Category: Human Rights

COP26: another Cop Out?

Monica Piccinini

21 Oct 2021

The climate scientists drum beat of concerning data continues with an increased rhythm and it is becoming clear to all but the global leaders that we are running out of time for material action.

As COP26 approaches, national leaders across the world should be galvanising and both individually and collectively evidencing real action to deliver on prior promises and commitments. Sadly, what might be expected appears to be far from the real situation.

It is very apparent that climate change can’t be addressed by a small number of nations. Global pollution and its effects have no respect for man-made sovereign borders. Possibly, for the first time in history, the world needs to truly work together for the greater good and ultimate survival. 

It’s complicated. The world needs full cooperation and commitment from the biggest polluters and the richest and most powerful nations, leaving their greed, egos and empty promises behind. In the short term, it’s those same countries that have the most to lose and need to spend the most in an altruistic manner.

It’s no coincidence that the largest economies have established themselves as powerhouses at the expense of the climate. Much of their industry depends on carbon fuels to function and importantly their infrastructure is from a time when carbon fuels were seen as the future.

So with that background and political short-termism combined, it’s no surprise that the question of climate and sustainability becomes deeply mired in protectionism, nationalism and global politics.

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, China’s Xi Jiping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador are not expected to attend COP26. Japan’s Fumio Kishida may also be absent from the Summit, which is about to start in Glasglow, Scotland, at the end of this month.

According to an analysis by Carbon Brief on CO2 emissions from land use and forestry, as well as those from fossil fuels, it showed the US as the largest CO2 emitter in history, accounting to 20% of the global total, followed by China with 11%. In third place came Russia (7%), Brazil (5%) and Indonesia (4%).

There is a real sense of urgency, as the world has already used 85% of the CO2 budget that would give a 50% chance of limiting heating to 1.5C, according to Carbon Brief’s data.

According to the OECD, CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass accounts for about 90% of total CO2 emissions and two thirds of total GHG emissions.

The top most powerful nations in the world, China and the US, are the top polluters, followed by India, Russia and Japan. China produces 28% of global emissions, more CO2 than all nations put together.

Will geopolitical competition between China and the US help the world tackle climate change?

China and the US should be leaving their differences aside and be focusing on setting up plans in order to tackle one of, if not the most challenging projects of our time, climate change.

The recent defense deal, the Aukus trilateral security partnership between the US, the UK and Australia, added to existing regional military tensions has not helped to soothe relations between the US and China, creating a stand-off which has the potential to evolve into a new cold war.

Additionally, issues like trade, the South China Sea, human rights, the threat of Chinese invasion in Taiwan and intellectual property theft, have contributed to more tensions and disagreement between both nations. This may impact heavily on their commitment to climate change.

President Xi Jinping has pledged to cut down emissions by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060, given its economic development is highly reliant on the fossil fuel industry.

More than half of all power in China is generated from coal, using 3 billion tonnes of thermal coal each year. Coal is the biggest contributor to climate change, accounting to 46% of carbon dioxide emissions across the world.

Coal is not the only concern. China produced around one billion tonnes of steel last year, which is the second most polluting industry after coal.

We can easily notice a pattern here. Chinese demand for coal is expected to increase until 2026, therefore increasing carbon emissions until 2030, contradicting the country’s emission goals. Chinese banks and corporations continue to finance and build coal-fired power plants across many countries.

Supply and demand – is it all China’s fault?

Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

The world has actively supported China becoming its industrial heartland. Built upon cheap labour, available raw materials and a welcoming government policy, a huge percentage of commodity product manufacturing has moved to China from other historic manufacturing nations, including the US, the UK, the EU, and other nations.  Servicing the demand has created pressure to build manufacturing infrastructure at the lowest cost possible, and that leads to low tech solutions like carbon based energy production.

It’s no surprise that China has rapidly become one of the biggest global polluters. Other nations have essentially pushed into China their polluting industries.

The denialistic approach

The Production Gap report released by the UN, states that governments across the world still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 and that the majority of gas and oil producers plan on increasing production beyond 2030. 

G20 countries have directed nearly USD 300 billion in new funds towards fossil fuel activities since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — more than they have toward clean energy, which contradicts entirely to the message they have been giving us all along.

According to a leak of tens of thousands of comments by governments, corporations, academics and others on the draft report of the IPCC’s ‘Working Group III’, recently published by Unearthed, fossil fuel producers including Australia, Saudi Arabia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), are lobbying the IPCC – the world’s leading authority on climate change – to remove or weaken a key conclusion that the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

These scandalous and irresponsible actions go on. Australia asks the IPCC to delete analysis explaining how lobbying by fossil fuel companies has weakened action on climate change in Australia and the US. Saudi Arabia repeatedly seeks to have the report’s authors delete references to the need to phase out fossil fuels.

Brazil and Argentina, two of the world’s biggest producers of beef and animal feed crops like soya beans, have also been pressing the IPCC to water down and delete messages about the climate benefits of promoting ‘plant-based’ diets and of curbing meat and dairy consumption. 

There is no slowing down. According to the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2021-2030, global GHG emissions from agriculture are projected to increase by 4% over the next ten years, with livestock accounting for more than 80% of this increase.

Meat production requires significant use of resources such as land, feed and water and is also a great contributor to climate change. By 2030, 34% of the agricultural production in Latin American and the Caribbean, is projected to be exported.

Brazil, the US and Europe are the three largest meat exporting countries. China is the world’s largest meat importer. According to the Brazilian Meat Exporting Industry Association, between January and July this year, shipments of beef from Brazil to China reached 490,000 tons and generated sales of US$2.5bn, an increase of 8.6 per cent and 13.8 per cent, respectively, compared with the same period last year.

