In Gaza, “the situation is beyond atrocious.” Aid worker Arwa Damon, a former CNN journalist and the founder of INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza, describes the deadly lack of access to food, water and medicine in the besieged territory. The situation on the ground conflicts with the claims of Israeli officials, who are denying the existence of starvation conditions. “If anyone goes into Gaza, within 15 minutes, the vast majority of what Israel is claiming just unravels before your very eyes,” says Damon. She is currently helping to facilitate aid access from outside of Gaza, which she and many other humanitarian workers have been barred from accessing since February.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Quds News Network

In Gaza’s emergency rooms, doctors now face a wave of patients suffering not from injury, but from hunger. The Ministry of Health confirmed that unprecedented numbers of people, from infants to the elderly, are arriving at hospitals in extreme exhaustion due to starvation.

The cause is not a drought or a natural disaster. It is the direct result of Israel’s full blockade, now in its 139th consecutive day. And the death toll is rising.

So far, 69 children have died from malnutrition. Another 620 patients have died due to the lack of food and medicine. Behind every number is a slow, painful process that strips the human body of life one stage at a time.

The Body’s Breakdown: A Four-Stage Collapse

Stage One: The Hunger Takes Over
In the first 48 hours without food, your body uses up its stored sugar (glycogen) from the liver and muscles. Hunger pangs hit hard. You feel anxious, irritable, and dizzy. Your stomach cramps. You may struggle to focus. Energy vanishes quickly, and even walking becomes a task. Children scream in discomfort or go silent from exhaustion.

Stage Two: Muscle Melts, Immunity Crumbles
After a few days, your body switches to survival mode. It starts breaking down fat into ketones for fuel. But when fat runs low, your muscles become the next target. You begin to lose strength. Your immune system weakens. Small infections grow dangerous. You feel cold, even when it’s hot. Simple tasks like standing or thinking become harder.

Stage Three: Your Organs Struggle to Keep Up
Now weeks in, your body is wasting away. You look skeletal. Your skin turns dry and brittle. Some parts of your body, like your belly or feet, may swell due to protein loss. Your heart rate drops. Your liver and kidneys slow down. Your mind becomes foggy. You may forget where you are. Some start hallucinating. You no longer recognize your own voice or the people around you.

Stage Four: The Final Shutdown
Eventually, your body gives up. You no longer feel hunger. Swallowing becomes impossible. You might fall unconscious or slip into a coma. Your organs (heart, lungs, liver) begin to fail. Death often comes quietly, not from hunger itself, but from a final, irreversible shutdown.

The Gaza Numbers That Should Alarm the World

In addition to the rising death toll, the Government Media Office in Gaza released staggering figures today:

• 650,000 children are now at risk of dying from hunger and malnutrition.

• 76,450 aid and fuel trucks have been blocked from entering Gaza in the past 139 days.

• 42 charity kitchens and 57 aid centers have been directly targeted by Israeli forces.

• 877 people have been killed near American-Israeli “aid centers.”

• 12,500 cancer patients and 60,000 pregnant women are also facing starvation without access to treatment or food.

A Man-Made Famine, a Global Failure

Starvation is not just physical. It destroys dignity, memory, and hope. In Gaza, it comes with the added trauma of displacement, bombardment, and abandonment by the international community.

“This is not just a humanitarian crisis,” the Government Media Office stated. “It is a deliberate policy. And the governments who support Israel or remain silent are complicit.”

The office called for immediate global action: opening the crossings, lifting the siege, and allowing unrestricted humanitarian aid into Gaza before more lives are lost.

But as of today, the siege remains. And every passing hour brings Gaza closer to a famine that the world could stop, but hasn’t.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dissident Voice Communications.

Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.

I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.

Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.

• READ MORE: Gaza babies face starvation as Israel blocks entry of baby formula
• Other Chris Hedges Report articles

It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.

“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.

Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.

The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.

Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.

Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.

Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”

On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”

Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.

Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.

“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.

“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”

He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.

“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.

Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”

The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.

“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.

“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”

GHF is a Mossad-funded creation of Israel’s Defense Ministry that contracts with UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, run by former members of the CIA and US Special Forces. GHF is headed by Reverend Johnnie Moore, a far-right Christian Zionist with close ties to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.

As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”

Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.

Ha’aretz, in its article headlined “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid” reported that Israeli commanders order soldiers to open fire on crowds to keep them away from aid sites or disperse them.

“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”

“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.

Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.

There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.

The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This story was originally published by In These Times on June 16, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

The risk of famine increases in Gaza as the Israeli government’s blockade of nearly all aid to Gaza approaches its third month. 

“I felt this almost sense of panic as every day went by without food let in,” Ash Bohrer, a Chicago-based Jewish activist in the Palestinian solidarity movement, told me as she outlined how high the stakes are as the genocide continues in Gaza.

“When I first heard it, my initial thought was … if there is some way I can use my body,” Bohrer said, ​“I am ready and willing to do it, and I think about it as a personal, moral and religious obligation to do so.”

Bohrer is joining five other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, Chicago — Becca Lubow, Avey Rips, Seph Mozes, Audrey Gladson and Benjamin Teller — in a hunger strike to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, unconditional military aid for Israel and the blockade of food and medical aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians now living amongst the rubble.

Bohrer, who’s also a scholar of social movements at Notre Dame, says she felt the moral and strategic call to use whatever resources or privileges she had to raise the stakes of the Palestinian freedom struggle in the United States as ​“our Palestinian comrades watch their friends and their family and their community members suffer a genocide in real time — starvation of truly epic proportions that comes [after] 19 months of bombing, 20 years of blockade and 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.”

The strike kicked off with an opening rally on Monday, June 16, where a series of political leaders and allies spoke, including Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), one of 18 members of Congress who last week introduced the ​“Block the Bombs” bill in the House to condition aid to Israel.

Organizers have 22 events scheduled over the following 16 days, including Shabbat services, Palestine teach-ins led by a wide range of supportive organizations, vigils and a screening of the popular documentary ​“Israelism.”

Since the beginning of March, Israel has blocked food, fuel and medical aid from entering the Gaza Strip, which has caused what human rights organizations have called a situation of forced starvation. This comes at the end of an unprecedented year and a half of violence in the region, which experts have called a genocide, that has galvanized the Palestine solidarity movement around the world to push for an end to unquestioned U.S. support for Israel’s violence. While these movements have exploded in size, Israel has continued its barrage and is now continuing the attack by preventing basic resources from making it to a population in desperate need of support.

“[These were] images of what hunger looks like. And to see children dying of starvation, the images were seared into my brain,” Teller tells In These Times. ​“When his comrades from JVP Chicago returned from their national gathering with an idea on how to escalate their campaign to end the violence, he was compelled to join them.

“As we confront what it means to starve our own bodies and what happens to the body without adequate nutrition for days and weeks and, in the case of people in Gaza, for months on end — it is not a good way to go,” says Teller. ​“It shouldn’t be happening to anyone.” 

Palestinian partner organizations that JVP had been working with, explains Bohrer, approached JVP activists specifically to ramp up the pressure, with the idea that a hunger strike might draw attention to the starvation that their loved ones are facing in Gaza.

The hunger strike is an escalation tactic, meant to draw waning attention back to the situation in Gaza and utilize the often-privileged position American Jews have in discourse on this issue. Hunger strikes are a form of protest where demonstrators, often lacking other viable tactics, turn their attention to their own body and refuse to eat, often forcing institutions, and the public, to bear witness as their bodies waste away. Because of this, they are often a rare and late-term option for campaigns where other pressure points simply failed to work.

As the death count in Gaza continues to climb, the American Palestine solidarity movement is at a crossroads — forced to acknowledge that while public opinion has shifted, Israeli violence has not. These activists are just a few of the thousands reassessing what tactics are available, or useful, as we enter ever-worsening conditions in one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. By engaging in this very public, and risky, protest tactic, the hunger strikers are picking up on a long tradition of calculated starvation as a method of forcing a public confrontation with crises.

Hunger strikes have a long history of success precisely because they are so dangerous, and because they force the public to watch as they slowly enact violence on their own bodies. They’ve been particularly prevalent for incarcerated activists who, because of confinement, are limited in their tactics. In Palestine hunger strikes go back decades as a method of resistance for the thousands of Palestinians arrested without charge, a policy known as ​“administrative detention.”

When multiple residents of Nahfa prison in Israel went on a hunger strike in 1980, they eventually won some of their demands for things like viable bedding and living spaces. But these victories came at a steep cost when some participants died mysteriously. Some believe it was from force feeding, which involves violently forcing a tube down a restrained striker’s nose and into their stomach, then pumping in a nutrient compound. This became a primary point of contention after a spring 2012 series of hunger strikes where nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners participated. The United Nations has ruled force feeding a form of torture and in violation of the Geneva Convention. The Israeli Medical Association later sided with medical consensus that forced feeding of hunger striking prisoners is ethically unconscionable, though the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the practice.

Hunger strikes can take a massive toll on the body, which is in part what makes them so influential. In 2012, Palestinian activist Khader Adnan was arrested and held in administrative detention. He went on a 66-day hunger strike to protest his imprisonment without trial, triggering international attention, a wave of solidarity protests, mass Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons and increased calls for prison reform. Adnan ended that strike upon reaching a deal with Israeli authorities for his release, but, after a string of arrests, refused food for 87 days following his final detainment in 2023. He died in his cell. 

Many Palestinian revolutionaries were also influenced by the well-publicized, and sometimes lethal, hunger strikes held by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) members during their 30-year conflict with Britain and Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, known as the Troubles. Irish Republicans had long used the tactic in their struggle against the British authority, often because they were fighting from within Ulster-controlled territory, where protests were likely to lead to arrest. By 1980, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to view IRA prisoners as prisoners of war, which would have ensured certain rights. Instead she publicly declared them criminals. This led to a series of hunger strikes, most famously including ​“volunteer” Bobby Sands, who ran and won a seat in the British Parliament amidst his 66-day fast behind bars in 1981. But Sands — and nine others, including Irish National Liberation Army prisoners — ultimately died during their protest, and while they won many of the provisions they demanded for IRA prisoners, it came at a grave cost.

But as Nayan Shah, who studies the history of hunger strikes, explains, hunger strikes are not confined to inside prison cells; there are also solidarity strikes, when supporters on the outside take action in solidarity with incarcerated people to raise the stakes. These solidarity strikes, done as part of a larger community struggle against inhumane systems, also have a particularly successful history.

“In the case of a prisoner, you can only hear that prisoner’s voice through intermediaries. In the case of someone who is in public and is hungry, there’s lots of ways you could hear their voice, what they’re feeling and experiencing, [and] why they’re doing it,” says Shah. Whether it’s in partnership with incarcerated hunger strikers or people forced into like situations, it creates a pathway to public recognition of a struggle by creating a volatile stunt that forces the public to confront the causes of such an extreme response. 

And part of that public confrontation is the hope that a public action of this type can inspire others to take action.

“Something that we heard [from other hunger strikers]… if you start, people will come, which I think is really powerful,” says Rips, a 32-year-old Chicago activist whose family emigrated to the United States alongside the wave of Soviet Jews. ​“We’re optimistic that once this strike goes public we will be getting a lot more support.”

Marc Kaplan says he is mobilizing his organization, Northside Action for Justice, to support the launch of the JVP hunger strike, which he says will need outside support. Kaplan was part of a 2015 hunger strike to save Dyett High School in Chicago from former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s massive school closings.

“It’s hard to keep your focus and keep your consciousness and spirit when you’re hungry,” says Kaplan, who lost 20 pounds during the strike. But the action inspired attention and community support and led the campaign to victory.

And the six hunger strikers in Chicago aren’t alone. As the college encampments popped up in 2024, many activists at colleges like the University of Oregon, Stanford and multiple colleges in the California State University system went on hunger strikes. A number of New York City veterans are now in the middle of a 40-day Fast for Gaza, and Friends of Sabeel, an organization pushing for justice and equity in historic Palestine, are also engaged in a fast where strikers are forced to survive on less than 250 calories a day — same limit 25 activists with the Maine Coalition for Palestine set when they announced their strike last month. The Chicago solidarity strikers have been in contact with some of these other strikers, as well as Palestinian partners, to put their tactics into a larger framework of escalating pressure on the state to act.

Many hunger strikes permit some calories or have a set end date, but the JVP activists plan to go a step further by consuming nothing but water and electrolytes until their demands are met.

​​“Fasting is a form of protest, it is a spiritual act in Jewish tradition,” says rabbi and JVP activist Brant Rosen, who will be supporting the hunger strikers and holding a Shabbat service with them on June 20 at Federal Plaza. “[Fasting] is a sign of atonement, of course … but it has also been used as a call to action historically.” In 2015, Rosen formed the country’s first non-Orthodox anti-Zionist synagogue named Tzedek Chicago. 

Jewish organizations, many of which have been publicly supportive of the Israeli government’s war, have a long history of supporting aid to impoverished communities facing food insecurity. 

“Both the bombing campaign and the starvation campaign are coordinated and maintained by the largest transfer of weapons the United States has ever done,” says solidarity striker Becca Lubow. ​“So the immediate call is for the money, the guns, the tanks, the bombs being sent to Israel [to stop]. Israel can no longer have a blank check [from the United States] to use against the Palestinians.”

Lubow works for an established Jewish organization and hopes others will hear the call and join the fight. 

As scholar of the Jewish left Benjamin Balthaser told me, solidarity has been one of the ways radical Jews understood their Jewishness, pointing to Jewish communists organizing with migrant laborers in the Imperial Valley or joining the Civil Rights Movement even when it could cause them material harm. ​“The hunger strike is a way to alert Americans to the desperateness of the situation.”

Shah also points to this history of Jewish activism, including Polish Jewish students using the tactic to win educational opportunities and a 1946 incident where 1,000 Jewish refugees were stuck on a ship bound for Palestine in Italy and needed to put pressure on Britain to let them in. In that case, it was communicating with world Jewry through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that sparked solidarity fasts in New York and Tel Aviv and won the demand handily.

Religion has been key for these fights, particularly given the moral weight of hunger strikes. In apartheid South Africa, 1989 saw a massive prison hunger strike of more than 600 political prisoners matched by solidarity fasts organized by faith leaders and activists. This raised the profile of the anti-apartheid struggle at the exact moment the media blockade was lifting. 

One of the six hunger strikers in Chicago is not Jewish, but as Gladson, who grew up Catholic, pointed out, Christian Zionism is a significant part of the massive political support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And since the U.S. government is using tax dollars to keep Israel’s military stocked with weapons and resources, it is not only American Jews who have a stake.

The hunger strike’s potential success is that it works alongside other escalating tactics. The fight didn’t start with the hunger strike. In recent weeks there was highly publicized flotilla that received international attention as they tried to deliver aid, as well as a march to the Rafah border in Egypt. A hunger strike is a more extreme tactic, but that shift has been determined by the failure of established strategies to halt the violence for good.

This tactic is nothing new for Chicago. In 1994, 10 parents launched a six-day hunger strike to push the Board of Education and Mayor Richard Daley Jr. to abandon the plan to close a school in the Back of the Yards, which itself had a formative role in community organizing as the neighborhood where famed organizer Saul Alinsky once built anti-poverty campaigns. After marches, boycotts and teach-ins failed to stop the school closure, parents camped out in tents adjacent to the school board and refused to eat. Eventually six political leaders, including Congressman Jesús ​“Chuy” García (D-Ill.), initiated negotiations between the parents and the school board that resulted in a series of votes that ultimately ratified the parents’ proposal to build a new school for the neighborhood.

More recently, 12 people followed the parents’ lead and held a 34-day hunger strike in 2015 to save Dyett High School, which had been the target of disinvestment and was set to be shuttered by the school board. Just like their counterparts in 1995, these parents, many of whom were working with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), spent three years escalating their efforts to save the school.

“It didn’t start with the hunger strike,” says Kaplan, who is also a member of Tzedek Chicago. ​“The struggle for Dyett had been a part of the whole campaign to stop the bleeding of educational institutions in primarily low-income, Black communities and some brown communities.”

But as has been seen historically, bold actions, especially when they expose the gap between a society’s actions and its ideals, can spark moral reflection and even social change. “[These hunger strikes are] happening in states that claim to be democracies,” pointed out Shaw, who noted that most well-known hunger strikes happen inside modern countries that say they are governed by the rule of law. ​“So these are fundamentally crises of democracy.” In other words, hunger strikes, an extreme form of protest, point to a broader failure of political systems to uphold their stated values. 

The list of organizations formally backing the JVP demonstration continues to grow, with groups committing to participate however they can, further amplifying the voices standing in solidarity with Gaza.

But the question remains: Is it enough to push the U.S. government to do what other tactics have failed to achieve?

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Shane Burley.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered the termination of all remaining overseas employees of USAID to complete the dismantling of the six-decade-old agency. USAID was an early target of Elon Musk and DOGE. We look at the dismantling of USAID and what it means for people around the world to lose this lifeline, as detailed in a new Amnesty International report. “We talked to somebody who actually saw IVs being ripped out of arms when the stop-work order came down,” says Amnesty’s Amanda Klasing, who describes the consequences of the U.S.'s retraction of critical aid to countries in the Global South and refutes the Trump administration's claims that no deaths can be traced to the cuts. Now, lacking funding from the wealthiest country in the world, aid workers like Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council are turning to other countries’ governments to bridge the gap. Egeland says, “The U.S. is leaving international solidarity and compassion completely,” even though, as Klasing notes, “It’s been the leader of humanitarian aid, and it should remain so.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Valizadeh, a former Radio Farda reporter, returned to Iran on March 6, 2024, after 14 years in exile. He was immediately detained by agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence, and later sentenced in two expedited court sessions for “collaboration with a hostile government,” without specifying which government in the charges or conviction. His appeal was denied.

“The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the Iranian authorities’ confiscation of Iranian-American journalist Reza Valizadeh’s identity documents, which is part of a broader pattern of using asset confiscation to punish and silence dissenting voices,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Targeting imprisoned journalists in this way is meant to further isolate them and intimidate others. Iranian authorities must return Valizadeh’s documents without delay and end the use of asset confiscation as a tool of repression against independent journalism.” 

The authorities have also moved to seize assets belonging to Valizadeh and his family, according to London-based news outlet Iran International. Without access to his identification documents, Valizadeh is no longer able to manage his property-related affairs for local and foreign assets. Iran International noted a growing pattern of such punitive measures targeting imprisoned dual nationals.

This is Valizadeh’s second hunger strike; he previously protested in March 2024 over what he called his “sham trial,” ending it after six days due to concern for his mother, who went on the strike with him.

In a separate case, Tehran prosecutors opened proceedings against financial journalist Marziye Mahmoodi over a tweet about a national cooking oil shortage. She was accused of “spreading falsehoods,” according to her social media post. The press freedom group Defending Free Flow of Information in Iran said the case reflects growing pressure on journalists who cover economic issues.

CPJ emailed the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York for comment on Valizadeh but did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

A group of veterans and their allies have entered their third week of a “Fast for Gaza” outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City. The group is calling for an end to arms sales to Israel and of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. We hear from multiple hunger strikers on their decisions to join the planned 40-day action and why they are pressuring the U.N. in particular. “We wake up each morning, and we don’t worry about whether or not our children have been buried under rubble overnight. We’re not drinking poisoned water. We’re not surrounded by rubble. We’re not dealing with the horrible traumas that people in Palestine and Gaza are dealing with,” says peace activist Kathy Kelly, who started her hunger strike two weeks ago. “What would make us stop? Well, certainly, if there were a permanent, unconditional, immediate ceasefire.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Starvation, dizziness, brain fog, and sickness all directly affect the daily reports produced by Gaza’s dismantled, exhausted press corps, most of whom are already living and working in tents, amid indiscriminate bombing, and often without electricity or internet access.

While what U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez described as a “teaspoon of aid” has trickled in to southern and central Gaza since May 19, the strip’s entire population of 2.1 million people remain acutely food insecure, with the prospect of famine looming amid an intense military offensive.

“Due to hunger, I lose focus and forget information during my live TV reports. On two occasions, I collapsed after finishing a report, and it turned out I had food poisoning,” Saleh Al-Natoor, Gaza correspondent for Al Araby TV, told CPJ from southern Khan Yunis, where he fled with his family to escape bombing in Gaza City in October 2023.

“We suffer from continuous hunger attacks, extreme fatigue, loss of balance, and an inability to think or perform any tasks. Sometimes I am too exhausted to search for food in the nearby street markets,” he said.

Assault on press freedom

The tiny, densely populated Gaza Strip was heavily reliant on food imports before October 7, 2023, with more than 500 trucks entering each day. Last year, journalists told CPJ they were on near-starvation rations, drinking unclean water, and foraging for scraps. CPJ has repeatedly called on the international community to urgently pressure Israel to allow food and humanitarian aid into Gaza, protect journalists, and lift the ban on media access.

Despite the images of emaciated babies on Western news channels following Israel’s March 2 blockade, international pressure has only produced what one U.N. spokesperson described as “a token that appears more like cynical optics than any real attempt to tackle the soaring hunger crisis.”

“What we are witnessing is not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but a direct, unprecedented assault on press freedom, while the world watches,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Journalists cannot carry out their work — let alone survive — while being deliberately starved and denied life-saving aid. Israel must allow humanitarians, international media, and human rights investigators into Gaza at once.”

Firsthand testimonies from journalists in Gaza offer some insight into the daily horrors that millions of Palestinians are living through.

“It feels as though your stomach walls are collapsing into each other, and you taste bitterness in your throat, as if the digestive fluids have reached your mouth,” Al-Natoor wrote on Facebook, detailing what it feels like to experience a “hunger attack.”

“A sharp headache strikes the top of your head or a sense of emptiness surrounds your brain. When you try to stand, you feel dizzy and off-balance. You quickly try to support yourself on something and close your eyes for a while, hoping the blood will return to your brain.

“Our bodies have started to digest themselves, muscle mass is vanishing, and we suffer from extreme emaciation. Hunger is not just a metaphor —  it is truly a murder weapon we face every hour,” he posted.

Canned food, exorbitant prices

The journalists who spoke to CPJ said their diet was mainly tinned goods, sometimes supplemented with sporadic supplies of foul-smelling flour, and occasional rotting vegetables. Even these minimal supplies have become increasingly scarce and unaffordable due to an exorbitant increase in prices.

“We rely solely on canned food from aid packages — beans, cheese, processed meats that lack sufficient nutritional value. They merely help us break our hunger — not more,” Al-Natoor told CPJ. 

“Even simple necessities, including canned goods, have become unavailable,” said Akram Dalloul, a correspondent for the Lebanon-based broadcaster Al-Mayadeen, whose weight has fallen from 95 to under 80 kilograms during the war.

“We are talking about a reality that is difficult to describe in words. Often, we cannot stand on our feet because there is no milk or eggs,” said Dalloul, who posted a video on Facebook of himself and his son sharing one raw eggplant as a meal.

Mohammad Al-Hajjar, a freelancer contributing to the Associated Press news agency and London-based site Middle East Eye, said journalists suffer like everyone else in Gaza.

“There are no basic food supplies — no flour, sugar, cooking oil, ghee, rice, or legumes. We only have a few canned goods and some locally grown vegetables in the southern part of the Strip,” Al-Hajjar told CPJ from Gaza City. “My eight-year-old son Majd suffered from malnutrition and dehydration during the first wave of famine at the start of the war.”

Money exchangers take 30% cut

Al-Hajjar is not the only journalist juggling work with finding food for his family.

“Fruits are non-existent, and some vegetables are available in very limited quantities and are far too expensive,” said Shrouq Al Alia, director of Ain Media production company, a correspondent for France 24 television network, and the sole parent to a toddler. “My daughter often complains of abdominal pain.”

Their poor diet has also caused stomach and colon problems for the 30-year-old, who received CPJ’s 2024 International Press Freedom Award in recognition of her courage in taking over Ain Media after her husband Roshdi Sarraj was killed on October 22, 2023.

“We face several battles: first, to find flour that is not spoiled and safe for human consumption; second, to afford the soaring prices; and third, to access cash because banks are closed,” Al Alia said, adding that the cost of a 25-kilogram sack of flour has risen from 25 to 1,500 shekels (US$7 to $418) or more — an increase of 6,900% — since the war began.

“This forces us to turn to money exchangers who take a 30% cut on any cash we withdraw,” said Al Alia, describing the system by which Palestinians transfer their money digitally to middlemen who provide them with cash since banks stopped operating.

And Israel’s blockade on cooking gas remained in place. “We rely on wood fire for cooking, which is inefficient and exhausting,” added Al Aila, whose weight has fallen from 59 to 50 kilograms during the war.

‘We work while hungry’

With the import of water purification supplies still prohibited, chronic water scarcity, and no way to manage sewage, diarrhea, scabies, and skin rashes have proliferated.

“We’ve been affected by hepatitis as a result of no food, hygiene kits, or clean water,” Majdi Esleem, a 40-year-old Palestinian reporter for the pro-Fatah Al Kofiya TV, told CPJ from Gaza City. “Most days we [journalists] work while hungry,” said the father of five.

“During work and daily life, I frequently suffer from health problems, including dizziness, difficulty seeing, constant headaches, and weakness,” said freelance photographer Abd Elhakeem Abu Riash, who contributes to Al Jazeera.

“It is extremely difficult to obtain food or even a single meal … The calories I burn during field journalism are not compensated for due to the scarcity of food.”

The Israel Defense Forces’ North America Media Desk in New York referred CPJ to the Israeli military unit overseeing humanitarian aid, COGAT, which said via email, “The IDF, through COGAT, is working to allow and facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip, and is also actively supporting these efforts, including by conducting regular monitoring of food stocks within the Strip.”

CPJ emailed the ministry of communications and ministry of defense requesting comment but did not receive any responses.

CPJ calls on EU, others to ensure access and aid to Gaza

As famine tightens its grip on Gaza, CPJ calls on the international community — particularly the European Union, itself currently reviewing the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and the 50 countries that make up the Media Freedom Coalition — to support the following calls to action:

● Israel and Egypt must allow immediate, unhindered media access to Gaza, so that they may directly cover the hostilities on the ground and related news stories, including starvation and the wider humanitarian toll.

● Israel should immediately facilitate access to humanitarian aid to journalists in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Journalists, like all civilians in Gaza, are struggling to obtain the essentials — such as food, water, and sanitary supplies — necessary to live, let alone to report on the reality facing Gazans.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Doja Daoud.

At this very moment, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have managed to survive Israel’s scorched-earth siege and bombing are being deliberately starved to death as a result of Israel’s 11-week blockade preventing food and aid from entering Gaza. As Jem Bartholemew writes at The Guardian, “The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, told the BBC [Tuesday] morning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time. Five aid trucks entered Gaza on Monday but Fletcher described this as a “drop in the ocean” and totally inadequate for the population’s needs.” In response to this dire humanitarian crisis, students at multiple university campuses in the US have launched hunger strikes in solidarity with the starving people of Gaza. In this urgent episode, we speak with four hunger strikers at the University of Oregon (UO), including: Cole, Sadie, and Efron, three undergraduate students who are all members of Jewish Voice for Peace – UO and who just completed a 60-hour solidarity hunger strike; and Phia, a Palestinian-American undergraduate student who has organized with JVP-UO on the hunger strike and who currently remains on hunger strike herself.

Additional links/info:

• UO Gaza Hunger Strike Instagram and TikTok
• UO Gaza Hunger Strike: Community Calls to Action!
• Press Release: University of Oregon Students, Faculty, and Staff Launch “UO Gaza Hunger Strike” Campaign Protesting Mass Starvation and Genocide
• Jewish Voice for Peace – UO Instagram
• Nathan Wilk, KLCC, “University of Oregon protesters begin hunger strike for Gaza”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “Students across the U.S. are going on hunger strike as Israeli-engineered famine takes hold in Gaza”
• Syma Mohammed, Middle East Eye, “US: UCLA student hospitalised during hunger strike for Gaza”
• Jem Bartholemew, The Guardian, “First Thing: UN says 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in next 48 hours under Israeli aid blockade”
• Ronen Bergman & Natan Odenheimer, The New York Times, “In private, some Israeli officers admit that Gaza is on the brink of starvation”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘The raids happened Wednesday, finals started Thursday’: FBI agents raid homes of pro-Palestine students at University of Michigan”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities” 
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. As you guys know, we’ve been covering the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. We’ve been speaking with faculty members and graduate students on this show as this new terrifying McCarthy’s crackdown has been unfolding in real time. But today’s episode is a pointed reminder that this climate of intense fear and repression is not achieving its primary goal of forcing people to retreat, hide, and silence themselves on campuses around the country.

People continue to stand up, fight back, and speak out. As Michael Aria reports at Mondoweiss, “In recent weeks, students across multiple university campuses in the United States have launched hunger strikes in solidarity with the people of Gaza enduring famine. The protestors are also calling on their schools to cut ties with weapons manufacturers and other companies connected to Israel. More than two dozen California students began a fast on May 5th with more schools joining in the proceeding days. San Francisco State University students recently ended their strike after obtaining several commitments from their school. The administration said it would expand the implementation of the divestment policy and work toward a partnership with Palestinian universities. Six students at Sacramento State, which also previously adopted a divestment policy also recently ended their hunger strike at UCLA. Student activists Maya Abdullah was hospitalized on the ninth day of her hunger strike.

Students with the group Yalies4Palestine recently met with Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis amid an ongoing hunger strike at the school. The demonstrators are demanding that Yale divest from weapons manufacturers adopt a human rights based investment strategy and end its academic partnerships with Israel and grant amnesty for student protestors.” At the University of Oregon. Students also initiated a hunger strike this week as Nathan Wilk writes for KLCC, which is Oregon’s NPR affiliate, “Protestors at the University of Oregon began a hunger strike Monday in an effort to bring attention to starvation in Gaza. Around 470,000 people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger. According to a Unbacked report released last week in Eugene, some WO students and employees announced that they would stop eating starting Monday morning in order to pressure local leaders to respond to the crisis the protesters want you owe to divest from companies with ties to Israel and provide more protections for pro-Palestinian activists on campus.

Protesters are also asking the public to call Oregon’s elected leaders in congressional delegation demanding they speak out against Israel’s blockades. In an email to KLCC Monday, UO representative Eric Howald said The university respects students’ right to express their views, but advise caution about their methods. “We urge them to choose forms of expression that prioritize their health, safety, and overall wellbeing,” said Howald, “while adhering to UO freedom of speech guidelines.” Now as we speak, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have somehow managed to survive Israel’s scorched earth siege and bombing are being deliberately starved to death. As Jem Bartholomew wrote on Tuesday at The Guardian, “The UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC this morning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time. Five aid trucks entered Gaza on Monday, but Fletcher described this as a quote, drop in the ocean and totally inadequate for the population’s needs.”

It followed the director General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying yesterday that 2 million people were starving in the Gaza Strip while tons of food is blocked at the border by Israel. This is all happening now. As I read this, this is urgent, dire, unbearable and unconscionable, and that is why we are seeing students escalating their protest tactics and engaging in these hunger strikes. And on Wednesday night, May 21st, I spoke with four hunger strikers at the University of Oregon, including Cole, Sadie and Efron, all undergraduate students at the University of Oregon and members of Jewish Voice for Peace-UO and Phia, a Palestinian American undergraduate student at the University of Oregon who is organized with JVP on the hunger strike and is currently on hunger strike herself. Cole, Sadie, and Efron had just completed a two day solidarity hunger strike before we recorded our episode. Here’s my conversation with Phia, Cole, Sadie, and Efron recorded on May 21st.

Well, Phia, Cole, Sadie, Efron, thank you all so much for joining us today, especially with everything that you’ve got going on over there, everything that is going on in the world right now. It’s a crazy time, but y’all are out there putting yourselves and your bodies on the line standing up for what’s right, and our listeners want to know more about this, who you are, why you’re doing this, what it feels like and what they can do to help. So I want to just jump right in and ask if we could go around the table here and just introduce yourselves to folks listening to this right now. Can you tell us a bit more about who you are and why you’re doing this and what exactly it is that y’all are doing right now?

Phia:

Yeah, for sure. I’m Phia. I’m a Palestinian American student, as was mentioned, and it is the third day of my hunger strike where I’m just drinking water and taking electrolytes. So haven’t had food since 9:00 AM on Monday morning. And this is all to raise awareness around the blockade currently happening on the border of Gaza with Israel, refusing to let any aid in. So the motivation, the goal, all of it is to raise awareness for Gaza’s for the situation in Palestine and to stand in solidarity with students who are speaking up for the right thing.

Cole:

I’m Cole. I am a Jewish student here at UO and I just completed the first segment of our hunger strike and we’ll resume next week. Yeah, I mean, we’re doing this because our school is sending funds through their investments to the Israeli war machine, and that’s not acceptable how they’re using our money. So we have tried various tactics throughout the year. We’ve tried protests, we’ve tried showing up at board meetings, we’ve tried an encampment, we’ve tried a massive petition, and they won’t listen. So this is the next step and we just have to keep trying tactics until they listen. We did a 60 hour hunger strike and next week we will do an indefinite one if they haven’t listened by then and we just have to keep going.

Sadie:

Yeah, my name is Sadie. I’m also a Jewish student at the University of Oregon. Like Cole and Phia said, the seige on Gaza has continued, and right now it’s more crucial than ever that we do everything that we can to stop what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza. Also, as a Jewish person, it’s really important to leverage our identities since a lot of this is being committed in our name. And yeah, I think our university is continuously complicit and refuses to listen to us or to meet our demands, which is why we’re continuing to do this hunger strike.

