A Local Solution to a Global Crisis - Agroecology for Famine Prevention? The case in Yemen

The greatest humanitarian crisis on Earth is already devastating communities across Yemen. Conflict, disease, drought, locust infestation, and lack of humanitarian access are wreaking havoc for over 80% of the country’s population. As I discussed in my last blog, the decaying SAFER oil tanker threatens a further catastrophe. The situation is incredibly dire, and unless some form of peace agreement can be reached and maintained by the Houthi rebels and Saudi-led coalition belligerent parties, the chance of stabilisation remains slim. By far the most pressing crisis for the Yemeni people is the ongoing catastrophic famine (fully detailed in the 2021 Global Food Crises Report, p252 – 257) that has led to starvation and malnutrition on a scale unseen in recent years.

Conflict, especially the kind of protracted and uneven conflict unfolding across Yemen, undoubtedly exacerbates food security issues and can lead to famine. By 2017, three years into the civil war, Yemen’s agriculture and food system had almost entirely collapsed. In 2018, the United Nations described the situation as “the worst famine in 100 years”, with 13 million people facing starvation. Detailed reporting from the Conflict and Environment Observatory shows over 257,000 hectares of cropland in distress, and details the myriad potential causes of this. Importantly, the report notes that the rise in food security across the country is mostly due to a reduction in livelihood opportunities, with export and trade reduction leading to poverty.

Famine risk areas in Yemen. Source: AFP.

This is interesting because it identifies a key contributing factor to Yemen’s crisis: the economy.

As with any all-encompassing conflict, since 2014 Yemen has transitioned towards a war economy. Corruption is rife, mafia-like systems of protection racketeering have developed, sanctions and embargoes have reduced the government’s capacity to pay its increasingly discontent military, and communities have been forced to adapt their economic activity. Hodeidah port, currently under the control of the Houthi rebels, was responsible for up to 70% of the country’s imports, and as a result of the strangled supply lines humanitarian assistance and basic goods cannot enter.

Subsistence agriculture has been significantly reduced by the degradation of land, and further curtailed by Houthi coercion of small-scale farmers to produce Qat, a narcotic substance chewed by up to 80% of the Yemeni population. The Houthis have drastically increased cultivation of Qat in order to utilise taxes they collect on its sale to fund the war effort and offer the substance to attract potential new recruits. As CEOBs references, another key overlooked factor may be the collapse of the beekeeping industry, as strangled exports and high national prices mean beekeepers cannot sell their honey and have moved to cultivating other subsistence crops, severely limiting the biodiversity of areas that were previously pollinated by bees.

This shift away from food agriculture towards economic monoculture in warzones is a well-documented phenomenon, seen in the shift towards poppy cultivation for the heroin trade in Afghanistan’s protracted war and the militarization of Iraq’s agricultural economy under ISIS to maximise food for fighters and exports to fund war efforts. As fighting continues and belligerent parties require new funds to continue their efforts, agricultural land is often the most easily confiscated and commandeered.

A solution to conflict may ease the burden on agricultural land and allow for the first steps towards recovery for the Yemeni people, but it may be a surprise to learn that the seeds of this crisis were sown long before the outbreak of violence in 2014.

According to Max Ajl, Yemen has long been the most fertile area on the Arabian Peninsula. Pre-1970, agricultural land was predominantly owned by small-scale farmers engaged in smallholder and subsistence level farming. A United Nations assessment of Yemeni agriculture in 1955 determined that Yemen was one the best terraced countries in the world, and various reports from this period hail innovation by Yemeni farmers as some of the most sophisticated agricultural developments globally. Britannica notes that “Yemen’s difficult terrain, limited soil, inconsistent water supply, and large number of microclimates have fostered some of the most highly sophisticated methods of water conservation and seed adaptation found anywhere in the world…”

Local farmers’ intimate knowledge of their land fostered a thriving smallholder agricultural community that were resilient and adaptive to the sometimes-difficult conditions of the Yemeni landscape. Such a skilled agricultural workforce should have fared better than they are currently, even given the apocalyptic conditions of the conflict. This is where the question of the cause of the famine in Yemen becomes complicated. Zaid Basha, a management consultant and expert on Yemen, discusses the deep-rooted causes of the collapse of agriculture in the country in this recent podcast. Smallholder farmers had been edged out of the market by long-term agricultural modernisation programmes starting with the British reforms to increase cotton exports in their protectorate of Aden up to 1967 and continuing through IMF-sponsored economic overhauls to open up the Yemeni economy to the import and export of oil and other commodities in the 1990s. As Ajl notes in his very detailed overview of the Yemeni agricultural sector, the oil boom encouraged increasingly unsustainable farming practices and allowed larger-scale corporate cash crops to be grown on land that was once owned by local farmers.

The impact of this shift to an export-oriented industrial agriculture was to undermine any resilience that had been built up by local farmers over the centuries prior. As an example from the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in the early 1960s, when Yemen’s population was around 5.3 million, the country produced between 700,000 and 760,000 tons of sorghum, a staple cereal crop for the country. By 2014, one year before the start of the war, the quantity had dropped to just 341,000 tons, while the country’s population had risen to 27.2 million. This shift away from locally-produced food in favour of exportable cash crops hollowed out any resilience the agricultural system had, leaving it desperately vulnerable to future threats, such as conflict.

Reliance on one monoculture crop for export both increases the likelihood that a farmer's whole livelihood will be wiped out with one pest infestation or blight, as we’re currently seeing in the desert locust crisis affecting the region, and also damages nutrients in soil, resulting in weaker yields over time as biodiversity declines. This impact of a shift to industrial agriculture has been replicated globally, with the global economy often pointed to as a cause of declining biodiversity and increasingly fragile farming systems. As Ajl notes, in Yemen this trend manifested as smallholder farmers losing land to large corporations and transitioning to wage workers in a cash economy. The impact of the encroachment of the neoliberal global economy into Yemen’s agriculture sector was that smallholder farmers were moved to large-scale corporate farms that produced monocultures for export, and as a result became reliant on imports for survival. Effectively, the devastation of the Soviet Union’s 5-year plans for agricultural collectivism were repeated in the name of large-scale corporate greed.