In China, per capita beef consumption is projected to rise a further 8% by 2030, after having risen 35% in the last decade.

Brazil has been the main destination for Chinese investments in South America, having received US$ 66.1 billion, equivalent to 47% of the total invested, in the last decade until 2020.

Between 2007 and 2020, Chinese companies made large investments in Brazil, mainly in the electricity sector, which attracted 48% of the total value, followed by oil extraction, with a 28% share, and mining, with 7%. 

A recently published report, The Lancet Countdown, mentioned that over a 6- month period in 2020, over 51 million people were affected by at least 84 disasters from storms, droughts and floods across the world.

The fact is that there is no going around the subject of climate change. Unless the situation we put ourselves is taken seriously and faced head on with immediate action, all of humanity faces a tragic future, or no future at all.  None of the world leaders, who continuously deny the situation, will be here to tell the story.

Nature has already shown its clear message to the world with extreme weather events like floods, wild fires, volcano eruptions, death and horrific devastation across the world, including in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, across Europe, India, Russia and the US. Turning a blind eye to these events and the certainty of a much worse scenario shows total irresponsibility and disregard to life, to each one of us, as well as to every single living being on this planet.

The world is calling for global leadership on a scale never seen before, at the very time when nations are sadly turning inwardly and political factions are more concerned with domestic rivalry and individual gains. 

Climate Change – Inaction May Prove Fatal to Humanity

Monica Piccinini

22 Aug 2021

Humanity has been in denial for decades, avoiding the truth about the implications of its complex relationship with nature. A toxic, turbulent and abusive liaison based on constant exploitation. Eventually, a break up is imminent!

As human population numbers have grown and with it consumption, we have seen the correlated demand in areas of food, living space as well as demand for luxury items created by commerce. At the heart, there is a very basic human desire for ‘more’.  Populations across the world are now interconnected in a way few would imagine, therefore creating an environmental impact most choose to conveniently ignore. 

An individual in the Western Northern Hemisphere seeking a never ending supply of fresh exotic vegetables, fruit and meat from half way around the globe at an ever decreasing price. For all those products to be on the consumer’s plate, it will have passed through an incredibly efficient, yet troublesome system.

From high production farming techniques driving the destruction of natural flora, fauna and land exploitation, to the use of pesticides, distribution from one country to another by lorries, planes and ships with huge carbon footprints, all managed by profit oriented distribution companies operating on a global scale.  The simple desire of a consumer wanting more products at bargain costs has created a significant ecological footprint with dramatic consequences. 

The interconnections between our global systems and social fabrics are very sensitive and easily interrupted. The world has had a taste of such disruption with the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the even bigger issues of climate change and biodiversity loss are upon us and we can’t afford to turn a blind eye to, nor try to separate them, as they are all interconnected.

The reality is that the pace of destruction is faster than we had ever predicted. Unless we address the critical situation we have created, and put our house in order, we may be homeless and face a grim future.

“2021 must be the year to reconcile humanity with nature”, said António Guterres, the UN secretary general, in an address to the One Planet Summit of global leaders in Paris last January.

We have seen how much the emergence of a pandemic can cost us and how quickly it can affect businesses, the global economy, and our physical and mental health. Climate change is one of the primary drivers of biodiversity loss, which is a key driver of emerging infectious diseases. Investing in ecological measures that can help future pandemics is much lower than the cost of a pandemic.

One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their natural ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of their habitats and wildlife, according to Swiss Re. Food, air, clean water, and flood protection have already been damaged by human activity.

According to the OECD, the total economic value to society of biodiversity and ecosystem services is estimated to be as much as USD 140 trillion per year and over half of the world’s GDP (USD 44 trillion) is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

The recently released 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, IPCC, is a stark warning that humanity will not be able to limit global warming, unless we take rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The top major green house gas emitters in the world are China, United States, India and Russia. China, Brazil, Australia and Russia’s current energy policies will prompt to an astonishing 5C temperature rise.

At 1.5C of global warming, we will see significant and unprecedented changes to the weather across all regions, but at 2C of global warming, the results could be catastrophic and irreversible, with heat extremes, heavy precipitation, marine heat waves, reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost, agricultural and ecological droughts.  

We have already seen the impact of climate change across the globe with fires, floods, draughts, hurricanes, etc. In Brazil, the worst drought in nearly a century, followed by extreme cold temperatures, has been reported, affecting heavily Brazil’s farming. Deforestation is considered as one of the main causes.  

As world population is predicted to increase to 9.7 billion by 2050, food demand will intensify, putting pressure on the land. We have already exploited more than a third of the world’s land area to crop and livestock production, affecting the lives of thousands of species as well as the land. At least 60% of the world’s agricultural area is dedicated to cattle ranching, making up to only 24% of the world’s meat consumption.

According to a projection by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, PBL, the area of land under agriculture could increase from 35% to 39% by 2050. Industrial agriculture is one such villain responsible for degradation of the land, water, and ecosystems, high green house gas emissions, biodiversity loss, hunger and nutrition deficiencies, as well as obesity and diet-related diseases.

“We are facing acute, interconnected crises – hunger, malnutrition, biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, growing inequality and poverty. What we need are real solutions, not more greenwashing from agribusiness. Real solutions – public regulation for agroecology and Food Sovereignty – require dismantling corporate power, redistributing resources, re-localising food systems and ensuring small scale producers have control. Food is a human right not a commodity”, said Kirtana Chandrasekaran, from Friends of the Earth International.

