it. The Bush officials ordered the torture after seeking legal cover from their lawyers.

But Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers who wrote the enabling memos are also liable for the same offenses. They were an integral part of a criminal conspiracy to violate our criminal laws. Yoo admitted in an Esquire interview last month that he knew interrogators would take action based on what he advised.

The President can no more order the commission of torture than he can order the commission of genocide, or establish a system of slavery, or wage a war of aggression.

A Select Committee of Congress should launch an immediate and thorough investigation of the circumstances under which torture was authorized and rationalized. The high officials of our government and their lawyers who advised them should be investigated and prosecuted by a Special Prosecutor, independent of the Justice Department, for their crimes.

John Yoo, Jay Byee, and David Addington should be subjected to particular scrutiny because of the seriousness of their roles in misusing the rule of law and legal analysis to justify torture and other crimes in flagrant violation of domestic and international law.

This essay is adapted from Marjorie Cohn’s testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
of the House Judiciary Committee.

Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of Cowboy Republic.

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Suicide bomber was in Guantánamo, says US

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

By Ewen MacAskill | The Pentagon confirmed yesterday that a Kuwaiti released from the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay three years ago carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq last month. The involvement of an ex-Guantánamo detainee will make it harder for civil rights lawyers in the US and Britain, who have been fighting for the release of the remaining prisoners at the camp complex in Cuba.

Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaitis are reported by their families to have taken part in an attack on Iraqi security forces in Mosul, a northern city that is the scene of intense fighting.

Although the families did not specify a date, seven people were killed in a suicide attack in Mosul on April 26.

Civil rights lawyers claim most of the detainees are innocent, while the US military claims they present a danger and would take up arms if released.

The US military opposed his release, saying there was a risk that he presented a continuing danger, but he was freed after being transferred to Kuwait.

A spokesman for the US central command, US navy commander Scott Rye, told the Associated Press he did not know the motives behind the suicide bombing.

Ajmi, aged 30, a former Kuwaiti soldier, was taken to Guantánamo as part of a general sweep in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

He was accused of fighting with the Taliban, a charge he repeatedly denied.

He was transferred from Guantánamo to Kuwait in 2005. Alleged evidence obtained at Guantánamo was not allowed in a Kuwaiti court, which acquitted him and four others on terrorist-related charges.

His cousin, Salem al-Ajmi, told al-Arabiya television last Thursday that a friend of Abdallah had informed the family that he had carried out an attack in Mosul.

“We were shocked by the painful news we received this afternoon … through a call from one of the friends of martyr Abdallah in Iraq,” Salem said.

Ajmi disappeared two weeks ago and his family learned he left Kuwait illegally for Syria, a regular transit point for jihadists travelling to Iraq.

He had sent messages to his wife from Iraq. He had a son after being released from Guantánamo.

Ajmi’s cousin said that he had given no indication that he was planning to leave Kuwait to join the insurgency in Iraq, though he had become more withdrawn recently.

The US military claimed he had deserted the Kuwaiti armed forces to fight with the Taliban for eight months in 2001 against the Northern Alliance, which after 9/11 was backed by the US.

As the Northern Alliance took Kabul with US help, Ajmi is alleged to have fled south to Tora Bora and was captured attempting to cross into Pakistan. He insisted he had gone to Pakistan to memorise the Koran, had never been in Afghanistan and had never heard of Tora Bora.

There are 275 detainees at Guantánamo, down from a high of 775. The US commander at the camp, Rear Admiral Mark Buzby, said in February that he expected about 80 to go on trial. Of the remainder, 80 have already been cleared for release but cannot find a country that will take them. The others are awaiting clearance.

The Democratic and Republican candidates to replace President George Bush in January next year have promised to close the camp.

The case against Ajmi in Kuwait collapsed after the court ruled that alleged testimony from Guantánamo was inadmissible because he had not signed it.

The presence of Kuwaiti foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq is rare. While 90% of suicide bombers have been foreigners, Kuwaitis have comprised less than 1% of foreign fighters in Iraq.

The first hearing at a new court complex at Guantánamo yesterday suffered a technical glitch. Journalists watching proceedings from behind a glass panel had no sound.

The case being heard was of a Yemeni, Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al-Bahlul, who is accused of serving Osama bin Laden as a bodyguard and al-Qaida recruiter.

The US military spent US$12m (£6m) on the new court complex. After the sound was sorted, there was a power failure and the lights went out. When sound and light was restored, Bahlul declined to enter a plea. He held up a sign saying he was boycotting the court and refused to distance himself from bin Laden and al-Qaida.

Charges are pending against 14 prisoners in the special court set up to try captives the US considers to be unlawful enemy combatants who do not merit trial in civilian and military courts.

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