Efron:

My name is Efron again. I’m also Jewish student. Why we’re doing this is once again, our university is complicit in this genocide. They specifically refuse to disclose and refuse to divest, yet they’re a public university and they have to uphold that. According to Oregon law, this is not us as organizers speaking, this is us speaking on behalf of we would like them to divest from this genocide, this ethnic cleansing and the continued starvation. And it is being done in our name. Why don’t we stand up for what’s right and stand in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as I read in the introduction to this episode, right, I mean the United Nations has warned that nearly 500,000 people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger right now. And the latest report from yesterday was that the UN was warning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours without aid let into Gaza, which Israel has had a total blockade on for months at this point. So I wanted to kind of connect that to what y’all are feeling right this second, fia, of course, the hunger strike that y’all have all engaged in and that FIA continues to engage in at this very moment. We’re recording this on Wednesday night, May 21st. As you guys said, you were doing this both in protest and in solidarity with our fellow human beings who are being starved to death, if not bombed to death among so many other catastrophic horrors. Could you just tell listeners a bit more about what it feels like, the hunger? I mean, what does your body go through and what is that, I guess, what do you want to communicate about that that is helping you at least understand a bit more what so many are going through in Gaza right now as we speak?

Phia:

Yeah, it’s been interesting. We’re only three days in which, or I’m only three days in, which is the average amount of time that people in Gaza go between meals, meals, so meals. What I am experiencing, I’ve been putting it in the context of this, has been people’s every day for months and it’s really unimaginable in the West. We don’t really have to contend with this type of hunger and starvation, especially used as a weapon in a lot of cases. We have the privilege to not have to experience that, but that doesn’t mean that the symptoms of hunger don’t exist. And I think that that’s what the purpose of this type of action is. I feel it in my body. I wake up and I’m tired every single mealtime because it’s ground into us or it’s drilled into us since we’re young, that morning is breakfast, afternoon is lunch, and nighttime is dinner, and something feels immensely off when there’s not that consistency.

And on top of that, out of culture has a very specific connection to food as it relates to hospitality. And I think that Israel’s starvation of Gaza is not only harming them physically, but it’s starving their souls in a way that is cultural erasure, not allowing them to participate in their food practices and culture while also just starving them to death. It is an erasure of people and an erasure of culture, but sorry, a little bit of a tangent on that, but physically, yeah, I have been experiencing headaches. I’ve noticed when I brush my hair, more of my hair falls out. I’ve noticed my voice is going a little bit. My whole body is responding to the lack of nutrients and yeah, I can’t imagine being in this state also under the constant home of drones, under the constant threat of bombing, with occupying soldiers constantly threatening to murder you in the streets. It’s truly just unimaginable.

Cole:

Yeah, I had an experience last night that I’d been thinking about where I was moving a trash can and I hit my ankle on it, not particularly hard, and it hurt so badly, not eating changed how I felt, the physical sensation. And I cannot imagine that pain from a trash can hitting your ankle. I cannot imagine being in an actual war zone with bombs flying and buildings crumbling and bullets flying. It’s genuinely unimaginable. So that’s been something I was thinking about. And then just functioning gets difficult. Thinking about things in detail. Making plans is hard. The brain fog sets in headaches were probably the most common thing all day headache and your muscles ache walking around. Your muscles hurt as if you had worked them out even though you’re just walking. And I mean, yeah, imagining running from something like that is just unbearable.

Sadie:

Yeah. There was another person who was organizing with us who was talking about a moment that they had while we were organizing the hunger strike and before we started about putting their groceries away and thinking about how food is so expensive and it’s so scarce. And I had a similar moment last night where I was feeding my cat and I got her food out of the fridge and I was looking at the groceries that I have, and I just got this kind of overwhelming wave of, I just felt very emotional, honestly, because I feel so lucky to have access to fresh food and nutrients and everything to keep me healthy. And I feel like that’s something that a lot of people take for granted and I don’t think we should because I think food also, it shouldn’t be a privilege. I think everybody should have access to fresh food and vegetables and anything. So yeah, I don’t know. That was just very emotional for me. And I think physically as well, I just felt a lot more sensitive in a lot of different ways physically and emotionally. Like Cole said, headaches were very consistent for me. And also sleeping too, going to sleep, it was really difficult, especially last night, which was the second night or third night? Second night, yeah, I was laying in my bed and my stomach hurt and I just was thinking, I also couldn’t imagine if there were bombs being dropped right now or if I was sleeping on rubble and things. So yeah, it was very eyeopening for me, for sure.

Efron:

For me, I have a specific moment of I was walking to school and I could feel it. I had a 20 minute walk from my house and every step I had super low energy, so my calves, specifically my calves, I’d feel it a lot and it felt super painful. And all I could think when I was walking was, oh my God, what would it feel like to be running to pick up the martyrs or transport them to the hospital or just trying to get food and flour? I could not imagine that pain. And then another time that was super transformative for me was sitting in my classes and everybody was super normal and talking, and my brain was completely out of it. I was like, I cannot sit and read for two minutes. It hurts. And psychologically speaking, not physically. And that was a defining moment for me, and I just was like, we got to do more. That is what I came to the conclusions of.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean you don’t want to trivialize it, but your brain, it reaches for the experiences that it can find that can help us understand and empathize with what our fellow human beings are going through. And everyone listening to this knows what it’s like to be hangry, right? I mean, yeah, you’ve missed a meal or here and there, or maybe there’s one day where you were just really burning a lot of calories and not eating many, and by the end of the day, your head’s pounding. You’re short with people. That is a drop in the goddamn bucket. Pardon my French. And we all understand that, but as you guys are all pointing out, we don’t know what it’s like for that to be our normal state and for that to be an imposed violently imposed state on us and everyone around us effectively trying to kill us.

I mean, I don’t know what that’s like. I do know what it’s like to not know where my next meal’s coming from and how I’m going to pay for it. And I think people listening to this show can also understand that because there’s a real psychological component with that as well. The feeling of fear, terror, anger, shame, all the things wrapped up in once when you don’t know how you’re going to get your next meal, let alone have you got children or other family members to try to provide for the mental load that puts on you compounds the physical exhaustion, and your body’s literally starting to eat itself after a while because that’s the only way it’s going to get energy. And I’m feeling so many things and thinking so many things, talking to y’all because what you’re saying is so powerful. What you’re doing is brave and dangerous.

I mean, it was just earlier this week that, what was it at UCLA, Maya Abdullah, one of the hunger strikers was hospitalized after nine days of hunger striking. And so Sophia and all of y’all, I got to imagine that’s also on your minds. This is not just a protest. This is putting your body on the line until something happens and really trying to force others to make something happen. I wanted to just ask in that vein where this goes, and if you could just say a little more about the demands, the hope that of what you can get the university to do by taking this drastic action and what you see happening here with hunger strikes occurring, not just on your campus, but on campuses increasingly around the country.

Phia:

Yeah, seeing other students go on hunger strike across the country has been absolutely inspiring, especially as it relates to food as a human right. And Palestine specifically has a long history of hunker striking prisoners. And Israeli prisons used to be called salt and water in Arabic because that’s what they would sustain on. So it’s been incredible to see this tactic specifically just take off among the student movement. And I think it also is for the reason of tactical, logistically, it is a good move because it allows us not only to talk to admin and negotiate with them on some of the things, at least on our campus, we’ve already achieved like scholarships, but it also allows us to leverage this power to connect our struggle and our movement and this action to our state representatives. So right now, one of our biggest demands is that we really, really want to meet with Val Hoyle, Merkley and Wyden, all Oregon State, sorry, state of Oregon representatives who do have the political power to put pressure in the right places to get an arms embargo and to get the blockade ended. So we are encouraging every single person that is in support of what we’re doing to reach out to Oregon representatives, your state representatives, any of your elected officials, and urge them to take action and use their political power.

Cole:

Yeah, I mean the interesting thing about this tactic in addition to its long, specifically Palestinian history, is I think sometimes it comes off as an emotional appeal. This is not an emotional appeal to administrators. They do not care if their students are hungry. They do not care if they call the police in riot deer on their students. What they care about is their bottom line and the publicity that the hunger strikes brings is what’s so essential to hurting that bottom line. And so that’s why this tactic now we hope will work. So far, they’ve agreed to meet, but only with administrators who do not have the power to meet our demands. So we’re in the process of forcing those upper level admin to come down from the ivory tower to meet with their students who they supposedly represent, supposedly care about and supposedly care about. And yeah, I mean it’s truly not an emotional appeal to them. It is a publicity and bottom line strategy, and that’s necessary because we’re asking them to change their finances, which is what they care about the most. We’re asking them to disclose their investments and to divest from the Israeli war machine, from these companies that are making and sending these bombs from these companies that are supporting the settlements. And they will not divest from that unless we can provide some counter pressure that hurts them more.

Sadie:

Yeah, definitely. Agreed. I think publicity is a big thing that they have made it clear that they don’t want on this, and I think it’s very telling how they’re responding to this and where in what ways they truly care about their students. In response to a lot of previous actions we’ve done, including the encampment or rallies and protests just in general, they often respond and say that they’re only in disagreement because they support students’ rights of free speech, but in the name of Jewish safety, this shouldn’t be something that we should allow on campus. And I feel like by using this tactic, it’s a good way to show them that this isn’t about Jewish safety. This is about them investing in the fact that, or investing in the genocide of so many Palestinians and also the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And yeah, I think they really just care about their finances and publicity, and I think that’s a big reason why they were quick to respond to meet with us, but not with the right people. So

Efron:

Yeah, to bounce off of that, they say it’s in the name of Jewish safety. It’s not even a little bit, it’s the name of antisemitism. It’s not. So the board of trustees, they’re like the head of the ivory tower, I like to call them. They can continue to make their money, they can continue to profit off genocide. They can continue to profit off ethnic cleansing. I want to bring up a new target. We have, it’s called DUO Mobile. It’s directly connected to the apartheid system in Israel. The Cisco mobile helps, it uses ai, other things to promote settlements and under international law, this has been declared by the ICJ that is illegal, but our university continues to invest in that. They’ve already shown that we use Duo Mobile, this app every single day, all 20,000 students use this app. They have made their priorities very clear. So as a Jewish student, I say, this is not in the name of Jewish Safety. This is in the name for you to continue to profit off genocide, colonialism, imperialism.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I wanted to ask if we could maybe go back around the table, but in reverse order, let’s stick with Sadie Colon nephron for a second, and then Sophia, we’ll go back to you. But as we mentioned at the top, y’all are members of Jewish Voice for Peace. You were just touching on how you are doing this in opposition of the narrative that is coming all the way from the White House and beyond down that campuses are rife with antisemitism. I mean, we’ve been on this very show. I’ve been interviewing graduate students at Columbia where Mahmoud, Khalil and others were abducted by ICE under that premise where encampments were squashed and people beaten by tons of police under that premise to protect Jewish students and preserve Jewish safety and to stop antisemitism, right? I mean, there is a draconian McCarthyist crackdown on free speech across higher education and beyond right now, ostensibly in the name of fighting antisemitism and protecting the safety of Jewish students.

I interviewed one of the, if not the foremost scholar on McCarthyism, Ellen Schreker on the Real News podcast earlier this month, and I asked her, how does this compare to McCarthyism? She said, it’s worse, it’s way worse. It’s much broader than what McCarthyism was in the early fifties. And this is a top down effort coming from, like we said, the White House coming from university administrations themselves coming from lobbying groups like apac, I mean media that are facilitating this narrative and amplifying this narrative while suppressing coverage of protests like yours and voices like yours. I know we only got about 10 minutes here, but I really wanted to ask if we could address that question, and if you guys could speak to listeners out there who are hearing this stuff, who are being told this narrative about what’s going on on campuses, what would you as three Jewish undergraduates, members of Jewish Voice for Peace who just engaged in the solidarity hunger strike for Gaza, what would you want folks to know about what’s really happening on campus and what else they need to correct their thinking on here?

Cole:

Yeah, I mean, I get Unspeakably disgusted thinking about this and angry because this administration is the same administration that works with Elon Musk who did a Nazi salute on tv, and they want to use antisemitism as an excuse to crack down on protests that are fighting to end an ongoing genocide. They want to use antisemitism as an excuse to deport immigrants when Jewish Holocaust refugees were turned around at the US border. It’s disgusting. It has nothing to do with protecting Jews. It has everything to do with enshrining power and preventing protest and preventing free speech.

Sadie:

Completely agreed. I also find it really disgusting, and it’s also not reflective of all Jewish students on campus. They don’t listen to all Jewish students on campus. They pick and choose. They pick and choose. There are multiple Jewish organizations on campus, including Halel and Habad and Jewish Voice for Peace and Halel in particular, at least the University of Oregon. Halel often, I guess kind of works in tandem with the university and they, that’s where the university sources their reports from. But they don’t consider the fact that there is an organization on campus that is an anti-Zionist Jewish organization and they don’t listen from us or ask us or consider the fact that maybe not all Jewish people think that this protesting on campus in solidarity with Palestine is antisemitic.

Cole:

Can we add J Street there?

Sadie:

Oh, yeah.

Efron:

And J-Street, yes. I’m just going to repeat myself what they just said. I also find it disgusting because all Trump and this administration, and this includes Biden too. Biden has facilitated this genocide. He is not guilty. He is just as guilty as Trump. They use the guise of antisemitism to further their own power to further Christian Zionism, to further their idea that Jews must immigrate to Israel so the rapture can happen. These politicians genuinely believe this. This is factual also to continue on that Trump just wants to inherent power. He’s more than okay to use Jews as a ploy to use this to continue his fascism and white supremacy. This isn’t new. We saw this in his previous administration. He’s just using this as a way to continue. In my mind, I wish I was surprised by what I’m seeing, but I’m not. They’re obviously showing who they are. We should respond back to show who we are as Jews. I will not stand for this, and I have to put my body on the line. The rest of my fellow friends here, I will do that. If that’s what it takes for our universities to listen, then we’ll do that.

Sadie:

I think they also just weaponize any identity that seems to serve them in that moment. And that’s kind of, Trump is antisemitic. We’ve seen that multiple times. And Elon Musk and everybody who he works with, most of them have had very clear situations where they have been antisemitic openly, like the Nazi salute that Cole mentioned. So yeah, I think it’s just like whatever works to their advantage in that moment to uplift themselves.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Phia, I want to also give you a chance to hop in here as well. I mean, we’re literally all sitting here on a call with you, a Palestinian American, and with your three fellow students from Jewish Voice for Peace, all y’all engaging in a hunger strike. You guys have mentioned the student encampment, the organizing that you’ve been doing on campus together. What do you think that says, or what do you want that to say to folks out there who are pushing this narrative, that this movement in solidarity with Palestinians in opposition to the ongoing genocide and the violent occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, what do you want people to take away from this to counter that narrative? That this movement represents a threat to Jewish safety and identity and all the things that we’re hearing in the media right now?

Phia:

Yeah, I think I truly can’t say it better than my fellow students did, but I think that there’s a real danger in the conflation that we see right now between Zionism and Judaism, and it’s important to remember that Judaism has always been a part of Palestinian land as much as Islam, as much as Christianity. Jerusalem has always been a hub for all three of the Abrahamic religions. That was never an issue until Zionism. Zionism was the thing that fractured the diversity of religion that was working for generations. And I think that isolating Zionism as the root cause and identifying the ways that we can criticize Zionism for its use or its weaponization of Judaism as a shield and a weapon, the ways that we can criticize it for that are important for protecting our Jewish students sincerely.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And in that vein, with the last few minutes that I have you guys here, I wanted to just ask if we could zoom out here and again, put these hunger strikes, both the one that Phia continues to be involved in right now, the one that Sadie, Cole, and Ephron, unless the university makes some movement, are going to be engaging indefinitely in next week. Students around the country are engaging in hunger strikes as we speak. I wanted to ask with the last few minutes, if we could just again, place this in the context of the broader student movement that we’ve seen over the past year or two years, and if you had any final messages for folks out there, folks on your campus and beyond, what do you want to communicate to them about what they can do to help?

Sadie:

Yeah, I think in the broader picture, our primary goal by doing this hunger strike, yes, we do want the administration to meet with us, and we do want them to meet our demands, but our primary goal is that all who bear witness to our hunger strike also bear witness to the humanity of Palestinians who are being starved to death in Gaza, because that is something that has continued. And last year we had, after, during our encampment, there was so much energy and there were so many people, and I think one big problem over the past year is that people just stopped paying attention. And I think by doing this, it’s bringing that reality, not that it will ever match up to what is really happening and what Israel is doing to Palestinians, but bringing that into our own community so everybody can see how horrible it is, what Israel is doing, they’re intentionally starving people in Gaza, and they don’t seem to intend on stopping anytime soon, which I think is why it’s so important that people continue to pay attention. And if we have to sit at a table on our campus and not eat for multiple days up to weeks, then that’s what we’ll have to do. Because in the broader picture, this is all about Casa and our university is complicit in it, but we also have to continue to pay attention to what is happening.

Cole:

Yeah, I think nationally this shows the terrain of struggle has changed, and we need to continue to adapt our tactics to what works. And I think the effectiveness of the hunger strikes speaks to the success that Israel’s had with dehumanizing Palestinians because the outrage about college students not eating for a week is much larger than the outrage about hundreds of thousands of Palestinians not eating for days for over a year. And we need to, I mean, that’s just how it is, and we need to draw attention to that however we can. And if that’s by utilizing the fact that people care about college students here more, then that’s what we have to do. And people hopefully will take that and use it as a sign to keep going to join whatever group is near them. If it’s an SJP or a JVP, Palestinian Youth Movement, PYN, anything that is doing something about Palestine, then that’s what we need right now.

Efron:

Honestly, when I think about the national student movement and how these hunger strikes have occurred, the amount of cross student solidarity that I’ve seen is insane. People are reaching out to us. I never expected this, but then I thought, okay, this solidarity between us is amazing, but how can we create solidarity among people in the west because clearly they’re not paying attention and we need to bring it back to Palestine. I mean, as we’re speaking, the occupied West Bank is being annexed. It’s about Palestine and Gaza, and we really need to bring that back to the people of the west because clearly they’ve shut their ears and are like, I don’t want to hear about this. I don’t want to listen about this. They need to listen, and they need to act. And like my friends just said here, I think they should follow through and I cannot wait to hear what VS says.

Phia:

Yeah. Gosh, that’s hard to follow. I think I would finish with the reminder that we will never understand what it feels like to be under constant bombing, under constant threat of displacement and murder, but we can understand a fraction of what the hunger feels like, and we can echo the emptiness of their stomachs and use that as our power and our advocacy. And I’d also just encourage people not to look away. It is really, really difficult to be completely conscious and aware of what we are responsible for as Americans and what the United States of America is culpable for, especially in Gaza. But to look away is complicity, point blank. And yeah, it is our moral imperative to make sure that we are not abandoning our fellow humans while they are undergoing the crime of all crimes. I’d also say that Israel isn’t only the most dangerous state for Palestinians. It is also the most dangerous thing for Jewish safety. It is the most dangerous thing for Judaism is the most dangerous thing for international order, for international law, for humanitarian law. So Israel is culpable of atrocities no matter how you look at it. And I encourage people to advocate against it in every single way. So thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just last question, I know you guys got to go, but just in case any of y’all had a final message here, I want to ask for folks listening to this who are still afraid to do what you’re saying to people who are scrubbing their social media right now, people who are giving into the understandable fear that engaging in this kind of protest is going to put them in danger as young people who are taking that step and continuing to speak up for what you believe in and for what you know and believe to be right. Do you have any final messages for folks out there listening who are afraid right now?

Phia:

Yeah, I had the exact experience that you were referring to. I was like, should I scrub my social medias? Should I be more quiet? Am I making too much noise? And I consulted one of my icons in the community space that I really look up to, and they reminded me this is exactly what the administration, the Trump administration, what our government wants. They want us to be paralyzed. They want us to be afraid to want to step back and be like, maybe I shouldn’t take this risk. That is their goal. And I think that even just saying, no, I’m going to stand firmly in what I believe, even if it’s becoming more dangerous, that’s a powerful act of resistance in itself. And I think that if you’re struggling to find ways to show your solidarity and get involved, your voice is one of the most important things that you have. And we underestimate what silencing ourselves really does. So keep speaking up is what I would say.

Cole:

What I would say is if you feel like you need to scrub your social media, scrub your social media, but then go to a median, do what you need to do to protect yourself, but don’t let that be the end. You need to be proactive while being safe. Use signal, use these platforms that are safer. Do the most that you can to protect yourself while still doing something.

Sadie:

Yeah, I think there are a lot of different levels you can engage yourself into. If you’re kind of in one of those moments where you feel nervous or scared and you don’t really, I don’t know, you’re nervous for your own, I want to say the word safety, but I feel like that’s not the right word. I just continue to remind myself that this is like I have to keep doing this. I am in a position of privilege where I can use my identity especially, but also just the things I’ve access to the university. And that might not be true for everybody, but there are still ways to access getting involved, and that could be community based. But yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s, I don’t know. I get those moments a lot where I get nervous and I feel like I need to censor myself or my social media and things, but then I don’t know. That kind of brings me back to thinking about what is happening and how urgent it is. And I don’t know if that has to stop for any reason. I don’t know. I just couldn’t see myself doing that because it’s very just deeply important and necessary that I continue doing it.

Efron:

I would say, I mean, what all my people have said here is very good. I would say for me, I’ve had some moments where I’m like, oh God, I’m a little freaked out because some people will docs and we’ll do these things, but in retrospect, they’re doing that out of hate. They have so much hate. I’d rather do what I’m doing out of love and had rather look at this fucking fascist government and Israel and be like, no, I’m going to stand up to you. And I also think people can do that in different ways. If people are really good at art, please do art. We need art. Or if you’re really good at writing, we need journalism out there, guys, or I don’t know, whatever skill you have, it could be used in the movement and it could be as small as like, oh, I want to make a poster that changes so much.

You have no idea. Or, oh, I want to do a press release can change so much. So I think acts of resistance can be as small as I want to make a banner for this marcher rally that is still standing against this administration and Israel, even if it is really small, it is still something. And I think people should understand that, okay, this isn’t enough. It is enough. And as long as you continue, the administration will continue to have problems. And that’s okay with us because we’re going to keep going and going and going. So that’s what I would say. Whatever you can do is amazing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Phia, Cole, Sadie and Efron from the University of Oregon. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

“Denying medical care to journalist Chadha Hadj Mbarek, whose health is deteriorating in prison, is inhumane and risks further endangering her life,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s chief of programs. “Tunisian authorities must ensure Mbarek receives proper medical attention and should release her immediately, as she never should have been imprisoned in the first place.”

Mbarek, a journalist and a social media content editor with local independent content firm Instalingo, is being held at the Al-Mas’adin prison in Sousse, south of the capital Tunis, according to a Facebook statement by the journalist’s brother Amen Hadj Mbarek, and news reports. She suffers from vision loss, spinal and joint pain, and gastrointestinal issues that prevent her from taking painkillers, and has experienced vomiting, fainting, and constant pain, according to her brother, who told CPJ that her condition is rapidly deteriorating.

Her brother said Mbarek’s requests to speak with prison officials about her care have gone unanswered despite repeated hospitalizations and doctors recommending spinal tests and possible surgery. 

Mbarek, arrested in July 2023, is serving a five-year prison sentence under Tunisia’s 2022 cybercrime Decree-Law No. 2022-54. Authorities have barred her from receiving lawyer or family visits until an appeal hearing is scheduled.

CPJ’s email to the presidency requesting comment on Mbarek’s denial of medical treatment did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Nguyen Thi Hue visited her son Huynh Duc Thanh Binh at Dong Nai province’s Xuan Loc Prison on Tuesday and said she was shocked by what she heard.

Binh is serving a 10 year sentence for “activities aimed at overthrowing the government,” following his arrest in 2019. Vietnam’s communist government is intolerant of dissent and deals harshly with people who promote pro-democracy views or criticize government policies.

He told his mother he’d refused food for most of February along with other political prisoners, to protest the state of the water they were given to drink and wash with. It is pumped unfiltered from a well, causing skin rashes and kidney stones, he said.

“The water source and general medical care in the prison are very poor,” Binh’s mother told RFA. “Prisoners’ health really suffers. The diseases are terrible.”

A former inmate told RFA he’d experienced similar conditions in Xuan Loc.

“During the dry season, if they use the underground well without any filtration system, it pumps up mud. I complained and talked to all the prison guards but they still haven’t resolved the problem,” said Nguyen Ngoc Anh who spent four-and-a-half years there before his release last August.

Binh told his mother he was also furious about a change in how meals were served. He said guards stopped going from cell to cell and now just abandon the food cart, allowing nearby inmates to serve themselves huge portions while others go hungry.

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After ending his hunger strike Binh said he was short of food this month, because he hadn’t bought extra from the canteen in February. Inmates often supplement rations this way, even though the prison charges four times the market price and limits each inmate to spending the equivalent of US$80 a month.

Angry at the meagre provisions, Binh and his cellmate decided to extend their hunger strike into this month, not eating until March 15 when Binh received food sent by his mother.

RFA tried to phone Xuan Loc Prison to ask about food, water and medical facilities but the number listed did not work.

RFA called Dong Nai provincial authorities and was told the message would be passed on to officials the following day but still has not received a reply.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Stephen Wright and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.

More than 3.5 million people have been displaced in Myanmar due to war between a junta that seized power in 2021, which is backed by China and sanctioned by Western governments, and a loose alliance of pro-democracy and ethnic minority groups battling to end military rule.

In the 2024 fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30, the U.S. provided $141 million in humanitarian aid to Myanmar, much of which is channeled through groups working on the Thai-Myanmar border.

The U.S. State Department on Friday announced the freeze on nearly all aid in order to give the State Department time to review programs “to ensure they are efficient and consistent with U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda.”

In the days since, stop-work orders have been sent by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to implementing partners ranging from media organizations to clinics.

One aid worker, who declined to be identified, said about 20 relief groups providing healthcare with USAID assistance along the Thai-Myanmar border were at risk of being suspended.

Nai Aue Mon, program director of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland group,which documents human rights violations, said communication and travel costs, salaries and stipends would be hit.

“To be honest, it’s widespread, it’s huge,” Nai Aue Mon said of the impact of the aid freeze on humanitarian groups in areas under the administration of the anti-junta Karen National Union in Kayin state and to the south in Mon state, affecting thousands of people.

“It significantly impacts those groups … nearly every organization is more or less impacted by this executive order.”

Groups might have some funds in reserve and were scrambling for other sources of donations but the outlook was grim, he said.

“As far as I know, my organization, we still have some resources but we don’t know after that,” Nai Aue Mon said. “We’re definitely struggling a lot.”

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Thailand to try to fill the gap

Some 100,000 ethnic Karen people from eastern Myanmar war zones have lived in camps on the Thai side for decades and people fleeing more recent repression in Myanmar’s towns and cities have also sought shelter on the border.

Refugee camp hospitals were having to discharge patients because health workers had been suspended from duties, a health worker speaking on the condition of anonymity for security reasons told RFA.

Thailand will help fill the gap in funding for the camps on its soil, at least for the time being, a government minister said, according to The Bangkok Post.

“We cannot abandon or chase them away since they have lived here in the camps for a long time,” Thai Public Health Minister Somsak Thepsutin told the newspaper.

“We cannot just talk about refugees who have been affected … All kinds of healthcare and assistance must be provided to other groups of people who live in this country.”

The freeze in U.S. aid comes as Myanmar is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis, aid groups say.

“A staggering 15 million people are expected to face hunger in 2025, up from 13.3 million last year,” the World Food Programme said in a report on Wednesday.

Almost 20 million people, or nearly one in three people in Myanmar, will need humanitarian assistance in 2025, the U.N. food agency said.

“Growing conflict across the country, access restrictions, a crumbling economy and successive weather-related crises are driving record levels of hunger,” said the WFP Country Director Michael Dunford.

“The world cannot afford to overlook Myanmar’s escalating crisis. Without immediate and increased international support, hundreds of thousands more will be pushed to the brink.”

Edited by RFA Staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kiana Duncan for RFA.

The prominent British Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah remains imprisoned in Cairo even after he completed his five-year sentence last September. Fattah came to prominence during the Egyptian revolution as a blogger and political activist, and he has been jailed multiple times by the authoritarian government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for his advocacy. His family and supporters continue to demand his freedom and have pressed the U.K. government to pressure Egypt into releasing him. Fattah’s mother Laila Soueif is now on her 117th day on hunger strike, standing on Downing Street for at least an hour every workday until her son is released. Now Australian journalist Peter Greste has launched his own hunger strike to pressure the British government, saying he owes his life to the Egyptian activist, who helped him survive when he was imprisoned in Egypt in 2013. “I quite literally owe Alaa my life,” says Greste. “He is the most popular, the most recognized political prisoner in the system, and I think they fear his capacity to mobilize people. They fear his capacity to inspire.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

International outrage is growing over Israel’s abduction of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Jabaliya refugee camp, who was detained after Israeli forces raided and shut down the last major hospital in northern Gaza last week. A new United Nations report finds that Israeli strikes on and near hospitals in the Gaza Strip have “pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse.” Displaced Palestinians throughout the territory are dying from the ongoing Israeli bombardment, as well as injuries, infections and diseases due to Israel’s restrictions on medical care and medical supplies. At least six babies have also died of hypothermia in recent days amid plunging winter temperatures. “Living conditions are just deplorable. They are not compatible with human life,” says Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency medicine physician who just left Gaza after volunteering there for a month. We also speak with trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who previously volunteered at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. “It’s very likely that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are going to die of the combination of malnutrition, displacement, exposure to the elements and hypothermia this winter,” says Sidhwa.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Three have stopped their strike, but Trinh Ba Phuong, who is serving a 10-year sentence at An Diem Prison in Quang Nam province for a “propaganda against the State,” was continuing to refuse to eat as of Tuesday, the relative said, requesting anonymity for security reasons.

The other three prisoners – Phan Cong Hai, Hoang Duc Binh and Nguyen Thai Binh – joined Phuong at the start of the hunger strike on Nov. 1.

Hai was released on Tuesday after completing his five-year sentence for “propaganda against the State.” He told family members of the hunger strike just after he was set free, the relative told RFA.

Hoang Duc Binh, who is serving 14-years for “abusing democratic freedoms” and “resisting enforcement officers,” joined the hunger strike because he hasn’t been allowed to have family visitors, Phuong’s relative said.

But Hoang Duc Binh stopped the strike after six days due to stomach pain and kidney stones, while Hai and Nguyen Thai Binh had to stop their hunger strike for health reasons on about Nov. 15, the relative said.

RFA was unable to contact Hai to ask more about the situation in the prison. Attempts to connect to An Diem Prison via a phone number posted on the internet were also unsuccessful.

RFA also tried to contact the People’s Procuracy of Quang Nam province. The person who answered a phone call asked the reporter to go in person to the agency’s headquarters to request information about the hunger strike.

Translated by Hanh Seide. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.

Chinese rights lawyer Wang Yu has been hospitalized after her health deteriorated following a nine-day hunger strike, which she began in protest during her detention following an Oct. 23 altercation with police outside a court building in the northern province of Hebei.

Wang was released from Weicheng County Detention Center on Nov. 1 after a brief administrative detention for “disrupting public order” following the fracas, and was taken straight to hospital by her husband and fellow rights attorney Bao Longjun, Bao told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.

When she got out, Wang was “completely hunched over and unable to walk” on her release from the detention center, and he carried her on his back, shocked at how little she weighed.

“It felt like carrying a sack of cotton wool; she was so light, weighing maybe just 30 kilograms” (70 pounds), he said.

Scans at the Wei County People’s Hospital revealed a “shadow” on Wang’s liver, so Bao had her transferred to the highly regarded Handan Central Hospital where she was placed on a drip and gradually started to eat solid food again, he said.

Targeting rights lawyers

Bao and Wang, who were among the first to be targeted in the July 2015 arrests, detention and harassment of more than 300 rights lawyers, public interest law firm staff and rights activists across China, are now staying in a hotel while they plan further medical treatment, he told RFA Mandarin on Nov. 1.

Police detained Wang along with fellow rights attorney Jiang Tianyong after they showed up to defend their client Liu Meixiang against corruption charges at the Wei County People’s Court.

A scuffle ensued after police snatched away the camera of a family member who tried to take photos of them, according to a lawyer at the scene who declined to be named for fear of reprisals.

Bao submitted a legal opinion through legal channels out of concern for his wife’s health on day 7 of her hunger strike, but nobody would accept the document, he said.

“I asked them to send Wang Yu to the hospital, and I went to the detention center and rang on the doorbell, saying that I wanted to meet with Wang Yu to get her to eat and drink,” Bao said.

“They lied to me, saying there was no need for that, and that she had eaten something the night before, but she hadn’t eaten anything at all, actually,” he said.

Wang‘s hunger strike was in protest at the authorities’ refusal to allow her to meet with her lawyer or family members, as well as their refusal to provide adequate medical treatment and to let her take a shower, among other things.

Bao said he plans to take Wang to seek further medical opinions in Beijing and Tianjin.

He also plans to appeal her administrative sentence as a form of public protest at her treatment.