Global agribusiness giants not only control the market price farmers get, but also what we eat, not to mention their contribution to poor health, food waste, soil erosion and soil acidification due to the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, wildlife destruction, ground water pollution, disease outbreaks, death, hunger and food insecurity, deforestation and climate change. According to the Climate Land Use Alliance, commercial agriculture drives 71% of tropical deforestation, posing serious risks to our global forests and climate.

According to the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services, IPBES, half a million terrestrial species of animals and plants may already be doomed into extinction. Up to one fifth of wild species are at risk of extinction this century due to climate change. Over 25% of forests have been permanently cleared. Since 1970, the global abundance of vertebrates has declined by 68% and since 1700, 90% of global wetlands have been lost.

The degradation of our oceans, soil, rivers, corals, can take decades, if not centuries to recover, and in some cases this destruction may already be irreversible.

Governments across the globe have made many commitments with the intent to tackle climate change. The commitments included the 2011 deadline to decrease emissions by 4%, the 2015 deadline to decrease it by 5%, and the 2020 deadline with the promise to decrease emissions by 10% each year. It has been a total failure and they have missed every single deadline. In the meantime, global emissions keep increasing.

“We have to reduce emissions far more rapidly than we are today. We have to leave fossil fuels in the ground, we have to remove the green house gases we have already put into the atmosphere that are creating this crisis today and into the future, and then to buy time while we manage those two processes. Then we also need to refreeze the Arctic. I don’t think it’s ridiculous, we have at least half a dozen of processes we’ve been looking at (Marine Cloud Brightening Technique)…. We don’t have the time we need to reduce emissions…buying time becomes essential”, said Sir David King, Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) at a Chanel 4 interview last July.

Humanity has to urgently re-think its relationship with nature. Not only we have the responsibility to address the current ecological crises we face, but also try to understand how we got here.

Will science and technology be able to solve the climate change and biodiversity loss crises?

“What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny – that is, by religion…  More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.” – Lynn White’s 1967 article.

This is the time of serious commitment not only from our world leaders, but also from each one of us. It’s our responsibility to get involved and put pressure on our governments, businesses and policy makers across the world and demand total transparency and urgent action!

Humanity’s Historical Ties with Eugenics

Monica Piccinini

10 Aug 2021

In recent years, the world and its leading nation states, appear to have experienced a fundamental change in social thinking. Evidenced by the reversal of globalisation towards isolationism, the move away from political leadership towards populism, and the move away from truth towards the mass use of mis-information for political gain, control and power.

With these changes in social thinking, major democracies have seen the worrying rise of a series of consequential symptoms:  the far-right movement, white supremacy, widespread use of misinformation, discrimination, xenophobia, inequality, misogyny, homophobia, extremism, racism, denialism, and violence.

Is this fundamental change something new in society, or is it itself the result of actions and belief systems that originated in the distant past? An outstanding 2019 documentary on BBC4, “Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal”, presented by science journalist and author, Angela Saini, and actor, presenter and activist, Adam Pearson, inspired my to write this piece.

Socially good intentions or not?

Eugenics (the word originated from the Greek for ‘good stock’ or ‘well born’), the term first used to describe a movement by Francis Galton, the British explorer and natural scientist, around the 1870’s, is the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations to improve the population’s genetic composition. It encouraged the most valuable people in society to procreate and discouraged it in those it considered less fit.

The world has perhaps unwittingly experienced ‘Eugenic’ ideals throughout its past 150-year history, with Eugenics featuring in some of the world’s most horrific historic events.

It appears that Eugenics continues to have an influence on policies being created by governments today and even more concerning is its resurgence within certain aspects of the scientific community.  Combined with recent technological advances in genetic science, the effects on the future of mankind could be both dramatic and irreversible.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a superb statistician (he discovered correlation and regression to the mean), also having contributed in the fields of meteorology, anthropology, geology, biology, psychology and psychometrics. He was highly inspired by Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” (1859) and dedicated his work into the study of inherited traits in human society. In Galton’s view, the best babies came from the intelligent and good-looking people.

It’s hard to know whether Galton’s work was malevolent at its core, however, eugenics laid the foundation for one of the world’s most horrific historic chapters, the Nazi genocidal project and sterilization programs across the world, as well as euthanasia programs and Aktion T4, colonialism, mass murder and racial oppression.

Recently, University College London (UCL) apologised publicly for having had a role in promoting eugenics in the past by having links to eugenicists like Galton. Francis Galton funded a professorship in eugenics at the university, the Francis Galton’s Laboratory for National Eugenics, where the focus was not only on disability, but also on race.

According to a recent Reuters report, the state of California has agreed to compensate all the citizens who were forcibly sterilized under old laws, aimed at people who were deemed unfit to have children between 1909 and 1979.

Atrocities influenced by eugenicists like Galton were committed around the world. In the early 1900’s, Germany’s imperial forces, called Schutztruppe, murdered around 80,000 indigenous people (Herero and Nama) in Southwest Africa (Namibia today), one of the first genocides of the 20th century. Medical experiments were performed where people were injected with tuberculosis and smallpox, and decapitated skulls were measured.

Galton’s protégé, Professor Karl Pearson, was an English mathematician and biostatistician and the first chair of national eugenics after Galton died. He was an anti-Semite and considered the Jewish population as physically and mentally inferior, and that the solution to the decay of the British population was to stop the Jewish immigration.

“If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.” – Karl Pearson (1901).

In 1910, Winston Churchill became Britain’s secretary of state and was also considered a strong eugenics advocate.

“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place”, Churchill’s words in 1937 to the Palestine Royal Commission.

It’s interesting to point out that eugenics is still reflected in some parts of society today. One example of this is the 11-plus exams still being used in some English schools and a product of Cyril Burt’s work. Burt was an educational psychologist and professor at UCL, worked very closely with the British government. He believed that intelligence was innate and that children from rich parents scored better than poor children was mainly because their parents were more intelligent.

