New! Essay Review of Joshua DÁVILA (aka The Blockchain Socialist) new book
Blockchain Radicals, & launch to further discussion of blockchain left, higher ed. etc. In my Blockchain and Society
#AI#OpenAI#OpenSource#GenerativeAI#FLOSS#BigTech#PoliticalEconomy: "Taken together, we find that ‘open’ AI can, in its more maximal instantiations, provide transparency, reusability, and extensibility that can enable third parties to deploy and build on top of powerful off-the-shelf AI models. These maximalist forms of ‘open’ AI can also allow some forms of auditing and oversight. But even the most open of ‘open’ AI systems do not, on their own, ensure democratic access to or meaningful competition in AI, nor does openness alone solve the problem of oversight and scrutiny. While we recognize that there is a vibrant community of earnest contributors building and contributing to ‘open’ AI efforts in the name of expanding access and insight, we also find that marketing around openness and investment in (somewhat) open AI systems is being leveraged by powerful companies to bolster their positions in the face of growing interest in AI regulation. And that some companies have moved to embrace ‘open’ AI as a mechanism to entrench dominance, using the rhetoric of ‘open’ AI to expand market power while investing in ‘open’ AI efforts in ways that allow them to set standards of development while benefiting from the free labor of open source contributors."
There are many posts today about Climate Overshoot Days. August 2nd, today, is the global day for 2023 when the earth's ecosystem's ability to renew/recover itself has been overshot by "our'' consumption and destruction of it.
Think of it like the Doomsday Clock that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists used to show how close we are to destroying the world with nuclear weapons. The double whammy of nuclear annihilation and global warming (ech boiling) looms.
How is this climate overshoot day calculated?
Climate overshoot days is estimated by multiplying the number of days in a year (365) with the ecological footprint of a nation (measured per capita as global hectares) divided by the “global biocapacity” of 1.6 global hectares (Gha) per person. This global biocapacity limit, defined as of 2018, ensures we are living "sustainably", i.e., like decent human beings ought to. If the ecological footprint is greater than the global capacity, the number we get is the number of overshoot days in a year.
Find below a summary chart of climate overshoot days.
It is a fun way to show how significant a threat “we” pose (so that the more educated and enlightened societies will ponder about it?). It’s noble, and concerned, but I don't see what actions it prompts. Maybe, I should try to cultivate optimism.
In the meanwhile, here are some facts/observations/omissions evident from that chart.
#EU#Google#Search#SearchEngines#ContentModeration#PoliticalEconomy#AI#GenerativeAI: "In this piece, which frames the special issue, “The State of Google Critique and Intervention,” we provide an overview of research focusing on Google as an object of critical study, fleshing out the European interventions that actively attempt to address its dominance. The article begins by mapping out key areas of articulating a Google critique, from the initial focus on ranking and profiling to the subsequent scrutiny of user exploitation and competitive imbalance. As such, it situates the contributions to this special issue concerning search engine bias and discrimination, the ethics of Google Autocomplete, Google's content moderation, the commodification of engine audiences and the political economy of technical systems in a broader history of Google criticism. It then proceeds to contextualize the European developments that put forward alternatives and draws attention to legislative efforts to curb the influence of big tech. We conclude by identifying a few avenues for continued critical study, such as Google's infrastructural bundling of generative artificial intelligence with existing products, to emphasize the importance of intervention in the future."
For those who might not know, following a week after the Russia-Ukraine wheat embargo, there are even bigger and ominous signs hinting at global food insecurity and the catastrophic agricultural crises coming our way.
India last week banned export on all non-basmati rice varieties.
I repeat: EXPORT BAN ON ALL non-basmati RICE varieties.
[Aside: export of basmati variety will continue, the demand for which is relatively small in India when compared to the nearly 15 major varieties of rice (it's home to at least a 1000 varieties) consumed by very large populations everyday(these are the ones which are now banned). Basmati is a "festive" and only occasionally consumed variety in India. It is largely exported to the richer nations, many of whom think it is the only variety of rice from India.]