What was a resilient and diverse portfolio of agricultural crops and methodologies had been hollowed out by the global import-export economy by the time conflict broke out. The conflict exacerbated these issues, but importantly also revealed the fragility of an economic sector hollowed out by large-scale programmes of “modernisation”.

Global Food Security Performance. Source: Statista

But why does any of this matter? Regardless of the causes of the famine, the fact remains that it is ongoing and at the current time the international community is fighting an uphill battle just to get emergency humanitarian aid into the country, let alone address the structural rot in the agricultural system.

It matters because understanding the long-term causes of famine in Yemen, or any crisis-affected state, has implications for humanitarian response and recovery. Resilience is the current buzz word in the humanitarian space, and resilience humanitarianism can be seen as a shift away from pure aid provision and lifesaving action towards a more collaborative response focused on the capacities of the affected population. Often, this manifests as a focus on humanitarian programming built around skills development and training programmes for affected groups or local professionals. Building skills is a key element of building resilience, and a welcome development in humanitarian thinking. However, in many cases, and particularly in the case of agricultural reform, it is very often the case that local populations are already the leading experts in best practice for their land. Indigenous peoples’ farming practices are often the most effective at enhancing food security and supply chain resilience for local communities.

In Yemen, we have seen how the international community devastated the centuries-old agricultural system that had been developed by innovative smallholder farmers over centuries. It is nothing short of hubris to assume the international community can find a better solution than those same farmers to rebuild resilience in the region.

This thinking is captured in the concept of agroecology*. Agroecology examines the relationships between plants, animals, people, and their environment, and incorporates these considerations into farming practices. It is, according to a recent webinar from Re-Alliance, a science, practice, and social movement. It is also a global movement.

Agroecology in Action. Source: Global Agriculture.

As I hope has been made clear here, one of the key underlying causes of Yemen’s current famine is the globally interlinked system of food production and agriculture that favours large-scale monoculture farming for export. This makes communities reliant on one crop or one source of livelihood, and therefore very vulnerable to collapse if conflict or disaster interferes with their supply chains and trade capabilities. A conflict that is already causing death and destruction becomes a conflict that causes death, destruction, and an inability to source basic food, water, shelter, and other goods. But an export-oriented economy is plugged into the global system of trade, so one country or region cannot remove itself from that system without impacting its trade partners.

If we want to improve resilience and support localisation in Yemen, we have to put that into practice wherever we are in order to decouple global economies and the reliance on international food trade.

Agroecology is therefore a global process. A recent report from the Soil Association details how Europe could transition towards a more agroecological model in the next ten years. The benefits to Europeans of a more locally-grown, ecology-focused agricultural system include a reduction in our food footprint, a 40% reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, increased biodiversity across Europe, and a healthier diet for many Europeans. The impact of climate-smart agricultural policy will be to reduce the massive planetary burden of factory farming, and, importantly, give power back to individual farmers tending land rather than global corporate entities. Large-scale farming has caused ecological devastation in whatever guise it has been tried, from China’s Great Leap Forward to neoliberal corporate collectivisation. Localised farming with shorter supply chains helps to decentralise food production, improving resilience in the system and reducing carbon impact.

Low-intensity farming methods can be maintained even in times of conflict, as demonstrated by the continued agricultural output of ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria in land controlled by smallholder farmers. Climate-smart agricultural programmes can build resilience, and focus on giving power back to local farmers to grow what they can in the contexts they live, rather than attempting to meet hunger needs through global humanitarian assistance, which consistently falls short. Localising food production in conflict areas has massive benefits, but the same process in peaceful countries can also have a significant positive impact. It won’t necessarily be easy, but it is imperative to support indigenous agriculture globally, and to reduce human impact on the climate.

Conflict inevitably increases food insecurity and damages land, but conflict does not happen in a vacuum. War will always cause destitution and devastation, but the scale of horror we are seeing in Yemen has been exponentially worsened by the global economic system that disenfranchised local workers, hollowed out an economy, and bred grievances that contributed towards the country’s collapse.

If we are able to re-evaluate our relationship to food, imagine a more diversified, less commodified global agricultural system, and take responsibility for our own consumption, we can help to reconstruct the systems of resilience in conflict- and disaster-affected countries. In Yemen, smallholder farmers might just hold the keys to a return to the “once-happy land” of self-reliance and success.

Globally, agroecological farmers are challenging the industrial farming approach. Their success will be for the benefit of us all.

*From Re Alliance: “In short, Agroecology is not merely a set of agricultural practices or one innovation amongst others. It is a paradigm shift in our food systems model that moves us towards diverse knowledge-intensive and ecology-based systems.”

Please read more about agroecology here or here, to understand the process in more detail than could be covered here.

 

Countdown to Environmental Catastrophe - The SAFER Oil Tanker

The floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) SAFER is located approximately 4.8 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen. Built in 1976 and moored off Yemen since 1988 to receive, store, and export oil from the Marib oil fields, SAFER has now become an existential threat to a huge number of Yemeni coastal communities.

Location of FSO SAFER. Source: OpenDemocracy

In 2015, in the early days of the Yemeni civil conflict, Houthi rebels seized control of Hodeidah port as part of their rebellion against President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. FSO SAFER is moored just outside of Hodeidah, and in an effort to pressure the government to the negotiating table, the rebels began to limit access to the unit and its approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil. The oil onboard SAFER is estimated to be worth in excess of $80 million, making it a powerful bargaining tool for the rebels and a potential source of future income to help fund the war effort should they find a way to extract and sell its contents. However, the rebels have lacked both the resources and skills to continue maintenance on SAFER, and as the war raged on, the decaying vessel slowly became more and more unstable.