To this day, some schools in the UK still perform the 11-plus testing regime, a harsh and unfair experience for students aged as young as 11 and 12, and the results can be traumatic, as some of the students who do not perform well are asked to move schools.

Another famous name to enter the eugenics list was the well-known Marie Stopes, a feminist, author, women’s rights campaigner and trained paleobotonist. She opened Britain’s first birth control clinic. Stopes was also a eugenicist and advocate for controlled selective breeding, calling for the “hopelessly rotten and racially diseased” to be sterilised and opposed inter-racial marriage.

Stopes was married to Reginald Ruggles Gates, a Canadian anthropologist, botanist, geneticist and eugenicist, obsessed with skin colour. Gates believed African-Americans to be a mentally inferior race and that racial intermarriage was the cause of some disabilities.

Eugenics also influenced many sterilisation programs across the world. After WWII, sterilisation policies were carried out in many countries in order to improve racial purity. In 1975, pressured by the American government (Lyndon B. Johnson), Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, with the help of her son Sanjay, embarked on a mass sterilisation program, considered as one of the most troubling human rights violation the country has ever experienced. As a result, by 1977, over 8 million people in India were sterilised.

Some politicians, scientists and academics across the world continue to value and support the eugenics thinking. In 1974, British senior conservative politician, Keith Joseph, said in a speech, “the balance of our population, our human stock is threatened”, meaning the poor were breeding too fast, and the danger was they were going to swamp everyone else.

“If we are not prepared to predict and intervene far more early then there are children who are growing up, in families which we know are dysfunctional, then the kids a few years down the line are going to be a menace to society”, said Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister.

In the UK, there are growing fears about new legislation being put in place after Brexit. An example of this is the recently introduced bill that would allow authorities to criminally prosecute and jail asylum seekers who are intercepted trying to enter the United Kingdom without permission for up to five years.

Many other countries across the world have supported and adopted the eugenics thinking, including Brazil. In the first half of the 20th century, Brazil debated on sterilisation of the “undesirables” to improve the race. Brazil did not pass any sterilisation law, however, in the 1920’s and 1030’s discussions on the subject were amongst doctors, intellectuals, politicians and eugenicists. During Getúlio Vargas government, new immigration policies were approved, preventing the entry of immigrants considered racially inferior. A sterilisation program was never implemented in Brazil, as it was considered a violation of the strong catholic tradition in the country.

Recently, in an audio broadcast, a professor at the faculty of medicine at Federal University of São Paulo, Unifesp, mentioned that blacks and indigenous people were “culturally backward”, trying to explain the notion of pure race.

The GM Designer Babies…

As genetic science technology advances, doors may be open to new forms of high tech eugenics through human genome editing, like CRISPR (the technique that enables precise DNA editing developed by scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna in 2012). This would create a non-accepting and more discriminatory society. The 1997 movie “Gattaca” exposed glimpses of what our world could look like if we take the wrong steps towards genetic modification, which will divide humanity against itself.

Nowadays, one has the option to select embryos without a faulty gene and implant it in the mother’s womb. Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, PGD, is a technique that involves testing cell(s) from embryos created outside the body by IVF for a genetic disorder. Tests are carried out for the specific disorder that the embryos are known to be at significant risk of inheriting.

CRISPR pioneer and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna said in her book on the subject of genome editing, “the power to control our species genetic future is awesome and terrifying. Deciding how to handle it may be the biggest challenge we have ever faced”. Doudna carried on saying, “we don’t have the ability to control the editing outcomes in a way that would be safe in embryos right now… It is very difficult to know how those edits will in fact affect the health outcomes of these kids“.

The World Health Organisation has recently released two new reports providing recommendations to help establish human genome editing as a tool for public health, with emphasis on safety, effectiveness and ethics.

“Human genome editing has the potential to advance our ability to treat and cure disease, but the full impact will only be realised if we deploy it for the benefit of all people, instead of fueling more health inequity between and within countries”, mentioned Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.

According to Stop Designer Babies, WHO’s reports on human genome editing spend many words to say nothing concrete and fail to recommend the obvious solution to the risks of unregulated creation of GM designer babies. The obvious solution, according to SDB, would be to ban on human germline genetic engineering altogether. Editing the human genome can lead to unintended consequences and can lead to an even more divided and unfair society.

In 2018, one specific event shocked the world when Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced he had altered the DNA of twin babies with the intent to prevent them from catching HIV. The result was Lulu and Nana, born not immune to HIV. Instead, they were both accidently given versions of CCR5 that are made up and do not exist in any other human genome in the world. Their genetic changes are still heritable and could be passed on to their children. Jiankui also broke the law by forging documents and misleading the babies’ parents about the risks involved. He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in jail for conducting “illegal medical practices”.

Clear signs of worldwide social, economic and political instability and division show that, as a society, we are swimming into very dangerous waters. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated existing issues in our society. Countries have retracted, adopting protectionist views and a colonial mentality, therefore creating more walls and discrimination.

It is essential for our society to embrace a compassionate, fair and ethical approach to decisions being made on how we are born as well as how we live our lives. There is an urgent need for a legislative framework to be set up by world leaders, with the objective to protect the most vulnerable ones in our society. We must make sure we do not commit the terrible crimes and mistakes made in the past. This will define the future of humanity.

Brazil: The Land of Impunity

Monica Piccinini

3 June 2021

“Impunity is safe when complicity is general”, once said Mariano José Pereira da Fonseca, Marquis of Maricá (1773-1848).

