DGR stands in solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. They are often decisive defenders of the landbase that is their home and also the most vulnerable people, facing endless attacks, harassment and genocide by the culture of empire.
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on Mongabay.
The Philippines’ Department of National Defense has unilaterally terminated an accord that ensured the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines were off-limits to the military and police.
The defense secretary justified the move by alleging that insurgents from the banned communist party and its armed wing are using the campuses’ sanctuary status as cover for their recruitment and propaganda purposes.
The decision has alarmed displaced Indigenous students who are harboring at UP’s Quezon City campus after the military bombed or took over their schools in a counter-insurgency campaign that began in 2018.
Critics say the move is the latest blow to human rights and environmental activists in the Philippines, following the recent enactment of an anti-terrorism law seen as giving the armed forces free rein to perpetuate abuses in a country already rated as the most dangerous in Asia for environmental and land defenders.
MANILA — Indigenous youths harboring from a military-led counterinsurgency in the Philippines may soon lose the only safe space they have known for the past two years.
Under a nearly 40-year pact, the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines are off-limits to the country’s military and police. Since 2019, a group of 68 Indigenous students and teachers have taken refuge at the UP campus in Quezon City, where they attend a makeshift school following the forcible closure of more than 160 schools catering to Indigenous communities, or lumad, in the southern island of Mindanao.
But in a letter dated Jan. 15 this year to the UP president, National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana unilaterally declared an end to the pact, effectively stripping the sanctuary status of the campuses of the country’s leading public university.
Lorenzana cited “recent events” that identified UP students as members of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (CPP/NPA), and said that “national security issues” and the safety of students against rebel recruiters are the main driving forces for the termination of what’s known as the UP-DND accord or the Enrile-Soto accord.
“The Department is aware that there is indeed an ongoing clandestine recruitment inside UP campuses nationwide for membership in the CPP/NPA and that the ‘Agreement’ is being used by the CPP/NPA recruiters and supporters as shield or propaganda so that government law enforcers are barred from conducting operations against the CPP/NPA,” the letter, addressed to UP President Danilo Concepcion, says.
The Department of National Defense (DND) says it will not “station military or police” on campuses and will not “suppress activist groups, academic freedom and freedom of expression.” The DND has nothing to gain from suppressing these activities, Lorenzana wrote: “We want them [the youth] to see their Armed Forces and Police as protectors worthy of trust, not fear.”
But despite the secretary’s reassurances, the news has triggered alarms for Indigenous students, who could now be targeted in military raids. The development threatens a repeat of the military attacks on Indigenous schools that occurred after President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao in 2017, says Ruis Valle of the Save Our Schools Network (SOSN).
In 2018, the military conducted a series of campaigns and operations to crack down on lumad schools in Talaingod, in Mindanao’s Davao del Norte province, after Duterte threatened in 2017 to bomb the schools.
He had accused the CPP/NPA of using the schools as training grounds.
Since then, more than 160 schools catering to Mindanao’s Indigenous inhabitants have been bombed or transformed into military detachments, and completely shut.
The group of Indigenous students and teachers who sought sanctuary at UP’s Quezon City campus have consistently called for the reopening of Indigenous schools forced to close by the government, the SOSN says. It adds the now-scrapped UP-DND accord “served as a protective barrier for lumad children from direct military and police harassment.”
Human rights and environmental groups have also expressed concern at the DND’s latest move, calling the accord’s termination an attack on UP “as a democratic space.”
Since 2012, the university has “opened its doors to the lakbayan and kampuhan of indigenous people, national minorities, and farmers protesting mining plunder, land grabs, and other attacks against their ancestral lands,” the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, an NGO, said in a statement to Mongabay.
The university has also been “one of the few safe spaces” for environmental and human rights defenders to mobilize amid the government’s militaristic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. Duterte signed a controversial anti-terrorism law during the lockdown, which critics say worsens an already fragile climate for environmental defenders and Indigenous groups in the Philippines. Eco-watchdog Global Witness rates the country the most dangerous for environmental and land defenders in Asia.
“The University of the Philippines is one of the pillars of academic freedom and critical thinking in the country,” Kalikasan said. “It is because of this freedom and critical thinking that the University can produce great minds that have excelled in different fields, including environmental protection and defense.”
Featured Image: The University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila.
Image by Ramon FVelasquez via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
This news article describes the impact of corrupt legislation on ordinary working people. The organised protests and solidarity of the public with farmers is an excellent example of how coordinated resistance can enable change.