Now the United Nations is calling for urgent action to stabilise SAFER and ensure the security of its contents. Should the vessel spring a leak, it risks spilling four times as much oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska. The Exxon Valdez disaster was the worst recorded oil spill in history until the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, but 30 years later pockets of crude oil remain off the Alaskan coast and continue to affect maritime habitats and fishing activities in the area. 1,300 miles of coastline were affected, hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals, and whales were killed, and the estimated economic cost of the spill was $2.8 billion. It should be noted again here that Exxon Valdez occurred off the coast of Alaska, and so immediate response was possible. Access to a spill site off the coast of Yemen during an ongoing conflict would be significantly more difficult.

And SAFER threatens to spill four times that amount of oil if it is not secured soon.

Yemen is already suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. After six years of war, some 24 million people, or 80% of the country’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance. The UN Humanitarian Office (UNOCHA) puts the current death toll of the conflict at 233,000, the majority of which have come from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services, and infrastructure. The crisis has been exacerbated by the world’s largest cholera outbreak in epidemiological history, brought on by the failure of water infrastructure as a result of the fighting, massive food shortages as a result of interrupted agriculture due to conflict displacement and a massive locust infestation, and ongoing barriers to humanitarian aid reaching the country. An oil spill of the size SAFER is threatening would be a final nail in the coffin for hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.

Source: Holm Akhdar, Yemeni Environmental Organisation

As SAFER decays, the warring factions in Yemen have resorted to blaming each other for the potential spill, before it has even happened. Many groups, including the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, have stated that the Houthis are withholding access to the tanker deliberately to force the international community to acquiesce to their demands. Houthi groups have responded by saying that the SAFER issue cannot be addressed separately from other peace negotiations. This is to protect one of the only bargaining chips they have to shore up their position in achieving concessions from the Saudi-led coalition they have been fighting against. Given the latest sanctions imposed on the Houthis by the Security Council, maintaining control of the wealth stored aboard SAFER is a major priority for the rebel group.

With both sides digging in and refusing to compromise, many observers are now calling for the UN to take a harder line in negotiating access to the vessel, and even to use force in order to take control of the area surrounding SAFER. An authorised use of force would allow the UN to intervene militarily to secure the tanker and conduct its assessments. But this would require the UN Security Council (UNSC) to invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows the UNSC to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" and to take military and nonmilitary action to "restore international peace and security".

The chances of a robust UN intervention without all parties agreeing to the terms are remote. UNSC member states are far from in agreement on how best to proceed with regard to the Yemeni conflict. Several permanent members of the Security Council are heavily involved in the arming and training of belligerents, particularly the UK, USA, and France. Meanwhile, Russia has been working closely with the Saudi-backed Hadi government to facilitate peace talks with the aim of extending its own soft power in the region, and China, rounding out the five permanent members of the UNSC, also finds itself backing the Hadi government. Although this represents a rare case where the five permanent UNSC members are largely aligned in their geopolitical interests in a conflict zone, this does not mean that a resolution on the SAFER container is guaranteed. Since the weight of the international community sits largely behind the Hadi government, the Houthi rebel group are distrusting of UN motives in the region, complicating negotiations and harming the image of neutrality required to secure access.

As with any proxy war, the belligerent sides of the Yemeni conflict have been co-opted by international actors to further their own ends, with the Hadi government receiving widespread international support despite the horrific war crimes being committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its defence, and the Iran-supported Houthi rebels receiving funding and resources from Saudi Arabia’s most significant opponents in the region.

Map of Yemen Conflict Areas as of May 2020. 

In addition to these geopolitical barriers to a robust UNSC response, the threat posed by SAFER is not one the UN is necessarily equipped to respond to. As CEOBS reports: “The UN Security Council has never approved the use of force to directly address an environmental threat, and the chances of all of its permanent members doing so now are remote. While Council resolutions have addressed environmental issues, such as the role of natural resources in fuelling conflict in the DRC, or the role of environmental degradation in the Lake Chad crisis, this would set an entirely new precedent.”

This is a precedent that may yet have to be set.

War and the environment are inextricably linked. Environmental degradation as a result of the changing climate is a major contributing factor to conflict globally, with experts suggesting that climate has influenced up to 20% of armed conflicts in the last century, and that figure is expected to increase dramatically. Though we cannot say that environmental degradation is the cause of conflicts, it is certain that resource competition and displacement due to environmental causes inevitably exacerbate tensions in conflict-prone regions. As the SAFER saga demonstrates, conflict also increases the threat of further environmental damage.

And this is not unique to Yemen. The retreat of ISIS in Iraq has revealed a toxic legacy of pollution and environmental degradation as a result of mismanagement of polluting factories and deliberate sabotage of water supplies. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, decades of war have left the majority of the rural population without access to clean water infrastructure. Conflict of all scales directly and indirectly damages the environment in myriad ways, and once that damage is done it inevitably causes further strife in conflict-affected communities. Environmental degradation forces displacement, and mass demographic changes, poverty, and competition over resources breed further conflict. A disaster of the scale expected should SAFER deteriorate further will inevitably exacerbate the tensions driving the conflict in Yemen, and the people who will suffer the consequences will be those already suffering the most.

The Yemen SAFER oil tanker situation is emblematic of the wider environmental crisis the world faces. As the tanker deteriorates and inches closer to environmental catastrophe, two warring parties fail to reach an agreement on the next steps. Meanwhile, an international community that lacks the teeth to make a meaningful impact fails to coerce or cajole either side to the table. The United Nations calls for sanity and urgent action to prevent a disaster, whilst member states jostle for power and influence over the long-term outcomes of the Yemeni conflict and continue to arm belligerents and provoke tension in the name of geopolitical goals.

This stark situation, the worst environmental threat from an oil tanker the world has seen, threatening the lives of a population living through the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet today, is the clearest example of a global climate in which we all find ourselves.

