Of Muddy Carrots and Optimum Population

Recently I heard, within a few hours, three snippets from radio programs concerning food. Firstly a British farmer complained that he could not produce food without government subsidies because consumers would not pay the prices that he would charge, “They would rather spend money on computers than food” He alleged.

Later the Radio told me that Africans were dying as they trekked across deserts to a UN feeding camp, they had no food. .

Finally another Brit, manager of an electrical goods shop, lamented lack of demand, people felt insecure, so they were spending all their money on food.

This illustrates how complex and contradictory the politics and economics of food have now become. In some parts of the developed world, medical conditions associated with overconsumption of processed foods, such as obesity and diabetes are epidemic, and paradoxically in some cases are doing most damage amongst poor and minority groups in these societies. When they are able to afford it, some developed world consumers attempt to seek alternatives to mass manufactured food, seeking out alternatives such as organics sometimes via “alternative“ outlets such as “farmers’” markets. But whilst a TV producer living in Kensal Green may be able to afford a bunch of organic carrots with real mud on it, poorer consumers on the nearby housing estates may be making do with processed food.

In other parts of the world, industrialised overdevelopment elsewhere, is putting more and more pressure on the availability of agricultural land. Some of this is simply due to the demands of developed world consumers for fresh (often airfreighted) food and even cut flowers all the year round. Then some rich nations, like Japan and Saudi Arabia which have relatively little agricultural land of their own, are buying up large swathes of land in poorer countries in an attempt to assure their future food supplies. Other nations and corporations are attempting to assure future fuel supplies as well by buying up land to grow crops used for biofuels. Such neo-imperialist tactics compound the pressures being put on agricultural land and the food resources available to the original inhabitants.

More pressure too arises from climate change, changes in ocean temperatures due to emissions from industrialised nations could well be affecting climate cycles, delaying or eliminating rainy seasons. Groups such as African pastoralists and farmers, who may have previously co-existed relatively peaceably, are now increasingly being forced into conflict over scarcer and scarcer amounts of fertile land. Climate wars and population displacements are already happening. Even when the consequences are not so immediately extreme land shortages may be placing strain on the environment as forests are cleared for farms. Some ameliorations, such as introducing agricultural methods similar to permaculture may be feasible in some regions, but so far these are not being introduced on a sufficiently large scale to have a marked effect on these problems.

Seen in this light, population pressure on land is, it is true, an exacerbating factor, but not the root cause and when pressure groups in the developed world harp on obsessively about this issue, they sound the same note as some reactionary land owners did during the Irish potato famine, blaming the poor (and perhaps their immorality) for poverty and want and focusing solutions onto the poor rather than onto the rich and inequality which really cause the problem

Coalition of Resistance Against Cuts & Privatisation National Organising Conference - 10am-5pm, Saturday November 27th

Coalition of Resistance Against Cuts & Privatisation
National Organising Conference - 10am-5pm, Saturday November 27th

Camden Centre Bidborough St, London WC1H 9AU (opposite St Pancras station)

Register here: http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/?p=317

Already several hundred people have registered for the conference. If you have and have not yet heard back from us please don't worry. We will be sending out tickets and a full programme of sessions in the next week. We have had to book further space for the conference and have obtained three large halls within 100 metres of the Camden Centre for workshops and forum sessions.

Apart from the opening and closing plenaries, sessions will include:
    •     Organising against the cuts locally
    •     Defending the Welfare State
    •     States of Inequalities
    •     Mobilising in the unions
    •     Analysis of the crisis
    •     Debate on our alternatives
    •     What should political representatives do?
    •     What future for education?
    •     Cultures of Resistance
    •     Youth and students
    •     Women and the crisis
Confirmed speakers include: Billy Bragg, Caroline Lucas MP, Tony Benn, John McDonnell, Paul Mackney, Bob Crow, Jeremy Dear, Dr Jacky Davis, Professor Colin Leys, Dot Gibson, Zita Holborne, Ozlem Onaran, Derek Wall, Lindsey German, Chris Baugh, Laurie Penny, John Hilary, Lowkey and many others.

There will be speakers from local anti-cuts groups from around the country. The National Secretary of the French railway unions will report on the recent strike wave there. And there will be a fraternal speakers from the People's Charter and other organisations.

The conference will discuss a plan of action and will elect a National steering committee.

Please register for the conference. You can either do this online using paypal or by printing off the form - http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/?p=317 - and sending it to our office with a cheque to the address below.

Conference Registration:
Unemployed / Student Rate £3.00
Standard Rate £5.00
Representative £10.00

The conference is costing many thousands of pounds to put on and we are keeping the registration fees as low as possible to allow maximum attendance.

We need volunteers to help cover the forthcoming student and Stop the War marches. Please contact Sam on 07872481769 if you can help.

There will be a small number of stalls for movement organisations at the conference and these will be £75 each. The stalls will have to be booked and paid for in advance.

Coalition of Resistance badges and t-shirts are now available and will on the website soon.

Please circulate this bulletin throughout the labour and trade union movement.

Andrew Burgin
07939 242229
Coalition of Resistance
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
London N1 9DX
www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk

The Campaign Against Climate Change meeting about “climate scepticism” on 14 April 2010

The Campaign Against Climate Change meeting about “climate scepticism” on 14 April 2010 was contentious, not least because the very term “climate scepticism” (or more accurately perhaps “climate change scepticism”), was one of the many subjects of disagreement.

