It’s time we stopped using the term ‘South Africa variant’

Referring to the new COVID-19 strain as the ‘South Africa variant’ creates the impression that the country is a threat to global health.

A health worker checks the temperature of an elderly patient at the emergency entrance of the Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria, South Africa on January 11, 2021 [Themba Hadebe/AP Photo]

Nearly a year ago when this COVID-19 crisis was taking hold, people across the world expressed outrage at the term “China virus”.

It was important to condemn such divisive and, some said, racist language.

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But a year later, after more than 2.3 million people across the world have died from the virus, the global economy has dived and education has been disrupted for an entire generation of children, I wonder if we have really learned our lessons.

Referring to the 501 V2 strain of COVID-19, which was first discovered in December here in South Africa, as the “South Africa variant” or “South Africa strain” is just as divisive.

This label apportions blame. It was discovered in South Africa because the country is leading in genome sequencing, just like with the variant in the United Kingdom. The global community is using the systems we are relying on to get out of this mess as a stick to beat us with, instead of championing them.

This label says loud and clear: South Africa is the source of a threat.

This label cares nothing for the nearly 50,000 lives lost in South Africa, for the majority of the population who have little to no access to healthcare. More than 40 percent of the continent’s total confirmed cases have been in South Africa.

Adding the fact that 20 percent of the population live with HIV, making them more vulnerable to the worst effects of the virus, COVID-19 has the potential to bring about South Africa’s biggest crisis since the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.

On top of this health emergency, through my work at Save the Children, I have seen the deep impact this crisis has had on the next generation.

Of course, we need restrictions to control the spread of the virus. Already in September the economy had taken a huge hit, with gross domestic product (GDP) plunging to its lowest in 13 years. The burden of this impact is felt by the poorest, widening social inequality in what was already the most unequal country in the world.

At the end of November, the country’s education minister confirmed that at least 300,000 primary-aged children had dropped out of school since March last year. The longer they stay out of school the harder it will be to get them to return, introducing not just barriers to future opportunities but a higher risk of child protection issues like increased child abuse at home.

Our country is in turmoil. But if you search for “South Africa” these days, the news is preoccupied with us as a threat, rather than another country traumatised.

Vaccine nationalism – which the WHO has called a “catastrophic moral failure” – is a very real concern. We are blamed for the global spread of this new variant, but when it comes to help in tackling it, South Africa and the wider continent have been, until far too recently, effectively hung out to dry. Through a bilateral deal, South Africa only received its first doses of the vaccine last week – two months after the UK. Our hopes have now been dashed again as the roll-out of AstraZeneca vaccines has been put on hold.

There has also been a lack of concern for what this strain means for other African countries which, having avoided the number of confirmed cases and deaths seen in other parts of the world during spring last year, have now recorded higher death rates with the recent second wave.

Many of these countries have far less capacity to deal with COVID-19. In Malawi, the surge in demand for oxygen coupled with a chronic oxygen undersupply is undermining the health system’s ability to cope with COVID-19 cases, as well as its ability to respond to other illnesses such as childhood pneumonia.

The COVAX initiative, which was set out to guarantee equitable access to vaccines, should be applauded. But a lack of financing coupled with higher income countries’ over-ordering of vaccine supplies continues to hinder its ability to roll out doses for the world’s poorest.

It’s time for people in the northern hemisphere to see the African continent as more than just the source of a problem. I ask people to think before they use the term “South Africa variant”. As we continue to wait for a vaccine that can protect our population – and ultimately the future of children – South Africa’s role in the global narrative should not be reduced to the source of a threat.

Believe me, we did not want this variant either.

• 
  Steve Miller

  CEO of Save the Children in South Africa

12 Feb 2021

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/12/its-time-we-stopped-using-the-term-south-africa-variant

 

The Democrat Precedent for Impeaching Trump Comes From a Racist Senator Who Wanted to Kill All Black People

Democrats say you can impeach a president after leaving office. Where did they get that idea?

“We are not in favor of giving a vote to the negro, because we believe that he is not fit to enjoy that right,” Senator Thurman once said.

These days, even while Democrats topple the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, two men that Thurman hated, the old dead racist has become the basis for the unconstitutional Democrat campaign to impeach President Trump after leaving office.

Thurman, who was picked by the Democrats as their nominee for Vice President, had played a major role in the sole case of the Senate deciding to impeach a public official after leaving office. The Democrat case for impeaching President Trump rests on that one case.

And on Thurman.