In 2018, the IPCC announced that globally we had 12 years to take drastic action to prevent catastrophic climate change. As this rather depressing BBC article from 2019 notes, many experts believed that we actually only had 18 months to make significant political commitments to prevent a global warming of over 2 degrees Celsius. 18 months that have now passed. As the world inches towards climate collapse, we still do not have a unified agenda to tackle the greatest threat facing us today. For many, this threat is still an abstract future concern. Other, supposedly more pressing geopolitical and social challenges divert our attention as we clash over COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, rampant nationalist identity politics, and populist political movements sweeping much of the world. The world eyes the rising China as a superpower competitor, whilst Iran takes steps to drag Europe into its war of words and tit-for-tat missile strikes with the US. Britain continues to fumble its way through a messy Brexit as the EU trips up on vaccination across the continent. Political and social upheaval are impacting populations across the globe, and the globe continues to heat up.

The people of Yemen struggle to survive as the warring parties fail to agree on a course of action to stabilise the SAFER oil container. Many fear that a deal will not be reached until it is already too late.

This is a lesson we should learn, and an issue we should act on whilst we still can.

As we squabble and kill over land and riches, a creeping environmental catastrophe looms.

Our Close-Mindedness is Killing Us

 The final episode of Mike Duncan’s excellent podcast The History of Rome opens with a discussion of what caused the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Rome itself, a civilisation that had been the hegemonic force in the Mediterranean for centuries, finally succumbed in the 400s AD, as Mike Duncan puts it, not with a bang but with a whimper. There are a thousand different reasons for its eventual collapse, ranging from economic crises, the weakening of the Roman legions, external pressures from other rising powers, climate change, and the emergence of a particular virulent plague outbreak. However, perhaps the most compelling reason for its collapse was the reversal of a Roman characteristic that, Duncan argues, had once made it the dominant force on the world stage.

Rome, from its inception, had been an outward-looking civilisation, ever expanding its borders and bringing new ethnic groups into its orbit. As Duncan explains, there was surprisingly little barrier to becoming a political leader in the Roman Empire if you were not “Romanized” in any sense that modern researchers might understand. Diversity of thought and culture, and expansion of boundaries, were prioritised in the golden era of Rome. Duncan argues convincingly that were it not for the new ideas and outlook brought to the Imperial throne by the Illyrian emperors that emerged in the aftermath of the Crisis of the Third Century, Rome could have collapsed nearly 200 years before it eventually did.

Mike Duncan's The History of Rome

When Roman ideas grew stale, the empire survived through adopting new cultural attitudes to leadership and organisation, and the Eternal City marched on. Rome was always characterised by the othering of those outside of the borderlands, with the Roman people facing off against barbarians at the gates on the frontiers of the Empire. Inside the Empire, however, all (with the notable exception of conquered slaves) were Roman citizens. When Rome stumbled, Illyrian Generals such as Diocletian, cultural and ethnic outsiders from the Italian forefathers of the empire, could don the purple and lead Romans back from the brink.  

However, by the time the 400s rolled round, this open-minded approach to culture had largely faded. Germanic Generals, such as Alaric, who for all intents and purposes were the most accomplished generals of their time, were excluded from the Imperial inner circle because the aged, stagnant Roman elite saw them as little more than barbarian savages who had no place at the table. As such, the best ideas of the time were not allowed to germinate in the halls of Roman power. Instead, they found new ways to develop. And as they inexorably grew, they stole the oxygen Rome needed to survive. The Eternal City suffocated because it refused to allow in new ideas. It died because of its own hubris, its own absolute certainty that Rome was superior, no matter what the evidence showed.

The modern world is fraught with similar prejudicial thinking. For the last two centuries, western thought has dominated global discourse. Beginning with European colonialism, the export of western ideals of social order and political organisation has been a defining feature of the modern global hierarchy. Often, as with the rise of Roman domination, this violent expansion of values to other societies was accompanied by brutal repression and ethnic violence in the name of “civilising the natives”. The barbarians at the gates motif was replaced with Social Darwinist theories that actively bastardised the scientific method in order to justify European looting of African, Asian, and American land. The ingroup / outgroup dynamic of coloniser and colonised remained intact.

The new world order that emerged after the end of the Second World War continued to push western liberal democratic values globally. As the European empires declined, American hegemony was established. Values of democracy, nationalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation were perpetuated to such an extent that by the fall of the Soviet Union those that subscribed to these liberal ideologies were prompted to announce that this could in fact be “The End of History”. Western thought was dominant. We were now a world of “developed” and “developing” countries. All that was left was for those developing countries to catch up to the “modern world”, and the job was done.

Unfortunately, when global powers begin to believe that they have found The Answer, they close their eyes and ears to any external ideologies that might challenge their progression. This, Duncan argues, is a major contributing factor to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And this, I am suggesting, is emerging as a significant threat to the current world order as we know it. In particular, it threatens those of us in western global hegemon, those developed countries in Europe and the Americas that “lead the way” in global development. We are products of a system that tells us we have the best possible structure for political and social organisation. But what if we don’t have that?

All ideas, good or bad, die when they no longer provide realistic solutions to a more diverse, disparate population of adherents. The system still works for those in the centres of power, but those at the fringes grow increasingly disillusioned and distracted by new value systems. Complacency kills civilisations.

The NYTimes published a bunch of photos of Thailand doing things right and titled it No One Knows What Thailand Is Doing Right. Credit: Indi Samarajiva.

But more importantly that than, complacency kills people. As is outlined in an excellent blog by Indi Samarajiva regarding media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, western journalism often fails to accurately describe western failures. Our inability to fathom that the “developed” nations of the world have erred when “developing” states have successfully halted the spread of COVID to a far greater extent than the US, UK, or Germany is actively harming our capacity to respond. I urge you to read the article in full, but the key takeaway from this powerful piece is that in the west, our own hubris is clouding our understanding of effective COVID responses, and potentially killing us in the thousands.