I liked the contentiousness, as one of the speakers (1) admitted, it is possible to be bored, or at least complacent when listening to yet another panel asserting that the majority of current scientific opinion is that human caused climate change is taking place.

He also suggested that simply relying on this scientific majority opinion had led the Green movement to blunder into the media furore that some now call “ climategate”, (although the use of that term too was disagreed about). “ Climategate” involved the leaking of emails about the work of climatologists at the University of East Anglia suggesting that some data they had about climate change may have been exaggerated. Their defenders assert that their findings were basically true but the apparent uncertainty was seized on by those who wished to deny that human caused climate change is happening. This matter received media coverage in November 2009 shortly before the climate change summit in Copenhagen.

As two of the panel speakers were from Green pressure groups and one was an environment correspondent of a quality paper (the Guardian), they were from bits of the Green movement that I seldom come into contact with. I was interested to hear them confirm, in slightly different ways, a report I had heard earlier that some such greens were in varying states of despair over the failure of Copenhagen. Most of my associates were not pleased that these talks had failed, a perhaps even a bit surprised that they failed as spectacularly and chaotically as they did; but I doubt if anyone really expected much real progress from them.

So when the panel speakers all basically advocated combating “ climate scepticism” with counter information campaigns and reaching out to sections of the population that the green movement allegedly did not usually reach, (trade unionists and Conservatives were the two examples given), I did not disagree but I came away doubting if that by itself would be enough.

There were differing nuances on this point of view, the journalist seemed the most sanguine, and some of the suggestions that people mainly agree with information that confirmed their existing opinions did seem to have pessimistic and possibly self-contradictory implications.

However I‘ll leave that one for one or other of the Green movements many philosophers to sort out merely noting that framing Green augments against “ climate scepticism” in such a way as to widen their appeal is a good tactic but may not an entire strategy.

One panel member was against using Climate change as an argument for organising anti-capitalist revolution suggesting that the threats posed by climate change were now too close for there to be time for such distractions. Similar grounds were given for not ruling out nuclear power generation, and there was no contradiction when it was suggested that the emerging middle classes of developing nations were not going to accept cutbacks in their improving standards of living.

The question as to how capitalist pressure for ever increasing economic growth was a definite indoor pachyderm and outside I wondered if persuasion was enough.

Town centres: Voids, antheaps, and covered markets

A week ago, a walk around central Birmingham could have confirmed my many metropolitan prejudices, especially as spent a long time not finding an open photocpying shop, but finding many many closed chinese resturants instead. A week later a triple night bus ride across central London showed that it seems to be changing into a 24 hr city as jolly revellers mingled with the morose and knackered leisure industry workers who had been servicing them.

But whilst London now has hosts of Rickshaws clogging its night arteries like pedalled cholestrol, Birmingham, which seemed to lack covered bicycles , does have several covered markets, which seemed to have the convenience of modern malls with none of their bland characterlessness.

“Thirlington Cubicles”

In the good old, bad old days, before flying away for foreign holidays became more immoral the more that you thought about it, I went to Bulgaria. This was in the very last days of Communism, at the time of the coup against Gorbachev in the USSR. Bulgaria was beautiful, or I saw the beautiful bits of it, but there was something a little boring about it and I couldn’t figure out what that was.

Then I realised whilst sitting in a roadside café that, the passing lorries had no logos on their sides. They were not emblazoned with any slogans, names or images. Bulgarian camions at this time were mostly pale grey in colour with a black registration number on the side in some sort of militaristic font.

I would rather be bored by Bulgarian logoless lorries than see capitalism continue along its destructive trajectory, but the all pervasive advertising plastered on nearly every available surface in contemporary Britain, brings me all sorts of absurd statements that I sometimes enjoy if I’m in the mood for it. I’ve even seen a sandwich delivery van than claimed, in its mission statement, to have an overarching existential purpose.

Today in Cricklewood I saw a large white lorry with the words “Thirlington Cubicles” written on it.

I realised immediately that I had been given a new name and a solution to some of the quandaries that might confront me when I sit at the Standing Orders Committee table at the next Green Party Conference. If someone approached with a problem or query and asks “Are you Peter Murry?”. I will respond “No. I am, Thirlington Cubicles, Peter Murry is that person of there in the red pullover who is grinding his/her teeth” This might buy me enough time to escape.

THE Kneeling Man

When I turned the corner into the narrow Holborn back street which leads to the Dragon Hall, I saw a man kneeling on the pavement. He was silhouetted against the bright electric light coming through a plate glass door situated behind him. At first he knelt, then he went down onto all fours then he rose again.

I can be sure how many times he repeated this movement as I slowly approached, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. His movements did seemed voluntary and did not indicate pain, so I began to come to the conclusion that he was engaged into the ritualised grovelling to an imaginary being that people call prayer.

This assumption depressed me until I came near enough to see the screwdriver in his hand. He was engaged in fixing the lock that was situated in a metal strip on the bottom of the plate glass door. I was relieved to see that his actions were rational and not mindless self abasement following a dogmatically dictated formula.

I was not to encounter much other such rationality that night because I was about to attend a meeting of the London Federation Of Green Parties.