Visiting my family in the south of Brazil in my early teenage years was always an eventful trip, as I had the opportunity to spend time with my cousins and at the same time I had the freedom to go out with them without being questioned and monitored by my parents. My cousins had a very well established circle of friends; the children of families with influence, power and wealth.

One day, I was told that one of their friends had committed a terrible crime; killing his mother! I was in a state of shock and horror. His parents had been recently separated and his mother was known to be parading town with younger boyfriends, which made him extremely embarrassed. We were then told he had left town, only to return a few months later as if nothing had happened. No one ever questioned him nor mentioned the event. This is the very first time I realised that there were two different set of rules in Brazil, one for the powerful and wealthy, the other one for the remainder of the population. I soon learned the name for it: impunity!

Brazil is known for being a friendly and hospitable country.  That aspect of the culture also extends to idolising and accommodating criminals from all over the world, no exception, including former Nazis like the “Angel of Death”, Josef Mengele and Franz Stangl; the infamous English criminal who helped plan and carry out the Great Train Robbery of 1963, Ronnie Biggs; a convicted fugitive Italian drug lord, Rocco Morabito, recently arrested in Brazil; one of the most important members of “Cosa Nostra”, Tommaso Buscetta; amongst many others.

It is worth pointing out that international criminals are a minority in Brazil, as the country is best known to be the land of impunity, a “safe heaven” for all types of local criminal activities committed by “businessmen”, politicians, the police, terrorists and drug lords.

“Corruption is not a Brazilian invention, but impunity is something very much ours”, once said TV presenter Jô Soares.

Corruption, violence and impunity are interconnected and run through every part of Brazilian society. Corruption leads to violence and impunity, an infectious disease affecting the most powerful in the country.

Published at Portal Brasil Empresarial, there are a few examples of violence, the fight for power, money, and impunity that has run through Brazilian politics for a very long time.

In June 1967, deputies Nelson Carneiro and Estácio Souto Maior, father of pilot Nelson Piquet, drew their weapons and exchanged fire in the Chamber of Deputies. With a .38 caliber revolver, Nelson Carneiro shot Estácio Souto Maior, who despite being wounded, managed to retaliate.

Four years earlier, on December 4, 1963, senator Arnon de Mello, father of the current senator and former president Fernando Collor de Mello, shot at senator Silvestre Péricles, who laid down on the ground and dodged the shots. One of the shots hit senator José Kairala, who died hours later. Fernando Collor’s father reacted to the threats, and during a speech in the Senate, he shot Péricles Silvestre.

In 1929, when the Federal Chamber was still headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, a discussion between deputies Sousa Filho and Simões Lopes resulted in death. Simões Lopes, who was armed, fired two shots at Sousa Filho, who died on the spot.

In all three occasions, all those involved were acquitted and were never held to account for their actions.

Crime-solving rates in Brazil are one of the lowest in the world. The country has loose criminal laws with soft penalties being applied to serious crimes, including incongruous criminal procedural legislation, which allows criminals to go free unpunished. Seven out of ten homicides are not punished in Brazil.

“An absolutely inefficient criminal law, unable to reach anyone who earns more than five minimum wages, has led us to build a country of rich offenders, a country in which people live on bid rigging, active corruption, passive corruption, embezzlement, money laundering. This was no accident. It spreads across the country”, said Luís Roberto Barroso, a Brazilian law professor, jurist and current Justice of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil.

Currently there are about 500 criminal cases in the Supreme Court, criminal proceedings as well as investigations, most of them against parliamentarians, mentioned Barroso at Jornal do Comércio.

Corruption and impunity work from top down in Brazil. The current president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his family have been involved in various criminal and corruption scandals, accused of money laundering, running a paramilitary death squad, and stealing from the population. These scandals often lack scrutiny and go unpunished.

Authorities in Brazil have always been a fortunate class. The privileged forum favours certain public authorities, unlike the majority of the population, encouraging white-collar crimes, corruption, and impunity to take place.

Developed countries usually have a few positions with privileged jurisdiction, but in Brazil over 45,000 authorities have this privilege. The factors that contribute to an individual or organisation to commit a crime is highly influenced by the possibility of it being tried and convicted by a justice system.

Impunity is also present in the police force in Brazil. The recent events of Jacarezinho in Rio de Janeiro, where an operation by the Civil Police that resulted in the deaths of 25 people, including one police officer, was news across the world. The victims were suspected of criminal activities, but no proof yet has been presented.

“It’s completely unacceptable that security forces keep committing grave human rights violations such as those that occurred in Jacarezinho today against residents of the favelas, who are mostly Black and live in poverty “, said Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil.

A study called “Labyrinthine Investigations”, published by Conectas, reveals that reports of violations committed by police officers tend to be ignored and shelved. A complex bureaucratic mechanism capable of silencing victims and protecting crimes committed by police officers was identified.

“The institutions work to justify the conduct of the police officers, to avoid investigation and punishment”, said Adilson Paes de Souza, a retired Military Police Lieutenant Colonel who has a PhD from the Institute of Psychology of USP (University of São Paulo).

“The existing doctrine in the Military Police is one of militarisation and war against the enemy, and this also spills over into the Civil Police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary. When the judge clear signs of torture that a detainee has suffered, the message is the following: this is the enemy, damn it, no standards and guarantees for him”, added Souza.

Brazil is like an orphan lacking protection and direction; a country being constantly fooled, beaten, controlled and exploited by ruthless greedy individuals and organisations. It has been left to fend for itself. It is bruised and traumatised. The criminals responsible are left unpunished, exempted of their heinous crimes.