“There’s no rule of law in this country, so all we can do now is to use it to speak out on our own behalf,” Bao said.

‘Heartbreaking’

U.S.-based rights lawyer Yu Pinjian said he had seen a photo of Bao Longjun carrying Wang Yu to hospital, which he described as “heartbreaking.”

“Human rights lawyers should be allowed to fight their cases using evidence and the law to defend their clients in court, but now they’re forced to go on hunger strike to defend their own human rights,” Yu told RFA Mandarin. “This shows that the legal system that human rights lawyers depend on for their survival has collapsed.”

Wang’s hunger strike came as authorities in the southwestern region of Guangxi released rights attorney Qin Yongpei at the end of a five-year prison sentence for “incitement to subvert state power,” people familiar with the case told RFA Mandarin.

Qin returned to his home in Nanning city following his release on Oct. 31, but his wife declined to comment when contacted by RFA Mandarin, saying it was “inconvenient,” a phrase often used to indicate pressure from the authorities.

Qin Yongpei was detained in November 2021 by the Nanning municipal police department during a raid on his Baijuying legal consultancy company.

His wife has previously said that Qin had spoken out many times about misconduct and injustices perpetrated by police and local judicial officials, and had likely angered many within the local law enforcement community.

U.S.-based rights lawyer Wu Shaoping said Qin hadn’t broken any laws with his consultancy activities, despite having been stripped of his lawyer’s license.

“He was accused of inciting subversion of state power only because he posted a lot of his personal opinions on the internet,” Wu said. “Everything he did was in compliance with the law and human justice in any normal country.”

“So he was wrongly convicted,” Wu said, calling on the authorities to restore his legal career and allow him to make a living.

“The most worrying thing is his physical condition,” he said, adding that the authorities typically continue to “stalk and harass” people on their surveillance blacklist even after their release from prison.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zhu Liye and Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.

Two political prisoners in Vietnam have ended their hunger strike after authorities agreed to improve conditions, the sister of one of them told Radio Free Asia.

Trinh Ba Tu, 35, called his family on Wednesday, telling them he and Bui Van Thuan, 43, were eating again after 21 days drinking only water. He said they had both lost about 11 kilograms (24 pounds) in weight but had achieved their goal of opening the “tiger cage” used to hold political prisoners in solitary confinement in the facility in Nghe An province.

“The ‘tiger cage’ has been open for a week,” Tu’s sister Trinh Thi Thao told RFA Vietnamese.

“The ‘brothers’ in the four cells were allowed to go out into the common yard to play sports, play chess and talk for two hours on Friday morning, Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon.”

The tiger cage is a cube made of iron bars which separates four cells housing single prisoners from the exercise yard with a space of about one meter (3.3 feet) to move around in, according to Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, who was in the same camp as the hunger strikers – Prison No. 6 – and was released late last month.

Prisoners have not been able to leave their cells to exercise in the yard or grow vegetables in the garden since April, when Deputy Warden Thai Van Thuy ordered the “tiger cage” locked, Thuc told RFA.

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Reporters were unable to contact Prison No. 6 via its listed phone number to ask about the situation of prisoners and the detention regime.

Tu and Thuan are both serving eight-year prison sentences for “anti-state propaganda.” They began their hunger strike with Dang Dinh Bach, former director of the Center for Law and Policy Research for Sustainable Development, who was sentenced to five years in prison for “tax evasion.”

Bach, 46, had to abandon the protest after 10 days because his health was suffering but he recovered after he began eating.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.

A deliberate, man-made famine is underway in Gaza, according to many human rights experts. Starving Gaza is a new documentary by Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines investigating how Israel has killed civilians seeking aid and attacked humanitarian networks. The harrowing film is based on the work of Palestinian reporters in Gaza who are suffering the same conditions as their subjects. “They’ve been displaced, they’ve been injured, they’ve watched their own children die in front of them, and yet they somehow conjure the professionalism to pick up a camera and record and tell other people’s trauma,” says journalist Hind Hassan. “They really will be remembered in history as the titans of journalists.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Three inmates at a prison in Vietnam’s Nghe An province have begun a hunger strike to protest against harsh conditions and demand the release of all political prisoners, relatives told Radio Free Asia.

On Friday, prisoner Trinh Ba Tu phoned his sister-in-law Thu Do, telling her he would refuse food from Saturday, along with two fellow inmates at Prison No. 6, Bui Van Thuan and Dang Dinh Bach.

“One reason is to call on the state to release political prisoners and social activists in order to pave the way for the country to democratize and establish a state that follows the rule of law in order to protect the human rights of each citizen,” Do wrote on Facebook.

“Only then can the country begin a great transformation. The Communist Party of Vietnam needs to give up its monopoly on the state and society,” said Do, adding that “inhumane” treatment at the hands of the officers in charge of the prison has “destroyed the health and spirit of political prisoners.”

Bui Van Thuan’s wife Trinh Nhung told RFA that since April 11, her husband and other political prisoners have been held in so-called “tiger cages” and not allowed to go outside to exercise or interact with other inmates.

The area consists of four cells, each measuring approximately 20 square meters (215 square feet). A small window in each cell provides a view of the “tiger cage,” a barred enclosure separating the cells from both the outside yard and each other.

The outside yard is a small area where prisoners are allowed to grow vegetables and exercise.

Prison regulations state that all inmates are allowed into the common yard for cultural and sports activities every Sunday.

Thuanh told his wife that the cells have poor sanitation and contain a single fan, which isn’t enough to cool them during the hot summer.

“Thuan was imprisoned in a three-person room that was only 12 square meters [129 square feet] wide. They had to go to the toilet and wash their clothes in the cell. There were three people in the cell so it was very cramped and they were locked in almost every day,” Nhung said.

She added that her husband became very thin, weak and stressed because of the harsh living conditions and had little energy.

She told RFA she was worried her husband’s health would get even worse because of the hunger strike, but she said his actions were justified.

“I believe in and support him because he is demanding legitimate rights. The goal of the hunger strike is to demand freedom for all political prisoners throughout Vietnam,” she said. 

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Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, who told RFA he was “forcibly pardoned” shortly before the end of his 16-year prison sentence, said he supported the three hunger strikers. 

In a Facebook post, he said if he hadn’t been released against his will on Sept. 20 he would have joined the protest, calling on his social media followers to share news of the hunger strike and support it.

Dissidents object to being forced to accept a pardon for a  wrongdoing that they don't accept they committed.

This is not the first time Tu, Bach and Thuan have gone on a hunger strike.

Land rights activist Tu, 35, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2020 for “disseminating documents” against the state. In June, 2022, he was beaten by prison officers, after which he staged a two-week hunger strike.

Lawyer Dang Dinh Bach, 46, is serving a five-year prison sentence for tax evasion. He went on hunger strike on Feb. 2, to protest harsh conditions and demand the prison respect inmates’ rights.

Thuan, 43, is serving an eight-year prison sentence for “propaganda against the state.” He refused food for five days in August to protest against the treatment of political prisoners.

Translated by RFA Staff. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Le Trong Hung, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for “propaganda against the state” in Vietnam’s Nghe An province, began a 50-day hunger strike Wednesday.

The teacher and independent journalist wants the chance to appeal his conviction and is protesting against the promotion of former police chief To Lam, first to president, and then to general secretary of the Communist Party, Vietnam’s top job.

But Hung’s wife told Radio Free Asia she is concerned that only drinking water will have serious implications for his health.

Hung, 45, was arrested on March 27, 2021 after announcing plans to stand as a candidate for the National Assembly, or parliament, that year.

Later that year, he was sentenced to five years in prison and five years of probation.

During a family visit on July 16, Hung started to tell his wife Do Le Na about his planned hunger strike, saying it was “related to the National Assembly and To Lam … protesting him sitting in the wrong place,” before prison guards stopped him.

To Lam was elected minister of public security in 2016. He became state president in May this year and general secretary on Aug. 3, following the death of Nguyen Phu Trong.

As police chief, he was widely criticized for talking about the need to stamp out corruption and then dining out on a US$1,900 gold-encrusted steak at a celebrity chef’s restaurant during an official trip to London. One Vietnamese activist, who mocked Lam’s lavish dinner on YouTube, was jailed for five-and-a-half years.

Prison officers warned Hung not to mention the hunger strike when he made his monthly phone call home on Aug 16. But when they weren’t paying attention, he spoke to his wife about it.

“My husband plans to go on a hunger strike, drinking only water for 50 days, but I am trying to convince him to reduce it to 30 days because October 4th this year is our 15th wedding anniversary,” Na told RFA Vietnamese on Wednesday. “However, Hung has not agreed yet.” 

She said Hung could be punished by losing privileges such as family visits and the phone calls home.

However, Na said a hunger strike was "almost the only way at this time for him to express his determination to follow the purpose and path he has chosen."

RFA Vietnamese tried to phone Nghe An’s Prison No.6 to ask about Hung’s case but the number wouldn't connect.

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Last year, Hung went on a 30-day hunger strike, also starting on Sept. 4. He said he wanted to persuade authorities to give him the chance to appeal his conviction again because he was denied a lawyer at his initial appeal and his family wasn’t told when it was taking place.

He also asked prison officers to respect prisoners' rights and requested a visit from a National Assembly representative, saying he wanted to propose the establishment of a constitutional court in Vietnam. None of his requests was met.

Hung is a former teacher at Xa Dan school for the deaf in Hanoi.

He is well-known in Vietnam after live streaming news reports on Facebook and the CHTV pro-democracy YouTube channel, criticizing government policies and denouncing corruption.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

The hurricane, which caused catastrophic damage as it roared across the Caribbean and the Yucatan Peninsula, pummeled southeastern Texas on July 8 before spawning tornadoes, rain, and flooding as far north as Vermont. All told, the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded has claimed the lives of at least 20 people, including 10 in southeast Houston, and caused at least $3.3 billion in damage. That figure is sure to rise in the weeks and months ahead.

So too is the hunger crisis.

With Beryl long since past, the biggest threat facing Texans — particularly the almost 300,000 of them still without power on Monday — is brutal heat and unrelenting humidity. The heat index for some areas approached 106 degrees Fahrenheit Friday and stayed above 90 all weekend. Widespread outages did more than eliminate air conditioning when it was desperately needed. It also caused food to spoil in homes, supermarkets, and warehouses.

To help combat this, the Houston chapter of the national nonprofit Feeding America has deployed a fleet of 60 or so refrigerated trucks each day to distribute food. It is working with more than 300 organizations to provide upwards of 700,000 pounds of food daily. Such efforts will surely continue as the region slowly recovers. 

“There are immediate needs that happen because of the storm. ‘I don’t have power. What am I going to cook?’” said Brian Greene, president of Houston Food Bank. “Then it really moves into the households that don’t have that financial cushion that took the hit. For those households, we may be working with them for many weeks.”

The outages caused about a quarter of the organizations the food bank typically works with to shut down until electricity is restored. But international nonprofits including World Central Kitchen have mobilized, the federal government has approved additional SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, benefits, and the Texas Department of Emergency Management has supplied the Houston Food Bank with ready-made meals. Roughly 500 American Red Cross volunteers are operating 18 shelters across Harris and surrounding counties. They have distributed more than 56,000 meals and snacks to thousands of people in the last week. 

But these resources don’t always reach everyone. The elderly and home-bound, immigrants, those with disabilities, and families with children often face challenges accessing them, said Kassandra Martinchek of the Urban Institute. Language barriers also create an impediment to getting help. That compounds what is a chronic problem, as nearly half of the people who struggle to afford food in Texas also don’t qualify for federal assistance like SNAP. (Texas has the most food-insecure population in the country, according to a 2024 Feeding America report.)

While emergency food relief doesn’t reach everyone, it remains essential. “There still might be barriers for households, but this immediate response by charitable providers and by federal nutrition programs is an important part of the broader patchwork of programs that help families post-disaster,” said Martinchek, who researches food access. “[Food insecurity] is really this household economic condition wherein families aren’t able to get the food they need to live a healthy and active life.”

Disasters augment that crisis. Poverty rates tend to climb in areas impacted by them because many people, particularly low-income households, are less able to prepare for a looming storm or recover from the emotional and physical damage they wreak. This deepens existing racial and socioeconomic divides and exacerbates the food insecurity most commonly experienced by communities of color, those with disabilities, and households below the federal poverty line, because research has shown that food tends to be among the first expenditures financially unstable households cut during economic turbulence. (Not only do they buy less food, but the quality decreases as well.) The immense cost of recovering from a storm like Beryl can deepen the plight of families already battling hunger and push those on the verge of it over the “hunger cliff.”

A 2023 analysis examined 43 counties across the country in which Black and Latino families face conflating rates of food insecurity and climate risk and pegged the average per capita cost of climate disaster over the past decade at $1,822. That’s about double the average cost for all other counties that experienced such events. This suggests that those already struggling to meet their food needs bear the economic brunt of climate hazards. Meanwhile, around 37 percent of American households lack the savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.

All of this makes relief critical. In a federally-declared disaster like Beryl, emergency SNAP benefits and charitable efforts are intended to deliver food in the weeks, and sometimes months, after the calamity. D-SNAP, or disaster SNAP, which the government enacted July 12 for those impacted by Beryl, offers temporary additional assistance. 

Although such efforts provide a buffer against the increased risk of food insecurity a disaster creates, they do little to address the underlying factors driving hunger. Apart from the mass mobilization of food in the wake of a crisis, the U.S. government offers little more than programs with fragmented eligibility systems to help households grappling with reduced food purchasing power, said Kristen Wyman of the nonprofit WhyHunger.

“We know that hunger is solvable,” said Wyman. “But we still live in a system that is designed to have an emergency food response as the ongoing band-aid around hunger and poverty.” 

The nation’s disaster response plans ought to look beyond immediate needs and include efforts to foster equitable long-term food access, said Sommer Sibilly-Brown. She founded the nonprofit Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition, which advocates for farmers and food justice. Brown would like to see emergency relief funding allocated to rebuilding community food infrastructure and more comprehensive aid programs that include expanded funding mechanisms for lower-income households, growers and food industry workers.

“We attend to emergency shelters and household needs with food,” said Brown. “It’s a 90-day to six-month window, depending on the level of disaster. But food insecurity continues based on what systems have been impacted. Have people been able to go back to work? Have people moved and been displaced? Do people still have power?” 

In the coming weeks and months, as the scope of Beryl’s impact has been assessed and the cleanup continues, the urgency of the recovery will begin to dwindle — and so too will the hunger relief efforts. That will leave the most vulnerable communities to grapple with economic downtowns a disaster inevitably creates, leaving many of them worse off than they were before the storm. And, no doubt, no less hungry.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hunger was already bad enough. Then Beryl hit. on Jul 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

The hurricane, which caused catastrophic damage as it roared across the Caribbean and the Yucatan Peninsula, pummeled southeastern Texas on July 8 before spawning tornadoes, rain, and flooding as far north as Vermont. All told, the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded has claimed the lives of at least 20 people, including 10 in southeast Houston, and caused at least $3.3 billion in damage. That figure is sure to rise in the weeks and months ahead.

So too is the hunger crisis.

With Beryl long since past, the biggest threat facing Texans — particularly the almost 300,000 of them still without power on Monday — is brutal heat and unrelenting humidity. The heat index for some areas approached 106 degrees Fahrenheit Friday and stayed above 90 all weekend. Widespread outages did more than eliminate air conditioning when it was desperately needed. It also caused food to spoil in homes, supermarkets, and warehouses.

To help combat this, the Houston chapter of the national nonprofit Feeding America has deployed a fleet of 60 or so refrigerated trucks each day to distribute food. It is working with more than 300 organizations to provide upwards of 700,000 pounds of food daily. Such efforts will surely continue as the region slowly recovers. 

“There are immediate needs that happen because of the storm. ‘I don’t have power. What am I going to cook?’” said Brian Greene, president of Houston Food Bank. “Then it really moves into the households that don’t have that financial cushion that took the hit. For those households, we may be working with them for many weeks.”

The outages caused about a quarter of the organizations the food bank typically works with to shut down until electricity is restored. But international nonprofits including World Central Kitchen have mobilized, the federal government has approved additional SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, benefits, and the Texas Department of Emergency Management has supplied the Houston Food Bank with ready-made meals. Roughly 500 American Red Cross volunteers are operating 18 shelters across Harris and surrounding counties. They have distributed more than 56,000 meals and snacks to thousands of people in the last week. 

But these resources don’t always reach everyone. The elderly and home-bound, immigrants, those with disabilities, and families with children often face challenges accessing them, said Kassandra Martinchek of the Urban Institute. Language barriers also create an impediment to getting help. That compounds what is a chronic problem, as nearly half of the people who struggle to afford food in Texas also don’t qualify for federal assistance like SNAP. (Texas has the most food-insecure population in the country, according to a 2024 Feeding America report.)

While emergency food relief doesn’t reach everyone, it remains essential. “There still might be barriers for households, but this immediate response by charitable providers and by federal nutrition programs is an important part of the broader patchwork of programs that help families post-disaster,” said Martinchek, who researches food access. “[Food insecurity] is really this household economic condition wherein families aren’t able to get the food they need to live a healthy and active life.”

Disasters augment that crisis. Poverty rates tend to climb in areas impacted by them because many people, particularly low-income households, are less able to prepare for a looming storm or recover from the emotional and physical damage they wreak. This deepens existing racial and socioeconomic divides and exacerbates the food insecurity most commonly experienced by communities of color, those with disabilities, and households below the federal poverty line, because research has shown that food tends to be among the first expenditures financially unstable households cut during economic turbulence. (Not only do they buy less food, but the quality decreases as well.) The immense cost of recovering from a storm like Beryl can deepen the plight of families already battling hunger and push those on the verge of it over the “hunger cliff.”

A 2023 analysis examined 43 counties across the country in which Black and Latino families face conflating rates of food insecurity and climate risk and pegged the average per capita cost of climate disaster over the past decade at $1,822. That’s about double the average cost for all other counties that experienced such events. This suggests that those already struggling to meet their food needs bear the economic brunt of climate hazards. Meanwhile, around 37 percent of American households lack the savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.

All of this makes relief critical. In a federally-declared disaster like Beryl, emergency SNAP benefits and charitable efforts are intended to deliver food in the weeks, and sometimes months, after the calamity. D-SNAP, or disaster SNAP, which the government enacted July 12 for those impacted by Beryl, offers temporary additional assistance. 

Although such efforts provide a buffer against the increased risk of food insecurity a disaster creates, they do little to address the underlying factors driving hunger. Apart from the mass mobilization of food in the wake of a crisis, the U.S. government offers little more than programs with fragmented eligibility systems to help households grappling with reduced food purchasing power, said Kristen Wyman of the nonprofit WhyHunger.

“We know that hunger is solvable,” said Wyman. “But we still live in a system that is designed to have an emergency food response as the ongoing band-aid around hunger and poverty.” 

The nation’s disaster response plans ought to look beyond immediate needs and include efforts to foster equitable long-term food access, said Sommer Sibilly-Brown. She founded the nonprofit Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition, which advocates for farmers and food justice. Brown would like to see emergency relief funding allocated to rebuilding community food infrastructure and more comprehensive aid programs that include expanded funding mechanisms for lower-income households, growers and food industry workers.

“We attend to emergency shelters and household needs with food,” said Brown. “It’s a 90-day to six-month window, depending on the level of disaster. But food insecurity continues based on what systems have been impacted. Have people been able to go back to work? Have people moved and been displaced? Do people still have power?” 

In the coming weeks and months, as the scope of Beryl’s impact has been assessed and the cleanup continues, the urgency of the recovery will begin to dwindle — and so too will the hunger relief efforts. That will leave the most vulnerable communities to grapple with economic downtowns a disaster inevitably creates, leaving many of them worse off than they were before the storm. And, no doubt, no less hungry.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hunger was already bad enough. Then Beryl hit. on Jul 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

The statement was issued to mark three years since Alsingace—an award-winning academic, blogger, and human rights defender—began a hunger strike on July 8, 2021, after prison authorities confiscated his manuscript on Bahraini dialects of Arabic, which he spent four years researching and writing.

Alsingace, who has a disability, has been detained since 2011 and reportedly tortured.

The joint statement is available in English here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today’s savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it “left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword.”  This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later.  Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of of one’s ancestors’ perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today’s Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels?  Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price.  Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Frantz Fanon wrote accurately about the link between bread and land: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

Without bread to eat, as Marx and Victor Hugo told us in their different ways, the desperate become desperadoes.

The poet Patrick Kavanaugh, in his haunting long poem, “The Great Hunger,” concluded it thus: “The hungry fiend/Screams the apocalypse of clay/In every corner of this land.”  Lines that with a slight difference pertain to every land where famine is used as a weapon of war.

But why is this so?  What is this demonic force that drives some human animals to oppress others?

I think we can agree that humans have animal needs of hunger, thirst, sex, etc. that need to be satisfied, but that we also are symbolic creatures – angels with anuses as Ernest Becker has said so pungently in his classic book, The Denial of Death.  We live in a world of symbols, not merely matter.  Unlike other animal species, we have made death conscious and must deal with that consciousness one way or another.  We have beliefs, ideas, symbol systems and get our sense of self-worth symbolically.  Of course, the anuses are the problem because they remind us that despite all our highfalutin fantasies of omnipotence of the symbolic sort, what goes in one hole comes out the other and like those backdoor hole deposits we too are destined for underground holes in the earth.

But this is unacceptable.  The thought of it drives many savagely crazy – individuals, groups, and nations.  So, as Becker writes, “An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn’t come off second best.”  Herein lies the root of competition and the desire to be successful and hoist the symbolic trophies that declare us winners.  And if there are winners, there must be losers.  If I win and you lose, then I can feel superior to you and “good about myself,” at least in the realm where we compete.  Equality is a problem for humans, whom Nietzsche termed “the disease called man.”  This sense of competition can be relatively harmless or deadly.

History is replete with the latter type, where the fear of not being immortal leads to the extermination of others, as if to say: “See, we are number one.”  You die but we live.  This is the case with the present Israeli policy of genocide of the Palestinians through famine, bombs, and guns.  The chosen enemy is always considered dirt, pigs, reduced to animal status not worthy to exist, and in a transference of existential trepidation emanating from a deep sense of insecurity masked as triumphalism, must be eliminated because their very existence threatens the oppressors God-like sense of themselves.

There is physical hunger and there is symbolic hunger.  Each needs satisfaction.  In a just and equitable world, the hunger for bread would be easy to satisfy.  It is the symbolic hunger for an answer to death that poses the deeper problem and causes the former.  For in a world where people could recognize their fears and deep-seated anxieties and stop transferring them to others, the bread of truth might reign.  We might stop slaughtering and starving others to purge ourselves of the self-hate and insecurity that drives us to feel the love of our fellow victimizers but the hate of our victims.  No one would be Number One.  All would be chosen and feast as equals at the table of the bread of life.

If only the Israeli and U.S. government leaders were wise enough to read, they might read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and turn from the path of their joint obsession to obliterate the world for a trophy that they will never hoist.  Ishmael might reach them with his words: “For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”  And they might seek peace, not an expansion of war.

If only. . . . but I dream, for they have chosen war, and the dark furies lay in wait.t navigation

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

One year ago this week, a devastating conflict erupted in Sudan when a fragile alliance between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces collapsed. The war initially began around the capital city of Khartoum but quickly spread to other parts of Sudan, including Darfur, Port Sudan and the Gezira state, situated in the country’s agricultural heartland. One year on, the conflict has driven nearly 9 million people from their homes, collapsed the country’s health system and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis. “This is essentially a war between two generals,” says Khalid Mustafa Medani, chair of the African studies program at McGill University, who explains why the warring parties have “absolutely no legitimacy in civil society” and how the fighting is weaponizing international aid. “Despite the severity of this conflict, there is only one solution and only one interest on the part of the majority of Sudanese — 99% of Sudanese — and that is the restoration of full civilian democracy.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The statement was issued to mark 1,000 days since Alsingace—an award-winning academic, blogger, and human rights defender—began a hunger strike on July 8, 2021, after prison authorities confiscated his manuscript on Bahraini dialects of Arabic, which he spent four years researching and writing.

Alsingace, who has a disability, has been detained since 2011 and reportedly tortured.

The joint statement is available in English and العربية.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Democracy Now! speaks with an active-duty soldier in the U.S. Air Force on hunger strike to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Senior Airman Larry Hebert is on day three of his hunger strike outside the White House, where he has been holding a sign that reads “Active Duty Airman Refuses to Eat While Gaza Starves.” “It’s just completely wrong and immoral for civilians to be starved and bombed and targeted in any manner,” says Hebert. “I’m hoping that other active-duty members will be more public with their concern over the atrocities happening in Gaza.” Hebert was inspired by the actions of Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in February to demand a Gaza ceasefire. “What really infuriated me was the silence thereafter. … I don’t know a single member of our government or leaders in the military that really spoke on Aaron, even uttered his name,” says Hebert, who is now looking to leave the military after learning more about U.S. foreign policy. “I can’t see myself continuing service.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Sudan is on track to become the world’s worst hunger crisis, according to the United Nations. For over a year, fighting between the Sudanese military and the rival Rapid Support Forces has disrupted the country, displacing over 8 million people who experience extreme hunger in the areas with the most intense fighting. The increasing demand comes as the U.N.'s appeal for $2.7 billion for Sudan is less than 5% funded. Funding is also drying up in Chad, where some 1.2 million Sudanese have taken refuge. “This is the largest sort of mass mortality crisis that we are facing in the world and the largest that we have probably faced for many decades,” says Alex de Waal, the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, who laments the “shocking” cuts to the World Food Programme that is essential to the global emergency response system. “If it doesn't work, we are going to find ourselves facing the kinds of crises of mass mortality that we have simply not seen for half a century or longer.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The United States’ airdrops of aid into Gaza are a textbook case of cognitive dissonance on the part of the US administration — dropping food while continuing to send Israel bombs with which to pulverise Gaza, reports Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post.

And, says the media watch programme presenter Richard Gizbert, the gulf between what is happening on the ground and the mainstream media’s reportage continues to widen.

Gizbert criticises the airdrops, what he calls the “optics of urgency, the illusions of aid”.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: Nearly 100 people killed in last 24 hours
• Other Listening Post items

“An absurd spectacle as the US drops aid into Gaza while also arming Israel,” he says.

Gizbert critically examines the Israeli disinformation strategy over atrocities such as the gunning down of at least 116 starving Gazans in the so-called “flour massacre” of 29 February 2024 — first denial, then blame the Palestinians, and finally accept only limited responsibility.

“The US air drops into the Gaza Strip are pure theatre. The US has been supplying thousands of tonnes into the Gaza Strip — but those have been high explosives,” says Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya.

“And then to claim that somehow it is ameliorated by 38,000 meals ready to eat is quite obscene to put it politely.

“People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.”

‘Who is the superpower?’
Australian author Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, says: “When I saw the US drop food, my first response was really anger; it was horror that this is apparently the best the US can do.

Absurd Aid Air Drops in Gaza.   Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post, 9 March 2024

“Who is the superpower here? Is it the US or Israel? There is no place that is safe. There is no place where you can find reliable food, where people can get shelter.

“Gazans are exhausted, angry and scared, and do not buy this argument that the US is suddenly caring about them by airdropping a handful of food.”

“People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.

Contributors:
Laura Albast — Fellow, Institute for Palestine Studies
Mohamad Bazzi — Director of NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
Antony Loewenstein — Author, The Palestine Laboratory
Mouin Rabbani — Co-editor, Jadaliyya

On Our Radar:
Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the war has been a delicate subject for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The war has led to censorship of news coverage and suppression of public protest. Meenakshi Ravi reports.

Israel’s cultural annihilation in Gaza
The Listening Post has covered Israel’s war on Gaza through the prism of the media, including the unprecedented killing of Palestinian journalists. But there is another level to what is unfolding in Gaza: the genocidal assault on Palestinian history, existence and culture.

Featuring:
Jehad Abusalim – Executive director, The Jerusalem Fund

• The Listening Post is a weekly media watchdog programme at Al Jazeera

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.

Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs, “Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”

The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”

Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”

The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.

In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”

The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am.”

But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.

On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.

Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.

As Professor Sachs stated, “…Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, “Before yesterday’s ‘Flour Massacre’, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”

The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.

You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.

Starvation in Syria was another matter

The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.

In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syrian government.

Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.

As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.

In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.

Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.

Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”=good, Assad=bad.

But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.

Open the borders

Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.

“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.

She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”

This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.

Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”

Professor Sachs made an important point: “This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none…They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support…that is not stopping this slaughter.”

Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

First published at RT.com.

The post The Hunger Killing Gaza’s Children Has a Clear Cause that Few are Willing to Name out Loud first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eva Bartlett.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/12/the-hunger-killing-gazas-children-has-a-clear-cause-that-few-are-willing-to-name-out-loud/feed/ 0 463618 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/10/net-zero-the-digital-panopticon-and-the-future-of-food/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/10/net-zero-the-digital-panopticon-and-the-future-of-food/#respond Sun, 10 Mar 2024 14:30:09 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=148767 The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system. Writer Ted Reece notes […]

The post Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.

Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

Shift to authoritarianism

The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

Net-zero agenda

But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.

All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

Here’s a quote from it:

Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.

Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

Fake green

The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

• The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

The post Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/10/net-zero-the-digital-panopticon-and-the-future-of-food/feed/ 0 463209 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/09/the-politics-of-starvation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/09/the-politics-of-starvation/#respond Sat, 09 Mar 2024 23:11:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=148754 No evil in post-World War II history matches Israel in its genocide of the Palestinian people. The ultimate evil used the October 7 single attack on fortified Israel as an excuse to destroy a defenseless people ─ driving them from their homes, killing them in the open, limiting their access to water, making them susceptible […]

The post The Politics of Starvation first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> No evil in post-World War II history matches Israel in its genocide of the Palestinian people. The ultimate evil used the October 7 single attack on fortified Israel as an excuse to destroy a defenseless people ─ driving them from their homes, killing them in the open, limiting their access to water, making them susceptible to contagious diseases, moving them around into desperation, and terrifying the children into life-long traumas. Apparently, that evil-doing was insufficient for the morally bankrupt Israel; its government decided to turn a debilitated, shocked, and pleading population into starving corpses.

Added to this evil are its allies — a bewildered world that does nothing to halt the obvious genocide and coordinated media instructors who divert the discussion.

The captured media turned demonstrations that confronted the U.S. government’s assistance in Israel’s genocide into an overriding and spurious discussion of anti-Semitism in America ─ a few well-placed Israel supporters claimed they could not go to class. In America, taunts at genocide supporters are more important than the genocide. Now we have the confrontation of the Israeli government in their starvation of the Palestinian people turned into a debate of whether Israeli soldiers deliberately killed Palestinians obtaining food aid or whether the Palestinians died from chaotic conditions. We have confirmation that several Palestinians died from bullets. Because they might obtain food and escape dying from starvation, Israel’s soldiers shot them. Why argue the numbers, one is as bad as 100. We also know that Israel’s military incursion into Gaza precipitated this situation and the path to starvation has been carefully planned, starvation of the mind, the body, and the emotions.

Bomb all the homes so Gazans cannot store food and cook. Destroy the Al-Ailat bakery, and make sure the Gazans don’t get their bread. Destroy the AbuShahla orange farm and make sure the Gazans don’t get their nutrients. Destroy the Italiano Pizzeria and make sure the Gazans don’t get their carbs. Destroy all the libraries, parks, cultural centers, schools, and mosques, and make sure the Gazans have no place to go for solace. Destroy all the hospitals so that after they get sick and wounded the Gazans have no way to recuperate.

The weapon of starvation is not original; Israel has a good teacher ─ its benefactor, the democratic, freedom-loving United States of America. Not preventing starvation in the past has led to the present use of the weapon of starvation.

The Politics of Starvation

The powerful cannot always use military might to suppress adversaries. Their citizens and world opinion may react unfavorably and undermine a military adventure. Logistics may not favor it. Besides, they have other means, one of which is economic warfare; a method that can silently crush an adversary without firing a shot. Going to the extreme, economic warfare has the force of a neutron bomb; it disables the nation’s infrastructure and debilitates the population.

Economic warfare requires preparation before implementation.

First, the “grieved” country accuses its adversary of intended crimes of aggression. The adversary is powerless to defend and becomes marked with the adjective “rogue state.” Since the “rogue state” cannot ameliorate the crimes of which it is accused, being that they may not exist, and because these states are usually proud and will not compromise with their national integrity (one reason for their fate) further action must be taken against them. The next step is isolation. This step has several stages.

Although contrary to law in democratic countries and contradictory to the criticism made by the democratic countries against a policy of the former Soviet Union, which imposed travel restrictions on its citizens, the “grieved” country cautions and sometimes forbids all its citizens, except its intelligence services, to travel to the “rogue state.” Subtle enforcement procedures, such as heavy fines, harassment, embarrassing airport searches, letting the neighbors know, and calls from the Internal Revenue Department are used to protect travelers from being contaminated with “rogue” germs, shield them from vicious propaganda, and prevent them from being kidnapped for ransom and from being arrested due to accusations of spying. The two latter reasons are valid. The unmentioned reasons are to assure the adversary doesn’t acquire tourist dollars that enable it to survive, make certain that travelers don’t learn that all they have read and heard from their government is propaganda, and prevent rogueidization, in which a citizen suddenly sympathizes with the rogue and acquires rogue traits.