Editor’s note: DGR strongly opposes the three new farm laws that have inspired the farmer’s protests in India. However, we do not necessarily agree with all of the demands of the protestors.
On 12th January, 2021, the Supreme Court of India suspended the ‘Three Contentious Farm Laws, amidst large scale protests from farmers in India. The three farm laws continue to be hailed by the ruling party as a means on giving farmers more autonomy over selling of their crops and will break big monopolies. Yet, it is the farmers who have mobilized and organized the mass-scale protests against the laws.
Resistance against the farm bills has been mainly organized by farmer’s unions, ongoing across different areas of the country, since the bills were first introduced. The protests intensified after the bills were passed by the parliament and signed by the President in late September. At the time of writing this, thousands of farmers are on the streets, demanding central government repeal the three acts. In the past five months, about 70 protestors have lost their lives to heart attacks, cold, accidents and suicides.
What does the laws mean for the farmers?
State governments in three states of India – Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan – have established a marketing board (APMC). Under this system, the first sale of agricultural produce (i.e. from the farmer to the middlemen) could happen only in the mandis (market yards) of APMC. The mandis in turn operate under a Minimum Support Price (MSP) system that ensure certain crops are sold at a minimum price set by the government at the beginning of the season.
By ensuring a minimum price for their produce, The APMC and MSP system act as a safeguard for farmers, against unexpected price drops, as well as exploitation by large retailers or local moneylenders.
Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, one of the new laws, remove the APMC system, and allow for sale of agricultural produce to private buyers without any government oversight. While the ruling party claims that this would liberate the farmers to sell their produce to the highest bidder, the farmers fear otherwise.
The direct dealings of farmers with large retailers will put the farmers in a vulnerable position No laws in India or any of the states consider the MSP system to be legally enforceable. The new laws also do not mention MSP in regards to direct dealings with retailers, and will likely dismantle the MSP system. Although the members of ruling party have verbally assured that the system will be intact, the farmers have demands a more formalized pledge to the continuity of MSP.
What if farmers are exploited?
On top of that, certain sections of the laws strip citizens’ right to legal recourse. One law grants complete immunity for any act performed in the process of implementation of the law as long as the act was performed in “good faith.” Another strips civil courts of jurisdiction over proceedings related to the laws. The judicial power is transferred to new institutions created by the laws, which will remain under the executive control.
In effect, anyone who can claim to be acting in “good faith” in their implementation of the rules could easily acquire legal immunity, with little to no consequences for their actions. A study of the impacts of deregulation policies across the world clearly demonstrate that it is the corporations who will enjoy this impunity, while the so-called beneficiaries of the policies (in this case, the farmers) will be further repressed under corporate control. It is clear for everyone to see that this ‘gift of legislation’ offers working people zero protection and could cause significant harm.
Responses to the protests
The protests have received overwhelming support from the public, celebrities, and even opposition parties. Whilst the motives behind the latter’s support are, of course, contentious, it is at this time welcome given what is at stake. Incredibly, approximately 250 million people participated in a nationwide general strike organized by farmer unions on November 26, 2020.
Unsurprisingly, from the governmental side, the peaceful protests have been met with water cannons, batons, tear gas, barricades and sand barriers to stop the protestors from crossing state borders. A youth who turned off a police water cannon, being used against the protestors, was later charged with attempted murder.
The members of the ruling party have used a number of tactics to discredit the organizers. Baseless accusations that the movement is led by “privileged” farmers, or secessionists, or even terrorists have been made and reported by the mainstream media.
Need for radical changes
The new laws will render the farmers vulnerable to big businesses. However, these are not the only problems that farmers in India have faced. It is estimated that ten farmers kill themselves everyday.
Majority of the problems that the farmers face can be traced back to the 1960s when India became an experimental ground for the Green Revolution, which introduced hybrid seeds, monoculture, chemical fertilizers and pesticides in India. The results of the experiments are horrifying.
In Punjab (ground zero of the Green Revolution in India), pesticide residues were found in a quarter of breast milk samples in 2014. “Cancer trains” carry pesticide related cancer victims from Punjab to Rajasthan. Farmers’ suicides (considered a national catastrophe) is a result of the increasing spiral of debt that the farmers cannot escape from. Testimonies of a few of the protesting farmers shows that a majority of their expenses is spent on pesticides and fertilizers.