Referencing a recent NY Post article, Samarajiva pushes back against a headline that states “Scientists can’t explain puzzling lack of coronavirus outbreaks in Africa”. He argues, forcefully, that they can. Its simple, effective, public health messaging. Messaging that has been completely lacking in western states. As Donald Trump veers from denying the virus is a threat, to refusing to wear a mask, to insisting he always said mask-wearing was important, to a brief interlude where he pondered the merits of drinking bleach, African nations have been working on solid, clear messaging to explain to populations what the virus is and how its spread can be slowed. As the UK public struggles to keep up-to-date with exactly what our guidance is – apparently the virus only comes out after 10pm if you’re in a pub, but make sure you’re going into the office, as long as you avoid the office where possible, but don’t forget to Eat Out to Help Out, and if you want to get married there can only be 15 of you, but if someone dies you can meet in a group of 30; but other than its six people unless you go grouse-hunting, why aren’t you following this? – Ghana has enacted pooled testing to maximise the effectiveness of its limited resources.

And why shouldn’t developing nations have the upper hand when it comes to effective public health communication?

In contexts that have been dealing with various health crises and epidemics for decades, you would expect that national leaders and community organisations have developed a toolkit for effective disaster response. In the words of Samarajiva, “I understand you’re used to seeing [developing countries] as disaster areas, but this has made us disaster masters. Poor nations have almost uniformly reacted quickly, decisively and survived.”

Take Africa, as an example of a continent that has most recently almost completely quashed the Ebola outbreak that threatened to turn into a pandemic of its own in 2014, continues to deal with the devastating effects of malaria and the AIDS epidemic, and is constantly combating all manner of contagious diseases in poorer communities with little access to medical support. Why would they not have the highest quality public health messaging available? Why would they not have built up trust in their health institutions so that people pay attention and comply with their regulations?

The answer, of course, is that they have done exactly that. And whilst anti-mask rallies take place all over Europe and America, citizens in developing countries quietly do what has to be done so that they can get back to functioning as normal. Meanwhile, and again I’m quoting Samarjiva, “the western media anoints white Germany a COVID leader, despite having outbreak the size of Iraq’s. They should be looking at Vietnam. Vietnam has the same population, much less wealth and has had a dramatically better response. Nearly 10,000 people have died in Germany, compared to 35 in Vietnam. Every two days Germany has as many cases as Vietnam did total. What are you learning here?”.

What we should be learning is that we do not have the answers to this crisis. Our governments, collectively, across the West, are failing us. We as communities are failing to get a grip of this crisis. We compare our own nation’s results to that of other, similar nations, and we neglect the majority of the world beyond these western walls. The barbarians at the gates have the answers we’re looking for, but we’re too blind to see them.

Finally, I will leave it once again to Indi Samarajiva to make the point that we’ve been missing for far too long:

“The racism of COVID coverage is overwhelming, and for once it’s not overwhelming us. We’re fine. My kids are in school. We’re having birthday parties. We’re living. This time, your racism is overwhelming you.”

If we fail to learn from those who are leading the way in the COVID response simply because we are too blind to see that they’re leading, we will continue to suffer the consequences of our ignorance.

Failing to tackle the racism that shapes so much of Western thought will leave us without the tools to tackle not just COVID-19, but all of the complex challenges of the 21^st century.

The ISC Russia Report - Exploiting a Breakdown of Political Legitimacy

The belated release of the ISC Russia Report (accessible here, released on the 21^st July 2020), which was ready for publication last October but sat on by Johnson’s government until long after the December election and UK’s exit from the European Union on 31^st January this year, has raised important questions about the state of British intelligence in the modern age of disinformation warfare.

The spectre of Russian interference in western politics and its potential effect on election outcomes has been discussed extensively, but little has been done to combat what is seen as a covert erosion of democratic institutions in the west through the targeted spread of disinformation and the clandestine support of institutions that directly or indirectly benefit the Kremlin’s objectives. In this context, the ISC report makes several points that may explain the reluctance on behalf of the UK government to publish its findings, notably that:

• There was little intelligence oversight into potential Russian meddling in the EU referendum or UK general elections, because the issue was seen as a “hot potato”, which no agency wanted to take responsibility for. Agencies did not see it as their responsibility to engage with issues related to UK democratic processes, which the report slams as “illogical”.
• Even in the aftermath of the revelations of Russian interference in the Scottish Independence Referendum, support for the French Front National, and attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential elections, there was still no retrospective review into the possibility of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum.
• In focusing disproportionately on terror-related threats, UK intelligence agencies allocated fewer and fewer resources to monitoring hostile state actions, and this has left us “playing catch up” to Russian espionage tactics.
• Russian elites have used London as a base for many operations linked to the Russian state. The UK government welcomed Russian money, particularly flowing into London, with little to no oversight over where that money was coming from. The “London laundromat” has allowed illicit finances to be recycled and legitimised, with patronage from the British establishment. Indeed, according to the report, these illicit funds funnelled through the oligarchs were welcomed “with open arms”.
• The money was also invested in extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment – PR firms, charities, political interests, academia and cultural institutions were all willing beneficiaries of Russian money, contributing to a ‘reputation laundering’ process.

The Kremlin, the seat of Putin's power in Moscow.

Given the extensive evidence and widespread knowledge that Russia is adept at disinformation warfare, and especially considering that the UK is quite clearly a top priority target of Russian influence in the West (let’s not forget that the Salisbury poisoning of Sergei Skripal in 2018 was a Kremlin-sponsored chemical attack on British territory that killed a British civilian), the lack of focus on Hostile State Actions (as actions against foreign states is referred to in the intelligence community) in British intelligence is surprising.

An extract from the Russia Report, detailing the lack of investigation into Russian interference in the EU referendum campaign.

The report does note that MI5, GCHQ, and SIS (MI6) have always had to juggle multiple threats in determining where to apportion their resources and attention, but notes that in 2006, the year that Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in London, MI5 had devoted 92% of its effort to counter-terrorism work, with SIS and GCHQ at 33%. Whilst it is reported that the percent of resources allocated to Hostile State Actions has risen again in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the exact split of focus was redacted in the report, and it is acknowledged that British intelligence continues to play catch up in terms of understanding the true reach of Russian influence in western politics.