Brazil’s Relationship With Violence

Monica Piccinini

19 May 2021

It was late 1970’s in the beautiful and peaceful coastal town of Praia da Costa, Southeastern Brazil, and I was on my way back home from school. I couldn’t fail to notice frantic shouting coming from a mini shopping mall about 200 meters away from where I was standing. I suddenly realised what was unfolding right in front of me, a distressed man firing his gun innumerous times at someone. In my entire life, I honestly can’t remember running as fast as I did then. This vivid memory of violence has stayed with me up to today.

Brazil is one of the most violent societies in the world!

Violence runs through Brazil’s entire history. It has become deeply engrained in the psyche of the population. A society has evolved where fear is an accepted part of every day life.

In order to understand this evolution you have to look back through time and the origins of Brazil. A culture of violence can first be seen in the young colonial period of Brazil (1540-1822), when the Portuguese Crown used violence against the indigenous people taking over their lands and imposing their white European culture and later during the period of enslavement of African peoples. This was followed by the Old Republic (1889-1930), in which the colonels used force and violence against rural populations in order to maintain political centrality and territorial unity.

Sadly the trail doesn’t stop there. A culture of violence continued in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) with the legitimisation of state violence through persecutions, end of individual freedom, political repression, torture, exile, etc.

The troubled past has created a Brazil that has the 9th highest homicide rate in the world. Recently, the WHO published data revealing that Brazil has five times the world average of homicides.

According to data from the UN agency, deaths in Brazil reached 31.1 people per 100,000 habitants, compared to worldwide rate of 6.4 homicides for every 100,000 people. In Africa the rate is 10 deaths per 100,000, compared to just 3.3 per 100,000 in Europe.

In 2020, Brazil had the highest number of violent deaths in the world, 70,200 deaths, 12% of the total worldwide, surpassing violence in India, Syria, Nigeria and Venezuela.

This incredible headline number hides the suffering of many social groups within Brazil that face violence on an incredible scale. According to the Small Arms Survey, Brazil has the third highest number of deaths of women in the world. In 2018, a woman was murdered every two hours in the country.

A staggering 71.5% of people murdered in Brazil are black or brown, which evidences the correlation between violent death and high levels of social, race and economic inequality.

Children are also victims of violence. Between 2010 and 2020, at least 103,149 children and adolescent aged up to 19 years old died in Brazil, victims of aggression, according to a survey released by SBP, the Brazilian Society of Pediatrics. 2,000 of them were under 4 years old.

The list of affected groups within society goes on and on.  Probably the longest suffering group being the indigenous population of Brazil, who have faced violence from the very first day of colonial settlers landing on Brazil’s shores.

“In cities like Rio de Janeiro, gang violence, the excessive use of force by the State, a system of Justice corrupt criminality, the militarisation of certain areas and the social accumulation of violence – where violence generates more violence – is what marks the extremely high homicide rates”, according to Small Arms Survey.

We can’t deny the fact that violence in Brazil is chronic, a legacy that has become a systemic problem. One has to question the reasons for so much violence in one single country. But they are countless, complex and interconnected. 

Overall, the country has a flawed education system, a health system in desperate need of investment, serious issues of social exclusion, extreme racism, inequality, corrupt institutions, a failed judiciary system unable to maintain a rigorous protocol of punishment for violent crimes and unscrupulous and corrupt governance.

It has ineffective drug-fighting policies, serious arms and human trafficking issues and high circulation of weapons. Firearms accounted to 71% of crimes committed against the lives of Brazilians. From 1980 to 2016, nearly one million Brazilians died by gunshot wounds, according to Atlas of Violence.

With the levels of violence seen annually, it comes as no surprise that Brazil has one of the largest prison populations in the world, where more than 40% of prisoners have not yet been put on trial.

Sadly, there’s no quick fix to the issue of violence in Brazil. Violence is simply the symptom of so many deep problems. It will likely take generations of committed Brazilians to heal the patient. The support of the populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, with his radical and divisive policies, suggests this generation will not be one to start the healing process.

Brazil’s History Repeating Itself?

Monica Piccinini

30 Apr 2021

It is 1978 in beautiful sunny coastal city of Praia da Costa, southeastern Brazil, and President Geisel is in town. This is my very first memory as a child of Brazilian politics and dictatorship.

My mother grabs my hand, in the same way other mothers grabbed the hands of their children, and we all were rushed to the main city road.  One hand in our mother’s hand, the other waving a Brazilian flag frantically as Geisel passes by in his uniform followed by his entourage.

Unknown to us at the time, we were not only waving flags at Geisel, we were waving away our rights and accepting the unacceptable.  Many unaware of the conditions we were forced to live in. The 70’s was a turbulent time in the country, a time of restricted public liberties and violation of human rights, a culture of fear and repression, enforced on the population by a military junta.

Little did we know that Brazil would continue to be governed by the armed forces for seven more years.

Ernesto Geisel, an army general, President during the dictatorship, from 1974 to 1978, has been accused of authorising the torture, murder and disappearance of political prisoners. This information was included in a memo written in 1974 and released in 2018 by the director of the CIA, William Colby, addressed to Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state.  

In 1975, the death of journalist Vladimir Herzog, director-in-charge of the department at TV Cultura in São Paulo and culture editor for Visão magazine, marked a period of revolt in the country. Herzog was found dead by hanging in one of the cells of the Operations Centre for Internal Defense, known as DOI-CODI. Additionally, there were reports by the press about the disappearance and execution of countless members of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), and whoever opposed the regime.

In 2014, a final report was presented holding 377 people responsible for the crimes committed during the military regime, including 5 presidents.

According to a recent report published by Human Rights Watch, in May 2020, a federal court dismissed charges against people involved in the torture and killing of journalist Vladimir Herzog.