The movement against the new farm laws are a significant blow to the exploitative and oppressive system. The farmers can build on this movement to reverse the devastating effects of the Green Revolution.
The food sector of India (as it is now) serves no one in the longer term. The food producers are trapped in inescapable spirals of debt. The consumers are ingesting toxins in their bodies. The landbase upon which we depend is getting poisoned by chemical toxins. Aquifers have started drying out. The diversity of crops and plants in India have been lost
This should be replaced by a system that serves both the ecology and the local communities should be established, through reindigenization of agriculture practices` and localization of food production.
Salonika is an organizer at DGR Asia Pacific and is based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.
Derrick Jensen interviews activists each week. This week Derrick interviews Cayte Bosler.
Cayte is an investigative environmental journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University. She researches solutions for protecting biodiversity and has worked with land-based communities and wildlife defenders throughout Latin America. Her interest is in chronicling community-led resistance to exploitation and ecological abuse to inspire resistance elsewhere. Today we talk about whales.
[Whales] are some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. They spend 99% of their lives under water, far beyond any of our observational tools. Even with the sliver of what we do know, it’s so fascinating.
We’ve only barely begun to understand their rich languages and music. It wasn’t a common knowledge until 1970s that whales could sing. We heard them singing on these amazing recordings that were release then and were part of what inspired this very effort to save them.
We don’t even know their migration routes or where they go in the oceans. A few years ago, we discovered – I’ve trouble with the word discovered. It’s not like out there waiting for us to discover them. But, they were discovered to science, off the coast of Japan species species of beaked whales.
There are about 89 species of cetaceans known to science. Cetaceans include whales, dolphins and porpoises. They’re generally categorized into baleen whales and toothed whales.
Baleen whales are the massive gentle giants. The blue whales, which is one of the biggest creatures ever to exist on planet Earth. Some fun facts: Their heart is the size of a car. Their tongue alone weighs more than an elephant. It’s said that they can fill 2000 balloons with a single breath. (I hope no one actually goes out and tries to test this. That will be a lot of plastic pollution we don’t want.) Some other baleen whales are right whales, humpback whales, or some of the most studied ones, minke whales, grey whales.
Even to understand where their feeding grounds are, we’re using tools like GPS to locate them. That’s really important so we can avoid collisions with ships and some other threats.
They’re just so intriguing. They have some of the biggest brains. We’re starting to try to come up with all these experiments to interact with them, have conversations even. It’s really a shame because I studied lots of different animals and I fall so in love with them and what they are capable of, and at the same time, I’m learning how we’re losing them, and the richness they bring to the world and how that’s being ousted as well.
The Green Revolution is a misnomer: it sounds like a radical environmental movement when it’s the exact opposite of that. It is a movement led by corporations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) to further reinforce the class-based heierarchy, while spreading an ecocidal practice across the world.
The Green Revolution has promoted the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; hybridized seeds and high yielding crop varieties; expansion of irrigation infrastructure, and modernization of management techniques. It started in late 1950s and has been credited as the movement that saved the world from mass starvation. (The mass starvation seemed imminent due to the human population overshoot. The population was 3 billion at the time and since then has increased by more than 5 billion – an almost threefold increase!) Norman Borlaug, the father of Green Revolution, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for saving a billion people from starvation.
Currently a second wave of Green Revolution is on the way. Influential people like Bill Gates are pushing the use of Genetically Modified Crops (GMOs) in countries of Africa as a new solution to the upcoming starvation.
This is the dominant narrative regarding the Green Revolution. There are some important points missing from this perfect little story.
Lets delve into the history of the agricorporations first.
The agricultural corporations have an intertwined history history with the wars. During World War II, the agricultural corporations (then chemical corporations) produced explosives and poisons. Monsanto operation the Dayton Project and the Mound Laboratories, and was involved in the development of the first nuclear weapons. During the Vietnam War, Monsanto also poisoned Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with Agent Orange. The effects on human health and ecology can be felt to this day.
The war legacy of these corporations extends beyond this. According to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals, Bayer had purchased 150 healthy women from the Auswitch concentration camp for experiments with sleep-inducing drugs. All of these women died during the experiments.
It is hard to believe that the companies that had no qualms in actively profiteering from wars, conducting war crimes, or purchasing humans, would simultaneously be sensitive to the sufferings of humanity. These corporations have proven time and again that they are willing to poison and exploit the oppressed (the poor, the women, those from the Global South) in pursuit of profit. It is ironical that proponents of GMOs use images of starving children in Africa to build a case in favor of these corporations.