This makes the assertion that there has been no retrospective review into Russian interference in British politics since 2016 even more damning. In stark contrast, Russian interference in the 2016 election of Donald Trump was investigated by US intelligence and a summary report was released, revealing that the Kremlin had hacked Democrat party servers and leaked damaging files in the run up to the election, potentially swinging opinion towards Donald Trump.

Of course, the extent to which Russian interference swayed the election is extremely debatable, as it is in the UK case, but considering the slim margins by which Trump won the election (actually receiving fewer overall votes but winning through the electoral college) and the Brexit vote passed (52% - 48%), any swing of the needle as a result of foreign state meddling should be investigated. The fact that no such investigation was instigated by any of the British intelligence services when there is such credible circumstantial evidence is damning, especially considering Boris Johnson’s suppression of the report upon its initial attempted release.

There should be no legitimate reason to suppress or prevent an investigation into foreign state meddling into UK democratic processes. As the report clearly states, if an extensive investigation found no interference, it would increase public confidence in electoral mechanisms. Regardless of reality, this obfuscation on behalf of the Johnson government, at a time of exceptional political turmoil in the country, will raise eyebrows and suggestions that he, or other current ministers or advisors, are a part of the British establishment that welcomed illegitimate Russian money into the UK “with open arms”.  

"The London Laundromat" - recycling dirty Russian money and enriching many benefactors in the British establishment.

To be clear, this report does not suggest that that is the case, and neither am I. There is no evidence of that. But with no thorough independent investigation into what we know is a credible threat, conspiracy is bound to grow, and further undermine the legitimacy of the UK government administration.

What matters here is what we consider to be our national security priorities. Since 9/11, counter-terror has overwhelmingly been the focus of British intelligence. This makes sense, as we have many examples, including in the years following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, that terrorism poses the greatest threat to life of the British public. But the terror threat in the UK is most significantly a result of home-grown terror cells rather than foreign bodies. As a result, the responsibility for tackling this can, and should, be more widely distributed. Conventional policing, social work, programmes like Prevent that allow the reporting of at-risk individuals, and community action can supplement covert intelligence operations to reduce the risk of homegrown terrorism affecting British lives.

In contrast, these same actors that can be so effective in reducing the threat of terrorism have very little control over hostile state interference in domestic politics. Whilst the operations undertaken by the Kremlin in western democracies has less direct impact on human life, it can sow political divisions and cause havoc in domestic politics and between western allies. That is its goal, and its long-term effect may be far more insidious than the connected but disparate terror attacks we have seen across the UK in recent years.

And it is not just Russia that has been utilising new technologies and methodologies to target western democracies. As the controversy surrounding Huawei’s 5g ban in the UK also demonstrates, a brewing cold war between the west and China threatens increased tit-for-tat escalations and antagonisms. Following Trump’s ill-advised assassination of Iranian General Qasim Soleimani in Iraq in January, it has been reported that an informant who gave the US information on Soleimani’s movements has been executed (on the 20^th July, one day before the release of the UK Russia Report). That short-lived crisis resulted in the death of 176 civilians when Iran unintentionally shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane whilst on heightened alert for further US attacks on military targets in Iran.

The era of great power politics is not over. Escalating international tension as a result of the wave of authoritarian political movements across the world threatens a return to Cold War realpolitik if we do not take these threats seriously and respond accordingly.

The findings of the ISC Russia report demonstrate the imperative for a thorough investigation into any potential interference in British politics by external powers, and the need for a shift in the intelligence community to address the growing threat of state-sponsored meddling in our political institutions.

The spread of increasingly reactionary politics across many western democracies can be in-part attributed to a feeling of disenfranchisement, of large groups of a population feeling left behind by political elites in capital cities. There are many reasons for this, the vast majority of them domestic in nature, and they should be addressed. But if hostile states can infiltrate our democratic systems by feeding these feelings of disenfranchisement, they can widen an already growing divide. They can turn a crack in the surface into a sinkhole that cannot be plugged.

As the report suggests, British intelligence is currently playing catch up in this new great game of cyber warfare, disinformation spread, and the slow erosion of democracy. That starts with an open, honest discussion of where international connections influence domestic institutions at an individual, organisational, and societal level.

Countering this encroachment, both in our domestic politics and with an eye on our international competitors, will be essential to the survival of the United Kingdom as we know it.

In Defence of the Truth - A Weapon Against Tyranny

Four years ago, Donald Trump became President. His campaign was one that revelled in the counterfactual, following arguably his first foray into mainstream politics with his racist claims that Barrack Obama was not an American citizen. Overnight, the world became familiar with the phrase that has defined not just his administration, but the global context that we currently find ourselves in. “Fake news” is king. Mainstream news media has been consistently attacked by governments around the world. Social media has allowed for the propagation of disinformation as effectively at it has democratised access to real facts.

Fake news as a concept gained popularity around 2016 and was quickly adopted by Donald Trump in his unhinged rants aimed at media outlets such as CNN, Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and basically anyone else who said something he did not like. In 2017, he shut down a CNN reporter’s question by asserting “you are fake news”. In 2018, he even hosted the “Fake News Awards”, where again, CNN featured heavily. On the 28^th May 2020, a CNN reporter was arrested by armed police whilst reporting on the Minneapolis protests that emerged in response to the murder of George Floyd in cold blood by a Minnesota police officer. Several other journalists have been targeted in the days since. This escalation was far from without warning, but it adds a new dimension to the violence targeted at African-Americans that suggests there will be an even less apologetic, more openly antagonistic police response to these protests than to the last major unrest in 2014/15.

George Floyd and his murderer Derek Chauvin. Photos: NY Times.

Coming just weeks after heavily-armed white militia entered the Michigan state capitol in protest against coronavirus lockdown measures, the murder of George Floyd understandably has led to a public outcry. How does a group of white men wielding assault rifles and wearing combat fatigues get to go home to their families after occupying a state building, whilst an unarmed black father of two, suspected of forgery (after allegedly using forged documents and a counterfeit $20 note to order food at a deli) is condemned to die with a knee on his throat? 6 years after the death of Eric Garner, which helped spur the Black Lives Matter Movement, another black man died at the hands of a white policer officer after uttering the final words “I can’t breathe”. They are two of many. The outrage felt by millions over this systemic racism and brutality has spilled out into protests before, but the Trump administration's complete disregard for the concerns of protestors, and Trumps tacit support for white supremacist groups in his rhetoric has given rise to a new anger that his government will be incapable of quelling.