In the final stage, the enemy is isolated from international agencies, relief efforts, finances, and communications. After being forced into isolation, the enemy might achieve the adjective “hermit kingdom.” That denomination signifies it is ready for the great strike ─ economic warfare. The economic warfare punch has many shapes. If preferred sanctions are insufficiently effective, warships produce an illegal embargo by arriving close to the beaches and dwarfing the rowboats of the sanctioned nation, or airplanes guard against the infiltration of military weapons, such as water pumps, medicines, and construction materials. If the embargo does not complete the cleansing task, then the “grieved” country might arm surrogate warriors inside or close to the “rogue country” and have them add human catastrophes to the imposed catastrophes that already punish the undesired country.

“Rogues,” which have special qualifications, earn the title of terrorists. This title sticks to their names like velcro. It appears in all articles, headlines, dispatches, reports, and news as if the word terrorist followed by the name is one word. The “terrorist xxxx” (insert Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran) earns this title by committing an evil deed that is usually in response to the tens of evil deeds committed against it. At times, economic warfare leads to a final step in whipping a “terrorist nation” back into shape ─ borderline starvation. If the food supply dwindles, certainly the unfortunate citizens of the “terrorist nation” will act as those who proclaimed “Liberte,” “Egalitie” and “Fraternitie” in the French Revolution. They will storm the gates of their oppressors, take away their cake, and demand bread. The United States has implemented political policies that have harmed nutrition in several countries. Despite the punitive measures, the leaders of “terrorist” nations still eat cake, while the populations suffer greatly from economic deprivation and, in some cases, function at a subsistence level

Since 1998, the US has established economic sanctions on more than 20 countries. The effectiveness of these sanctions in changing the Rogue” nation’s posture is described in two reports:

(1)    In an earlier report Daniel Griswold, “Going Alone on Economic Sanctions Hurts U.S. More than Foes.” CATO Institute, September 23, 2000, showed that trade sanctions failed to change the behavior of sanctioned countries, barred American companies from economic opportunities, and harmed the poorest people in the countries under sanctions, without significantly advancing national security.

From Cuba to Iran to Burma, sanctions have failed to achieve the goal of changing the behavior or the nature of target regimes. Sanctions have, however, deprived American companies of international business opportunities, punished domestic consumers, and hurt the poor and most vulnerable in the target countries. According to the president’s Export Council, the United States has imposed more than 40 trade sanctions against about three-dozen countries since 1993. The council estimates that those sanctions have cost American exporters $15 billion to $19 billion in lost annual sales overseas and caused long-term damage to U.S. companies ─ lost market share and reputations abroad as unreliable suppliers.

(2)    Dursun Peksen, “Better or Worse? The Effect of Economic Sanctions on Human Rights,” Journal of Peace Research, shows that extensive sanctions are more detrimental to human rights.

Utilizing time-series, cross-national data for the period 1981—2000, the findings suggest that economic sanctions worsen government respect for physical integrity rights, including freedom from disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture, and political imprisonment.

In almost all cases, sanctioned countries have not changed their behavior and innocent civilians have greatly suffered.

Russia

Sanctions against Russia have failed to stifle the economy or diminish Putin’s willingness to continue the war. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts Russia’s Gross domestic product to rise by 2.6 percent in 2024. Cost of food in Russia increased 8.10 percent in January of 2024 over the same month in the previous year. Food Inflation averaged 9.14 percent from 2002 until 2024. Russian fossil fuel exports steadily declined after the invasion.

Iran

Iran’s romance with the atomic age provoked a series of sanctions  Asset freezes (March 2008) and an expanded arms embargo (June 2010) prohibited Iran from buying heavy weapons, such as attack helicopters and missiles. All of this initially proved futile and counterproductive. The 2007 US sanctions against Iranian banks provided Iran with immunity from the global financial crisis and enabled it to be one of the few major economies not to be severely affected by the economic downturn.

Economic warfare soon reached full scale by strikes against Iran’s earnings from its most precious resource and export ─ oil. The U.S. Congress passed unilateral sanctions that targeted Iran’s energy and banking sectors and penalties were imposed on firms that supplied Iran with substantial amounts of refined petroleum products.

The economic warfare affected Iran’s industries and welfare. In February 2024, Iran’s currency, the Rial, fell to a record low against the US dollar, losing about 95 percent of its value in the last decade. Lack of spare parts and inability to replace planes have affected aviation safety. Real GDP fell from $644b in 2010 to $240b in 2020 and is expected to rise to $421b in 2024.

Food Inflation in Iran averaged 34.95 percent from 2012 until 2024, reaching an all-time high of 87.00 percent in July of 2022

Sanctions have not stopped Iran’s nuclear activities, not prevented it from signing contracts with foreign firms to develop its energy resources, and not stopped the Islamic nation from implementing other contracts by funding in currencies other than the dollar. Crude oil exports, an essential part of Iran’s economy greatly declined, but, increased in recent years, as Iran adapted to a new world order.

Iraq

If Iraq were Pompeii, then the US would be Mt. Vesuvius.

After destroying much of Iraq in a declared war, the U.S. continued to destroy it further ─ first in the post-1991 Gulf War and later in the post-2003 invasion.

Excerpts from A UN Report on the Current Humanitarian Situation in Iraq, outline the suffering of the Iraqi people from the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Before the Gulf War

•  Before 1991 Iraq’s social and economic indicators were generally above the regional and developing country averages.
• Up to 1990, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) cited Iraq as having one of the highest per capita food availability indicators in the region.
• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), prior to 1991, health care reached approximately 97% of the urban population and 78% of rural residents.
• A major reduction in young child mortality took place from 1960 to 1990; with the infant mortality rate at 65 per 1,000 live births in 1989 (1991 Human Development Report average for developing countries was 76 per 1,000 live births.)
• Southern and central Iraq had well-developed water and sanitation systems, composed of two hundred water treatment plants (“wtp’s”) for urban areas and 1200 compact wtp’s to serve rural areas, as well as an extensive distribution network. WHO estimates that 90% of the population had access to an abundant quantity of safe drinking water.

After the Gulf War

• Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that Iraqi GDP may have fallen by nearly 67% in 1991, and the nation had “experienced a shift from relative affluence to massive poverty” and now had infant mortality rates that were “among the highest in the world.”
• The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimated the maternal mortality rate increased from 50/100,000 live births in 1989 to 117/100,000 in 1997.
• Calorie intake fell from a pre-war 3120 to 1093 calories per capita/per day in 1994-95.
• The prevalence of malnutrition in Iraqi children under five almost doubled from 1991 to 1996 (from 12% to 23%). Acute malnutrition in Center/South rose from 3% to 11% for the same age bracket.
• The World Food Program (WFP) estimated that access to potable water decreased to 50% of the 1990 level in urban areas and 33% in rural areas.
• School enrollment for all ages (6-23) declined to 53%. According to a field survey conducted in 1993, as quoted by UNESCO, in Central and Southern governorates, 83% of school buildings needed rehabilitation, with 8613 out of 10,334 schools having suffered serious damage.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq continued the destruction of Iraq.
Iraq became a war-torn nation, with sectarian strife bordering on civil war. By October 2010, post-invasion deaths of Iraqi civilians were estimated at almost 187,151 – 210,610.

A London Guardian report provided additional information on the effects of the war on Iraqi civilians: Rory Carroll in Baghdad: March 31, 2005, The Guardian reports:

Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children aged under five nearly doubled last year because of chaos caused by the US-led occupation, a United Nations expert said yesterday. Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission’s special expert on the right to food, said more than a quarter of Iraqi children do not have enough to eat and 7.7% are acutely malnourished – a jump from 4% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion. Reporting to the commission’s headquarters in Geneva, the Swiss professor claimed the situation was “a result of the war led by coalition forces.”

Excerpt from Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Joy Gordon. Harvard University Press, 2010, describes the extent of irrational economic warfare conducted by the United States against a defenseless Iraq.

For thirteen years the United States unilaterally prevented Iraq from importing nearly everything related to electricity, telecommunications, and transportation, blocked much of what was needed for agriculture and housing construction, and even prohibited some equipment and materials necessary for health care and food preparation.

On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Commentator Lesley Stahl asked the ambassador, “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Madeleine Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

Conclusion

Warfare is visualized in terms of dead soldiers, battlefield blood, eerie noises, and bombed-out structures. We cannot easily comprehend that warfare can be silent and still be deadly. Economic warfare has equivalents to military war. The country that takes the offense becomes the aggressor, as in any war, and the destruction to the defending state is equally brutal. In most cases, the economic war has worse results. In a one-sided manner, the civilian population of the defending nation suffers greatly and the aggressor country suffers few losses. The war rarely achieves the results that the offended party desired, and no peace treaty is signed. The struggle remains an open issue.

Gazans have suffered all forms of warfare — military, political, economic, and the politics of starvation. Their courage and battle to survive have no equal in all of history. A new word should be added to the language to remember their sacrifices ─  Gazavalor is one suggestion.

Israel’s tactics also deserve an addition to the vocabulary, one that describes its genocidal nature ─ Israelicide.

A major part of the corrupted U.S. media continues to rationalize Israel’s use of the weapon of starvation for the destruction of the Palestinian people and depicts Israelis as the victims. Some parts of the media give the starving Palestinians a voice and temper their voice with Israeli propaganda to give the situation a balance. Genocide cannot be balanced.

The American government’s obedience to its criminal partner, Israel, is an insult to the American people and pretends an equitable solution to a crisis. In the latest maneuver, President Biden, knowing he is losing support for his obsequious relationship with Israel, sought a scheming way out of his dilemma. He sent Vice-President, Kamala Harris, who will probably be ditched in the next election, to demand an immediate cease-fire. Israel will ignore the advice and AIPAC will get the hint  ─ undermine Kamala Harris.

A satisfactory use of the weapon of starvation is to starve the beast and the beast is Israel.

The post The Politics of Starvation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/09/the-politics-of-starvation/feed/ 0 463125 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/07/argentinas-8m-feminist-strike-women-are-protesting-cuts-and-hunger/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/07/argentinas-8m-feminist-strike-women-are-protesting-cuts-and-hunger/#respond Thu, 07 Mar 2024 14:02:40 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/feminism-argentina-strike-food-crisis-8-march-javier-milei-inflation/
This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Angelina de los Santos.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/07/argentinas-8m-feminist-strike-women-are-protesting-cuts-and-hunger/feed/ 0 462724 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/04/morocco-prison-confiscates-journalists-letter-to-wife-prompting-hunger-strike/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/04/morocco-prison-confiscates-journalists-letter-to-wife-prompting-hunger-strike/#respond Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:29:49 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=363593 New York, March 4, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Moroccan prison authorities’ decision to prevent imprisoned journalist Soulaiman Raissouni from sending a letter to his wife and urgently calls for his immediate release.

After authorities in the Ain Borja prison confiscated and withheld a letter meant for his wife, Raissouni, editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Akhbar al-Youm, began a hunger strike on Thursday, February 29, according to a Facebook post by Kholoud Mokhtari, Raissouni’s wife. In a statement issued to local news outlets, prison authorities said the hunger strike was incited by “foreign entities.”

“We are shocked by Ain Borja prison authorities’ continuous harassment of imprisoned journalist Soulaiman Raissouni, who is being denied his lawful right to send letters, which prompted him to start a hunger strike in protest,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour from Washington, D.C. “Moroccan authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Raissouni, especially since his last hunger strike gravely deteriorated his health.”

Raissouni was arrested on May 22, 2020, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence on sexual assault charges. Since 2018, Morocco has repeatedly used sex crime allegations to target journalists; as of December 1, 2023, three journalists were imprisoned in the country for alleged sex crimes, according to CPJ’s most recent prison census.

On April 8, 2021, before his sentencing, Raissouni began a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment that lasted 122 days. As a result, the journalist lost more than 66 pounds, developed chronic hypertension, lost consciousness several times, and could no longer move his right leg freely. 

CPJ’s emails to Morocco’s Ministry of Interior for comment did not receive any response. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/04/morocco-prison-confiscates-journalists-letter-to-wife-prompting-hunger-strike/feed/ 0 462056 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/conscious-and-unconscionable-the-starving-of-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/conscious-and-unconscionable-the-starving-of-gaza/#respond Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:24:38 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=148540 The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip.  One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services. […]

The post Conscious and Unconscionable: The Starving of Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip.  One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services.

In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

A month has elapsed since the ICJ order, after which Israel was meant to report back on compliance.  But, as Amnesty International reports, Israel continues “to disregard its obligation as the occupying power to ensure the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are met.”

The organisation’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Heba Morayef, gives a lashing summary of that conduct.  “Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying callous indifference to the fate of Gaza’s population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said placed them at imminent risk of genocide.”  Israel, Morayef continues to state, had “woefully failed to provide for Gazans’ basic needs” and had “been blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza strip, in particular to the north which is virtually inaccessible, in a clear show of contempt for the ICJ ruling and in flagrant violation of its obligation to prevent genocide.”

The humanitarian accounting on this score is grim.  Since the ICJ order, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has precipitously declined.  Within three weeks, it had fallen by a third: an average of 146 a day were coming in three weeks prior; afterwards, the numbers had fallen to about 105.  Prior to the October 7 assault by Hamas, approximately 500 trucks were entering the strip on a daily basis.

The criminally paltry aid to the besieged Palestinians is even too much for some Israeli protest groups which have formed with one single issue in mind: preventing any aid from being sent into Gaza.  As a result, closures have taken place at Kerem Shalom due to protests and clashes with security forces.

Their support base may seem to be small and peppered by affiliates from the Israeli Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but an Israeli Democracy Institute poll conducted in February found that 68% of Jewish respondents opposed the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza.  Rachel Touitou of Tzav 9, a group formed in December with that express purpose in mind, stated her reasoning as such: “You cannot expect the country to fight its enemy and feed it at the same time.”

Hardly subtle, but usefully illustrative of the attitude best reflected by the blood curdling words of Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who declared during the campaign that his country’s armed forces were “fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” in depriving them of electricity, food and fuel.

In December 2023, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding, among other things, that the warring parties “allow and facilitate the use of all available routes to and throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including border crossings”.  Direct routes were also to be prioritised.  To date, Israel has refused to permit aid through other crossings.

In February, the Global Nutrition Cluster reported that “the nutrition situation of women and children in Gaza is worsening everywhere, but especially in Northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children are acutely malnourished and an estimated 3% face the most severe form of wasting and require immediate treatment.”

The organisation’s report makes ugly reading.  Over 90% of children between 6 to 23 months along with pregnant and breastfeeding women face “severe food poverty”, with the food supplied being “of the lowest nutritional value and from two or fewer food groups.”  At least 90% of children under the age of 5 are burdened with one or more infectious diseases, while 70% have suffered from diarrhoea over the previous two weeks.  Safe and clean water, already a problem during the 16-year blockade, is now in even shorter supply, with 81% of households having access to less than one litre per person per day.

Reduced to such conditions of monumental and raw desperation, hellish scenes of Palestinians swarming around aid convoys were bound to manifest.  On February 29, Gaza City witnessed one such instance, along with a lethal response from Israeli troops.  In the ensuing violence, some 112 people were killed, adding to a Palestinian death toll that has already passed 30,000.  While admitting to opening fire on the crowd, the IDF did not miss a chance to paint their victims as disorderly savages, with “dozens” being “killed and injured from pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks.”  The acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Salha, in noting the admission of some 161 wounded patients, suggested that gun fire had played its relevant role, given that most of those admitted suffered from gunshot wounds.

If Israel’s intention had been to demonstrate some good will in averting any insinuation that genocide was taking place, let alone a systematic policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian population, little evidence of it has been shown.  If anything, the suspicions voiced by South Africa and other critics aghast at the sheer ferocity of the campaign are starting to seem utter plausible in their horror.

The post Conscious and Unconscionable: The Starving of Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/conscious-and-unconscionable-the-starving-of-gaza/feed/ 0 461445 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/22/kazakh-journalist-mukhammedkarim-starts-hunger-strike-demanding-his-trial-be-public/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/22/kazakh-journalist-mukhammedkarim-starts-hunger-strike-demanding-his-trial-be-public/#respond Thu, 22 Feb 2024 11:10:31 +0000 https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakh-journalist-mukhammedkarim-hunger-strike-trial/32830675.html Ukraine's military has acknowledged it struck a training ground in occupied Kherson where Russian troops were preparing for an assault on Ukraine's bridgehead at Krynka on the left bank of the Dnieper River, the second time this week a strike has killed scores of Russian personnel.

At the same time, Kyiv denied Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's claim that Russian forces had captured the Ukrainian bridgehead at Krynka.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

"There were at least three strikes on the concentration of Russian troops at the training ground near Novaya Kakhovka," Nataliya Humenyuk, spokeswoman of the Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine, told RFE/RL on February 22.

"The Russian military was preparing to storm Krynka, which they claimed they had already been captured.... According to preliminary data, commanders of the Dnieper group [of Russian forces] were also there. The information is still being checked," Humenyuk said.

In a separate statement made to Suspilne, Humenyuk said at least 60 Russian soldiers were killed in the attack.

Russia has not commented on the strike, which was first reported by both the Ukrainian Telegram channel DeepState and Russian pro-war bloggers that it resulted in heavy losses. A video of the purported attack consisting of three strikes was also published on Telegram channels.

However, the information could not be independently verified.

At a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 20, Shoigu said Krynka "has been cleared," but Ukraine's military said his statement was "a falsification of the facts."

Ukrainian forces in November 2022 liberated Kherson city and the rest of the region on the right bank of the Dnieper forcing Russian troops across the river. Last year, Kyiv's troops managed to also establish a small bridgehead on the Dnieper's left bank, which has come under constant Russian attacks.

The purported Ukrainian strike on Russian forces in Kherson was the second in as many days in which a large number of Russian troops were reportedly killed.

On February 21, BBC Russian reported that a Ukrainian strike on a training ground in Moscow-occupied Donetsk had killed at least 60 Russian troops.

According to the report, Russian soldiers from the 36th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade had been lined up and were waiting for the arrival of Major General Oleg Moiseyev, commander of the 29th Russian Army, when the strike occurred on February 20.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine has commented on the report. Pro-Russian social media outlets posted videos and photos purportedly showing dozens of uniformed dead bodies, accusing Moiseyev of making soldiers stand in line waiting for his arrival when they were hit.

Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said on February 22 that since launching the invasion two year ago, Russia has launched more than 8,000 missiles and 4,630 drones -- of which 3,605 have been shot down -- at targets inside Ukraine.

In Moscow, former President Dmitry Medvedev boasted that after Ukrainian forces last week withdrew from the eastern city of Avdiyivka following a monthslong bloody battle, Russian troops would keep advancing deeper into Ukraine.

With the war nearing its two-year mark amid Ukrainian shortages of manpower, more advanced weapons, and ammunition, Medvedev signaled Moscow could again try and seize the capital after being pushed back decisively from the outskirts of Kyiv during the initial days of the invasion in February 2022.

"Where should we stop? I don't know," Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said in an interview with Russian media.

"Will it be Kyiv? Yes, it probably should be Kyiv. If not now, then after some time, maybe in some other phase of the development of this conflict," he said.

Medvedev was once considered a reformer in Russia, serving as president to allow Vladimir Putin to be prime minister for four years to abide by term limits before returning to the presidency for a third time in 2012.

But the 56-year-old former lawyer has become known more recently for his caustic articles, social media posts, and remarks that echo the outlandish kind of historical revisionism that Putin has used to vilify the West and underpin the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/22/kazakh-journalist-mukhammedkarim-starts-hunger-strike-demanding-his-trial-be-public/feed/ 0 460173 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/28/palestinian-agency-condemns-funding-cuts-as-collective-punishment/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/28/palestinian-agency-condemns-funding-cuts-as-collective-punishment/#respond Sun, 28 Jan 2024 08:15:48 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=96267 Asia Pacific Report

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has joined a chorus of global development and political figures defending the United Nations “lifeline” for more than two million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip enclave.

Declaring New Zealand should stick to its three-year funding agreement with the UN relief agency for Palestinians (UNRWA), Clark joined the pleas by the agency chief executive Philippe Lazzarini — who condemned the US action to suspend funding as “collective punishment” — and Secretary-General António Guterres.

New Zealand is due to fund the agency $1 million this year.

• READ MORE:  Israel’s war on Gaza live: Aid cuts are ‘collective punishment’ – UNRWA
• More countries pause funds for UN Palestinian agency

Protesters at an Auckland solidarity rally for Palestine demanding an immediate unconditional ceasefire also condemned the countries suspending UNRWA funding amid reports of serious flooding of Gaza refugee camps.

Suspension of funding by 9 countries to @UNRWA amounts to further collective punishment of besieged #Gaza population. #UNRWA is largest UN humanitarian & development service provider there. Staff accused of crimes have been dismissed. Do donors want relief operation to collapse? https://t.co/xU5jAfqm7T

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) January 27, 2024

Other political leaders to voice concerns as eight countries joined the US in announcing they were suspending their funding for UNRWA include Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf and former leader of the UK Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn.

Two countries — Ireland and Norway — declared they they would continue funding the agency and Lazzarini said: “It is shocking to see a suspension of funds to the agency in reaction to allegations against a small group of staff.”

Cuts one day after ICJ ruling
The cuts to funding were announced by the US a day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocidal acts and to punish those who committed such acts in its war on Gaza, and to immediately facilitate aid to the victims of the war.

Israel had alleged that about a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 employees had been involved in the deadly Hamas raid on southern Israel on October 7.

UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in #Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival.

93% of displaced families in southern governorates of#Gaza have reported inadequate food consumption.

People are desperate, hunger stalks everyone. pic.twitter.com/WLr0JYNRb2

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) January 27, 2024

The eight other countries that have joined the US in suspending funding are Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland.

“Serious as allegations around a tiny percentage of now former UNRWA staff may be, this isn’t the time to suspend funding to UN’s largest relief and development agency in Gaza,” said Clark, who is also the former head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), in a post on social media.

Secretary-General Guterres said in a statement that the UN had taken “swift actions” following the “serious allegations” against UNRWA staff members, terminating most of the suspects and activating an investigation.

“Of the 12 people implicated, nine were immediately identified and terminated by the Commissioner General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini, one is confirmed dead, and the identity of the two others is being clarified,” he said.

“Any UN employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.

‘Ready to cooperate’
“The secretariat is ready to cooperate with a competent authority able to prosecute the individuals in line with the secretariat’s normal procedures for such cooperation.

“Meanwhile, 2 million civilians in Gaza depend on critical aid from UNRWA for daily survival, but UNRWA’s current funding will not allow it to meet all requirements to support them in February.”

The day after @ICJ concluded that Israel is plausibly committing Genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA, collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time, and most likely violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention. https://t.co/fl32DrDeFs

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) January 27, 2024

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said that states cutting funding to UNRWA could be “violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention”.

“The day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA,” Albanese said in a post on social media.

Albanese also described the decision taken by several UNWRA donors as “collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time”.

Noting the irony, lawyer and social media content producer Rosy Pirani said in a post on Instagram: “The US stopped funding UNHRA over an unverified claim that some of its employees may have been involved in 10/7, but continues to fund Israel despite actual evidence [before the ICJ] that it is committing genocide.”

Meanwhile, the largest hospital in besieged Khan Younis city remained crippled and faced collapse as Israel’s offensive continued nearby. Doctors described it as a “dangerous situation”.

Footage showed people in the crowded facility being treated on blood-smeared floors as frantic loved ones shouted and jostled. Cats scavenged on a mound of medical waste.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/28/palestinian-agency-condemns-funding-cuts-as-collective-punishment/feed/ 0 455314 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/25/iranian-dissidents-at-home-and-abroad-go-on-hunger-strike-to-protest-executions/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/25/iranian-dissidents-at-home-and-abroad-go-on-hunger-strike-to-protest-executions/#respond Thu, 25 Jan 2024 16:14:21 +0000 https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-dissidents-hunger-strike-protest-executions/32791833.html It is not only missiles that are being lobbed as U.S. and U.K. air strikes aim to stop the Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen from targeting ships in a key global trade route -- mutual threats of continued attacks are flying around, too.

The question is how far each side might go in carrying out their warnings without drawing Tehran into a broader Middle East conflict in defense of the Huthis, whose sustained attacks on maritime shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden led to its redesignation as a terrorist organization by Washington last week.

"Our aim remains to de-escalate tensions and restore stability in the Red Sea," the United States and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement following their latest round of air strikes on Huthi targets in Yemen on January 21. "But let us reiterate our warning to [the] Huthi leadership: we will not hesitate to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most critical waterways in the face of continued threats."

The Huthis responded with vows to continue their war against what they called Israel's "genocide" of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

"The American-British aggression will only increase the Yemeni people’s determination to carry out their moral and humanitarian responsibilities toward the oppressed in Gaza," said Muhammad al-Bukhaiti, a senior Huthi political official.

"These attacks will not go unanswered and unpunished," said Huthi military spokesman Yahya Saree.

On cue, the two sides clashed again on January 24 when the Huthis said they fired ballistic missiles at several U.S. warships protecting U.S. commercial vessels transiting the Bab al-Mandab Strait off the coast of Yemen. U.S. Central Command said three anti-ship missiles were fired at a U.S.-flagged container ship and that two were shot down by a U.S. missile destroyer while the third fell into the Gulf of Aden.

With the stage set for more such encounters, Iran's open backing and clandestine arming of the Huthis looms large. While continuing to state its support for the Huthis, Tehran has continued to deny directing their actions or providing them with weapons. At the same time, Iran has showcased its own advanced missile capabilities as a warning of the strength it could bring to a broader Middle East conflict.

The United States, emphasizing that the goal is to de-escalate tensions in the region, appears to be focusing on preventing the Huthis from obtaining more arms and funding. In addition to returning the Huthis to its list of terrorist groups, Washington said on January 16 that it had seized Iranian weapons bound for the Huthis in a raid in the Arabian Sea.

The United States and United Kingdom also appear to be focusing on precision strikes on the Huthis' military infrastructure while avoiding extensive human casualties or a larger operation that could heighten Iran's ire.

On January 24, the Pentagon clarified that, despite the U.S. strikes in Yemen, "we are not at war in the Middle East" and the focus is on deterrence and preventing a broader conflict.

"The United States is only using a very small portion of what it's capable of against the Huthis right now," said Kenneth Katzman, a senior adviser for the New York-based Soufan Group intelligence consultancy, and expert on geopolitics in the Middle East.

Terrorist Designation

The effectiveness of Washington's restoration on January 17 of the Huthis' terrorist organization label and accompanying U.S. sanctions -- which was removed early last year in recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen and to foster dialogue aimed at ending the Yemeni civil war involving the Huthis and the country's Saudi-backed government forces -- is "marginal," according to Katzman.

"They don't really use the international banking system and are very much cut off," Katzman said. "They get their arms from Iran, which is under extremely heavy sanctions and is certainly not going to be deterred from trying to ship them more weapons by this designation."

But the strikes being carried out by the United States and the United Kingdom, with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands, are another matter.

The January 21 strikes against eight Huthi targets -- followed shortly afterward by what was the ninth attack overall -- were intended to disrupt and degrade the group's capabilities to threaten global trade. They were a response to more than 30 attacks on international and commercial vessels since mid-November and were the largest strikes since a similar coalition operation on January 11.

Such strikes against the Huthis "have the potential to deter them and to degrade them, but it's going to take many more strikes, and I think the U.S. is preparing for that," Katzman said. "You're not going to degrade their capabilities in one or two volleys or even several volleys, it's going to take months."

The Huthis have significant experience in riding out aerial strikes, having been under relentless bombardment by a Saudi-led military collation during the nine-year Yemeni civil war, in which fighting has ended owing to a UN-brokered cease-fire in early 2022 that the warring parties recommitted to in December.

"They weathered that pretty well," said Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East defense analyst with the global intelligence company Janes.

"On the battlefield, airpower can still be fairly decisive," Binnie said, noting that air strikes were critical in thwarting Huthi offensives during the Yemeni civil war. "But in terms of the Huthis' overall ability to weather the air campaign of the Saudi-led coalition, they did that fine, from their point of view."

Since the cease-fire, Binnie said, the situation may have changed somewhat as the Huthis built up their forces, with more advanced missiles and aging tanks -- a heavier presence that "might make them a bit more vulnerable."

"But I don't think they will, at the same time, have any problem reverting to a lighter force that is more resilient to air strikes as they have been in the past," Binnie said.

Both Binnie and Katzman suggested that the Huthis appear willing to sustain battlefield losses in pursuit of their aims, which makes the group difficult to deter from the air.

The Huthis have clearly displayed their intent on continuing to disrupt maritime shipping in the Red Sea, which they claim has targeted only vessels linked to Israel despite evidence to the contrary, until there is a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

This has brought the Huthis' complicated relationship with Iran under intense scrutiny.

'Axis Of Resistance'

The Huthis have established themselves as a potent element of Iran's so-called "axis of resistance" against Israel and the United States, as well as against Tehran's regional archrival, Saudi Arabia.

But analysts who spoke to RFE/RL widely dismissed the idea that the Huthis are a direct Iranian proxy, describing the relationship as more one of mutual benefit in which the Huthis can be belligerent and go beyond what Tehran wants them to.

While accused by Western states and UN experts of secretly shipping arms to the Huthis and other members of the axis of resistance, Iran has portrayed the loose-knit band of proxies and partners and militant groups as independent in their decision-making.

The grouping includes the Iran-backed Hamas -- the U.S. and EU designated terrorist group whose attack on Israel sparked the war in the Gaza Strip -- and Lebanese Hizballah -- a Iranian proxy and U.S. designated terrorist group that, like the Huthis, has launched strikes against Israel in defense of Hamas.

"The success of the axis of resistance ... is that since Tehran has either created or co-opted these groups, there is more often than not fusion rather than tension," between members of the network and Iran, explained Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

But the relationship is not simply about "Iran telling its proxies to jump and them saying how high," Taleblu said. "It’s about Iran’s ability to find and materially support those who are willing to or can be persuaded to shoot at those Tehran wants to shoot at."

Iran's interest in a certain axis member's success in a given area and its perception of how endangered that partner might be, could play a crucial role in Tehran's willingness to come to their defense, according to Taleblu.

Middle East observers who spoke to RFE/RL suggested that it would take a significant escalation -- an existential threat to Tehran itself or a proxy, like Lebanese Hizballah -- for Iran to become directly involved.

"The Islamic republic would react differently to the near eradication of Hizballah which it created, versus Hamas, which it co-opted," Taleblu said. "Context is key."

"Iran is doing what it feels it can to try to keep the United States at bay," Katzman said, singling out the missile strikes carried out on targets this month in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan that were widely seen as a warning to Israel and the United States of Tehran's growing military capabilities. Iran is "trying to show support for the Huthis without getting dragged in."

Iran is believed to have members of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the ground in Yemen. Tehran also continues to be accused of delivering arms to the Huthis, and at the start of the year deployed a ship to the Gulf of Aden in a show of support for the Huthis before withdrawing it after the U.S.-led coalition launched strikes in Yemen on January 11.

"So, they are helping," Katzman said, "but I think they are trying to do it as quietly and as under the radar as possible.

A U.S.-led ground operation against the Huthis, if it came to that, could change Iran's calculations. "Then Iran might deploy forces to help them out," Katzman said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/25/iranian-dissidents-at-home-and-abroad-go-on-hunger-strike-to-protest-executions/feed/ 0 454850 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/10/idf-is-using-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war-says-israeli-rights-group-btselem/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/10/idf-is-using-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war-says-israeli-rights-group-btselem/#respond Wed, 10 Jan 2024 14:56:53 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=85599fbc2e4ea64573e87991a4f21b02
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/10/idf-is-using-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war-says-israeli-rights-group-btselem/feed/ 0 450828 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/10/israel-is-starving-gaza-israeli-rights-group-btselem-says-idf-is-using-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/10/israel-is-starving-gaza-israeli-rights-group-btselem-says-idf-is-using-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war/#respond Wed, 10 Jan 2024 13:42:15 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=0c898c4fb6e6eb58daac615c93fab994

Human rights groups say Israel is using starvation as a weapon in the Gaza Strip as Israel severely restricts the delivery of humanitarian aid, medicine and food supplies to millions inside the besieged and bombed territory. In a new report,” Israeli human rights group B’Tselem lays out how Israel’s decision to cut off electricity, water and international humanitarian aid to Gaza after a 17-year blockade against the territory has led to a very quick collapse of infrastructure. “The things that impede this provision of food for people who are starving is a declared policy by Israel,” says Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem international advocacy lead. “The Israeli government is at fault, is responsible for this, and this should lead to immediate international action.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/10/israel-is-starving-gaza-israeli-rights-group-btselem-says-idf-is-using-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war/feed/ 0 450835 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/08/i-went-on-a-thirty-two-hour-hunger-strike-for-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/08/i-went-on-a-thirty-two-hour-hunger-strike-for-gaza/#respond Mon, 08 Jan 2024 22:49:46 +0000 https://progressive.org/latest/hunger-strike-for-gaza-stein-20240108/
This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Sam Stein.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/08/i-went-on-a-thirty-two-hour-hunger-strike-for-gaza/feed/ 0 450411 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/the-distortion-of-science/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/the-distortion-of-science/#respond Tue, 02 Jan 2024 18:20:36 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147135 Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests. Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact. The Unmaking of Science […]

The post The Distortion of Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests.

Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact.

The Unmaking of Science

The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and harms. This campaign lasted for almost 50 years, and was extremely successful… until it wasn’t. This tobacco industry’s strategic brilliance lay in the use of a marketing and advertising campaign (otherwise known as propaganda) to create scientific uncertainty and sow doubts in the minds of the general public. This, combined with legislative “lobbying” and strategic campaign “donations” undermined public health efforts and regulatory interventions to inform the public about the harms of smoking and the regulation of tobacco products.

Disrupting normative science has become a de rigueur component of the pharmaceutical industry business model. A new pharmaceutical product is not based on need, it is based on market size and profitability. When new data threatens the market of a pharmaceutical product, then that pharma company will try to sprout the seeds of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof. For instance, clinical trials can be easily coopted to meet specified end-points positive for the drug products. Other ways to manipulate a clinical trial include manipulating the dosing schedule and amounts. As these practices have been exposed, people no longer trust the science. Fast forward to the present, and the entire industry of evidence-based (and academic) medicine is now suspect due to the malfeasance of certain pharma players. In the case of COVID-19, Pharma propaganda and cooptation practices have now compromised the regulatory bodies controlling the pharma product licensing and deeply damaged global public confidence in those agencies.

We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day.

Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications- and therefore to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe). Those who produce a counter narrative from the government approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.

And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the “war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. Remember, the NIH peer review system only triages grants, it does not actually chose who receives grant money. The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied. This little truthbomb was conveyed to me – word of mouth- many years ago by a researcher and Professor who specialized in drug addiction research. Nothing printed, all heresy. Because that is how the system works. A whisper campaign. A whiff of a message on the wind.

The ends justify the means.

The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/propaganda/”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with COVID-19.

Just like with the tobacco industry’s scientific disinformation campaign, they are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside. The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.

As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set-up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.

The standard approach for nutritional research is based on a food-frequency and portion questionnaire – usually kept as a diary. The nutrient intake from this observational data set is then associated with disease incidence. Randomized interventional clinical trials are not done due to expense and bioethical considerations.

The problem is that the confounding variables in such studies are hard to control. Do obese people eat more, so would their intake of meat be more or less in proportion to dietary calories? What do they eat in combination? What about culture norms, combined with genetic drivers of disease? Age? Geo-considerations? The list of confounding variables is almost never ending. Garbage in, garbage out.

We have all witnessed how these studies get used to promulgate one point of view or another.

It’s not just within the context of red meat. The same thing happens over and over. We get dietary recommendations put together by expert committees and the data are reviewed. But when subsequent, so-called systematic reviews of specific recommendations take place, the data don’t meet reliability standards…

Yes, available information is mostly based on studies of association rather than causation, using methods that fall short of proving chronic disease effects, especially in view of the crucial dietary measurement issues. The whole gestalt produces reports that seem very uncertain in terms of the standards that are applied elsewhere in the scientific community for reliable evidence. (Dr. Ross Prentice, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)

Some recent “peer reviewed” academic publications on climate change and diet:

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Enter climate change regulations, laws and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030. Enter globalists determined to buy up farm-land to control prices, agriculture and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.

Below are some of the more outlandish claims being made in the name of climate science and nutrition. The United Nations’s World Food Program writes:

The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action.

Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.

In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board.

The prevalence of undernourishment is the leading indicator of food availability. The chart below shows that the world still has a significant issue with poverty and food stability, but it is not increasing. If anything, people are better nourished in countries with extreme poverty than they were 20 years ago.

*Note the COVIDcrisis has most likely exacerbated extreme poverty and undernourishment, but those results for the 2021-2023 years are not (yet?) available.

Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.

These are from the front search page on google for “climate change starvation”:

But the actual data documents something different.

This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine, they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.

The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.

If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates <and reduce our immigration pressure>, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.

Famine is not a climate change issue, it is an energy issue. Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific”. Rather, it is yet more weaponized fearporn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations and non-governmental organizations.

Facts matter.

The post The Distortion of Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/the-distortion-of-science/feed/ 0 449026 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/an-immense-hunger/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/an-immense-hunger/#respond Tue, 02 Jan 2024 10:12:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147130 Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, ‘I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger. – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964 […]

The post An Immense Hunger first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, ‘I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964

Now that our revels are ended, the holiday celebrations and feasts, if one had them, just a dream melted into thin air, our hungers perhaps richly satiated temporarily or not, our visions project us into a new year in which we hope to realize in a not insubstantial way the images we see before the canvases of our inner eyes.

What can we do, how create the new when we are such stuff as dreams are made on?

To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.

My wanderlust has taken me to scores of countries, I imagine, glimmering destinations that have inflamed me with images of satisfaction, but I have never kept an exact count since numbers bore me and my imagination forbids it.

“To a child who is fond of maps and stamps / The universe is the size of his immense hunger,” wrote Charles Baudelaire in Le Voyage in 1859.

When I was young and collected stamps of all the exotic places that I hoped to visit, what did I know of desire?  Then it seemed satiable, as when I finished one book after another, and placed them neatly on a shelf, as if to say, now that is done – for now.  Now the books are different, so too each piece of edible writing that disappears out the backdoor of my days.  Today, those tangible little colored stamps on Air Mail envelopes are rarely seen, and so young potential voyagers usually dream digitally as little is left to their imaginations.  Their dreams are mass-produced, but their hunger is real.  My hunger is still immense.

But the desire to travel, like all hunger, is only satisfied for a while.  It is insatiable once it bites you.  Every time you are on your way away, you wonder if this voyage will be the last one where you find what you are looking for, even when you don’t know what that is.  You close your eyes, spin the globe, and place a finger to find where you might vacate the old for the new.  You hope to return with photographs and memories, knowing secretly that they fade with your days.  Perhaps you think you will be like Odysseus, who at the end of his Odyssey has just returned home after twenty years and killed all the suitors who have been hitting on his wife Penelope, but then he shockingly tells her that he must be off again for new wanderings: “Woman, we haven’t reached the end of our trials,” he says, as they then proceed to their great olive tree-trunked bed with its mighty roots.  It is a short hot rest before he is off again.

Why?  What is his destination?  What are ours?  Where are we all going?

“One morning we set out, our brains aflame, / Our hearts full of resentment and bitter desires, / And we go, following the rhythm of the wave, / Lulling our infinite on the finite of the seas:”

In 1946 the French poet, Jacques Prévert, asked an analogous question, one that haunts us still, as we contemplate the corpses piling up in Gaza and around the world, victims of ruthless smiling jackals with polished faces.  His poem “Song in the Blood” asks, “There are great puddles of blood on the world/where’s it all going all this spilled blood/is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk . . . .  No the earth doesn’t get drunk . . . . it turns and all living things set up a howl . . . . it doesn’t stop turning/ and the blood doesn’t stop running/ where’s it all going all this spilled blood/murder’s blood . . . war’s blood/misery’s blood . . . .”

When I was young and in the early years of my blooming, my blood running down another road, I would watch a television show called “Adventures in Paradise.”  I would always watch it alone on a small television set that I had in my bedroom, won, as I recall, by some member of my large family on a TV game show.  It starred a handsome actor named Gardner McKay, who would sail the South Pacific on his schooner Tiki, looking for romance and adventures in every port.  My only memory of the shows is of the boat sailing the beautiful and exotic waters, accompanied by stirring music.  These images kindled the romantic in me, some hunger that I could not then name.  It was pure fantasy, of course, but it took me to places I had never been but thought enticingly fulfilling.  Each show was a new stamp in motion, just as were the many movies I would attend by myself during my teen years that took me to Italy, France, Greece, Russia, and so many other places.  But my hunger persisted.

Years later I would read an obituary of Gardner McKay in The New York Times where I learned that after a three-year run of the show, McKay refused to renew his contract with Twentieth Century Fox nor star in a movie with Marilyn Monroe, despite her personal pleas, because he hated the celebrity game where his photo had appeared on the cover of Life magazine as “a new Apollo.”  He left for the Amazon rainforest where for two years he worked as an agronomist’s assistant, before moving to France and then Egypt, eventually settling back in the U.S.A. with his wife, where he became a writer.  He was a Baudelaire who didn’t self-destruct.

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave / Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, / They never turn aside from their fatality / And without knowing why they always say: ‘Let’s go!’”

In a fascinating essay, “On Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema,” written in 2012 and included in his new book, Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle, Jonathan Crary notes that Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss filmmaker who died in 2022, maintained that Baudelaire’s poem, Le Voyage, anticipated cinema and its effects. “Its general evocation of the boredom and bitterness of experience in a flattened, disenchanted world,” writes Crary, “describes the conditions for new kinds of journeys or dislocations that can occur without movement in space, in its figuration of an apparitional screen on which images and memories are projected.”

Connecting the political history of the period from 1859 to today, it is necessary, maintains Crary, to view it as inseparable from “the intertwined history of the camera arts.”  This analysis, which I think is very accurate, is not a call to despair; it is rather the opposite: “. . . Godard implies that each generation must wage its own battle against historical amnesia from the lived conditions of its unique historical vantage point, and that this struggle necessitates the remaking of the techniques and language available to it.”

Here we are today saturated with images, moving and still, a world where digital media, photographs and film in all their manifestations dominate most people’s consciousnesses.  But the paradoxical mystery of this development, as Crary notes, is revealed in Godard’s film, Histoire(s) du cinema, wherein Baudelaire’s poem Le Voyage is continuously recited.  As the film travels along, the poet’s words about the disillusionment of actual voyages is recited contrapuntally, as if to suggest that the most ancient of human arts – the poetic voice (“Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story . . . . of that man . . . the wanderer”) – remains fundamental, even as technology develops new methods of image making and people travel through film.

One doesn’t have to share Godard’s view that Baudelaire’s poem was prophetically describing cinema to appreciate the rich possibilities of such a meditation at a time when the world seems entrenched in a media system that manipulates people’s minds in all directions simultaneously, carrying both meaning and its countermeaning, resulting in minds stuck at anchor, caught neurotically in dazed stasis.

“Godard’s larger suggestion here,” writes Crary, “is that the material basis for cinema, including projection, owes as much to the imaginative labor of poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Hugo, Zola, and Charles Cros as it does to any nineteenth-century traditions of applied science or mechanical bricolage.”

To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.

“We wish to voyage without steam and without sails! / To brighten the ennui of our prisons, / Make your memories, framed in their horizons, / Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.”

So I sit here in a quiet room, not moving, yet moving still, traveling in words to an undiscovered country that I can’t see but hope will satisfy my immense hunger.  We all have our ways but have a singular destiny.  “And being nowhere can be anywhere,” as Baudelaire said, just as being somewhere can be everywhere.

“Must one depart? Remain? If you can stay, remain; / Leave, if you must. One runs, another hides / To elude the vigilant, fatal enemy,. / Time! There are, alas! those who rove without respite,”

So let Ernest Hemingway, who had one of his heroes, Jake Barnes, say nearly a hundred years ago, “Cheer up, all the countries look just like the moving pictures,” have the penultimate words, again from A Moveable Feast:

It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid.

That makes two of us.

The post An Immense Hunger first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/an-immense-hunger/feed/ 0 448951 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/29/serbian-opposition-leader-on-hunger-strike-against-stolen-elections/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/29/serbian-opposition-leader-on-hunger-strike-against-stolen-elections/#respond Fri, 29 Dec 2023 18:07:31 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=4716f15632d5cda6fb585b582f920d60
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/29/serbian-opposition-leader-on-hunger-strike-against-stolen-elections/feed/ 0 448481 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/21/oxfam-america-reaction-to-the-shocking-hunger-statistics-in-gaza-released-by-the-integrated-food-security-phase-classification-ipc/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/21/oxfam-america-reaction-to-the-shocking-hunger-statistics-in-gaza-released-by-the-integrated-food-security-phase-classification-ipc/#respond Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:22:59 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/oxfam-america-reaction-to-the-shocking-hunger-statistics-in-gaza-released-by-the-integrated-food-security-phase-classification-ipc

With the sale, "we're again seeing our waters and environment sold off at bargain prices to oil and gas companies, just devastating after a year of record-breaking heat," said Healthy Gulf campaign director Raleigh Hoke. "Communities of the Gulf Coast are tired of being a sacrifice zone, and the Biden administration disappointingly missed a historic opportunity to protect our people and planet and solidify his commitment to climate justice by standing up to Big Oil."

"Lease Sale 261 is a major step backwards for President Biden's climate and justice goals."

Hoke and others, including Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), stressed that future drilling in the region could imperil marine life, including further threats to the already at-risk whale species.

"The oil industry and its allies know the Rice's whale could go extinct if they keep expanding Gulf drilling, but they've pushed aggressively to prioritize their profits and hold this sale anyway," said Monsell. "Perpetual leasing, new fossil fuel export projects, and oil spills in the Gulf are creating a hellish situation for marine life and frontline communities that's only getting worse. We can't wait any longer for President Biden to fight back and phase out offshore drilling altogether."

Oceana acting campaign director Michael Messmer pointed out that "the gluttonous appetite of oil and gas companies has led them to already hoard away thousands of leases on millions of acres across the Gulf of Mexico. They don't need any more."

"While President Biden had to move forward with this sale by court order, he does have the authority to prevent the expansion of offshore drilling through executive authority to permanently protect U.S. waters and coasts," Messmer added. "The United States can lead the call for a transition away from fossil fuels that was agreed upon by more than 200 countries at COP28 last week, but only if President Biden steps up to permanently protect our waters from future offshore drilling."

The final deal out of COP28, the United Nations climate talks that concluded in Dubai earlier this month, explicitly endorsed a move away from fossil fuels—a historic first but far from the phaseout demanded by science and many countries enduring the impacts of global warming, including rising seas, more extreme weather, and devastating wildfires.

"On the heels of a historic global agreement at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels and the release of the first-ever White House Ocean Justice Strategy, Lease Sale 261 is a major step backwards for President Biden's climate and justice goals," said Ocean Defense Initiative director Jean Flemma.

While campaigning in 2020, Biden—who is now seeking reelection next year—vowed to end new fossil fuel leases for public lands and waters, but he has run up against the courts and industry allies in Congress. A CBD analysis from January found that the administration allowed more drilling permits for federal land during its first two years than were approved in 2017-18 under former President Donald Trump, the GOP's 2024 front-runner who says he wants to "drill, drill, drill" if reelected.

The Inflation Reduction Act signed by Biden last year included significant climate provisions but also mandated some lease sales—including the one held Wednesday—and conditioned the use of public lands and waters for renewable energy development on future fossil fuel auctions. In line with that, the administration on Friday finalized a new offshore drilling plan.

The five-year plan features the fewest Gulf sales in history, with just three set to be held in 2025, 2027, and 2029. While Big Oil and its congressional backers wanted a more industry-friendly plan, critics warn any more drilling is incompatible with climate ambitions.

"Each additional oil and gas lease sale makes it harder to achieve the ambitious goals we need to achieve to stave off climate catastrophe," Athan Manuel, Sierra Club's lands protection program director, said Wednesday. "2023 will likely be the hottest year on record. At this critical moment, we should be expanding clean energy, not locking ourselves into fossil fuel for decades. We once again call on the Biden administration to take the bold action we need and end new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters."

Biden has enraged frontline communities, green groups, and younger voters by not only continuing lease sales but also backing liquefied natural gas expansion, the Willow oil project in Alaska, and the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. He also skipped COP28 and has refused to declare a national climate emergency.

"No amount of new leasing or development for offshore oil and gas is acceptable to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis," charged Zero Hour executive director Zanagee Artis. "The hundreds of millions of dollars in bids on Lease Sale 261 represent a failure of our leaders to protect the futures of young people and our most vulnerable communities and ecosystems. It is time to end the era of fossil fuels."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Theary Seng, 52, has been serving a six-year sentence since her June 2022 treason conviction. 

An Appeals Court hearing scheduled for Wednesday was delayed while she receives treatment, according to Nuth Savana, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s prison department.

“We have kept her in the hospital for convenience in case there is an emergency,” he said. “We continue to monitor her health on a regular basis and if there is an emergency, she is already at the hospital.”

She began the 10-day hunger strike on Dec. 7. Her health issues were announced in the courtroom on Wednesday where supporters, relatives, diplomats and representatives from the U.N. human rights office had gathered for the scheduled hearing.

Appeals Court Judge Yon Narong also postponed the cases of Kak Komphea and Heng Chansothy. Both are detained former senior officials from the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party.

Theary Seng, who holds dual Cambodian and U.S. citizenship, often dressed herself in elaborate costumes to argue for democracy and the rule of law at public protests before her conviction. 

As the “Statue of Liberty,” she wore a copper-patina hued flowing gown and speckled herself in glitter. She also once dressed as “Lady Justice,” complete with blindfold, scale and sword.

Her U.S.-based attorney Jared Genser called her a “human rights icon” in a Dec. 7 statement about the current hunger strike. 

“I am deeply concerned about Theary’s health and safety,” he said. “We hope that the world listens to her brave and peaceful act of protest and stands behind her in calling for the restoration of democracy in Cambodia.”

Previous hunger strike

Her conviction stemmed from her failed efforts in 2019 to bring about the return to Cambodia of political opposition leader Sam Rainsy. 

The cases of Kak Komphea and Heng Chansothy are also related to Sam Rainsy’s planned return. Both men were arrested in 2020.

In August 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed then-Prime Minister Hun Sen to free Theary Seng and other activists during a visit to Phnom Penh.

Other U.S. officials, including Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, USAID Administrator Samantha Power and Ambassador W. Patrick Murphy, have also called for her immediate and unconditional release. 

Theary Seng also did a hunger strike in July from a remote jail in northern Preah Vihear province. That began just after the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a judgment calling her detention “arbitrary, politically motivated, and in violation of international law.”

In September, she was transferred from Preah Vihear to Prey Sar II prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The transfer allowed her to work directly with her defense team ahead of this month’s scheduled appeal. 

Outside the court on Wednesday, about 10 supporters raised banners demanding that the court release her and the two opposition party officials.

Ny Sokha, president of the ADHOC human rights group, expressed regret over the delay, noting that the activists are suffering while their cases “drag on.”

“Those being jailed are waiting for justice,” he said. “This is sad and it affects the image of the government.”

RFA was unable to reach Russian Hospital Director Ngy Meng for comment on Theary Seng’s condition on Wednesday. The public hospital was founded in 1960 with funding from the Soviet Union.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Theary Seng, 52, has been serving a six-year sentence since her June 2022 treason conviction. 

An Appeals Court hearing scheduled for Wednesday was delayed while she receives treatment, according to Nuth Savana, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s prison department.

“We have kept her in the hospital for convenience in case there is an emergency,” he said. “We continue to monitor her health on a regular basis and if there is an emergency, she is already at the hospital.”

She began the 10-day hunger strike on Dec. 7. Her health issues were announced in the courtroom on Wednesday where supporters, relatives, diplomats and representatives from the U.N. human rights office had gathered for the scheduled hearing.

Appeals Court Judge Yon Narong also postponed the cases of Kak Komphea and Heng Chansothy. Both are detained former senior officials from the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party.

Theary Seng, who holds dual Cambodian and U.S. citizenship, often dressed herself in elaborate costumes to argue for democracy and the rule of law at public protests before her conviction. 

As the “Statue of Liberty,” she wore a copper-patina hued flowing gown and speckled herself in glitter. She also once dressed as “Lady Justice,” complete with blindfold, scale and sword.

Her U.S.-based attorney Jared Genser called her a “human rights icon” in a Dec. 7 statement about the current hunger strike. 

“I am deeply concerned about Theary’s health and safety,” he said. “We hope that the world listens to her brave and peaceful act of protest and stands behind her in calling for the restoration of democracy in Cambodia.”

Previous hunger strike

Her conviction stemmed from her failed efforts in 2019 to bring about the return to Cambodia of political opposition leader Sam Rainsy. 

The cases of Kak Komphea and Heng Chansothy are also related to Sam Rainsy’s planned return. Both men were arrested in 2020.

In August 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed then-Prime Minister Hun Sen to free Theary Seng and other activists during a visit to Phnom Penh.

Other U.S. officials, including Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, USAID Administrator Samantha Power and Ambassador W. Patrick Murphy, have also called for her immediate and unconditional release. 

Theary Seng also did a hunger strike in July from a remote jail in northern Preah Vihear province. That began just after the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a judgment calling her detention “arbitrary, politically motivated, and in violation of international law.”

In September, she was transferred from Preah Vihear to Prey Sar II prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The transfer allowed her to work directly with her defense team ahead of this month’s scheduled appeal. 

Outside the court on Wednesday, about 10 supporters raised banners demanding that the court release her and the two opposition party officials.

Ny Sokha, president of the ADHOC human rights group, expressed regret over the delay, noting that the activists are suffering while their cases “drag on.”

“Those being jailed are waiting for justice,” he said. “This is sad and it affects the image of the government.”

RFA was unable to reach Russian Hospital Director Ngy Meng for comment on Theary Seng’s condition on Wednesday. The public hospital was founded in 1960 with funding from the Soviet Union.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Theary Seng, 52, has been serving a six-year sentence since her June 2022 treason conviction. 

An Appeals Court hearing scheduled for Wednesday was delayed while she receives treatment, according to Nuth Savana, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s prison department.

“We have kept her in the hospital for convenience in case there is an emergency,” he said. “We continue to monitor her health on a regular basis and if there is an emergency, she is already at the hospital.”

She began the 10-day hunger strike on Dec. 7. Her health issues were announced in the courtroom on Wednesday where supporters, relatives, diplomats and representatives from the U.N. human rights office had gathered for the scheduled hearing.

Appeals Court Judge Yon Narong also postponed the cases of Kak Komphea and Heng Chansothy. Both are detained former senior officials from the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party.

Theary Seng, who holds dual Cambodian and U.S. citizenship, often dressed herself in elaborate costumes to argue for democracy and the rule of law at public protests before her conviction. 

As the “Statue of Liberty,” she wore a copper-patina hued flowing gown and speckled herself in glitter. She also once dressed as “Lady Justice,” complete with blindfold, scale and sword.

Her U.S.-based attorney Jared Genser called her a “human rights icon” in a Dec. 7 statement about the current hunger strike. 

“I am deeply concerned about Theary’s health and safety,” he said. “We hope that the world listens to her brave and peaceful act of protest and stands behind her in calling for the restoration of democracy in Cambodia.”

Previous hunger strike

Her conviction stemmed from her failed efforts in 2019 to bring about the return to Cambodia of political opposition leader Sam Rainsy. 

The cases of Kak Komphea and Heng Chansothy are also related to Sam Rainsy’s planned return. Both men were arrested in 2020.

In August 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed then-Prime Minister Hun Sen to free Theary Seng and other activists during a visit to Phnom Penh.

Other U.S. officials, including Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, USAID Administrator Samantha Power and Ambassador W. Patrick Murphy, have also called for her immediate and unconditional release. 

Theary Seng also did a hunger strike in July from a remote jail in northern Preah Vihear province. That began just after the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a judgment calling her detention “arbitrary, politically motivated, and in violation of international law.”

In September, she was transferred from Preah Vihear to Prey Sar II prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The transfer allowed her to work directly with her defense team ahead of this month’s scheduled appeal. 

Outside the court on Wednesday, about 10 supporters raised banners demanding that the court release her and the two opposition party officials.

Ny Sokha, president of the ADHOC human rights group, expressed regret over the delay, noting that the activists are suffering while their cases “drag on.”

“Those being jailed are waiting for justice,” he said. “This is sad and it affects the image of the government.”

RFA was unable to reach Russian Hospital Director Ngy Meng for comment on Theary Seng’s condition on Wednesday. The public hospital was founded in 1960 with funding from the Soviet Union.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

We get an update from one of the few hospitals still operating in southern Gaza from Ahmed Moghrabi, a doctor at Nasser Hospital, who describes horrific conditions. “I’ve developed [a] psychological disorder,” says Moghrabi, who himself is barely surviving on little food and clean water. “Please stop this genocide against us. Stop this war. Please, please, I beg you.” We also speak with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room medical doctor shot by the Israeli military in Gaza in 2018, about the arrests, killings and torture of his fellow medical workers by the Israeli military, and the enormous risk of disease as a consequence of the lack of essential aid and supplies available in the region. He predicts tens of thousands of deaths from starvation, dehydration and infectious disease will soon hit Gaza as Israel’s assault continues in the coming weeks.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Over that time period, the number of people without enough food increased from 19.7 million to 27.8 million nationwide.

Hunger Free America attributes the surge in food insecurity to the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit and universal school meals. Many federal benefit increases have either gone away entirely, or are being ramped down, even as prices for food, rent, healthcare, and fuel continue to soar. Said Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, “This report should be a jarring wake up call for our federal, state, and local leaders."

According to the USDA food insecurity data - a different way of measuring food hardship analyzed by Hunger Free America - 11.9% of Americans, or 38.8 million people, were found to live in food insecure households over the course of a whole year, as averaged for the years between 2020 and 2022. The states with the highest rates of food insecure individuals from 2020-2022 were Texas (19.0%), Arkansas (16.3%), Louisiana (16.1%), Mississippi (15.4%), Oklahoma (15.3%), and South Carolina (15.3%). Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas were consistently on the lists of the top ten states with the highest rates of food insecurity for individuals overall, children, employed adults, and older Americans.

This year, Hunger Free America also compiled the most recent nonparticipation rates for SNAP, WIC, and school breakfast programs by state. Nationally, 18% of individuals eligible for SNAP were not receiving SNAP in 2018. WIC had the highest rate of nonparticipation, with 49% of eligible individuals not receiving WIC in 2021. School breakfast had a similar nonparticipation rate, with 48% of children who receive school lunch not receiving school breakfast during the 2021-2022 school year.

Continued Berg, “Effective federal public policies over the previous few years were spectacularly successful in stemming U.S. hunger, but as many of those policies have been reversed, hunger has again soared. At exactly the moment when so many Americans are in desperate need of relief, many of the federally funded benefits increases, such as the Child Tax Credit and universal school meals, have expired, due mostly to opposition from conservatives in Congress. Just as no one should be surprised if drought increases when water is taken away, no one should be shocked that when the government takes away food, as well as money to buy food, hunger rises. Our political leaders must act to raise wages and provide a strong safety net, so we can finally end U.S. hunger and ensure that all Americans have access to adequate, healthy food.”

Other findings from the report:

● 15.8% of children in the U.S. lived in food insecure households in the 2020-2022 time period. The states with the highest rates of food insecure children were Delaware (21.4%), Nebraska (21.0%), Texas (20.7%), Georgia (20.0%), Kentucky (19.7%), and Louisiana (19.7%).

● Nationally, 9.1% of employed adults in the U.S. lived in food insecure households during the three-year time period. The states with the highest rates of food insecurity among employed adults were Arkansas (13.7%), Texas (13.4%), Louisiana (12.5%), South Carolina (12.5%), and Oklahoma (12.4%).

● In the U.S., 7.6% of older Americans, defined as people 60 years and older, lived in food insecure households. Louisiana had the highest rate of food insecurity among older Americans at 13.9%, followed by Mississippi (12.7%), District of Columbia (12.6%), West Virginia (11.0%), and Oklahoma (10.4%).

● The states with the lowest rates of food insecurity were New Hampshire (6.1%), Minnesota (7.3%), Vermont (7.7%), Colorado (8.4%), and North Dakota (8.6%).

The report includes detailed public policy recommendations at the federal level, including passage of the HOPE Act of 2021, reauthorization of the Child Tax Credit, which raised millions of families out of poverty, and immediately fully funding the WIC program for pregnant women, infants, and children under five, including maintaining increased allotments for fruit and vegetable purchases.

The full report, “Hunger is Political Choice”, is available on Hunger Free America’s website: https://www.hungerfreeamerica.org/en-us/research/2023-annual-survey-report

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

That fridge is one among many “community fridges” across the country that volunteers stock with free food — prepared meals, leftovers, and you name it. Zauderer had helped set a network up in New York City during the pandemic as a way to reduce waste and fight hunger. The idea came about when he was a middle school teacher looking to provide short-term help to students whose families couldn’t afford food. He stationed the first fridge in the Bronx in September 2020. That one, the Mott Haven Fridge, was hugely popular, and it motivated Zauderer to expand. Since then, he has helped plug in seven more fridges in the Bronx and Manhattan, including the one where he dropped off his leftover pizza. 

“It just blossomed into way more than I ever could have expected,” said Zauderer, who now works full-time at Grassroots Grocery, a food-distribution nonprofit he co-founded in New York. 

It’s not just Zauderer’s project that has blossomed. Community fridges first cropped up a decade ago in a few isolated spots around the globe, then spread across the United States right after the pandemic started in 2020, when supply chains were crumbling, food prices were rising, and families across the country were struggling to find meals. At the time, the fridges were viewed as a creative response to an urgent need. But when the pandemic subsided, it became clear that the refrigerators — sometimes called freedges, friendly fridges, and love fridges — were more than a fad. Today, nonprofits and mutual aid groups are overseeing hundreds of fridges that bolster access to food in cities from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska.

The fridges also embody a straightforward solution to climate change. Each year, tens of billions of pounds of food, more than a third of what’s produced in the U.S., get tossed into trash bins. Most of those scraps end up in landfills, where they decompose and release methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas. The sheer quantity of the country’s combined waste makes it a major source of climate pollution: Food waste accounts for as much as 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And more food is being thrown out than ever.

“There’s no solution to our climate problem that doesn’t also address food waste,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. 

There are many ways to keep food out of landfills and on dinner tables. Companies are developing apps to connect people with donated goods, and food banks have been around for decades. Experts say raising awareness and changing policy around things like expiration dates on food packaging, which can be arbitrary, would help, too. But fridges are especially effective when other solutions fall short. Though food banks are great for storing large amounts of shelf-stable items like canned vegetables, they’re not well-equipped to handle food that doesn’t last as long and turns up in small amounts— a pizza slice here, a sandwich there. Those remnants make up much of the country’s food waste, about 40 percent, and that’s where community fridges excel. “These are just a really elegant solution to that,” Broad Leib said. 

The fridges also offer a degree of anonymity for those in need that’s hard to find at more traditional food distribution centers, like food pantries. People don’t have to sign up or prove their eligibility to use them. “The whole point is dignified, anonymous access,” Zauderer said. “We’re not the arbiters of how much to take.”

In Chicago, an artist named Eric Von Haynes co-founded a fridge network called The Love Fridge in 2020. Today, he helps oversee more than 20 love fridges, each decorated with eye-popping colors and phrases like “Free food for all!” According to Von Haynes, the fridges are filled, cleaned, and maintained by hundreds of volunteers. He estimates that thousands of pounds of food move through them each month. 

One concern that researchers have with projects that repurpose food is that they require additional resources, like transportation and electricity. “Rescuing [food] still comes at a cost,” said Kathryn Bender, a professor and food waste researcher at the University of Delaware.

But community fridges are about as low-key and energy efficient as solutions get. Zauderer didn’t burn any fossil fuels to walk his pizza to the fridge near his apartment. And the Love Fridge, which acquires only used refrigerators, powers two of them with solar panels — a vision that Von Haynes has for more to come. 

Even a fridge that draws electricity from a coal-powered grid uses less energy each day than a single cell phone, said Dawn King, who researches food waste and policy at Brown University. “Is it worth using greenhouse gas emissions to plug in a refrigerator so people can eat food that otherwise would have gotten wasted? Hell yes it is.”

Other challenges include navigating concerns about rotten or unwanted food, making sure fridges are working properly, especially during increasingly hot summers, and keeping them stocked. Ernst Bertone Oehninger, who helped set up what may have been the first “freedge” in the U.S. in 2014 in Davis, California, has learned that some items don’t belong in them.

“Think about a half-eaten burger. That’s a no-go,” said Oehninger. “But this is very rare. Most people bring good leftovers.” Like Zauderer’s pizza.

A fridge in Austin, Texas, once went missing. It had been “borrowed” by someone who wanted to keep beers cold for an event at South by Southwest, according to Kellie Stiewert, an organizer at the ATX Free Fridge project. But such shenanigans are rare. That the fridges can be placed with a property owner’s permission just about anywhere — in front of a taqueria, a person’s home, an office building — is what makes the concept “beautiful,” Stiewert said.

Organizers say keeping the fridges full is one of the toughest tasks. People sometimes gather to pick up items within minutes of a fridge getting stocked. “When I first get volunteers to do food distro with me, I’m always waiting for them to recognize how fast the food goes,” Von Haynes said. “It’s really hard to explain to people.” 

As for Zauderer’s pizza slices: “They definitely weren’t there the next day.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Community fridges don’t just fight hunger. They’re also a climate solution. on Oct 26, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Max Graham.

That fridge is one among many “community fridges” across the country that volunteers stock with free food — prepared meals, leftovers, and you name it. Zauderer had helped set a network up in New York City during the pandemic as a way to reduce waste and fight hunger. The idea came about when he was a middle school teacher looking to provide short-term help to students whose families couldn’t afford food. He stationed the first fridge in the Bronx in September 2020. That one, the Mott Haven Fridge, was hugely popular, and it motivated Zauderer to expand. Since then, he has helped plug in seven more fridges in the Bronx and Manhattan, including the one where he dropped off his leftover pizza. 

“It just blossomed into way more than I ever could have expected,” said Zauderer, who now works full-time at Grassroots Grocery, a food-distribution nonprofit he co-founded in New York. 