The criminals of human rights abuses from 1964 to 1985 dictatorship have been protected from justice by a 1979 amnesty law that the Supreme Court upheld in 2010, violating Brazil’s obligation under international law. Since 2010, federal prosecutors have charged about 60 former agents of the dictatorship with killings, kidnappings, among other crimes. Lower courts have dismissed most cases.

Memories of the dictatorship are still fresh and have not been forgotten by most Brazilians who lived during these unnerving, distressing and turbulent years. At the same time, Brazilians now have as a leader President Jair Bolsonaro, former military, who has repeatedly praised the dictatorship.

Bolsonaro has sought to minimise human rights violations during the years of dictatorship and has spread “misinformation” about the military regime, according to 5 United Nations rapporteurs.

Human rights have been violated in many areas during Bolsonaro’s administration. Since taking office, Bolsonaro, his allies, and government officials have been accused of lashing out at reporters over 400 times. In one instance, the federal police was asked by the government to investigate presumed defamation by two journalists and a cartoonist who criticised the president.

It is no secret the fact that Bolsonaro’s government has weakened environmental laws in Brazil, having transferred the responsibility for leading anti-deforestation efforts in the Amazon from environmental agencies to the armed forces. He also accused indigenous people and NGO’s of being responsible for the destruction of the rainforest, without any proof. Furthermore, the government also gave green light to criminal organisations engaging in illegal deforestation in the Amazon, who used intimidation and violence against forest defenders.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Bolsonaro administration has sabotaged environmental law enforcement agencies, falsely accused civil society organizations of environmental crimes, and undermined Indigenous rights. These policies have contributed to soaring deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon, an ecosystem vital for containing climate change.

Another point of concern is the recently sharp increase of violence in Brazil. In 2019, police killed a staggering 6,357 people, 80% of them were Black, one of the highest rates of police killings in the world. Police killings rose 6% in the first half of 2020 and homicides rose 7% during the same period.

According to the Human Rights Watch report, Bolsonaro’s government has also been accused of violating women’s and girl’s rights, environmental rights, sexual orientation and gender identity rights, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers rights, disability and children’s rights, amongst many others.

It is grim when one looks back in history and realises that Brazil remains a society of masters and slaves, continuously failing to invest in health, education, and tackle systemic corruption. Many other important issues, such as civil rights, discrimination, inequality, social justice, socioeconomic exclusion, political participation and environmental degradation continue to be deprioritised.

Examples from today and recent history should be a constant reminder that, unless the rotten trees are removed from their roots, the disease will continue to resurface and spread freely every four years for a very long time to come.

Global Food Crisis

Monica Piccinini

26 Jan 2021

A radical and collective rethink is required to re-engineer many of humanities core living systems, if we are to sustain our existence on the planet.  With the global population having grown from 6.1 billion to 7.7 billion in 20 years, demand on the world’s resources is at breaking point. 

Two powerful forces are magnifying each other’s effects, creating a hurricane, which will leave devastation in its path.  These forces are not military or subversive in nature, they are basic human instincts; to feed ourselves and our families with healthy nutritious food, and the human desire for easy access to more food, more clothes, more products and more money.

The voracious demand of the worlds growing consumer base is fuelling and incentivising commercial greed, which in turn is feeding the demand within the world’s population.  A tornado that is spinning faster and faster and getting bigger, as our population gets larger and older.

Less scrupulous organisations and individuals knowingly cut corners and standards to deliver more to more, at less and less.  Often camouflaged in the respectable delivery of corporate profit and shareholder value.  This is a race to the bottom, a race in which humanity will lose.

Industrial agriculture is one such villain responsible for degradation of the land, water, and ecosystems, high green house gas emissions, biodiversity loss, hunger and nutrition deficiencies, as well as obesity and diet-related diseases.

The world’s population is set to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, with huge concern on the need to ensure universal access to healthy food, but at the same time making sure food is produced in a sustainable way. Hunger and malnutrition is a result of the oligopoly control of the agrifood business supply chain. A high percentage of food is often lost along this supply chain before it even reaches the consumer.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO, an estimated 2 billion people in the world did not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food in 2019, putting them at greater risk of various forms of malnutrition and poor health. This forecast grew worse early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, with the World Food Programme (2020) warning on 21 April 2020 that the planet was facing a famine of “biblical proportions”.

More than 30 countries in the developing world, the UN agency cautioned, could experience widespread hunger, and 10 of those countries each already have more than 1 million people on the brink of starvation. 

“We are facing acute, interconnected crises – hunger, malnutrition, biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, growing inequality and poverty. What we need are real solutions, not more greenwashing from agribusiness. Real solutions – public regulation for agroecology and Food Sovereignty – require dismantling corporate power, redistributing resources, re-localising food systems and ensuring small scale producers have control. Food is a human right not a commodity”, said Kirtana Chandrasekaran, from Friends of the Earth International.

Countries need to realise the urgent need to support small-scale food producers, such as family farming and agroecology, adopt measures to address food price volatility, better market linkages and shorter supply chain, improving coordination between producers and consumers. Agroecology contributes to reduction of greenhouse emissions and builds farming that is more resilient to climate change.

Family farming represents 90 per cent of all farms globally, and produce 80 per cent of the world’s food in value terms, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO. Family farmers combined with the practice of agroecology could be key to addressing global food security, as well as the conservation of ecosystems, considering they have full government support through adequate policy, resources, services, programs and regulations and their production methods comply with environmental standards. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has produced a document, “The 10 Elements of Agroecology”, a guide to transition to sustainable food and agricultural systems, offering a unique approach to meeting significant increases in our food needs of the future.

It is evident the dominance exercised by mega-corporations over food systems. A few corporate food empires control the majority of the food we consume and their practices have caused a serious impact on our health, environment, and farming communities. Their production is carried out on mass scales, based on intensive use of agrochemicals, hormones and antibiotics. They prioritise profit above all else.