Legal partisans have spent weeks debating whether President Trump can be impeached after leaving office. Every single one of these analyses is heavy on rhetoric and light on precedent.

There’s a very good reason for that.

Impeachment exists to remove officials who are in office. The brilliant legal scholars who argue otherwise might want to put down their law books and check a dictionary. Impeachment shares its origin with the more commonplace word, ‘impede’. The whole point of impeachment is to impede public officials from holding office by using legislators as investigators and courts.

The post-office impeachment arguments remind me of the movie, Gus, where a mule is allowed to play professional football because the referee can’t find anything in the rulebook that says the players can’t be mules. Every argument for impeaching President Trump comes down to the same position that mules can play football because the Constitution never says they can’t. 

“It makes no sense whatsoever that the president or any official could commit heinous crimes against our country and then defeat our impeachment powers and avoid the vote on disqualification by simply resigning," Senator Schumer argued.

Like saying, “You can’t fire me, I quit”, that gets the same result.

The purpose of impeachment is removing an official from office. If he quits, then he’s removed. And if he committed “heinous crimes” then a court of law could try him for those offenses.

Democrats are obsessed with removing President Trump from an office he no longer holds, but their only precedent for that is the impeachment of Belknap, Grant’s Secretary of War, who was tried and acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.

“The Senate convened a trial, and voted, as a chamber, that Mr. Belknap could be tried ‘for acts done as Secretary of War, notwithstanding his resignation of said office.’ The language is crystal clear, without any ambiguity,” Schumer blotivated. “The history and precedent is clear: the Senate has the power to try former officials.”

Schumer is quoting a resolution by Senator Allen Thurman, who opposed President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation and campaigned against allowing black people to vote. But that’s just the old Democrat habit of refighting the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Even while accusing President Trump of sedition, the Democrat cause is wedded to sedition.

The Democrat precedent for impeaching President Trump is a resolution put forward by a Senate Democrat who had opposed the Grant administration because he was a violent racistSenator Thurman had previously delivered a speech to the Democratic State Convention in West Virginia declaring that Republicans wanted "to put the heel of the negro upon the neck of the white man" with the 14th Amendment.

That’s the Constitutional scholar on whose resolution the Democrat impeachment crusade rests.

If Schumer and the Democrats are going to use Thurman’s resolution as a constitutional precedent, making him the arbiter of what the Framers thought, then they must share his opinion of the 14th Amendment and allowing black people to vote. That would be consistent.

Eight years before the impeachment of Belknap, Thurman was warning that there would be another civil war, leading to "a war of races in the South and the extermination of the negro".

Thurman went on to argue that black people were inferior, couldn’t be allowed to vote, and that they were little more than brutes who would be killed if they kept demanding equal rights.

This is the author of the Democrat precedent for trying President Trump after leaving office.

Senator Thurman’s opposition to President Grant and attempts to smear his administration had everything to do with his racism and support for the Confederacy, rather than the rule of law.

The sole Democrat precedent for post-office impeachment comes from a racist who was threatening the country with a second civil war, and the extermination of black people, and was waging a political war against President Grant because he had defeated the Confederacy.

It’s not just Schumer. The Belknap trial and the Thurman resolution have been widely quoted.

Every time the media trots out a legal expert to explain why President Trump can be impeached, he turns to the Belknap trial and the Thurman resolution as if they were the Constitution.

The legal experts, like Schumer, don’t discuss how the Belknap trial concluded.

There were only enough votes to impeach Secretary of War Belknap in the first place because legislators argued that Belknap had resigned to avoid impeachment. But the Senate acquitted Belknap because its members believed that a former official couldn’t actually be impeached.

Impeachment failed because 23 senators voted, “not guilty for want of jurisdiction.”

Not only did the Belknap trial fail because Schumer was wrong, but the entire premise doesn’t even apply. Had Belknap’s term naturally expired, there would have been no impeachment.

It was only because Belknap had so blatantly resigned to avoid impeachment that his behavior was so provocative that he was illegally impeached to avoid creating a bad example.

When your only real precedent for trying a former president in American history is one case from 1876 of a cabinet official that was highly controversial at the time and ultimately failed, you’re gonna need a whole lot more precedents to actually impeach a former president. 

Especially when your only real basis for it is a resolution by a Democrat racist seditionist. 

Impeaching elected officials can be political theater or serve a legitimate purpose. Impeaching former officials is never anything except political theater. That’s true of the campaign to paint the Grant administration as corrupt which helped pave the way for a Democrat revival by smearing a generation of Republican officials associated with the Grant administration as crooked thieves.