It’s not just Zauderer’s project that has blossomed. Community fridges first cropped up a decade ago in a few isolated spots around the globe, then spread across the United States right after the pandemic started in 2020, when supply chains were crumbling, food prices were rising, and families across the country were struggling to find meals. At the time, the fridges were viewed as a creative response to an urgent need. But when the pandemic subsided, it became clear that the refrigerators — sometimes called freedges, friendly fridges, and love fridges — were more than a fad. Today, nonprofits and mutual aid groups are overseeing hundreds of fridges that bolster access to food in cities from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska.

The fridges also embody a straightforward solution to climate change. Each year, tens of billions of pounds of food, more than a third of what’s produced in the U.S., get tossed into trash bins. Most of those scraps end up in landfills, where they decompose and release methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas. The sheer quantity of the country’s combined waste makes it a major source of climate pollution: Food waste accounts for as much as 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And more food is being thrown out than ever.

“There’s no solution to our climate problem that doesn’t also address food waste,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. 

There are many ways to keep food out of landfills and on dinner tables. Companies are developing apps to connect people with donated goods, and food banks have been around for decades. Experts say raising awareness and changing policy around things like expiration dates on food packaging, which can be arbitrary, would help, too. But fridges are especially effective when other solutions fall short. Though food banks are great for storing large amounts of shelf-stable items like canned vegetables, they’re not well-equipped to handle food that doesn’t last as long and turns up in small amounts— a pizza slice here, a sandwich there. Those remnants make up much of the country’s food waste, about 40 percent, and that’s where community fridges excel. “These are just a really elegant solution to that,” Broad Leib said. 

The fridges also offer a degree of anonymity for those in need that’s hard to find at more traditional food distribution centers, like food pantries. People don’t have to sign up or prove their eligibility to use them. “The whole point is dignified, anonymous access,” Zauderer said. “We’re not the arbiters of how much to take.”

In Chicago, an artist named Eric Von Haynes co-founded a fridge network called The Love Fridge in 2020. Today, he helps oversee more than 20 love fridges, each decorated with eye-popping colors and phrases like “Free food for all!” According to Von Haynes, the fridges are filled, cleaned, and maintained by hundreds of volunteers. He estimates that thousands of pounds of food move through them each month. 

One concern that researchers have with projects that repurpose food is that they require additional resources, like transportation and electricity. “Rescuing [food] still comes at a cost,” said Kathryn Bender, a professor and food waste researcher at the University of Delaware.

But community fridges are about as low-key and energy efficient as solutions get. Zauderer didn’t burn any fossil fuels to walk his pizza to the fridge near his apartment. And the Love Fridge, which acquires only used refrigerators, powers two of them with solar panels — a vision that Von Haynes has for more to come. 

Even a fridge that draws electricity from a coal-powered grid uses less energy each day than a single cell phone, said Dawn King, who researches food waste and policy at Brown University. “Is it worth using greenhouse gas emissions to plug in a refrigerator so people can eat food that otherwise would have gotten wasted? Hell yes it is.”

Other challenges include navigating concerns about rotten or unwanted food, making sure fridges are working properly, especially during increasingly hot summers, and keeping them stocked. Ernst Bertone Oehninger, who helped set up what may have been the first “freedge” in the U.S. in 2014 in Davis, California, has learned that some items don’t belong in them.

“Think about a half-eaten burger. That’s a no-go,” said Oehninger. “But this is very rare. Most people bring good leftovers.” Like Zauderer’s pizza.

A fridge in Austin, Texas, once went missing. It had been “borrowed” by someone who wanted to keep beers cold for an event at South by Southwest, according to Kellie Stiewert, an organizer at the ATX Free Fridge project. But such shenanigans are rare. That the fridges can be placed with a property owner’s permission just about anywhere — in front of a taqueria, a person’s home, an office building — is what makes the concept “beautiful,” Stiewert said.

Organizers say keeping the fridges full is one of the toughest tasks. People sometimes gather to pick up items within minutes of a fridge getting stocked. “When I first get volunteers to do food distro with me, I’m always waiting for them to recognize how fast the food goes,” Von Haynes said. “It’s really hard to explain to people.” 

As for Zauderer’s pizza slices: “They definitely weren’t there the next day.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Community fridges don’t just fight hunger. They’re also a climate solution. on Oct 26, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Max Graham.

Image by Zeyn Afuang.

It is one of the world’s greatest tragedies, and it is still neglected. In 2021, the world reached a new, although unwelcome landmark: the number of people affected by hunger rose to 828 million, an increase of about 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This, according to a United Nations report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI). The numbers are evidence that the world is moving away from its goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition by the end of this decade, according to the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Food insecurity (defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a “household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food) is growing. According to the World Food Programme (WFP) in 2022 nearly 258 million people across 58 countries faced higher levels of food insecurity. And women continue to be an underutilized resource to improve this situation.

Although the proportion of people affected by hunger remained relatively unchanged between 2015 and 2019, it increased in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021 to 9.8 percent of the world population, compared with 8 percent in 2019. At the same time, there has been a marked gender gap in food insecurity in 2021. Thirty two percent of women in the world were moderately or severely food insecure, compared to 27.6 percent of men.

World conflicts, economic shocks, climate change and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have driven the increase in global hunger. Women and girls are disproportionately affected, often eating last, and eating less. As a result of the war in Ukraine, the global food supply chain has been disrupted, since that country is major supplier of cereal grains and sunflower oil.

What is the best approach to solving this problem? According to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), improving women farmers’ access to adequate resources, technologies, markets, and property rights can help them increase agricultural productivity and improve household nutrition. This is relevant because women’s work has an impact on their nutritional status and that of their families. The Global Food and Farming Futures states that the existing food system is failing half of the people in the world today.

Women make up 43 percent, on average, of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, and they tend to have low-paying jobs. They have, for the most part, seasonal or part-time work. Plots managed by women tend to be smaller than those managed by men, and they have less access to tools and technology compared to male farmers. Women farmers with better resources could increase their incomes and agricultural yields, better manage natural resources and help secure livelihoods for their families. It has been estimated that by providing women the same resources as men, they could increase agricultural output by 4 percent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent.

Women have the traditional role of being the sole care-givers for children, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped and all those who cannot care for themselves. In Africa, women work approximately 50 percent more hours each day than men. I remember visiting the countryside in Equatorial Guinea where I saw what is called casa de la palabra (house of the word.) There, men gather in the afternoon after work and spend several hours chatting or discussing problems in the village or community, while their wives continue working at home or in the fields. This is true in other African countries as well.

There is still little recognition of the critical role that women could play in increasing agricultural and business productivity. Although commercial banks are lending more to women entrepreneurs to develop new agricultural services and products, some interventions such as land tenure rights and access to markets continue to keep women from accessing those resources.

In Cameroon, for example, women hold less than 10 percent of land certificates, even though they perform a significant part of the agricultural work. In Africa, 70 percent of the food is grown by women; in Asia, the figure is 50-60 percent and in Latin America it is 30 percent. But women’s work is not limited to the production of food crops; they are also involved in the production of cash crops.

Women’s work is essential for the survival of their families. In Kenya, it has been shown that women with the same levels of education, information, experience and farm resources as men have 22 percent greater farming yields. To help eliminate hunger, women should have easier access to seeds, fertilizers, and time-saving technologies, as well as better credit, more arable land, and better job opportunities. Women are probably the world’s most underutilized resource. Creating more opportunities for women to support their families through new agricultural initiatives will significantly boost their productivity and help end the scourge of world hunger.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

Image by Randy Fath.

It is one of the world’s greatest tragedies, and it is still neglected. In 2021, the world reached a new, although unwelcome landmark: the number of people affected by hunger rose to 828 million, an increase of about 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This, according to a United Nations report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI). The numbers are evidence that the world is moving away from its goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition by the end of this decade, according to the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Food insecurity (defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a “household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food) is growing. According to the World Food Programme (WFP) in 2022 nearly 258 million people across 58 countries faced higher levels of food insecurity. And women continue to be an underutilized resource to improve this situation.

Although the proportion of people affected by hunger remained relatively unchanged between 2015 and 2019, it increased in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021 to 9.8 percent of the world population, compared with 8 percent in 2019. At the same time, there has been a marked gender gap in food insecurity in 2021. Thirty two percent of women in the world were moderately or severely food insecure, compared to 27.6 percent of men.

World conflicts, economic shocks, climate change and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have driven the increase in global hunger. Women and girls are disproportionately affected, often eating last, and eating less. As a result of the war in Ukraine, the global food supply chain has been disrupted, since that country is major supplier of cereal grains and sunflower oil.

What is the best approach to solving this problem? According to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), improving women farmers’ access to adequate resources, technologies, markets, and property rights can help them increase agricultural productivity and improve household nutrition. This is relevant because women’s work has an impact on their nutritional status and that of their families. The Global Food and Farming Futures states that the existing food system is failing half of the people in the world today.

Women make up 43 percent, on average, of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, and they tend to have low-paying jobs. They have, for the most part, seasonal or part-time work. Plots managed by women tend to be smaller than those managed by men, and they have less access to tools and technology compared to male farmers. Women farmers with better resources could increase their incomes and agricultural yields, better manage natural resources and help secure livelihoods for their families. It has been estimated that by providing women the same resources as men, they could increase agricultural output by 4 percent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent.

Women have the traditional role of being the sole care-givers for children, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped and all those who cannot care for themselves. In Africa, women work approximately 50 percent more hours each day than men. I remember visiting the countryside in Equatorial Guinea where I saw what is called casa de la palabra (house of the word.) There, men gather in the afternoon after work and spend several hours chatting or discussing problems in the village or community, while their wives continue working at home or in the fields. This is true in other African countries as well.

There is still little recognition of the critical role that women could play in increasing agricultural and business productivity. Although commercial banks are lending more to women entrepreneurs to develop new agricultural services and products, some interventions such as land tenure rights and access to markets continue to keep women from accessing those resources.

In Cameroon, for example, women hold less than 10 percent of land certificates, even though they perform a significant part of the agricultural work. In Africa, 70 percent of the food is grown by women; in Asia, the figure is 50-60 percent and in Latin America it is 30 percent. But women’s work is not limited to the production of food crops; they are also involved in the production of cash crops.

Women’s work is essential for the survival of their families. In Kenya, it has been shown that women with the same levels of education, information, experience and farm resources as men have 22 percent greater farming yields. To help eliminate hunger, women should have easier access to seeds, fertilizers, and time-saving technologies, as well as better credit, more arable land, and better job opportunities. Women are probably the world’s most underutilized resource. Creating more opportunities for women to support their families through new agricultural initiatives will significantly boost their productivity and help end the scourge of world hunger.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

New Zealand’s Green Party says it will double the Best Start payment from $69 a week to $140 — and it will also make it available for all children under three years.

Greens co-leader Marama Davidson announced the policy today, saying it is part of a “fully costed plan” paid for with a fair tax system.

“One in 10 children are growing up in poverty. For Māori, it is one in five. How is it possible that in a wealthy country like ours, there are thousands of children without enough to eat, a good bed, warm clothes, and decent shoes?,” she asked.

• READ MORE: Other NZ election 2023 reports

“That is why the Green Party would ensure all families have what they need for these early years, by doubling Best Start from $69 a week, to $140, and make it universal for all children under three years.”

Currently, families can receive the $69 weekly Best Start payment until their baby turns one, no matter the income.

However, they do not get that payment while they are receiving the paid parental leave payment. After the first year, only families earning under $96,295 are eligible to receive the payment until their child turns three.

The doubling of the Best Start payment is part of the Green Party’s Income Guarantee plan.

“This universal payment for the first three years recognises that just like in our older years through superannuation, the very first years of a new baby’s life are a time when every family needs extra support,” Davidson said.

Fairer Working for Families
“Under this plan we’ll also reform Working for Families into a simpler, fairer system.

“This will provide a payment of up to $215 every week for the first child, and $135 a week for every other child, in addition to the Best Start payments.

“With the Green Party in government, we can take action to guarantee every whānau has enough to get by no matter what.

“There is no reason for any child in Aotearoa to go hungry or to live in a damp, cold house. Poverty is a political choice.

“Our plan will provide lasting solutions that will guarantee everyone has what they need to live a good life and cover the essentials — even when times are tough.”

Since 2021, the Labour government has increased the Best Start payment from $60 to $69 a week.

• Monday night’s Newshub-Reid Research poll gave the Greens a boost, rising to 14.2 percent, as the Labour Party dipped slightly to 26.5 percent.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Living in the Papua New Guinea capital of Port Moresby without a house or a source of income is a death sentence, says Raymond Green.

He highlights the struggles of sleeping in the streets, begging for his daily bread and wandering around aimlessly — living a life of quiet desperation.

His advice: Don’t ever borrow money from someone if you don’t have the means to repay them.

• READ MORE: Other PNG poverty reports

According to Raymond Green, he learnt this lesson the hard way when he had to sell off everything under his name to repay his debt.

“I have absolutely nothing. No house, no wife, no money, no valuables and certainly no food in my stomach as we speak,” he told the PNG Post-Courier.

“My struggles cannot be explained by words.

“Every day I have to keep on moving to survive, begging for scraps of food here and there.

Harassment and bullying
“I enjoy the cold nights, but I just wish it could be more peaceful, as there are always people out there who find happiness in harassing and bullying me,” he says.

“I live in pain, agony and desperation. My past haunts me, and my regrets fill me with sorrow.

“Sometimes I wish life could give me a fresh start, but it sadly does not work that way.”

Green doesn’t mince his words when he expresses his daily struggles of being “homeless” and “poor”.

Something he explains that he could have avoided if he had taken the right path when he was younger.

“My daily living is a constant struggle for survival, and I sometimes feel like I am dead inside,” he says.

‘Ultimately have nothing’
“It’s true, being homeless is practically like being dead because you ultimately have nothing.

“All I own can be seen inside my small bag. Everything I had has been either stolen, lost or destroyed somewhere or somehow.”

He says he is waiting for a one off-payment from a certain office, by which he can then use the money for his retirement.

He says there is a high chance he may never receive this payment.

Raymond Green is one of the many who live under extreme poverty conditions, while continuously fighting to survive in Port Moresby.

Theophiles Singh is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The hunger strike is the latest effort by prisoners to protest harsh conditions at Monywa Prison. 

Prison guards raided the cells of the political prisoners on Friday, according to the Monywa People’s Strike Steering Committee.

“Authorities from multiple departments – including police, soldiers and the prison – confiscated prisoners’ books, clothes, pots, dishes and blankets, and left them with a bare wardrobe,” steering committee member Lwin Moe Thant told Radio Free Asia. “They took all their belongings.” 

The reason for the raid was unknown. There are nearly 700 political prisoners being held at Monywa Prison. 

A similar raid took place on political prisoners at the facility in January 2021, Lwin Moe Thant said.

In April 2022, guards shot at protesting inmates who were chanting anti-junta slogans, sources at the time told RFA. At least one prisoner was killed.

Lwin Moe Thant said the 14 prisoners who went on hunger strike on Friday come from each ward at the prison. More inmates could join the hunger strike if demands aren’t met, he said.

RFA’s calls to the junta spokesman for the Sagaing region, Tin Than Win, went unanswered on Friday.

Authorities have responded to past protests over ill-treatment by political prisoners in Yangon’s Insein Prison and Mandalay’s Obo Prison by beating protesters, denying them medical treatment and putting them in solitary confinement.  

More than 24,000 people, including pro-democracy activists, have been arrested since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, according to the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma). The association says almost 20,000 are still being detained across Myanmar.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kyaw Lwin Oo for RFA Burmese.

The hunger strike is the latest effort by prisoners to protest harsh conditions at Monywa Prison. 

Prison guards raided the cells of the political prisoners on Friday, according to the Monywa People’s Strike Steering Committee.

“Authorities from multiple departments – including police, soldiers and the prison – confiscated prisoners’ books, clothes, pots, dishes and blankets, and left them with a bare wardrobe,” steering committee member Lwin Moe Thant told Radio Free Asia. “They took all their belongings.” 

The reason for the raid was unknown. There are nearly 700 political prisoners being held at Monywa Prison. 

A similar raid took place on political prisoners at the facility in January 2021, Lwin Moe Thant said.

In April 2022, guards shot at protesting inmates who were chanting anti-junta slogans, sources at the time told RFA. At least one prisoner was killed.

Lwin Moe Thant said the 14 prisoners who went on hunger strike on Friday come from each ward at the prison. More inmates could join the hunger strike if demands aren’t met, he said.

RFA’s calls to the junta spokesman for the Sagaing region, Tin Than Win, went unanswered on Friday.

Authorities have responded to past protests over ill-treatment by political prisoners in Yangon’s Insein Prison and Mandalay’s Obo Prison by beating protesters, denying them medical treatment and putting them in solitary confinement.  

More than 24,000 people, including pro-democracy activists, have been arrested since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, according to the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma). The association says almost 20,000 are still being detained across Myanmar.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kyaw Lwin Oo for RFA Burmese.

Do Le Na said Thursday her husband wants to protect the country’s constitution, claiming that many officials have violated it without punishment.

The 44-year-old is known for livestreaming on Facebook and YouTube videos on controversial social and political issues, particularly land rights cases that have been at the center of controversies in Vietnam.

He was arrested in March 2021 on charges of “disseminating anti-State materials” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, shortly after nominating himself to run for Vietnam’s National Assembly elections in defiance of the ruling Communist Party. 

Hung was later sentenced to five years in prison and five years of probation. 

Na said her husband started his hunger strike on Sept. 3 and plans to continue until Vietnam’s Law Day on Nov. 9.

She said Hung made his plans known to her during a visit last month.

After returning to Hanoi, she sent a letter to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the deputy of the National Assembly's People Relations Committee and a number of other National Assembly members to present Hung’s wishes.

“Firstly, my husband wants the competent people of the National Assembly of Vietnam as well as the National Assembly deputies to be able to come to Prison No. 6 to meet and listen to his wishes,” Na said.

“If so, he will petition the National Assembly of Vietnam to immediately establish a constitutional court. There have been quite a number of individuals, organizations and agencies in Vietnam that have seriously violated the Constitution of Vietnam.”

Na said her husband was also going on hunger strike to raise the issue of prisoners’ rights, such as the right to receive proper medical examinations and treatment, and the right to send letters to family members.

Na said her family had not received any letters from Hung for more than six months even though he had written many.

Na, a teacher at a school for disabled children in Hanoi, said her family was very worried about Hung's health because he announced that he would only stop going on a hunger strike when the National Assembly deputies came to see him in prison.

It would be unprecedented for a National Assembly deputy to visit any political prisoner.

Recently, two activists Tran Huynh Duy Thuc and Dang Dinh Bach, who are also in Prison No. 6, said prisoners with knives threatened them.

After telling his family Bach said he was beaten by prison guards.

Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Do Le Na said Thursday her husband wants to protect the country’s constitution, claiming that many officials have violated it without punishment.

The 44-year-old is known for livestreaming on Facebook and YouTube videos on controversial social and political issues, particularly land rights cases that have been at the center of controversies in Vietnam.

He was arrested in March 2021 on charges of “disseminating anti-State materials” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, shortly after nominating himself to run for Vietnam’s National Assembly elections in defiance of the ruling Communist Party. 

Hung was later sentenced to five years in prison and five years of probation. 

Na said her husband started his hunger strike on Sept. 3 and plans to continue until Vietnam’s Law Day on Nov. 9.

She said Hung made his plans known to her during a visit last month.

After returning to Hanoi, she sent a letter to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the deputy of the National Assembly's People Relations Committee and a number of other National Assembly members to present Hung’s wishes.

“Firstly, my husband wants the competent people of the National Assembly of Vietnam as well as the National Assembly deputies to be able to come to Prison No. 6 to meet and listen to his wishes,” Na said.

“If so, he will petition the National Assembly of Vietnam to immediately establish a constitutional court. There have been quite a number of individuals, organizations and agencies in Vietnam that have seriously violated the Constitution of Vietnam.”

Na said her husband was also going on hunger strike to raise the issue of prisoners’ rights, such as the right to receive proper medical examinations and treatment, and the right to send letters to family members.

Na said her family had not received any letters from Hung for more than six months even though he had written many.

Na, a teacher at a school for disabled children in Hanoi, said her family was very worried about Hung's health because he announced that he would only stop going on a hunger strike when the National Assembly deputies came to see him in prison.

It would be unprecedented for a National Assembly deputy to visit any political prisoner.

Recently, two activists Tran Huynh Duy Thuc and Dang Dinh Bach, who are also in Prison No. 6, said prisoners with knives threatened them.

After telling his family Bach said he was beaten by prison guards.

Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing a dramatic deterioration of infrastructure and displacement of citizens as a result of armed violence, flooding and the world’s largest hunger crisis. In recent months, rampant violence of armed groups has forced more than half a million people to flee their homes, while the United Nations says some 3,000 families also lost their homes after recent intense flooding and mudslides in the eastern part of the country. Twenty-five million people are facing starvation as displaced citizens are unable to access their land to grow their own food, and the humanitarian response has so far failed to address the crisis. “The crisis is beyond belief,” says Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council Jan Egeland, who just visited the DRC and reports that the international community still looks for the country’s resources while ignoring its plight. “The Congo is not ignored by those who want to extract the riches of that place. It’s ignored by the rest of the world who would want to come to the relief of the children and families of the Congo.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Zhang, 39, was sentenced to four years' imprisonment by Shanghai's Pudong District People's Court on Dec. 28, 2020, and has been eating very little, rather than refusing all food, to avoid being force-fed by tube.

Zhang, who is scheduled for release in May 2024, was admitted to hospital from Shanghai Women's Prison for digestive diseases linked to malnutrition following several months of hunger strike, fellow rights activists said.

Rights activist Wang Jianhong, who founded the Zhang Zhan Concern Group, said Zhang's illness remains life-threatening.

"Zhang Zhan's physical health is very poor, because she has been refusing to eat for a long time now," Wang said. "This semi-hunger strike has been going on for more than two years."

"The situation doesn't seem to be improving, yet she still has more than eight months of her sentence to run," Wang said, and called for Zhang's release on medical parole. 

"If the authorities don't offer humanitarian treatment and nutritional supplements, she won't survive her sentence."

Repeated attempts to contact Zhang's family met with no response on Thursday.

Weighs just 37 kilograms

Gansu-based rights activist Li Dawei said he had recently spoken with Zhang's mother, who visited her daughter in prison last month, and said she was “almost skin and bones.”

Zhang currently weighs 37 kilograms (82 pounds), roughly half her normal body weight, Li said.

"The main issue is disorders of the digestive system," Li told Radio Free Asia. "She also has a low white blood cell count and excessive tumor markers."

Zhang appeared at her trial in a wheelchair, where she pleaded not guilty. A guilty plea is typically a prerequisite for more lenient treatment in China's judicial system.

Li said Zhang had managed to avoid force-feeding by tube by eating around half or one-third of what other prisoners are given.

"She is using this as a way to fight back and show her innocence, and that her trial and detention by the authorities were unfair," he said. "Her mentality is that of a political prisoner displaying resistance."

Jailed for allegedly fabricating news

Li said he expects Zhang to be released from prison as scheduled, but that it's unlikely she will be free.

"There's a question mark over whether or not she will be at liberty following her release," he said. "Look at me – I haven't regained my freedom since my release."

"Whenever I go out nowadays, the state security police follow me wherever I go, and my passport [and other travel documents] have all been declared invalid for no reason," Li said.

Zhang was jailed for allegedly fabricating two items in her reporting from Wuhan.

The first item was her report that Wuhan citizens were forced to pay a fee to get tested for COVID-19, and the second was that residents confined to their homes under a city-wide lockdown had been sent rotten vegetables by neighborhood committees.

Zhang said she admitted to all of the material facts of the case, but refused to plead guilty to the charge, saying that the information she posted wasn't false.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

Image by Scott Goodwil.

Market fundamentalists would have us believe that if only we left the provisioning of all human needs to the tender mercies of unregulated markets, a cornucopia of fabulous wealth would trickle down to all. A powerful fire hose of propaganda ceaselessly proclaims this, amply funded by those whose interest lie in accumulating unlimited wealth without regard to social or environmental harm.

More

The post The World’s Food System Brings us Inflation, Hunger and Waste appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

“The release of journalist Pape Alé Niang is a relief, but Senegalese authorities should never have arrested or charged him in the first place. The cases against him should be dropped and journalist Maty Sarr Niang, who was arrested in May, should also be released,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa Program Coordinator, from Durban, South Africa. “Senegal was once a beacon of press freedom in West Africa, but that light is being snuffed by the repeated jailing and harassment of journalists.”

On Tuesday, August 8, a court in Dakar, the capital, provisionally released Pape Alé Niang, editor of the privately owned news site Dakarmatin, after a 10-day hunger strike, according to the journalist’s lawyer, Moussa Sarr and local media reports. Sarr told CPJ that Niang still faces charges of insurrection and acts or maneuvers likely to compromise public security. Niang was arrested on July 29, the day after a broadcast on his outlet’s YouTube channel in which he discussed the latest arrest of opposition politician Ousmane Sonko.

Authorities did not place any new conditions on Niang’s release, Sarr said, but the journalist remains under strict conditions connected to an ongoing case from November 2022. Those conditions include a gag order and a ban on foreign travel.

Separately, Maty Sarr Niang (no relation to Pape Alé Niang) has remained in detention since her arrest on May 16. Authorities have charged her with “calling for insurrection, violence, hatred, acts and maneuvers likely to undermine public security, contempt of court and usurping the function of a journalist.” She similarly conducted a hunger strike from July 30 until  August 3, according to family members of the journalist who spoke to CPJ over a messaging app but asked not to be named for security reasons.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The post World Hunger and the War in Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The post World Hunger and the War in Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The United Nations this week released its annual report on nutrition, finding that the pandemic, extreme weather shocks and the war in Ukraine have all contributed to food insecurity around the world — now higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials estimate that the world saw an increase of more than 100 million people facing hunger in 2022 compared to 2019. For more, speak with Million Belay, general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, as well as Raj Patel, research professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post Twenty-Five Years of Hunger and War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Andrew Cockburn – Claud Cockburn.

Lawyer and environmentalist Dang Dinh Bach, 44, who had campaigned to reduce Vietnam’s reliance on coal, was arrested in June 2021 and then sentenced to five years in jail. 

Bach was director of the Law and Policy of Sustainable Development Research Center, which works with communities affected by development, poor industrial practices and environmental degradation to help them understand and enforce their rights.

Authorities accused him of not paying taxes for sponsorships his organization received from foreign donors. He is one of several Vietnamese activists sentenced for tax evasion—a charge that rights groups say is politically motivated. 

In a conversation with RFA’s Vietnamese Service on Thursday, Bach’s wife, Tran Phuong Thao, said he planned to start a hunger strike the next day. She said he had already been skipping meals and had only been eating one meal a day since March 17.

“He wants to send his sincere love to all species and people,” said Thao. “The hunger strike is for the environment, justice, and climate. He wants to take action to awaken everyone’s love to protect Mother Nature and combat climate change.”

Bach also told his wife that the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Vietnamese government should reconsider their stance on environmental activists, as they are not a threat to political security.

“[They should] stop ungrounded arrests and wrongful convictions,” said Thao. “Also, [Vietnam] must implement its commitments against climate change in a responsible and substantive manner.”

Thao said that it would be her husband’s fourth hunger strike, which could last for many days and be dangerous. Bach asked his family to stop sending food to him in prison except for hydration and electrolyte replenishment packs for emergency use.

Bach said he would regularly send two letters to his family each month, she said, and if no letters arrived, that meant he was in danger in prison.

Rights dialogue

The news from Bach’s wife comes on the eve of a bilateral human rights dialogue with the European Union. 

The regional bloc should add cases like Bach’s to the agenda for discussion, New York-based Human Rights Watch, or HRW, said in a statement Thursday.

“The EU claimed its 2020 Free Trade Agreement would encourage Vietnam to improve its human rights record, but just the opposite has happened,” said Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director. 

“Hanoi’s disregard for rights has already made it clear that the EU needs to consider actions that go beyond simply issuing statements and hoping for the best.”

HRW recalled that the expectation for the establishment of the a EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement Domestic Advisory Group was to promote Vietnamese independent civil society groups’ participation in monitoring the implementation of the EVFTA trade and sustainable development provisions, but cited the tax related arrests of Bach, and another activist Mai Phan Loi, as evidence to the contrary.

HRW also urged the EU to press the Vietnamese government to amend or repeal several vague penal code articles which the authorities frequently use to repress civil and political rights, as well as two constitutional articles which allow for restrictions on human rights for reasons of national security that go beyond what is permissible under international human rights law.

“The EU should get serious about pressing the Vietnamese government to convert rights pledges into genuine reform,” Robertson said. “It’s not much of a rights dialogue if Vietnam officials are just going through the motions, expressing platitudes, and waiting for the meeting to end.”

Political prisoners

In May 2023, HRW made a submission to the EU on the human rights situation in Vietnam, and urged the bloc to press the Vietnamese authorities to immediately release all political prisoners and detainees.

Among the hundreds of cases raised in the submission was that of  “Onion Bae” Bui Tuan Lam, who is serving a 5½-year sentence on propaganda charges.

Lam, 39, who ran a beef noodle stall in Danang, achieved notoriety in 2021 after posting an online video mimicking the Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe, known as “Salt Bae.”

The video was widely seen as a mockery of Vietnam’s minister of public security, To Lam, who was caught on film being hand-fed one of Salt Bae’s gold-encrusted steaks by the chef at his London restaurant at a cost of 1,450 pounds (US$1,790). 

In a conversation with RFA about Lam’s recent trial in May, his lengthy sentence, and the upcoming EU-Vietnam human rights dialogue, his wife, Le Thanh Lam said that rights organizations in the EU and UN understand how Vietnamese authorities have done many wrongful things the family. 

“My kids lost their right to have a father next to them while their father did not do anything unlawful. Everything my husband did is[allowed] under Vietnam’s Constitution and laws,” she said. “He only exercised freedom of speech and other human rights enshrined in the U.N. documents that Vietnam signed.”

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese Service.

As hunger continues to spread around the world, urgent efforts are needed to safeguard the ocean and ensure that it continues to provide food for a growing global population, in a sustainable way.

Ahead of Thursday’s World Oceans Day, Manuel Barange, Director of the Food and Aquaculture Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), has been talking to FAO’s Michele Zaccheo about the promise of aquaculture, or farming in water, and how the ocean is an essential part of the solution to the interlinked issues of poverty, malnutrition, food security and climate change.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Michele Zaccheo.

Climate justice and human rights organizations from around the globe are rallying around prominent Vietnamese environmental lawyer, Mr. Dang Dinh Bach, on the two-year anniversary of his arrest with the launch of the#StandwithBach hunger strike. A public letter was also released today by over 80 organizations worldwide calling for Bach’s immediate release, along with a petition and social media campaign.

Bach was imprisoned for “tax evasion” after leading a campaign to reduce Vietnam’s reliance on coal. He declared that on June 24, 2023 – the second anniversary of his arrest – he will go on a hunger strike to the death in defense of his innocence. In his own spirit of nonviolent and peaceful protest the May 24 – June 24 “relay hunger strike” – in which at least one organization per day will strike in solidarity with Bach – hopes to raise awareness about this extreme injustice and prevent the need for him to risk his own life. Participating groups are from the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Spain, South Korea, Palestine, South Africa, and more countries around the world.

“Bach is a climate champion and should not be punished for his participation in Vietnam’s clean energy transition,” said Meena Jagannath, Coordinator of the Global Network of Movement Lawyers at Movement Law Lab, of which Bach’s organization was a part before being forced to shut down. “It’s crucial for human rights lawyers and environmental defenders to stand up worldwide for our colleague in Vietnam. This kind of solidarity is vitally important for the future of the region and the planet. Right now, we are all concerned for his life.”

As the founder of the Law and Policy of Sustainable Development Research Centre, Bach dedicated his life to protecting communities from harmful pollution, phasing out plastic waste, and supporting the government’s transition to clean energy. He is one of four members of the Vietnam Sustainable Energy Alliance who have been imprisoned in Vietnam, despite playing an instrumental role in the country’s ambitious climate commitments, indicating an ongoing and highly concerning trend. International renowned climate leader and Goldman Environmental Prize winner, Ms. Nguy Thi Khanh, was arrested on similar charges and released this month after serving 16 months in prison.

The imprisonment of climate leaders in Vietnam has ironically all occurred in the wake of the Vietnamese government’s commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 and the $15.5 billion deal announced in December by the U.K., U.S., and other governments to support a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) in Vietnam. Right now, the JETP implementation plan is being developed, and the coalition supporting Bach is urging decision-makers to ensure that civil society is welcome to participate meaningfully in this process without the threat of arrest.

“A just energy transition cannot be successful with people like Bach in jail,” said Maureen Harris, Senior Advisory from International Rivers. “The result of such a repressive environment is that civil society is effectively excluded from negotiating spaces and deliberations around energy transition partnerships, programs, and projects, even as they proclaim to be ‘just’”.

Bach was not granted a fair trial. He was not allowed to meet with his lawyer until seven months after he was arrested and his sentence was much harsher than is usual for people accused of tax evasion. United Nations experts suggest that Bach’s prosecution was politically motivated.