These global agribusiness giants not only control the market price farmers get, but also what we eat, not to mention their contribution to poor health, food waste, soil erosion and soil acidification due to the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, wildlife destruction, ground water pollution, disease outbreaks, death, hunger and food insecurity, deforestation and climate change. According to the Climate Land Use Alliance, commercial agriculture drives 71% of tropical deforestation, posing serious risks to our global forests and climate.

On a report of Mighty Earth, more than one million square kilometers of the planet have been cleared of their natural vegetation to grow soy, one of the primary ingredients of animal feed used to raise meat. More than three quarters of the world’s soy is used to feed livestock.

Cargill, Bunge, JBS, ADM – Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson are the World’s largest agribusiness companies. Cargill is a US privately held company, found in 1865 by William Wallace Cargill. It was named the “worse company in the world”, according to an astonishing Mighty Earth Report. The company has been involved in scandals that go from fatal food poisonings, agricultural pollution, deforestation, contamination, to allegations of child enslaved labour. This large corporation still manages to keep a very low profile.

“The people who have been sickened or died from eating contaminated Cargill meat, the child laborers who grow the cocoa Cargill sells for the world’s chocolate, the Midwesterners who drink water polluted by Cargill, the Indigenous People displaced by vast deforestation to make way for Cargill’s animal feed, and the ordinary consumers who’ve paid more to put food on the dinner table because of Cargill’s financial malfeasance — all have felt the impact of this agribusiness giant.” These are the words of former Member of Congress and Chairman of Mighty Earth, Henry A. Waxman.

Cargill, the UK’s largest soybean importer, has been linked to the deforestation of 61,260 hectares of forests in the Brazilian Amazon and the Cerrado since March 2019. Cargill provides chicken to the UK market via Avara, the company’s joint enterprise with Faccenda foods. They supply chicken to Tesco, Nando’s and McDonald’s.

“British consumers have been talking loud and clear – they don’t want to be complicit in destroying Brazil’s precious forests. However, supermarkets are failing to protect them from eating meat fed with forest-destroying soy, ”says Robin Willoughby, director of Mighty Earth UK. “We are urging the CEOs of Tesco PLC, J.Sainsbury’s, ASDA, Morrisons and Aldi UK to take immediate steps to stop the destruction of Brazil and abandon Cargill.”

Brazil’s Cerrado and the Amazon rainforest are not the only regions that have been affected by the exploitation of Cargill. The Gran Chaco region, 110 million hectare ecosystem, spanning Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, faced burning of their fields to make way to genetically modified soy. Home to communities of Indigenous Peoples, including the Ayoreo, Chamacoco, Enxet, Guarayo, Maka’a, Manjuy, Mocoví, Nandeva, Nivakle, Toba Qom, and Wichi.

Cargill also helped drive destruction of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire’s forests to grow cheap cocoa, buying cocoa grown through the illegal clearing of protected forests and national parks as a standard practice. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are the world’s two largest cocoa-producing countries. Many other countries across the world have also been affected by the greedy practices of Cargill.

“The agricultural sectors and livestock farming in particular must shift towards sustainability to enhance their contribution to food security, nutrition and healthy diets and build back better to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges”, FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said on September 28, 2020,  in his opening remarks to the 27th session of the Committee on Agriculture (COAG).

Many other factors affect the way our food is grown, such as the use of pesticides, which cause a huge impact on our health, soil, water and animal life. Chemicals considered harmful to our health, and also to the environment, have been sold by the world’s largest agrochemical companies: Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, and Corteva – members of Croplife International lobby group. These chemicals have been linked to increased cancer, liver disease, DNA damage, reproductive failure, endocrine disruption and also groundwater contamination, microbiome disruption, poisoning of birds, mammals, fish and bees. Although in European markets some of these dangerous products have already been banned, European companies can still produce and sell them to regions with lesser regulations. 

Recently, the UK government has allowed farmers to use a poisonous bee-killing pesticide neonicotinoid thiamethoxam on beet crops, a chemical that has already been banned in the EU. Pesticides should be replaced with safer, agro-ecological and other appropriate non-chemical alternatives.

Another great concern is the fact that the largest technology companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft, are now entering the food sector, where we have seen a strong relationship being formed between companies that supply farmers with pesticides, expensive machinery, drones, etc., and those who are in control of food distribution and collecting and storing data.  Farmers are being pushed to use their mobile phone apps, which feeds them with data as well as monitors their every movement. It is worth pointing out that small farmers can’t afford this high tech data gathering technology.

The largest agribusiness companies all have apps that cover millions of hectares of farmland, supplying farmers with information in exchange for a discount on their products. One example is Bayer, the world’s largest pesticide and seed company, where its app is being used in the US, Europe, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. This digital infrastructure is run by platforms developed by tech companies that run cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The aim is to integrate millions of small farmers into a wide centrally controlled network, making it easier for corporations investing in agribusiness to control and profit by encouraging and forcing them to buy their products. Profit is definitely the main and only purpose of these global technology companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, as well as agrochemical corporations, such as Sygenta/Chem China, Basf, Bayer/Monsanto, Corteva, including the involvement of international institutions supporting digital agriculture such as AGRA, CGIAR, FAO and the World Bank.

There is no question that something needs to be done in order to ensure the protection of biodiversity by developing sustainable agricultural practices. By dismantling the power of large agribusiness corporations and reconstructing sustainable agri-food systems, a more reliable, secure and healthy world will be the place where we will be able to live in harmony with the environment, and where it will provide us with our very basic human right: food. We are facing an urgent call from Nature!