Why is India banning rice now?
Answer: global warming.
What’s happening in India (and South Asia at large) should both terrify you and wake you up
Here’s more (facts? trivia? bothersome news? how the world actually works?).
With erratic monsoons now a regular feature, intense floods are followed immediately by heatwaves that have caused the entire agriculture cycle to go haywire, crop yields to plummet, and near droughts across all major food basket regions in India.
Tamilnadu, my home state, used to be rice-country, historically recorded by both the Tamils and later the Brits as giving three harvests a year. Now it is barely struggling to give a single harvest.
West Bengal, one of the largest rice producers has reported highest levels of aridity in its arable lands.
Punjab, and Haryana, the heartlands of most agriculture have had multiple crop collapses, the worst top soil degradation because of intensive practices, and fertilizer polluted irrigation ways (not to mention the highest levels of cancer).
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populous states, and heavily reliant on agriculture as both economy and livelihood have had one of the worst years on record for yields on almost all food crops.
Riverbeds, lakes, and canals that depend almost exclusively on the monsoons are drying up.
All across the country, groundwater has plummeted and deep wells are now dug that reach waters from a few million years back.
What is said of India extends to the entire Indian subcontinent/South Asia as well.
Pakistan too is a wheat and rice basket and a major rice exporter, and we saw what happened when nearly a third of the entire country was flooded last year. This year, the temperatures soared to 50 degrees across most of that flooded region.
Sri Lanka, in a moment of hubris and misguided thinking (however good willed) decided to ban all intensive farming overnight and forced everyone to adapt to organic farming with nary a transition plan. The result, a complete collapse of everything.
Bangladesh, which in normal monsoon has roughly 5-10% of its delta region swallowed by water, now has more than 20% sinking. It too produces a bunch of essential food grains for largely domestic consumption, but also some exports (especially lentils).
Of course, Bangladesh will be the canary in the coalmine when global warming hits the fan and when “climate politics” starts. This is a people already preparing for climate adaptation, not waiting for the reversing to happen, they are well aware nothing is getting done elsewhere.
Europe saw Syria (that civil war began with a global warming induced drought in the late 2000s) come and were repelled, wait when Bangladesh comes at you, and they will come.
It's slowly dawning on the “stalwart agricultural and economic experts” in New Delhi, trained at the premier institutes that know how agriculture works better than farmers and agricultural scientists, i.e., the Harvard Kennedy School, the University of Chicago and the likes. They are realizing that Food security is a matter of national security and economy. And that at some level, though they are the elites, they are realizing they are still from India, and when they call for help from their buddies in DC or Brussels, it might go to the voicemail. Not that they know what they are doing about food security, they will be making a hash of it anyway.
The volatility in the grains futures markets in Singapore and Chicago, the staggering drop in crop yields, and inflationary pressure have all caused one of the largest price hikes for rice in India within a year.
The export ban is a way to stabilize prices and feed its people. India is still the country with the highest absolute number and percentage of malnourished children. Oh, also, there is an election coming up next year, no incumbent government (state or central) would like to be on the receiving end of getting voted out by angry starving masses. Democracy at work you know.
Rice is not the only basic food commodity that is off the roofs. Wheat prices have soared too, and price controls were put in earlier. Most recently, a kilo of tomato costs as much as 200 Rupees now. Adjusted for currency exchange and purchasing power, that's like buying a kilo of tomato for more than 10$ in the US! How does that "cost of living crisis" sound?
India has forever been an "ecological basket case", heavily dependent on an almost clockwork arrival of the monsoons for its ecological and economic revival. The effect of erratic monsoons and intense heatwaves has forced very large areas of formerly arable land to waste. Top soil degradation is fully apace thanks to intense adoption of monocultures, use of fertilizers and herbicides etc.,
Global warming is the distal cause for which India will and should take no blame and must point the finger at the West.