The ultimate goal of that plot was the restoration of Democrat power and of segregation.

Democrats failed to make their case in actual courts, but holding hearings and an absurd impeachment tainted President Grant and Republicans in the eyes of the American public. Grant would labor, even while dying of cancer, to finish his memoirs, provide for his family and redeem his reputation from the Democrat smear campaigns of Grant Derangement Syndrome.

That’s the playbook that Democrats are following in their campaign against President Trump.

If the Democrats believe that President Trump is actually guilty of committing the crimes for which the Constitution says that can be impeached, "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors", then why not bring them into a court of law?

Democrats and their legal hounds have generated numerous investigations. New York has been drowning in blood while Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance have spent their time inventing new Trump investigations. And those haven’t fared very well.

The US Attorney’s office in Manhattan is done with the “Individual-1” investigation that Democrats had been claiming would “lock up” President Trump. But surely if the Democrats claim to have evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, their allies in the FBI and among federal prosecutors would be happy to see them. Why settle for a mere impeachment and disqualification when the Democrats could finally fulfill their dream of seeing him behind bars?

Especially when they’re almost certain to lose their latest impeachment again in the Senate.

Instead, the Democrats claim that they have evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but clearly don’t expect these “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be actionable in an actual court.

Courts try people for actual crimes. Impeachments are political proceedings.

Every single presidential impeachment in our history was a political proceeding. The proliferation of impeachments and attempted impeachments in recent American history is a symptom of partisan abuse of legislative powers, not of higher ethical standards.

The Framers of the Constitution wanted impeachment to be taken seriously.   

Impeachment was meant to keep the government clean, instead the government is hopelessly dirty, and impeachment has become a tool for making it even dirtier and keeping it dirty.

The Democrats are turning America into Venezuela, endlessly borrowing and spending money that doesn’t exist, while keeping the streets full of soldiers, and using security powers against political opponents, while their Big Tech oligarchy suppresses opposition political speech.

Washington D.C. is full of razor wire and military checkpoints through impeachment. Impeachment may be doomed, but it provides another justification for extending a manufactured state of emergency. And if any violence does take place, that will extend the D.C. occupation.

Even Chief Justice Roberts, no friend of the Trump administration, has refused to preside over what he clearly doesn’t think is a legal presidential impeachment process. The same Democrats who universally voted for an unconstitutional 25th Amendment coup couldn’t care less. When you’ve got troops in the streets and control over the government, the law is what you make of it.

Those are high crimes and misdemeanors. Maybe the impeachers should impeach themselves.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/democrat-precedent-impeaching-trump-comes-racist-daniel-greenfield/

 

The ‘Five Million Palestinian Refugees'

A profitable hoax that keeps on growing.

Thu Feb 11, 2021 

Hugh Fitzgerald

 

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Mitchell Bard has provided a detailed look at the data surrounding the claims of refugee status for five million “Palestinian refugees” here: “The Palestinian refugee hoax,” by Mitchell Bard, Israel Hayom, January 31, 2021:

The negotiation affairs department of the PLO tweeted on May 15, 2020, “Every nakba commemoration day, we mark the catastrophe that befell our people in 1948, when 957,000 Palestinians became refugees.” The truth is that number was concocted, as is the current figure of 5.7 million used by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The actual number is more likely less than 30,000.

Palestinians typically claim that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians became refugees between 1947 and 1949. The last census was taken in 1945. It found only 756,000 permanent Arab residents in Israel. On Nov. 30, 1947, the date the United Nations voted for partition, the total was 809,100. A 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war, which meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine (as of September 1948) arrived at an even lower figure: 360,000. The CIA estimate was 330,000. In 2011, historian Efraim Karsh analyzed the number of refugees by city and came up with an estimate of 583,000 to 609,000.

When the United Nations created UNRWA to assist the Palestinians, a refugee was defined as “a needy person, who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood.”

The Palestinians claim there were several hundred thousand more Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine/Israel than in fact existed in that entire territory before the war. How could between 800,000 and one million Arabs have become refugees, when the total Arab population of that area was—according to the Arabs but not according to anyone else — 810,000, and after the refugees left, there were 160,0000 Arabs still living in the country? That would mean – as a maximum – there might have been 650,000 refugees. But Bard notes that others came up with far lower numbers: the office of the UN Mediator on Palestine (hardly a hotbed of Zionism) reported there were only 360,000 Arab “refugees.” The CIA’s estimate was lower still: 330,000. It would be interesting to know how both the UN Mediator and the CIA came so close in their own estimates, and so very far from what the Arabs claimed. Note that these estimates were made soon after the 1949 war had ended, and before the ranks of the refugees were swollen by large numbers of other Arabs from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and even Arab states farther afield, who wanted to pass themselves off as refugees from “Palestine” so as to receive the generous benefits that were being distributed by UNRWA. We still have no idea as to how many of those “Palestinian Arab refugees” were simply Arabs from other countries. Bard doesn’t mention this phenomenon, but it buttresses his general argument.