Lets take a case of the state of Punjab in India.
The Green Revolution was introduced in Punjab in 1965. It has been credited for pulling India out of starvation.
In reality, there was no starvation in India in 1965.* A nationwide drought had increased the food prices, creating a need to import food grains. However, the US government and the World Band imposed a condition on the import of food grains and forced synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically redesigned crops to the farmers of Punjab. These synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were produced using the same chemicals that had been used to produce poisons and explosives during the Second World War. Native crops all over rejected these chemicals. So, the agriculture corporations genetically altered crops so that they would accept (and be dependent on) the synthetic chemicals. These crops later became known as the high yielding varieties and the hybridized seeds.
The Green Revolution has had serious implications in Punjab. The native biodiversity has been destroyed. Once, Punjab used to produce 41 varieties of wheat and 37 varieties of rice. Since the Green Revolution, all of this has been replaced by monocultures of imported crops.
These crops require further use of chemicals. It has toxified the entire ecology. A 2014 study found pesticide residue in 25% of breast milk sample collected from Punjab. In a culture where breast milk stands for purity and love of a mother for her child, a quarter of mothers cannot express this love toward their infants without simultaneously poisoning them.
The number cancer cases are so high in Punjab that a special train carries people suffering from pesticide-related cancer to Rajasthan (another state in India). This train is called the “cancer train.”
Technology transfer or wealth transfer?
The Green Revolution has been credited for technology transfer from the corporations to the farmers. In fact, it has resulted in a massive wealth transfer from farmers to corporations. The farmers in India are dying from an inability to pay the massive loans they have accrued. Since the 1990s, farmers suicide has been a national catastrophe in India. It is estimated that more than 10 farmers commit suicide every day. Ironically, or perhaps symbolically, most kill themselves on their fields by drinking pesticides.
I was once asked why the movement is called the Green Revolution. I said, “Because poison-your-land movement would have sounded less appealing.” It would definitely have been more accurate though!
Shale Must Fall: Global day of climate actions uniting sites of extraction in the Global South and beyond with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North.
Friday Dec. 11th, on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a diverse group of environmental movements from 20 different countries are mobilizing together to bring visibility to the environmental destruction of fracking.
The movement is mobilizing to highlight the damage caused by European multinationals that do abroad what they are banned from doing at home (in this case, fracking) with the complicity of their governments that subsidize the industry.
The day of action highlight how those government policies completely undermine the Paris Agreement, as Europe is simply “outsourcing” its emissions to the rest of the world.
The actions around the world are focusing on some of Europe’s largest climate criminals which are also shale oil companies—Repsol, Total, Wintershall, Shell, BP—by connecting the dots of their operations around the world.
It is outrageous that Europe is on one hand committing to emissions reductions and the Paris Agreement, yet on the other it is allowing and even subsidizing companies based in their country to frack the rest of the world, causing enormous harm to human health and to the natural world, and dooming future generations—including their own people—to climate chaos.
Local and grassroots movements from the frontlines of extractivism in the Global South are mobilizing against the operations of these multinationals from the Global North demanding climate justice and an end to this international ecocide.
Solidarity is Strength
Each of the environmental resistance struggles at the frontlines in the Global South is usually not strong enough, if isolated, to defeat a threat so disproportionately larger. But as our struggles begin to come together as we are doing today, we can present a united multinational resistance against a threat that is multinational in nature.
The Harms of Fracking
Science has shown fracking to be responsible for more than 50% of all of the increased methane emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately 1/3 of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade. Methane is 87 times more harmful than CO2 in its global warming impact on the atmosphere during the first 20 years, and thus the fracking industry is a major cause for accelerating global warming.
This also makes shale gas the fossil fuel with highest greenhouse gas emissions among all fossil fuels.
After having banned or imposed moratoria on fracking in their home countries, European governments are not only allowing their companies to frack the rest of the world, but they are also subsidizing the import of fracked gas with billions of euros of taxpayers’ funds, by building LNG import terminals across the region that will lock the EU into decades of dependency into this fossil fuel.
They are selling the fossil fuel with the worst carbon footprint of all as a clean form of energy that will serve as a bridge to move away from coal. A transition away from coal with something worse than coal? This is insane and we have to stop it. Clean gas is a dirty lie!