Just last week the UN Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention released an opinion regarding Bach’s imprisonment, finding it a “violation of international law” and expressing concerns about a “systemic problem with arbitrary detention” of environmental defenders in Vietnam.

The coalition is urging all governments, multilateral institutions, and others invested in a just energy transition for Vietnam to 1) insist on Bach’s release; and 2) demand that civil society in Vietnam is welcome to participate meaningfully in the just energy transition process.

“I have witnessed so many painful stories of poverty and terrible diseases that weigh on abused communities in Vietnam,” said Bach in a recent statement from prison. “They are deprived of their land and livelihoods and do not have opportunities to speak out for justice and the right to be human in the face of environmental pollution, especially in places with coal-fired power plants across the country. In order to conceal the truth and threaten the voices of people, the Vietnamese authorities have arrested, convicted and unjustly detained environmental and human rights activists in defiance of national and international law.”

www.standwithbach.org

#StandwithBach

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Visualizing Palestine.

As the U.S. government on Wednesday released its latest inflation report, the watchdog Accountable.US put out a new analysis detailing how Americans face food insecurity while major food corporations are padding their profits with price hikes.

"Big Food's staggering increase in earnings shows they did not need to raise prices so high on consumers but did so anyway to maximize record profits," said Liz Zelnick, director of Economic Security and Corporate Power at Accountable.US, in a statement.

"It's shameful that Americans are left food insecure and have to skip meals while corporations and their wealthy shareholders enjoy the spoils of supersized profits under unjustified price hikes," she added. "It's clear that the food industry will not hold itself accountable. It's time Congress do more to rein in corporate greed, one of the main factors currently driving up costs for families."

"It's time Congress do more to rein in corporate greed, one of the main factors currently driving up costs for families."

The Accountable.US report takes aim at General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and Mondelez—three of the top "at home" food companies in the United States based on market capitalization—focusing on January through March, the first quarter of this calendar year.

General Mills is one of a few companies that dominate the U.S. breakfast cereal market, with brands including Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp, and Lucky Charms. Kraft Heinz is known for not only ketchup and macaroni and cheese but also Jell-O, Kool-Aid, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Mondelez's top brands include Chips Ahoy! and belVita.

The companies' combined net earnings for the quarter rose by 51% year-over-year (YoY) to a combined $3.47 billion, and the trio collectively spent over $1.3 billion on shareholder dividends, Accountable.US found. Of the three, only General Mills saw its earnings drop from the first three months of 2022 to the same period in 2023—though the company still spent more on dividends this year compared with last year.

The first three months of this calendar year were the third quarter of General Mills' 2023 fiscal year. Accountable.US cited Reuters' March 23 report that the company "raised its fiscal 2023 forecasts for a fourth time after beating estimates for quarterly results, helped by price increases and steady demand for its packaged-food products."

The watchdog also highlighted that General Mills "saw its net earnings increase by nearly $2 billion YoY for the first nine months of FY 2023, as the company spent over $2.16 billion on its shareholders through a combination of dividends and stock buybacks."

For Kraft Heinz, the watchdog referenced Reutersreporting earlier this month that it "raised its full-year profit forecast on Wednesday on the back of higher prices and sustained demand for its packaged food items." The analysis adds that the company "saw its Q1 2023 net income increase by 7.1% YoY to $837 million and spent $491 million on shareholder dividends."

Accountable.US noted that during the first quarter of this year, "Mondelez—which touted price hikes for its double-digit increases in revenue and earnings—returned $928 million to shareholders through a combination of dividends and stock buybacks, after reporting $2.1 billion in profits, a 143% increase from last year."

The group used its new analysis to call out the Federal Reserve, saying that "the findings are the most recent evidence that while inflation is slowing, the Fed's single-minded policy of repeated interest rate hikes [is] doing little to contain the primary driver of rising costs—corporate greed."

The report also emphasizes recent admissions from economists that corporate greed is driving inflation—which progressive organizations and experts have been stressing for months in response to the Fed's interest rate hikes.

As the analysis points out, The Wall Street Journalreported earlier this month:

Consumers have... been unusually willing to accept higher prices lately. Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, said businesses are betting that consumers will go along because they know about supply bottlenecks and higher energy prices.

"They are confident that they can convince consumers that it isn't their fault, and it won't damage their brand," Mr. Donovan said.

According to the consumer price index report released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "the food at home index fell 0.2%" from March to April. While cereals and bakery products saw a slight increase, there were decreases for milk; nonalcoholic beverages; fruits and vegetables; and meats, poultry, fish, and eggs.

However, the bureau's report also provides context from the past year: "The food at home index rose 7.1% over the last 12 months. The index for cereals and bakery products rose 12.4% over the 12 months ending in April. The remaining major grocery store food groups posted increases ranging from 2.0% (fruits and vegetables) to 10.4% (other food at home)."

The Accountable.US analysis notes that in January and February, "food-equity advocates warned that 'food insecurity for millions of American consumers is worsening' despite overall inflation easing, with higher numbers of food stamp recipients reporting 'skipping meals, eating less, and going to food banks to manage costs.'"

The U.S. Census Bureau has estimated throughout 2023 that based on household surveys, roughly 25 million people sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous seven days. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that nearly 34 million people live in food-insecure households—though research published last month suggests that figure is likely an undercount.

Additionally, food insecurity figures don't provide a full picture of how many families struggle to stay fed, as Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of food bank network Feeding America, explained to CNN in March: "The nuance is that some people are not 'food insecure' because they get access to the charitable food system. That doesn't mean they're able to achieve self-sufficiency."

U.S. households are also contending with losing assistance related to the Covid-19 pandemic—including the end of the expanded child tax credit, universal free school meals, and increased Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps.

As Common Dreamsreported in late February, while experts warned that the end to boosted SNAP benefits would cause a rise in U.S. poverty, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman declared that "a decent society would not let this happen."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Resistance fighters in Gaza launched a volley of rockets at Israel amid protests and a call for a general strike after Palestinian activist Khader Adnan, who had been on a nearly three-month hunger strike, died in an Israeli prison early Tuesday.

Adnan, a 45-year-old father of nine and member of the resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, died in Nitzan Prison in Ramle on the 87th day of a hunger strike to protest the Israeli practice of administrative detention—indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial.

"My flesh has melted, my bones have gnawed, and my strength has weakened from my imprisonment," Adnan said in his will, written a month ago. "My dear Palestinian people… do not despair. Regardless of what the occupiers do, and no matter how far they go in their injustice and aggression, our victory is close."

Palestinian media report hundreds of people gathered outside Adnan's home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Arraba. Randa Musa, Adnan's widow, urged Palestinians to remain peaceful.

"We do not want a single drop of bloodshed," she said. "We do not want rockets to be fired, or a following strike on Gaza."

The Associated Pressreports Palestinian militants launched 22 rockets from Gaza into southern Israel after Adnan's death, wounding three people—all foreigners—at a construction site in Sderot.

"This is an initial response to this heinous crime that will trigger reactions from our people," a coalition of Gaza-based Palestinian militant groups led by Hamas said in a statement.

Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees Palestinian prisoners, responded to Adnan's death by ordering the Israel Prison Service (IPS) to show "zero-tolerance toward hunger strikes."

According to Middle East Eye, Adnan spent a total of 316 days on hunger strikes in various Israeli prisons over the past two decades:

Growing up under Israeli military rule, Adnan became involved in anti-occupation work from a young age.

He was first arrested by Israeli forces while he was still a student at Birzeit University in Ramallah, where he graduated with a degree in economic mathematics in 2001.

His first detention lasted four months without charge or trial. He was then rearrested and held for another year.

Over the next two decades, Adnan was arrested 10 more times, spending a total of eight years behind bars.

The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS), an umbrella advocacy group, called Adnan a "true fighter" who waged "long battles with his empty stomach to gain his freedom."

"Today we lost a true leader," PPS said in a statement, adding that Adnan "carried the voice of Palestinian prisoners to the world."

Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) tweeted: "When he was arrested for the last time, Adnan again protested his detention. The hunger strike was Adnan's last resort to nonviolently protest the oppression he and his people face every day. These strikes were a protest not only against his own administrative detentions but also against its decadeslong use as a tool of political oppression against Palestinians."

PHRI continued:

For weeks, following a severe deterioration in his condition, we tried to convince the Health Ministry, Kaplan Hospital, and the Israel Prison Service to keep Adnan hospitalized. The IPS clinic was not equipped to monitor Adnan and could not provide emergency intervention in case of sudden deterioration. After visiting Adnan a few days before his death, PHRI chairperson Dr. Lina Qasem-Hassan published a medical report warning that he faces imminent death and must be urgently transferred to a hospital for observation. Unfortunately, our efforts to raise these concerns judicially and individually fell on deaf ears. Even the request to allow Adnan's family to visit him in prison—when it was clear this may be their final meeting—was denied by the IPS.

"Beyond the medical, professional, and ethical failures, Khader Adnan's story demonstrates Israel's fear of addressing the main issue against which Adnan protested for so many years—the injustices of the occupation," the group added.

PPS said Adnan is the 237th Palestinian since 1967 to die while imprisoned by Israel. According toMiddle East Eye, at least seven other Palestinians previously died while on hunger strike in Israeli prisons; the last such death occurred in 1992.

"By incarcerating him in the first place and purposely subjecting him to medical neglect the Israeli regime is responsible for Khader Adnan's death. But it is important to understand hunger strikes as acts of resistance in a context where prisoners are stripped of all agency," Palestinian academic Yara Hawari tweeted.

"Whilst it may seem that by inflicting damage on the body is oppositional to liberation, hunger strikes allow prisoners to seize back the power of life and death from the incarceration regime," she added. "This is why they have long been used as a tool of resistance around the world."

According to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian advocacy group, Israel currently imprisons nearly 5,000 Palestinians, including more than 1,000 administrative detainees and 160 children.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Resistance fighters in Gaza launched a volley of rockets at Israel amid protests and a call for a general strike after Palestinian activist Khader Adnan, who had been on a nearly three-month hunger strike, died in an Israeli prison early Tuesday.

Adnan, a 45-year-old father of nine and member of the resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, died in Nitzan Prison in Ramle on the 87th day of a hunger strike to protest the Israeli practice of administrative detention—indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial.

"My flesh has melted, my bones have gnawed, and my strength has weakened from my imprisonment," Adnan said in his will, written a month ago. "My dear Palestinian people… do not despair. Regardless of what the occupiers do, and no matter how far they go in their injustice and aggression, our victory is close."

Palestinian media report hundreds of people gathered outside Adnan's home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Arraba. Randa Musa, Adnan's widow, urged Palestinians to remain peaceful.

"We do not want a single drop of bloodshed," she said. "We do not want rockets to be fired, or a following strike on Gaza."

The Associated Pressreports Palestinian militants launched 22 rockets from Gaza into southern Israel after Adnan's death, wounding three people—all foreigners—at a construction site in Sderot.

"This is an initial response to this heinous crime that will trigger reactions from our people," a coalition of Gaza-based Palestinian militant groups led by Hamas said in a statement.

Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees Palestinian prisoners, responded to Adnan's death by ordering the Israel Prison Service (IPS) to show "zero-tolerance toward hunger strikes."

According to Middle East Eye, Adnan spent a total of 316 days on hunger strikes in various Israeli prisons over the past two decades:

Growing up under Israeli military rule, Adnan became involved in anti-occupation work from a young age.

He was first arrested by Israeli forces while he was still a student at Birzeit University in Ramallah, where he graduated with a degree in economic mathematics in 2001.

His first detention lasted four months without charge or trial. He was then rearrested and held for another year.

Over the next two decades, Adnan was arrested 10 more times, spending a total of eight years behind bars.

The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS), an umbrella advocacy group, called Adnan a "true fighter" who waged "long battles with his empty stomach to gain his freedom."

"Today we lost a true leader," PPS said in a statement, adding that Adnan "carried the voice of Palestinian prisoners to the world."

Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) tweeted: "When he was arrested for the last time, Adnan again protested his detention. The hunger strike was Adnan's last resort to nonviolently protest the oppression he and his people face every day. These strikes were a protest not only against his own administrative detentions but also against its decadeslong use as a tool of political oppression against Palestinians."

PHRI continued:

For weeks, following a severe deterioration in his condition, we tried to convince the Health Ministry, Kaplan Hospital, and the Israel Prison Service to keep Adnan hospitalized. The IPS clinic was not equipped to monitor Adnan and could not provide emergency intervention in case of sudden deterioration. After visiting Adnan a few days before his death, PHRI chairperson Dr. Lina Qasem-Hassan published a medical report warning that he faces imminent death and must be urgently transferred to a hospital for observation. Unfortunately, our efforts to raise these concerns judicially and individually fell on deaf ears. Even the request to allow Adnan's family to visit him in prison—when it was clear this may be their final meeting—was denied by the IPS.

"Beyond the medical, professional, and ethical failures, Khader Adnan's story demonstrates Israel's fear of addressing the main issue against which Adnan protested for so many years—the injustices of the occupation," the group added.

PPS said Adnan is the 237th Palestinian since 1967 to die while imprisoned by Israel. According toMiddle East Eye, at least seven other Palestinians previously died while on hunger strike in Israeli prisons; the last such death occurred in 1992.

"By incarcerating him in the first place and purposely subjecting him to medical neglect the Israeli regime is responsible for Khader Adnan's death. But it is important to understand hunger strikes as acts of resistance in a context where prisoners are stripped of all agency," Palestinian academic Yara Hawari tweeted.

"Whilst it may seem that by inflicting damage on the body is oppositional to liberation, hunger strikes allow prisoners to seize back the power of life and death from the incarceration regime," she added. "This is why they have long been used as a tool of resistance around the world."

According to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian advocacy group, Israel currently imprisons nearly 5,000 Palestinians, including more than 1,000 administrative detainees and 160 children.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Imagine being able to provide food, shelter, medicine and clean drinking water for the 230 million most vulnerable people on Earth, and still having a cool $2bn in spare change. That’s the equivalent of the entire economic output of Gambia rattling around in your pocket.

The reason for this unlikely thought experiment is a new analysis showing that 20 of the world’s biggest food corporations – the largest in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors – returned a total of $53.5bn to their shareholders in the last two financial years.

To put that into perspective, the UN estimates that it needs $51.5bn to provide life-saving support to 230 million people deemed most at risk worldwide. You get the idea.

What’s more, the corporations ‘earned’ these profits during a period of unprecedented turmoil – a global pandemic and full-scale war in Ukraine – when global supply chains were disrupted and millions of people went hungry.

While readers in wealthier countries may have noticed higher prices for the weekly shop, the impact in developing countries has been devastating. Food prices rose by between 3% and 4.5% in the UK, Canada and the US in the first few months of the pandemic – but by 47% in Venezuela.

The World Food Programme estimates that the number of people facing acute food insecurity more than doubled from 135 million people before the pandemic to 345 million. Countries in the Horn of Africa as well as Afghanistan and Yemen have been particularly badly hit.

Owning the market

So how were 20 companies able to get their hands on this amount of money amid two major crises?

By literally owning the market. The new report from Greenpeace International shows how this small group of companies are able to wield wildly disproportionate control, not only over the supply chains for food itself, but over information about those supplies.

When supply chains were disrupted and food prices rose, the profits rolled in. Cash dividends and shareholder buyback programmes allowed them to transfer an astronomical amount of money to their shareholders, while further amplifying their power over the sector’s industry and governments.

A systemic failure of public policy has allowed a select group to record huge profits, enriching the individuals that own and operate them and transferring wealth to shareholders, most of whom are in the Global North.

Let’s take one example from the report: Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine last year also resulted in steep price rises for agricultural commodities such as wheat, maize, sunflower oil and some fertilisers, of which Ukraine and Russia are major exporters.

Just four companies – Archer-Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus – control up to 90% of the world’s grain trade. They are under no obligation to disclose what they know about global markets, including their own grain stocks. This lack of transparency means that these companies withhold information that can shape grain prices according to their needs – not even hedge funds can get information except directly from them.

Our report finds that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, opacity around the true amounts of grain in storage was a factor in the development of a speculative bubble that led to grain prices rising around the world. In the last two financial years, these four companies paid out a total of $2.7bn in cash dividends, and at least $3.3m in share buybacks, though the true figure is likely much higher because not all of them report on their finances in detail.

If we want to see a world without hunger, the most impactful structural change we can make to the global food system is to bring about food sovereignty. This means policymakers empowering consumers and food producers through policies that benefit local food production, the environment and workers’ rights.

For years, food sovereignty movements have sought to return autonomy to food producers, shortening and strengthening supply chains to reverse the damage done by unsustainable farming. It is not just wishful thinking: from Papua New Guinea to Brazil to Mexico and many other countries, there are deep structural movements working to bring food to everyone’s plate.

But there must also be policies to loosen the grip of corporate control on the global food system – measures such as regulations to ensure greater transparency, an ambitious and sector-wide windfall tax, and significant taxation on dividend payouts as well as on income from dividends.

Achieving zero hunger is the second of the Sustainable Development Goals that UN member states committed to reach by 2030. Recent UN conferences, such as COP27 and COP15, have highlighted industrial agriculture as an important driver of greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

It is time for food to be seen as what it is: a basic human need that has to be available to us all, and not another commodity to be exploited and traded for the profit of the few.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Davi Martins.

In 2022, it was estimated that a quarter of a billion people across the world would be pushed into absolute  poverty in that year alone. 

In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, as millions go without heat and skip meals. Due to the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, 10.5 million are experiencing financial difficulty. An additional 13.7 million people would be at risk of financial difficulty with further increases in costs. 

Living standards in the UK are plummeting. For instance, 28 per cent (up from 9 per cent pre-COVID) of UK adults said that they could not afford to eat balanced meals. Absolute poverty is set to rise from 17.2 per cent in 2021-22 to 18.3 per cent in 2023-24, pushing an additional 800,000 people into poverty.  

In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.   

In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US.  

Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate. Private bankruptcy filings in 2023 have exceeded the highest point recorded during the early stages of COVID by a considerable amount. The four-week moving average for private filings in late February 2023 was 73 per cent higher than in June 2020. 

Meanwhile, nearly 100 of the biggest US publicly traded companies recorded 2021 profit margins that were at least 50 per cent higher than their 2019 levels.  

The Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock. In 2022, he said that a “very entitled” generation of people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.  

Crisis – what crisis? 

Of course, Kapito is no doubt referring to ordinary US citizens and not himself. Kapito, as the president of BlackRock, made $26,750,780 in total compensation in 2021. 

Nor is he referring to the high-net-worth individuals who benefit from hunger by investing in BlackRock, a firm that continues to profit from a globalised food system which – by design – leaves around a billion people experiencing malnutrition. BlackRock is one of the rich ‘barbarians at the barn’ who continue to make huge financial killings from an exploitative food regime.   

Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to their ‘new normal’ while business as usual prevails elsewhere, not least in one of the world’s most financially lucrative sectors – arms manufacturing. The war in Ukraine has been a ‘gold rush’ for Western arms makers as wealthy US neocons like Victoria Nuland continue to try to bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia by fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian.     

When Huw Pill tells ordinary people to get used to being poorer, he is not referring to the  individuals and firms who have made hundreds of millions of pounds (courtesy of the taxpayer) from corrupt COVID equipment contracts thanks to the UK government prioritising politically connected suppliers at the start of COVID.  

And this cannot be brushed aside as a ‘one-off’. These revelations are merely the tip of a massive corruption iceberg.  

For example, Byline Times reports a cross-party parliamentary watchdog raised concerns that decisions on how to award money from the £3.6 billion towns fund, designed to boost economic growth in struggling towns, were politically motivated. It also notes that 40 potential breaches of the Ministerial Code were not investigated in the past five years. 

Little wonder that in January 2023 the UK plunged to its lowest-ever position in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. 

Consider that the UN estimates that just $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. Then consider that 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the financial years 2020 and 2021.  

According to Global Witness, ‘excess profits’ are sudden and significant increases in a company’s financial returns that are due not to their own actions but to external events. The EU says profits count as ‘excess’ when they are more than 20% above the average return of the previous four years. 

Global Witness finds that the 2022 annual profits of the five largest integrated private sector oil and gas companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – were $195 billion. Up by almost 120% on 2021 and the highest level in the industry’s history. 

This means that these companies made $134 billion in excess profits, which could cover nearly 20% of the money all European governments together have allocated to shielding vulnerable households and businesses from the current energy crisis. 

Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, reports record profits for 2022. Operating profits of £3.3bn were recorded, up from £948m in 2021. This surpassed its previous highest ever yearly profit of £2.7bn in 2012.  

In May 2021, it was reported that COVID vaccines had created at least nine new billionaires. According to research by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, the new billionaires included Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which has produced a vaccine with Pfizer. Both CEOs were then worth around $4 billion. Senior executives from China’s CanSino Biologics and early investors in Moderna have also become billionaires. 

Although the nine new billionaires were at that time worth a combined $19.3 billion, the vaccines were largely funded by public money. For instance, according to a May 2021 report by CNN, BioNTech received €325 million from the German government for the development of the vaccine. The company made a net profit of €1.1 billion in the first three months of the year, thanks to its share of sales from the COVID vaccine, compared with a loss of €53.4 million for the same period last year. 

Moderna was expected to make $13.2 billion in COVID vaccine revenue in 2021. The company received billions of dollars in funding from the US government for development of its vaccine. 

This article has briefly touched on four horses of the economic apocalypse – agribusiness, oil, arms and big pharma. But let’s finish by mentioning the fifth and the most powerful – finance. The sector which sparked the devastation that we now see.  

By late 2019, a financial crisis was looming. It was multiple times worse than the 2008 one.  

Investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019: 

“All talk about big finance bankrupting the nation by looting public funds, politicians destroying public services at the behest of large investors and the depredations of the casino economy were washed away with COVID. Predators who saw their financial empires coming apart resolved to shut down society. To solve the problems they created, they needed a cover story. It magically appeared in the form of a ‘novel virus’.”  

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers. 

What happened in Europe was part of a strategy to avert the wider systemic collapse of the hegemonic financial system. And what we now see is an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history under cover of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’. 

As millions of workers take strike action in the UK, Huw Pill implies that they should accept their plight as inevitable. But they have no reason to. 

The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months. Between April and July 2020, during the initial lockdowns, the wealth held by these billionaires grew from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion.  

The only thing inevitable about the current crisis was the collapse of a debt-fuelled, unsustainable neoliberalism set up to facilitate outright plunder by the super-rich who have offshored more than $50 trillion in hidden accounts.  

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

Republican Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota on Monday signed one of the nation's most draconian abortion bans into law, just weeks after the state's GOP lawmakers shot down a proposal to provide free school lunches to low-income students.

The new forced pregnancy law, which takes immediate effect, prohibits abortion care in nearly all cases. Abortion is allowed in cases of rape or incest, but only during the first six weeks of pregnancy—before many people realize they are pregnant. Abortion is also allowed without gestational limits if terminating a pregnancy could prevent the pregnant person's "death or a serious health risk."

North Dakota is one of several states where dormant abortion bans took immediate effect last June when the U.S. Supreme Court's reactionary majority overturnedRoe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had legalized the healthcare procedure nationwide.

However, "North Dakota's trigger ban was blocked last year by a district judge, after its sole abortion provider, the Red River Women's Clinic, filed a lawsuit against the law," The New York Times reported Monday. "The state Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling last month and said the state constitution protected abortion rights in some situations."

Burgum, a former vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement that North Dakota's new forced pregnancy law "clarifies and refines" the existing abortion ban that has been blocked by courts.

As the Times noted:

Under the earlier ban, providers who performed an abortion to save the life of a mother could face felony prosecution. The provider would need to offer an "affirmative defense" proving that the abortion was medically necessary within the confines of the state law.

Under the new version of the law, the exceptions do not require an affirmative defense from providers. But providers could still face criminal charges if they violate the exceptions detailed in the law.

Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights, accused North Dakota lawmakers of "attempting to bypass the state constitution and court system with this total ban."

"They made the exceptions a little bit less narrow but essentially tried to repackage the trigger ban," she told the Times.

North Dakota has been completely bereft of abortion clinics since August, when the Fargo-based Red River Women's Clinic moved its operations a short distance across the border to Moorhead, Minnesota. But as the Times reported, Center for Reproductive Rights attorneys representing the clinic "say it is important to ensure that the ban does not take effect, so that patients facing medical emergencies can receive abortions in hospitals and from their doctors."

As the lawsuit opposing North Dakota's currently enjoined abortion ban proceeds, fresh legal challenges to the state's new forced pregnancy law are expected.

"I don't think women in North Dakota are going to accept this, and there will be action in the future to get our rights back," state Rep. Liz Conmy (D-11) toldThe Associated Press. "Our Legislature is overwhelmingly pro-pregnancy, but I think women in the state would like to make their own decisions."

Burgum, who also signed a bill prohibiting gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth last week, argued that the new abortion ban "reaffirms North Dakota as a pro-life state."

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, however, contrasted North Dakota Republicans' willingness to enact a forced pregnancy law with their refusal last month to expand access to free school lunches.

Condemning GOP lawmakers and officials, Newsom summarized their position as follows: "Mandating birth is state responsibility. Helping feed those kids is not."

Just 10 days after North Dakota Republicans rejected a bill that would have broadened eligibility for free school lunches, they voted in early April to increase their own daily meal reimbursements from $35 to $45, adding insult to injury.

"I'm beyond enraged at these cruel backward MAGA extremist politicians," tweeted human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid. "A special place in hell."

In sharp contrast to their counterparts in Bismarck, North Dakota, lawmakers in St. Paul recently made Minnesota the fourth state to guarantee universal free school meals.

Meanwhile, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit filed last month by five Texas women whose lives were endangered by that state's near-total abortion ban underscores the spurious nature of so-called "abortion exceptions," as Common Dreamsreported.

With its new law, North Dakota became at least the 14th state with an active ban on nearly all abortions. Additional states have slightly less restrictive prohibitions in place.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 opinion last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ended the constitutional right to abortion and turned regulation of the procedure over to individual states, leaving tens of millions of people without access to lifesaving reproductive healthcare.

The ruling's elimination of federal protections has enabled right-wing lawmakers to prohibit or restrict abortion in more than half of the states, unleashing a life-threatening crisis that human rights advocates consider a violation of U.S. obligations under international law.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next few years. 

As a result, almost three-quarters of Africa’s governments have reduced their agricultural budgets since 2019, and more than 20 million people have been pushed into severe hunger. In addition, the world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports. 

Last year, Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher stated that there was a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people would fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. That year, food inflation rose by double digits in most African countries.  

By September 2022, some 345 million people across the world were experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019. Moreover, one person is dying of hunger every four seconds. From 2019 to 2022, the number of undernourished people grew by 150 million. 

Billions of dollars’ worth of arms continue to pour into Ukraine from the NATO countries as US neocons pursue their goal of regime change in Russia and balkanisation of that country. 

Yet people in those NATO countries are experiencing increasing levels of hardship. The US has sent almost 80 billion dollars to Ukraine, while 30 million low-income people across the US are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.  

Due to the disruptive supply chain effects of the conflict in Ukraine, speculative trading that drives up food prices, the impact of closing down the global economy under the guise of COVID and the inflationary impacts of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system between September 2019 and March 2020, people are being driven into poverty and denied access to sufficient food. 

Matters are not helped by issues that have long plagued the global food system: cutbacks in public subsidies to agriculture, WTO rules that facilitate cheap, subsidised imports which undermine or wipe out indigenous agriculture in poorer countries and loan conditionalities, resulting in countries ‘structurally adjusting’ their agri sectors thereby eradicating food security and self-sufficiency – consider that Africa has been transformed from a net food exporter in the 1960s to a net food importer today.  

Great game food geopolitics continue and result in elite interests playing with the lives of hundreds of millions who are regarded as collateral damage. Policies, underpinned by neoliberal dogma masquerading as economic science and necessity, which are designed to create dependency and benefit a handful of multi-billionaires and global agribusiness corporations who, ably assisted by the World Bank, IMF and WTO, now preside over an increasingly centralised food regime. 

Many of these corporations have engaged in rampant profiteering at a time when people across the world are experiencing rising food inflation. For instance, 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the fiscal years 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the UN estimates that $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. 

As a paper in the journal Frontiers noted in 2021, these corporations form part of a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies and export-oriented countries who are subverting multilateral institutions of food governance. Many who are involved in this alliance are co-opting the narrative of ‘food systems transformation’ as they anticipate new investment opportunities and seek total control of the global food system. 

This type of ‘transformation’ is more of the same wrapped in a climate emergency narrative in an attempt to move food and farming further towards an ecomodernist techno-dystopia controlled by big agribusiness and big tech, as described in the article “The Netherlands: Template for Ecomodernism’s Brave New World.” 

A ‘brave new world’ where a concoction of genetically engineered items, synthetic food and ultra-processed products will do more harm than good – but will certainly boost the bottom line of the pharmaceutical corporations.  

While securing further dominance over the global food system and undermining food security in the process, global agribusiness frames this as ‘feeding the world’. 

The model these corporations promote not only creates food insecurity but also produces death and illness.   

Former Professor of Medicine Dr Paul Marik recently stated: 

If you believe the narrative, Type 2 diabetes is a progressive metabolic disease that’ll result in cardiac complications. You’re going to lose your legs. You’re going to have kidney disease, and the only treatment is expensive pharma drugs. That is completely false. It’s a lie.

It is projected that by the end of this decade half of the world’s population are going to be obese and over 20% to 25% will have Type 2 diabetes.   

According to Marik, the bottom line is Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease due to bad lifestyle and really bad eating habits: 

“We eat all the time. We snack all the time. This is part of the food industry’s goal. Processed food, starch, becomes an addiction. Most of us are glucose addicted and it’s, in fact, more addictive than cocaine. It creates this vicious cycle of insulin resistance.” 

He adds that if you’re insulin resistant, this prevents leptin and the other hormones acting on your brain, so you’re continually hungry: 

“If you are continually hungry, you eat more, which causes more insulin resistance. It causes this vicious cycle of overeating carbohydrates…” 

This is the nature of the modern food system. Cheap processed ingredients, low-nutrient value, highly addictive and maximum profits. A system that is being imposed or has already been imposed on countries whose populations once had healthy, unadulterated diets (see Obesity, malnutrition and the globalisation of bad food – theecologist.org). 

Over the past 60 years in Western nations, there have been fundamental changes in the quality of food. In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas in “A Review of the 6th Edition of McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation” noted a precipitous change towards convenience and pre-prepared foods containing saturated fats, highly processed meats and refined carbohydrates, often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives including colourings, flavourings and preservatives. 

Aside from the negative impacts of Green Revolution cropping systems and practices, Thomas proposed that these changes are significant contributors to rising levels of diet-induced ill health. He added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health. 

Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet, specifically micronutrient deficiency, and pesticide use. 

It is clear that we have a deeply unjust and unsustainable food system that causes environmental devastation, illness and malnutrition, among other things. People often ask: So, what’s the solution? The solutions have been made clear time and again and involve a genuine food transition towards agroecology.  

Unlike the co-opted version of ‘food transition’ being promoted, agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. Agroecology challenges the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system. Well-known academics like Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez have written extensively on the potential of agroecology. And its benefits are clear. 

In finishing, let us consider the skin-deep morality pedalled throughout the COVID period. During COVID, the official narrative was underpinned by emotive slogans like ‘protect lives’ and ‘keep safe’. Those who refused the COVID jab were labelled ‘granny killers’ and ‘irresponsible’. All presided over by government politicians who too often failed to obey their own COVID rules.  

Meanwhile, while having terrorised the public with a health crisis narrative, they continue to collude with powerful agrifood corporations that destroy health courtesy of their practices. They continue to facilitate a system that serves the needs of global agricapital and ruthless investors like BlackRock’s Larry Fink who secure massive profits from a monopolistic food system (Fink also invests in the pharma sector – one of the biggest beneficiaries of a sickening global food regime) that by its very nature creates illness, malnutrition and hunger.    

The COVID narrative was imbued with the notion of moral responsibility. The people who sold it to the masses have no morality. Like the UK’s former health minister and COVID rule breaker Matt Hancock (see Matt Hancock’s Car Crash Interview), they are willing to sell their soul (or influence) to the highest bidder – in Hancock’s case, a £10,000 wage demand for a day’s ‘consultancy’ as a sitting politician or a few hundred thousand to bolster his ego, bank balance and image on a celebrity TV programme.  

In a corrupted and corrupting society, the rewards could be even higher for the likes of Hancock when he leaves office (a health minister who helped traumatise the population while doing nothing to hold the health-damaging agribusiness corporations to account). But with a long line of well-rewarded fraudsters to choose from, we already know that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

United Nations humanitarian officials on Tuesday renewed warnings that as many as 48 million people across West and Central Africa will likely go hungry in the coming months due to severe food insecurity driven by armed conflict, Covid-19, inflation, and the worsening climate emergency.

Officials from four U.N. agencies—the World Food Progam (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)—this week amplified calls for help, underscoring a December 2022 analysis warning that the number of hungry people in West and Central Africa would reach a "record high" in 2023 "if urgent and long-lasting solutions to address this crisis" aren't implemented soon.

"The spiraling food security and nutrition situation in Western Africa is just heartbreaking," WFP regional director Chris Nikoi said in a statement. "There is a crucial need for massive investmentin strengthening the capacities of communities and individuals to withstand shocks whileprioritizing local and long-term solutions to food production, transformation, and access for vulnerable groups."