Armed white protestors pictured in Michigan a few weeks ago, protesting the coronavirus lockdown, seen wielding assault rifles, some displaying confederate flags and even swastikas. Considered less dangerous than an unarmed black man accused of forging a check. Currently at home with their families. 

Protests broke out almost immediately across Minnesota, and with the announcement that criminal charges would not be brought against the four officers involved (Derek Chauvin has now been arrested in response to the outcry), these protests continued to gather steam and riots broke out. In this moment of crisis, President Donald Trump appeared to take to Twitter to advocate for the use of lethal force to restore order, stating “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. Aside from the obviously sinister undertones of that statement, and the similarly racist use of the term “thugs” to describe the protestors, Twitter determined that this tweet in particular breached their rules because it glorified violence - a finding that it is impossible to deny. However, this, along with another spat about Trump’s fake claims regarding mail-in ballots that Twitter pointed out were untrue and required fact-checking, has led the President to sign an executive order attempting to prevent Twitter from adding these warnings to his absurd and dangerous tweets. Pointing out that basically everything the President tweets to the world is untrue is, according to Trump, an attack on his free speech.

Some of the Tweets that Twitter deemed in violation of their rules

This coming from the administration that has just arrested a CNN reporter for covering a major news story that portrays the police and government in a bad light.

Lie in order to spread doubt over the democratic process for the upcoming election. Lie to demonise a rightly angry population. Lie to protect your power, and lie to allow the lying to continue. Accuse those who are trying to bring the truth to light of being “fake news”, and then incite violence against them. These are the actions of man who is eroding democracy. These are the actions of a fascist and a dictator.

How can we hold governments to account, when we do not know what the facts are?

We have access to more information that at any point in human history, which means we also have access to more disinformation than ever before. Increasingly, authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike are leaning on the confusion caused by this overwhelming amount of data to strengthen their political positions.

So, let’s get some facts straight.

George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who had had several previous accusations of racism brought against him. In response, angry protestors took to the streets. Those protests escalated to riots following a heavy-handed police response. And Donald Trump took to Twitter to incite violence against an angry, disenfranchised, and oppressed section of US society. He branded those who disagree with his white supremacist, inflammatory rhetoric as “fake news”. He praised those in his supporter base who threatened journalists, political opponents, rights campaigners, and anyone else who dared point out his ignorance.

US citizens continue to be murdered on the streets by a police force that is supposed to protect them. Reporters, attempting to tell the story as it unfolds, are arrested. And, regardless of reality, if what you say contradicts the President, you are wrong.

Trump would have you believe that there is only one reality, one truth, and it’s the one inside his head. Do I really need to spell out where that sort of thinking ends up?

The truth still matters. And we have to defend it.

Learn how to counter disinformation here:

https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/RESIST_Toolkit.pdf

Find out more about protecting the rights of journalists, and support real freedom of speech here:

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/free-speech-freedom-expression-human-right

https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/right/freedom-of-expression/

Donate to help cover the legal fees on the Minnesota protestors here: https://minnesotafreedomfund.org/donate

No Such Thing As Normal - Dreaming of a Post-COVID World

In the UK, we are now over a month into the COVID-19 lockdown that has brought the world to a halt. The death figures continue to rise, and our government appears to mark each day with new revelations of catastrophic mismanagement of the crisis and a seeming overwhelming drive to protect themselves rather than the public. In an atmosphere of uncertainty, people have become increasingly unsure of what to do during this lockdown. Counterfactual narratives have been shared across social media platforms, with no response from officials or health experts, and impatience at the perceived draconian measures being taken to prevent the virus spreading is growing.

A glimpse of the kind of discord that lockdown measures can sow is evident in the absurd anti-quarantine protests currently taking place across the United States. Although the number of people involved in the protests is currently relatively small, their impact has been to poison the discourse around the coronavirus lockdown in the states and embolden those who would break the rules intended to prevent the spread of the virus. These protests grow as President Donald Trump insanely suggests that perhaps disinfectant could be injected as a response to COVID-19. His statement prompted global disinfectant manufacturers Dettol and Lysol to warn people against ingesting their products.

Nurses face down anti-lockdown protesters in Colorado, US. Credit: Alyson McClaran/Reuters.

What is happening in the US right now is absurd and dystopian. It goes beyond satire, but we mustn’t forget that its real. And in other countries, like the UK, the same anti-scientific trend cuts a more insidious path. Our own Prime Minister proudly proclaimed that he “shook hands with everybody” in a COVID-19 hospital ward at the end of March. At the time of writing, he finally returns to work after a bout of COVID-19 that nearly killed him. In his absence, our government continues to lie about its coronavirus response – first promising 100,000 tests a day by the end of April which seem incredibly unlikely to materialise, then deliberately dodging questions related to the number of COVID-19 deaths in care homes, and unsuccessfully trying to inflate the number of tests of NHS workers currently being completed daily in parliamentary questions. Simultaneously, BBC panorama reports that “more than half of all the PPE items [included in official figures] are surgical gloves - and in most cases, each individual glove is counted rather than pairs.” (emphasis my own). That means that the UK government is deliberately inflating the number of PPE items it is claiming to have delivered to frontline workers, as it is announced that over 100 NHS staff have now died of COVID-19.

But whilst the news appears to bombard us with more shocking revelations every day about our lack of preparedness, our botched responses, our hypocritical leaders, growing social tension, and rising deaths, something else is also happening, quietly and without acknowledgement in the mainstream media. I first noticed when I realised I had found myself agreeing with Piers Morgan, of all people, as he challenged government ministers on their handling of the crisis. Then I noticed that my neighbours on my street, none of whom have I spoken to before, have started to chat to each other over garden walls after the weekly clap for the NHS. You can look at volunteering figures in the country and find that support agencies cannot keep up with the demand of people wanting to help out however they can. The skies are clearer, nature is returning, people are learning to adapt and cope in a situation they never would have dreamed of 5 months ago. People are coming together, across political lines and social divides, giving up time to help others and try to make a difference.