However, let’s not give the Indian governments a free pass.There are many proximal causes for the decimation of the backbone of Indian society and livelihood, that is the Agricultural sector.
Those proximal causes should be squarely blamed on the state (not just the current dispensation). Several serious policy flaws, failures, and disastrous ideologies have been set in motion since 1991, when India “liberalized” and opened itself to the "free market" regime. Hey, we are global players now, let’s see what we can do.
Here’s a litany of the wonderful things that the Indian state has been responsible for, one way or another since we became “liberal” in 1991:
*Failures in proper grain storage, management, and distribution. In doublespeak, supply chain. So much so that large amounts of food grains (strategic reserves) are left to rot rather than feed the hungry and emaciated. India produces enough “essential food grains” to feed two Indias. At the height of COVID-19, the first and only priority was to make sanitizers out of rice rather than to feed the largest number of humans in the world who went hungry. The free food public distribution for 80% of the population came much later.
*Per capita consumption of essential food grains have plummeted. For a few years, they were as low as what it was in the Bengal Famine of 1943 (which killed 5 million people) under the British Raj! Starvation deaths for the first time in Independent and Democratic India. To this day, the per capita consumption is lower than what it was pre 1991.
*Failure to pay farmers "Minimum support prices" as recommended by the Swaminathan committee (this has been so since late 2000s).
*Predatory land grabbing by corporations (Indian and international), with the full support of the Indian state for “development”, hell-bent on extracting every bit of value that can be extracted from adivasi lands all the way to agricultural lands.
*Predatory consumption and resource extraction by the largest corporations within and from outside India while pacifying a tiny middle class in the megalopolises. While the wonderful malls, beauty products and luxury cars were parading these megacities; electrification, irrigation, and basic access to credit were delayed or denied to the people who produced their food.
*Subsidizing agribusiness and acquiescing to the WTO agreements. Somehow the poorest farmers and agricultural workers in the world must restructure themselves to be market viable, but the US (and EU) has every right to be protectionist and subsidize its agriculture to the tune of 65 billion$ annually. Even more perverse, for example, the subsidy offered year-on-year for sugar and cotton produced in the US is more than the total revenue they generate. Some efficient market viable agriculture.
*Letting market forces dictate, and forcing farmers from planting food crops to cash crops.
An example: Wayanad (literally means paddy country) in Kerala went from paddy farms to vanilla cultivation. Indian market for vanilla, near zero. When the global market found a better offer from Madagascar and Indonesia (not blaming them), the plantations collapsed. Many parts of Wayanad didn’t make it back to paddy.
*Forcing farmers in a vicious cycle of debt-despair-suicide. The less I say about this, the better for everyone, including my own sanity.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, the list goes on.
What’s the principal outcome of all these agricultural policies?
Decimation of livelihood in the Indian countryside leading to the largest internal migration within any country in modern history (you can call it internal displacement, sub-national refugees, asylum seekers) from the rural to the urban.
And no, before you jump in, this urbanization is no sign of progress. No viable replacement for their livelihoods has been created. The manufacturing sector remains teetering, and the high tech service sector is saturated. The primary education system is criminally underfunded, opportunities to reskill hardly exist. Most important of all, even with skills and training, some of the highest levels of unemployment while we can boast of having the 5th largest economy. Meanwhile, the two richest Indian billionaires must have worked so hard that they now are combined wealthier than two of the relatively wealthy states (Punjab and Haryana). If there is anything that has a sensational growth that any economist can be proud of, it’s the rate of growth of inequality in India.
That’s the state of India, its food, agriculture and roughly 80% of its people (~1.1 billion).
Now back to the rice export ban from India with which we started. Why is this a big deal internationally?