For the first time in the Sahel—a semi-arid strip running from Senegal and southern Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to Sudan and Eritrea on the Red Sea—45,000 people are at risk of experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger, or one step away from famine.

Most of the affected people are in Mali and Burkina Faso, which has replaced Mali as the epicenter of the ongoing fight against militant Islamist groups including the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin. French, U.S., and mostly private Russian forces, as well as the militaries of some African nations, have intervened in the war to support regional government forces.

In the wider region, lengthy droughts, heatwaves, floods, and other extreme weather have negatively impacted water supplies, crops, livestock, and agricultural production in a region whose people overwhelmingly live off the land.

Nikoi toldAxios that "if you go deeper, climate is a large contributor to why these things have now reached the level they have reached."

As in much of the world, food prices have soared in Africa following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The war has driven up the cost of fertilizer and fuel, while trade restrictions have exacerbated shortages across the continent.

"The situation is worrying," Ann Defraye, a regional nutrition specialist for UNICEF in West and Central Africa, toldThe Associated Press. "Last year, we saw a large increase—31%—in the number of children admitted to health facilities with severe wasting across the Sahel."

"In many areas, it is getting much more difficult for families to find nutritious food to eat, especially where we have communities under blockade," she added.

According to Bloomberg:

Burkina Faso has halted grain exports to Niger, Nigeria has stopped rice shipments to Benin, and Ivory Coast has halted exports of plantains to Burkina Faso, according to data collected by the WFP...

The town of Menaka in eastern Mali and Djibo in northern Burkina Faso are among 30 localities identified by the WFP as areas where food transport has been blocked because of insecurity.

"We see areas that are completely blocked," Alexandre Lecuziat, the WFP's senior emergency preparedness and response adviser, said at a press conference in Dakar.

Robert Guei, FAO's sub-regional coordinator for West Africa, called the food security situation in the region "unacceptable."

"This trend will probably continue to worsen the food and nutrition situation and therefore we mustaddress the root causes of this crisisin a concerted manner and immediately," he said. "It is time for action to boost agricultural production to achieve food sovereignty in our region."

Much of Africa beyond the Sahel is also facing a historic food crisis. According to the Red Cross, 146 million Africans are going hungry.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reportedly set to unveil a proposal Monday morning that would slash federal food aid for millions of people as part of Republicans' broader plan to avert a debt ceiling crisis of their own making.

But Democratic lawmakers were quick to reject the idea of food assistance cuts, denouncing the Republican leader's proposal as immoral and unacceptable.

"My family and I depended on food stamps. So do over 65,000 men, women, and children in the community I serve," Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said in a statement Sunday after Politico reported that McCarthy's (R-Calif.) proposal includes an expansion of work requirements for certain Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients and a call to limit states' ability to waive work mandates—a power that has been used to ensure consistent aid access during times of economic turmoil.

The outlines of McCarthy's proposal resemble legislation introduced last month by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), who suggested expanding SNAP work requirements for adults deemed able-bodied and without dependents. Specifically, Johnson's bill would impose the stringent requirements on such adults between the ages of 18 and 65, up from the current age ceiling of 49.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) notes, the existing SNAP work requirements for able-bodied adults limit benefits "to just three months in any 36-month period when they are not employed or participating in a work or training program for at least 20 hours a week."

In a recent analysis, CBPP estimated that Johnson's bill would put 10 million people at risk of losing benefits. The think tank stressed that around 4 million children live in households that the legislation would impact.

In her statement on Sunday, Lee said Congress "cannot allow Republicans' threats to crash our economy if we don't bend to their pro-starvation agenda."

"Stop playing politics with people's lives," Lee added.

Lee's fellow Pennsylvania Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman, also voiced opposition to the Republican speaker's planned attack on food aid:

\u201cCut SNAP for families\u00a0and kids while pushing tax cuts for billionaires? \n\nNot on my watch. https://t.co/ndwDkiIFLq\u201d

— Senator John Fetterman (@Senator John Fetterman) 1681690280

McCarthy's plan will come weeks after millions of people across the U.S. saw their federal food aid cut—in some cases by hundreds of dollars per month—as emergency allotments for the Covid-19 pandemic were terminated, forcing many to turn to food banks for support amid elevated prices.

The GOP plan's prospects are uncertain given Democratic control of the Senate and the White House's stated opposition to attaching more punitive work requirements or other attacks on aid programs to an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. The U.S. is expected to default on its debt this summer if Congress doesn't act.

Senate Republicans have expressed doubts that McCarthy's food aid proposal would be able to pass while still praising "the intent behind the House GOP efforts to expand work requirements for SNAP," as Politico reported.

"I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can," an unnamed Republican Senate aide told Politico. "We're going to live in reality over here."

According to Punchbowl, the broader debt ceiling plan that House Republicans are considering would raise the limit until May 2024—setting up another dangerous standoff in the near future—in exchange for "either a cap on non-defense discretionary spending or a cap on overall discretionary spending after reducing it to FY 2022 levels."

Such caps would require significant cuts to key federal education, healthcare, and housing programs. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development warned last month that the GOP's proposed spending cuts could affect rental assistance for 640,000 families and make it "impossible to stave off mass evictions."

Claire Guzdar, a spokesperson for the ProsperUS coalition, said in a statement that "the House Republican majority's latest proposal is a complete nonstarter."

"We have already lived through the economic devastation of deep cuts like those proposed here," said Guzdar. "Enough is enough. Congress must raise the debt limit without conditions or risk economic catastrophe."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Jahesh is one of many exiled Afghan journalists still in limbo more than 18 months after the Taliban seized power, forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee. Those who left included hundreds of journalists seeking refuge as the Taliban cracked down on the country’s previously vibrant independent media landscape.

While some journalists found shelter in Europe or the U.S., those unable to move beyond neighboring Pakistan are in increasingly dire straits. Unable to find jobs without work authorization, their visas are running out as they struggle with the snail-paced process of resettlement to a third country. Pakistan, which last year announced it would expedite 30-day transit visas for Afghans going to other countries, is now taking harsher steps against those in the country without valid documents. In March, the government announced new restrictions limiting their movements. At least 1,100 Afghans have been deported in recent months, according to a Guardian report citing Pakistani human rights lawyer Moniza Kakar.

Pakistan is not a signatory to the U.N. refugee convention stating that refugees should not be forced to return to a country where they face threats to their life or freedom, and Afghan journalists told CPJ they fear the Taliban’s hardline stance on the media would put them at particular risk if they were sent back.

Some journalists told CPJ they have to pay exorbitant fees to renew a visa and applications can take months to be processed. Those without valid visas live in hiding for fear of detention or extortion. Even those with the proper documentation said they have been harassed by local authorities. The uncertainty, they say, has put a strain on their mental health.  

“People are worried about being identified and arrested if they go out to try to renew their visas. The risk of deportation is putting everyone under pressure,” said Jahesh, who suspended his plan to sell his kidney following a donation after tweeting his desperate offer in February.

The situation is “dire,” said Ahmad Quraishi, executive director of the advocacy group Afghanistan Journalists Center, which estimates there are at least 150 Afghan journalists in Pakistan. He called on embassies to prioritize resettlement applications of at-risk journalists. 

CPJ spoke with five other exiled Afghan journalists in Pakistan who are facing visa issues. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Ahmad Ferooz Esar, a former journalist with Arezo TV and Mitra TV, fled to Pakistan in December 2021 with his wife, also a journalist. He was briefly detained in early February and is in hiding after speaking out about his detention.

On the night of February 3, the police entered our house and arrested me and a number of other Afghans living there. I asked the police why I was being arrested, they didn’t say anything. They asked me about my job and what I did in Afghanistan, I was very afraid. They did not even check our passport or visa status.

We were taken to the police station. They asked for money. Before my mobile phone was taken away, I shared my arrest with some media colleagues in Islamabad. With their help, I got out later and I gave media interviews in which I talked about police corruption. I stated the facts, but the police came looking for me later. We had to leave the house.

We are living in fear. Every moment we fear they may find out our current address and come here to arrest me. Please help me and my wife escape from this horror and destruction. There is no way for us to go back to Afghanistan.

Khatera Ahmadi, a former news presenter with Afghan broadcaster TOLONews, fled to Pakistan in July 2022. A photo of her covering her face on-air following an order by the Taliban was one of the most widely shared images illustrating the restrictions on female journalists in the country.  

I had to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban came to power and after the threats that were made against me. I got the visa and came to Pakistan with my husband, who is also a journalist. It’s been eight months now, we’re in a bad situation. We can’t travel freely in Pakistan. We have to go to the Torkham border [a border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan that some Afghans are required visit every two months] to renew our visas, but the Taliban might arrest me there.

I cannot go anywhere, my family cannot transfer me money, I cannot make the [rental] contract for the house. We can’t do anything here.

Medina Kohistani, a former journalist with TOLONews, fled to Pakistan a year ago. She said there has been heightened anxiety among exiled Afghan journalists in Pakistan.

The police always patrol the streets and markets and check the visas and passports of Afghans. In some cases, they enter buildings and check the visas and residence permits of Afghan refugees.

In one case, several people, including journalists, had been arrested over visa issues, and were later released after paying a bribe. My friend, who is a journalist, did not have money to pay the fines after his visa expired, he is living in constant fear.

Ahmad, who asked to be identified only by his first name, has been living in Islamabad for about 10 months. He was forced to flee Afghanistan after he was detained by the Taliban over his reporting.

I have seen that most Afghan journalists have had to buy their [Pakistan] visas for US$1,200 to be able to flee Afghanistan and now, their visas have expired. Even though they tried to apply for an extension, they didn’t get an answer. The only way to get a visa is by paying a bribe, which is impossible, given the financial situations of many Afghan journalists.

I personally witnessed one of the journalists whose visa has expired…pay a bribe to the police. I cannot provide more details as I may face more risks to discuss that.

An Afghan journalist in Pakistan, who is also a father of three children aged 5 to 14. He fled to Pakistan over a year ago and asked not to be named for the security of his family.

Pakistan does not provide education for our children, public and private schools do not enroll our children. This is a really big issue. What will be the future of these children while there is no hope for a third country resettlement?

When we fled Afghanistan, we had a small amount of cash savings that we kept with us. We had just enough to get by with those savings in the beginning, now we have to sell our belongings like my wife’s jewelries for cash and for food.

There are no other options, we can’t go back to Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior did not respond to a request seeking comment for this article, including the allegations of bribery.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Beh Lih Yi.

Russian authorities have held Danylovych, a nurse and freelance journalist covering the healthcare system, since April 2022. During her detention, authorities have beaten and threatened to kill her.

On March 22, 2023, the Ukrainian human rights group Zmina published a letter from Danylovych saying that her health had deteriorated while behind bars, that she had been denied medical treatment, and she had begun a dry hunger strike, refusing all liquids until she was granted access to adequate medical care.

Also on March 21, Danylovych fainted while being transported to a Crimean court, according to multiple news reports, a report by Zmina, and Lutfiye Zudiyeva, a representative of the human rights group Crimean Solidarity, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

“Russian authorities in occupied Crimea should immediately grant journalist Iryna Danylovych access to medical assistance and stop punishing members of the press for their work,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Danylovych should not be in prison in the first place, and authorities should stop retaliating against Crimean journalists by depriving them of their basic rights.”

In her letter, Danylovych said that she had suffered from hearing loss and a constant ringing in her left ear for four months, causing her “unbearable pain.” She wrote that she suspected that she had suffered “a mini stroke” but had not been examined or treated, and that local authorities had been aware of her condition since late November 2022.

Danylovych’s father Bronislav Danylovych told CPJ by phone that she was “suffering from strong headaches and had a constant noise in her ears, as if she was standing close to an aircraft engine,” when he last met with her on March 20.

Bronislav Danylovych told CPJ that he met with representatives of the detention center and the penitentiary system’s medical service on March 27. During that meeting, those representatives told the journalist’s father that Danylovych was receiving medication, but he told CPJ that he did not believe them. He said he considered her treatment to be retaliation for her journalism.

Zudiyeva told CPJ that such medical assistance is required to be administered at a civilian hospital, and said the journalist had not been transferred to such a facility.

During a March 21 meeting with her lawyer, Danylovych said she could not properly study her case files because of her health, Zudiyeva told CPJ. In her letter, she wrote that she would not study her files until she recovers and considered her treatment “torture.”

Danylovych worked at a medical center in the village of Vladyslavivka and contributed to local news websites InZhir Media and Crimean Process.

On December 28, 2022, she was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined 50,000 rubles (US$690) for allegedly handling explosives. She denied the charges and wrote that explosives had been planted to incriminate her.

Danylovych appealed her conviction, but a date for an appeal hearing has not been set, according to Zudiyeva and Zmina’s international advocacy officer, Tetiana Zhukova, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app and email.

CPJ emailed the Feodosia City Court, where Danyloych’s trial is taking place, as well as the Simferopol detention center, where she is being held, and the Crimean Federal Penitentiary Service but did not immediately receive any responses.

At least 19 journalists, including Danylovych, were behind bars in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea on December 1, 2022, when CPJ conducted its most recent prison census.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Russian authorities have held Danylovych, a nurse and freelance journalist covering the healthcare system, since April 2022. During her detention, authorities have beaten and threatened to kill her.

On March 22, 2023, the Ukrainian human rights group Zmina published a letter from Danylovych saying that her health had deteriorated while behind bars, that she had been denied medical treatment, and she had begun a dry hunger strike, refusing all liquids until she was granted access to adequate medical care.

Also on March 21, Danylovych fainted while being transported to a Crimean court, according to multiple news reports, a report by Zmina, and Lutfiye Zudiyeva, a representative of the human rights group Crimean Solidarity, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

“Russian authorities in occupied Crimea should immediately grant journalist Iryna Danylovych access to medical assistance and stop punishing members of the press for their work,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Danylovych should not be in prison in the first place, and authorities should stop retaliating against Crimean journalists by depriving them of their basic rights.”

In her letter, Danylovych said that she had suffered from hearing loss and a constant ringing in her left ear for four months, causing her “unbearable pain.” She wrote that she suspected that she had suffered “a mini stroke” but had not been examined or treated, and that local authorities had been aware of her condition since late November 2022.

Danylovych’s father Bronislav Danylovych told CPJ by phone that she was “suffering from strong headaches and had a constant noise in her ears, as if she was standing close to an aircraft engine,” when he last met with her on March 20.

Bronislav Danylovych told CPJ that he met with representatives of the detention center and the penitentiary system’s medical service on March 27. During that meeting, those representatives told the journalist’s father that Danylovych was receiving medication, but he told CPJ that he did not believe them. He said he considered her treatment to be retaliation for her journalism.

Zudiyeva told CPJ that such medical assistance is required to be administered at a civilian hospital, and said the journalist had not been transferred to such a facility.

During a March 21 meeting with her lawyer, Danylovych said she could not properly study her case files because of her health, Zudiyeva told CPJ. In her letter, she wrote that she would not study her files until she recovers and considered her treatment “torture.”

Danylovych worked at a medical center in the village of Vladyslavivka and contributed to local news websites InZhir Media and Crimean Process.

On December 28, 2022, she was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined 50,000 rubles (US$690) for allegedly handling explosives. She denied the charges and wrote that explosives had been planted to incriminate her.

Danylovych appealed her conviction, but a date for an appeal hearing has not been set, according to Zudiyeva and Zmina’s international advocacy officer, Tetiana Zhukova, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app and email.

CPJ emailed the Feodosia City Court, where Danyloych’s trial is taking place, as well as the Simferopol detention center, where she is being held, and the Crimean Federal Penitentiary Service but did not immediately receive any responses.

At least 19 journalists, including Danylovych, were behind bars in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea on December 1, 2022, when CPJ conducted its most recent prison census.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Minnesota last week became just the fourth U.S. state to guarantee universal free school meals, triggering a fresh wave of demands and arguments for a similar federal policy to feed kids.

"Universal school meals is now law in Minnesota!" Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents the state, tweeted Monday. "Now, we need to pass our Universal School Meals Program Act to guarantee free school meals to every child across the country."

Omar's proposal, spearheaded in the upper chamber by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), "would permanently provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to all school children regardless of income, eliminate school meal debt, and strengthen local economies by incentivizing local food procurement," the lawmakers' offices explained in 2021.

Congressional Republicans last year blocked the continuation of a Covid-19 policy enabling public schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all 50 million children, and now, many families face rising debt over childrens' cafeteria charges.

"The school bus service doesn't charge fares. Neither should the school lunch service."

Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, highlighted Monday that while children who attend public schools generally have not only free education but also free access to bathrooms, textbooks, computer equipment, playgrounds, gyms, and sports gear, "around the middle of each school day, the free schooling service is briefly suspended for lunch."

"How much each kid is charged is based on their family income except that, if a kid lives in a school or school district where 40% or more of the kids are eligible for free lunch, then they are also eligible for free lunch even if their family income would otherwise be too high," he detailed. "Before Covid, in 2019, 68.1% of the kids were charged $0, 5.8% were charged $0.40, and 26.1% were charged the full $4.33... The total cost of the 4.9 billion meals is around $21 billion per year. In 2019, user fees covered $5.6 billion of this cost."

Bruenig—whose own child has access to free school meals because of the community eligibility program—continued:

The approximately $5.6 billion of school lunch fees collected in 2019 were equal to 0.7% of the total cost of K-12 schooling. In order to collect these fees, each school district has to set up a school lunch payments system, often by contracting with third-party providers like Global Payments. They also have to set up a system for dealing with kids who are not enrolled in the free lunch program but who show up to school with no money in their school lunch account or in their pockets. In this scenario, schools will either have to make the kid go without lunch, give them a free lunch for the day (but not too many times), or give them a lunch while assigning their lunch account a debt.

Eligibility for the $0 and $0.40 lunches is based on income, but this does not mean that everyone with an eligible income successfully signs up for the program. As with all means-tested programs, the application of the means test not only excludes people with ineligible incomes, but also people with eligible incomes who fail to successfully navigate the red tape of the welfare bureaucracy.

The think tank leader tore into arguments against universal free meals for kids, declaring that "hiving off a tiny part of the public school bundle and charging a means-tested fee for it is extremely stupid."

Bruenig pointed out that socializing the cost of child benefits like school meals helps "equalize the conditions of similarly-situated families with different numbers of children" and "smooths incomes across the lifecycle by ensuring that, when people have kids, their household financial situation remains mostly the same."

"Indeed, this is actually the case for the welfare state as whole, not just child benefits," the expert emphasized, explaining that like older adults and those with disabilities, children cannot and should not work, which "makes it impossible to receive personal labor income, meaning that some other non-labor income system is required."

Conservative opponents of free school lunches often claim that "fees serve an important pedagogical function in society to get people to understand personal responsibility" and because they "are means-tested, they serve an important income-redistributive function in society," he noted. "Both arguments are hard to take seriously."

Pushing back against the first claim, Bruenig stressed that right-wingers don't apply it to other aspects of free schooling such as bus services. He also wrote that the means-testing claim "is both untrue and at odds with their general attitudes on, not just redistribution, but on how child benefit programs specifically should be structured."

A tax for everyone with a certain income intended to make up the $5.6 billion in school meal fees, he argued, "would have a larger base and thus represent a smaller share of the income of each person taxed and such a tax would smooth incomes over time," while also eliminating means-testing—which would allow schools to feed all kids and ditch costly payment systems.

As Nora De La Cour reported Sunday for Jacobin: "The fight for school meals traces its roots all the way back to maternalist Progressive Era efforts to shield children and workers from the ravages of unregulated capitalism. In her bookThe Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, Jennifer Gaddis describes how early school lunch crusaders envisioned meal programs that would be integral to schools' educational missions, immersing students in hands-on learning about nutrition, gardening, food preparation, and home economics. Staffed by duly compensated professionals, these programs would collectivize and elevate care work, making it possible for mothers of all economic classes to efficiently nourish their young."

Now, families who experienced the positive impact of the pandemic-era program want more from the federal government.

"When schools adopt universal meals through community eligibility or another program, we see improvements in students' academic performance, behavior, attendance, and psychosocial functioning," wrote De La Cour, whose reporting also includes parent and cafeteria worker perspectives. "Above all, the implementation of universal meals causes meal participation to shoot up, demonstrating that the need far exceeds the number of kids who are able to get certified."

Crystal FitzSimons, director of school-based programs at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), told Jacobin, "There is a feeling that we can't go back."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

An analysis released Monday estimates that more than 10 million people across the United States—including 4 million children—would be at risk of losing food benefits if the GOP's proposed attacks on federal nutrition assistance become law.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) analysis focuses specifically on legislation introduced last week by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), who wants certain recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to face even more strict work requirements than they do under current law.

"Adults aged 18 through 49 without children in their homes can receive benefits for only three months out of every three years, unless they can document they are working or participate in a qualifying work program at least 20 hours a week or prove they are unable to work," note CBPP's Katie Bergh and Dottie Rosenbaum.

If passed, Johnson's bill would raise the age ceiling for the strict work requirements from 49 to 65, a move that Bergh and Rosenbaum argue would endanger food benefits for both the adults specifically targeted by the law and those in their households.

Adults between the ages of 18 and 65 and without disabilities would be subject to the work requirements and benefit time limits "unless they have a child under age 7 in their home," CBPP points out.

Research has demonstrated repeatedly that work requirements do virtually nothing to boost employment, undercutting the GOP's stated rationale for attempting to expand them year after year.

Johnson's legislation would also limit states' ability to temporarily waive SNAP benefit time limits for able-bodied adults, a freedom that has been used to ensure people have consistent access to benefits during economic downturns.

"A total of more than 10 million people, about 1 in 4 SNAP participants, including about 4 million children, live in households that would be at risk of losing food assistance under the Johnson bill, based on our preliminary estimates," Bergh and Rosenbaum write.

People who would face the loss of benefits, according to CBPP, include "some 3 million adults up to age 65, primarily parents or grandparents, who live in households with school-age children." Those millions of children "would see their household's food assistance fall if their parents or other adults in the family aren't able to meet" the Johnson measure's work requirements, the analysis notes.

Additionally, the Johnson bill—which currently has 24 Republican co-sponsors—would potentially strip food benefits from "about 2 million older adults aged 50 to 64 who do not have children in their homes" as well as adults who happen to live in areas with higher levels of unemployment, making it more difficult to find and hold a job.

"A total of more than 10 million people, about 1 in 4 SNAP participants, including about 4 million children, live in households that would be at risk of losing food assistance under the Johnson bill."

While Bergh and Rosenbaum stress that "not everyone newly subject to these requirements would lose benefits," a "very significant number are likely to be impacted because they are out of work, the state failed to screen them for an exemption they should have qualified for, or they were unable to navigate the verification system to prove they are working."

"This is a punitive and ineffective approach," Bergh and Rosenbaum argue. "SNAP is successful at reducing poverty and food insecurity and should be both protected this year from cuts and be strengthened in some areas so that it does more to combat food insecurity and hunger."

Johnson's bill was introduced after pandemic-related SNAP enhancements were allowed to expire earlier this month, hitting millions of people with steep benefit cuts—in some cases hundreds of dollars per month—as food prices remain elevated nationwide.

"I'm just going to have to go back to not eating very much, about a meal a day," Teresa Calderez, a 63-year-old SNAP recipient who saw her benefits drop from $280 a month to $23, told NPR in a recent interview. "Unfortunately, I have known hunger. And it's not a good feeling."

The South Dakota Republican's proposal isn't the only one the House GOP is considering ahead of upcoming negotiations over the farm bill and the debt ceiling.

As CBPP notes:

Budget plans put forward by the Republican Study Committee and by Trump-era Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought would also take food assistance away through harmful work requirements while, respectively, instituting a strict block grant (often used to promote large, unspecified cuts) and radically restructuring SNAP by capping program spending.

In addition, the extensive cuts that House Republicans passed in their 2018 farm bill and similar measures the Trump Administration pursued by regulation could offer clues to what may be ahead in the farm bill debate. In 2018, we detailed how such provisions would hurt older people, workers, children, women, people with disabilities, and veterans. The House-passed bill would have caused more than 1 million households with more than 2 million people to lose benefits altogether or have them reduced. Those provisions were soundly rejected on a bipartisan basis in the Senate.

Facing criticism for failing to keep pandemic-related SNAP expansions alive, Democrats in the House and Senate have pledged to oppose any food assistance cuts going forward.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said during a hearing last week that Congress "must ensure that the farm bill continues to support the nutrition programs that serve as a lifeline to millions of people and families across this country."

"The SNAP program provides food assistance for more than 41 million Americans, including children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities," said Stabenow. "Spending on nutrition programs does not rob resources from other farm bill programs, just as crop insurance doesn't rob resources from other programs when disaster strikes and spending goes up."

"But threats we are hearing from some in the House in favor of reckless and indiscriminate mandatory budget cuts will result in cuts to all farm bill programs," the senator added. "We cannot go backward at a time when our farmers and families need us most."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Surrounded by students, teachers, and advocates, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Friday afternoon signed into law a bill to provide breakfast and lunch at no cost to all of the state's roughly 820,000 K-12 pupils regardless of their household income.

The move to make Minnesota the fourth U.S. state to guarantee universal free school meals—joining California, Maine, and Colorado—elicited praise from progressives.

"Beautiful," tweeted Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University.

"No child should go hungry for any reason, period."

UC-Berkeley professor and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on social media: "Let this serve as a reminder that poverty is a policy choice. In the richest country in the world, it is absolutely inexcusable that millions of our children go to school hungry because they are living in poverty."

An estimated 1 in 6 children in Minnesota don't get enough to eat on a regular basis. But 1 in 4 food-insecure kids live in households that don't qualify for the federal free and reduced meal program, leading to "mounting school lunch debts in the tens of thousands of dollars," Minnesota Public Radioreported.

Tens of thousands of children are set to benefit from Minnesota's new law, which could be operational as early as summer school in July. Some of them were there to thank Walz at the signing ceremony, where the sense of elation was palpable.

"As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota's working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state," Walz said. "This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen."

The Minnesota House—led by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, the state's Democratic affiliate—first passed the bill in February in a 70-58 party-line vote. The state Senate—where the DFL holds just a single-seat advantage—approved it on Tuesday by a 38-26 margin. The state House rubber-stamped an amended version of the bill on Thursday.

In a now-viral clip from the state Senate's debate over the bill earlier this week. Sen. Steve Drazkowski (R-20) questioned whether hunger is really a problem in Minnesota—even as the state's food banks reported a record surge in visits last year, months before federal lawmakers slashed pandemic-era Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

"I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry," Drazkowski said before voting against the bill. "I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don't have access to enough food to eat."

During Friday's signing ceremony, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (DFL) said, "To our decision-makers who believe they have never met someone who is experiencing or has experienced hunger: Hi, my name is Peggy Flanagan, and I was 1 in 6 of those Minnesota children who experienced hunger."

"By providing free breakfast and lunch to all of our students, we are removing barriers and removing stigma from the lunch room," said Flanagan. "We are helping family pocketbooks, especially for those 1 in 4 who don't qualify for financial assistance with school meals. We are leading with our values that no child should go hungry for any reason, period."

"This is an investment in the well-being of our children, as well as an investment in their academic success," Flanagan added, calling the "generation-changing" bill "the most important thing" she's ever worked on in her life.

"By providing free breakfast and lunch to all of our students, we are removing barriers and removing stigma from the lunch room... This is an investment in the well-being of our children, as well as an investment in their academic success."

As Minnesota Reformerreported: "The majority of Minnesota schools receive federal funding from the National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for each meal served, though it doesn't cover the cost of the entire meal. Under the new law, schools are prohibited from charging students for the remaining cost, and the state will foot the rest of the bill—about $200 million annually."

MPR noted that "the legislation is similar to a program that was introduced during the pandemic to provide meals for all students, but was discontinued at the end of last year."

Last month, The Star Tribune editorial board opined that providing free breakfast and lunch to all of Minnesota's students, including affluent ones, is "excessive."

Pushing back against this argument for means-testing, Darcy Stueber—director of Nutrition Services for Mankato Area Public Schools and public policy chair of the Minnesota School Nutrition Association—asserted that meals should be guaranteed to all kids at no cost, just like other basic learning necessities.

"We don't charge for Chromebooks and desks and things like that," she told MPR. "It's a part of their day and they're there for so many hours. It just completes that whole learning experience for the child."

Minnesota Rep. Sydney Jordan (DFL-60A), the bill's lead author, made the same point to counter GOP lawmakers' complaints following the initial passage of the legislation.

"We give every kid in our school a desk," Jordan said last month. "There are lots of kids out there that can afford to buy a desk, but they get a desk because they go to school."

Walz, for his part, stressed Friday that his administration is "just getting started" when it comes to boosting education funding.

"The big stuff," said the governor, "is still coming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda, have been particularly affected.

All seven countries are battling measles outbreaks, four have reported cholera outbreaks and malaria is a serious threat in Sudan.

With more on the human impact of this ongoing emergency, here’s Liesbeth Aelbrecht, WHO Incident Manager, talking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.

My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.

In our South Bronx apartment, given the lack of food, there was no breakfast. It was simply a missing meal, so my sisters, brother, and I never expected it. Lunch was usually a sandwich and sometimes a can of juice, though none of us used the whole can. We knew enough to just put a little juice in our glass and then fill it with water. Dinner, which one of my sisters called the “real food,” would invariably be cheap and starchy servings meant to fill us. There wasn’t any cooked fish, salad, or fresh fruit. Rarely was anything left over. Most of our neighbors faced similar food scarcity and many suffered physical problems at relatively young ages: dizziness, fatigue, loss of strength, and other maladies, including asthma and diabetes.

Why Food Should Be a Basic Right

Food is to health as air is to breathing. One thing I learned from the world I grew up in was that if you get little or no food for long periods of time, medical attention is likely to be needed. Children, in particular, must have enough food to thrive, grow, think, and perform then as well as later in life.

Only recently, we saw how a pandemic of unwellness — thanks to Covid-19 — could overwhelm a hospital system, leaving doctors, nurses, and health services in general overworked and in danger of collapse. Think of hunger as another kind of pandemic that, however little noticed, can also overwhelm a health-care system (or at least that modest part of ours devoted to the neediest among us). Without enough nutritious food, emotional and physical needs only continue to proliferate along with a growing demand for ever more health care.

For working poor and uninsured people, however, health services are often difficult to come by or afford. Should you pay for a prescription or an ER visit or much-needed new glasses or buy the necessary food for the next two or three days? In Black and Brown communities, in particular, where racism, poverty, and under-employment continue to be realities of daily life, food deprivation regularly sends people into a cycle of illnesses that only make working more difficult and disability more likely.

Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger. And hunger has continued to be an all-American reality decade after decade, in good economies and bad, even though food should be a basic right. It’s a problem that, in possibly the world’s richest country, no one has been able to solve. Why is that?

Food is certainly plentiful in the United States. And yet enough of it never reaches the tables of those who struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, by almost any measure, income inequality has only increased in the past 30 years. And as succinctly demonstrated by the all-too-long-ago protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, high wages have been and continue to be concentrated among the top earners. In fact, as of 2019, three Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of American society and things have not gotten better since.

Food Inequity in America

In 1969, the Black Panther Party responded to food scarcity in its communities by introducing a breakfast program for children. One aim was simply to fill their stomachs, the other to help them do well in school, since those who are hungry find it difficult to concentrate.

Having visited their Harlem Breakfast Program in New York City, I was moved then by the sense of joy in the room and the healthy food being offered, which most of the children seemed to be eating with delight. At the time, recognizing the deep-seated need for food and finding a way to meet it seemed like a revolutionary act. Unfortunately, when the political winds changed in the early 1970s, the program ended. Many children of color there once more went to school hungry as so many still do in communities across this country.

Decades later, during the Covid pandemic, the Brotherhood Sister Sol organization began providing food to people in Harlem. Once a week, boxes of it were available to anyone who came to pick them up and many did. Recognizing an emergency, that group acted to try to resolve it, something deeply appreciated by the community. Eventually, however, money and contributions ran out and the effort ended. In Harlem today, there is still hunger.

During the pandemic, at a national level, Congress acted in a significant fashion to increase the Supplemental Nutrition (SNAP) benefits to households already receiving food assistance. Effective March 1, 2023, however, depending on family size and income, the monthly allowance of an extra $95 to $200 in food stamps for tens of millions of households, a majority of which have children, ended. The loss of that extra money and so of nutritional upgrades comes at a time when inflation has sent food prices soaring. As if that weren’t bad enough, the federal law passed to provide free school lunches during the pandemic ended last year. (Pre-pandemic free lunches were offered in some schools, but not everywhere.) If the government was able to provide such free meals as well as extra food subsidies in those pandemic years, the question is (or at least should be): Why won’t it continue doing just that? After all, wealthy people ate well before and during the worst of the pandemic and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Available food pantries and food banks gather supplies from farms, shops, and contributions. They then package and deliver them to the needy or provide places where such food can be picked up. Helpful as they are to many, though, they aren’t accessible to so many others in need. Even more important, they, too, represent temporary fixes that rise and fall in relation to the political and economic moment. Sadly, people’s food needs in this country are anything but temporary and should be assured in the same way social security (so far) is for seniors and those unable to work. That drugs like heroin and fentanyl are sometimes easier to come by in poor communities than nutritious, affordable food should be considered deeply shameful.