This gives me hope for the future after the crisis subsides.

Dramatically reduced pollution levels across London and Europe as a result of the lockdown. Credit: Descartes Labs.

We are far from out of the woods. There is a lot more turmoil, disruption, and heartache for us to bear. But this will one day end. With a vaccine, perhaps a cure, better treatment, a better protected, more resilient health care system, and a greater appreciation for the need to prepare, properly fund and support our health care workers and medical researchers, we will emerge from this crisis.

But we should not long to return to normal.

Normal was 10 years of austerity, politicians cheering at halting pay rises for junior doctors, rising xenophobia and racism across the developed world, continuing inequality, and a global population marching blindly off the cliff of the climate crisis. I was pissed off at the world long before COVID-19, and so were many others.

The pandemic has been worsened by much of this action. The crisis has been defined by NHS staff and essential workers going into battle without proper protection. It has been defined by catastrophic mismanagement by our leadership. It has been an excuse to further alienate outside groups and turn inwards. It has been a global crisis, and a personal tragedy for millions. And it will continue to be, for many more months.

But it has also been a time to come together. Physically distant but socially strong, millions have volunteered for NHS support roles, and many more have signed up to deliver food and medicines to the most vulnerable. We've all found ways to stay connected in this darkest of times. It has been clearer skies, falling pollution, a return of nature to our global beauty spots. It has been a time of reflection, a time of appreciation for those things we previously took for granted. It has been a time of learning. We can change. We have changed. And, if necessary, we will change again.

One day we will turn on the news and we will have beaten this silent killer. We will have overcome. We will be able to see our families again, to go out with friends again, to travel, to go to public spaces, to sit in a beer garden or go to a football game or an art gallery, to go to a gig or watch a show. We will be able to return to our social norms.

But we must not return to normal.

We must do better.

We can do better.

We will do better.

COVID-19 has exposed the weaknesses in our governments that must be addressed when this comes to an end. Leaders must be held to account for their failures in managing the crisis. But COVID-19 has also exposed the weaknesses in ourselves. And we must be held to account as well. We must ask who we want to be.

For every landlord who kicked out essential staff for fear they would bring the infection into their homes, many more have welcomed them in with free accommodation. For every attacker who targeted Asian minorities in countries around the world, others have focused on supporting Asian businesses and highlighting their importance to our country. To those who flouted social distancing rules and met up with friends and family, remember that millions of others stayed home. To the hoarders, and to the conspiracy theorists spreading medical misinformation, and to the anti-lockdown protestors, you should remember how you acted in this time of crisis. And you should remember that you are in the minority.

Selfishness, callousness, and stupidity have defined some of us during this time. But the majority have shown resilience, capacity to adapt and change, compassion, kindness, and solidarity. The new world that emerges after the crisis will need a lot more of that.

I've spent a lot of time throughout this despairing at the news of government failure, community failure, and global indifference. No doubt I will feel that a lot more before we are through. But we will get through. And we get to choose what our new dawn looks like.

The challenges will be many. Containing, treating, and slowing the spread of COVID-19 in developing countries with poorer health care systems will be a far bigger task than even here in the UK. The challenge of COVID in refugee camps and slums globally seems insurmountable. We must do all we can to aid the poorest among us, as they will suffer the most if we do not. If we weather the coronavirus storm, the climate crisis will lead to greater devastation, more upheaval, more ruined livelihoods and premature deaths, but we now know that we can and will respond to these threats when we have to. So we must.

Tackling the joint challenges of coronavirus, poverty, and overcrowding in slums will be a key obstacle to global recovery from this pandemic. Credit: Getty Images.

The coronavirus pandemic has taught us above all else that we are a global community. When a disease breaks out in China, it will bring Europe to its knees weeks later. If COVID is controlled in one place but not another, it will return with a vengeance at similar speed. Similarly, if we do not lower our carbon emissions in the Western world, before the end of the century Pacific Islands will be underwater, and Africa and Asia will face worse storms than we can currently conceive. Violence and instability in distant parts of the world will prompt mass displacement, and spawn the rise of far-right hate groups in countries receiving refugees. What each and every one of us does at every moment matters, because we are all connected.

If you ignore social distancing now and go to see your friends when you should be in lockdown, you could unknowingly spread the virus and kill someone you will never meet. If you share a Facebook Post with incorrect medical advice, a friend of a friend might see it, follow it, and end up in hospital taking up a bed someone else might need. If you clap for the NHS without holding the government who failed to provide them with appropriate PPE to account, more doctors will die.

If you go back to normal when this pandemic is over, we can expect more frequent, more severe disasters around the corner. A more unstable and dangerous world can lead to people turning on each other, and greater levels of intergroup violence and hatred. If you do not stand up to those who share bigotry, xenophobia, racism and sexism today, it will be too late by then.

Once this is over, let's not get back to normal. Breathe the cleaner air, hear the birds sing, be thankful for the privilege of being able to social distance and keep safe. And fight like hell for those who can't, and who won't be protected from the next crisis. Though it might not feel like it, today we are the lucky ones. Tomorrow we might not be. But whatever happens, we will always have each other.

If nothing else, COVID-19 should teach us that.

Coronavirus volunteering opportunities:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/participation/get-involved/volunteering/#

https://www.redcross.org.uk/get-involved/volunteer

Donate to organisations fighting coronavirus in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/apr/11/donate-help-victims-coronavirus-hospital-food-bank

https://www.redcross.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/uk-emergency-response/coronavirus

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/coronavirus-charity-donate-how-to-help-support-vulnerable-a9437711.html

And abroad:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/donate

https://thekanjiproject.org.uk/tkp-coronavirus-statement/

Learn the facts:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019