India is THE largest exporter of rice and accounts for 40% of the total. These predominantly feed the poorest peoples in Africa (western and sub Saharan) and other parts of Asia. That’s feeding about another billion people. With the wheat market in deep trouble following Russia-Ukraine, the world was already straining (look at Egypt, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa), now with the Indian rice ban, and Thailand and Vietnam (the next largest exporters) not being able to meet the world's demand to fill India's void, it can just tip over. Expect a lot of hunger and misery.
The great philosopher and one of the very few economists, and intellectuals of our times, Amartya Sen (who lived through the Bengal famine of 1943) wrote, “All famines are political… No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”
We might have to sadly upend that worldview (I hope I am horribly, completely wrong on this count!).
"Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security... Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models... Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain."
"Concurrent crop failures in major crop-producing regions constitute a systemic risk as associated spikes in food prices can lead to conflict and undernutrition in countries that rely on imports... We find that simultaneous extremes linked to a meandering jet stream from amplified Rossby waves19 lead to regional yield losses... and to concurrent low harvests across the mid-latitudes... This increased likelihood of concurrent low yields in major breadbaskets, is mostly reproduced by historical model experiments, whether driven by reanalysis data or climate models in particular."
If people are not aware, the jetstreams meandering (Rossby waves) over western continental US have stay put (i.e., have not migrated, or diminished, or collapsed) over the last month.They now engulf almost the entirety of continental US, and predictions say that it will continue to stay put over the entire summer.
Let's also not forget, as of now, even without concurrent crop failures as detailed in the paper, as the World Food Programme, FAO and IFPRI have reported, currently 350 million people worldwide are acutely food insecure, with a further 2 billion within the category of being precarious when it comes to food security.
For a news version of this paper including identifying the primary suspects, the politics, why there is hardly any media coverage, and why this is possibly the only thing we should be talking about, here is George Monbiot writing in The Guardian:
"It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?"
#PoliticalEconomy#Inflation#Neoliberalism#ClassWar: "So this is where we have arrived in 2023: to bring inflation back to 2 per cent while preserving the banks, common sense insists that we need higher interest rates for longer, plus austerity. And, at this point, you have to ask whether western elites have learnt anything from the last decade and a half.
How long is it since we were calling for a new social contract, championing democracy against lopsided capitalism and asserting the priority of sustainable development and the climate crisis? Of course, price stability is important and even moderate inflation inflicts real costs, notably on vulnerable groups. But the cost of living crisis is a social problem that should be addressed with adequate welfare support.
We are told that abandoning 2 per cent would make a society such as Britain into a joke. There are plenty of ways in which the UK has made itself a laughing-stock of late, but to use that as an argument for a radical and deliberately recessionary policy is to add injury to insult. You don’t demonstrate that you are serious by compulsively clinging to symbols and obsessing about your reputation. It is precisely that kind of politics, piled on top of years of austerity, that led Britain into the folly of Brexit."
#Europe#Imperialism#PoliticalEconomy: "Tame empires came at a high cost: permanent continental separation. Polanyi imagined these units as autarkic, free from the world-swallowing universalism of both capitalism and socialism. Contemplations of a post-imperial EU must not indulge the fantasies of some east European conservatives that the end of the Cold War could mean a comfortable “return to Europe” if that means turning their back on the world at its doorstep. It’s not just the EU that has colonial origins – the entire world does. As Bhambra has written, the biggest obstacle to understanding decolonisation is the misconception of European states “being nations and having empires”. Shedding the latter allowed them to become more of the former. Addressing Europe’s colonial past will require more than token recognition of past sins. More radical solutions include the proposal of E Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s special rapporteur on race and racism, on migration as decolonisation: free movement into the former metropole as the most effective form of reparations. Europe’s past is not offshore. As the Egyptian politician Hamdeen Sabahi put it in 2012, “The Mediterranean is a lake.”"
If you want to understand the #politicaleconomy of the #watercrisis in England, then the Guardian has a nice little dynamic diagram of how the water firms have extracted billions from the provision of a sub-standard service... this all plays into the arguments about whether renationalisation is the best answer for water!