The scholar Ephraim Karsh came up with an absolute maximum of 609,000 Arab refugees (he didn’t supply his estimated minimum). So let’s keep those estimates firmly in mind when we are assured by Palestinian propagandists that there were 800,000 to one million “refugees.”

And let’s also keep in mind that in 1948 the accepted definition around the world of a “refugee” was someone who “as a result of war or other conflict, had lost his home and means of livelihood.” Any children that refugee had abroad were not considered refugees themselves. A Russian refugee who fled the Revolution and moved to Europe, where he had a child, remained a “Russian refugee,” but his child was never thought of as a refugee. A Jewish refugee from Germany – e.g., Henry Kissinger – remained a German Jewish refugee, but his child born in the U.S. was not.

And that same definition has been applied to all the hundreds of millions of refugees who have been created since World War II: “A refugee is someone who as a result of war or other conflict has himself lost his home and means of livelihood.” With one exception. Only the Arab refugees from the 1947-1949 period have had a unique rule applied to them and to no others. The condition of being a “Palestinian refugee” has, since UNRWA ‘s very beginning, been treated as an inheritable trait. A Palestinian refugee’s son, grandson, great-grandson are all treated as, and receive benefits from being considered,“Palestinian refugees.” Thus there are more “Palestinian refugees” born every day, and there is no way, as long as the current bizarre definition of “Palestinian refugee” prevails, to put an end to those ever-increasing rolls.

Initially, UNRWA had a list of 950,000 names, but the agency knew that this number was inaccurate. UNRWA accepted most claims while acknowledging that, for example, many Palestinians did not report deaths in their families so they could continue to collect rations for the deceased. The agency admitted that many fraudulent cases were discovered but was unable to remove undeserving individuals from the relief rolls. It also knew that it would not get any cooperation from the refugees themselves. UNRWA was petrified, however, of criticism for failing to address the humanitarian problem:

From its very beginning, UNRWA was the victim of several kinds of fraud. And since most of those staffing UNRWA were themselves Palestinian Arab refugees, they had no desire to root out that fraud but, instead, turned a blind eye to it. Of course the list of 950,000 names was preposterous, but UNRWA refused to reject that figure. Among the frauds was multiple counting. The more children in a refugee’s family, the greater the benefits that family would receive for housing, food, and general maintenance. Those children might then be “lent” to another refugee family, most often relatives, and then that second family could claim those same children as their own, and see their benefits increase accordingly. Even when the fraud was detected – as when the same staff member went to both families and recognized the children, UNRWA found it almost impossible to remove those engaged in fraud from the rolls; it would have roiled the agency’s Arab staff. Besides, why not let a few hundred thousand more impoverished Arabs be supported by the rich Western donors to UNRWA?

Another kind of fraud involved the dead: Palestinian Arab refugees who died were seldom removed from the rolls, but kept on for as long as possible, so that their families would continue to receive benefits—especially ration coupons –that the deceased had received when alive.

UNRWA accepted from its very inception an inflated initial list of 950,000 names. That number of “refugees” was larger, by at least 150,000, than the total number of Arabs that had been living in Mandatory Palestine/Israel. Indeed, if we are to believe the CIA, there were only 330,000 Arab refugees – about one-third the number UNRWA declared. A considerable number of those who managed to get onto UNRWA’s rolls from its earliest days were not Palestinian Arabs at all but, rather, Arabs from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and even farther afield, who were eager to pass themselves off as “Palestinian Arab refugees” and receive all the benefits available to such refugees from UNRWA. The swelling of UNRWA’s rolls, through fraudulent practices deliberately overlooked by UNRWA staffers who were themselves either Palestinian Arab refugees or other Arabs sympathetic to the Palestinians, continues to this day: multiple-counting of children, ascribed to more than one family; failure to remove the dead from the rolls, so that posthumously they continue to receive benefits; and finally, the failure to weed out those non-Palestinian Arabs who early on passed themselves off as refugees deserving of, and consequently receiving, generous UNRWA benefits.

Conferring refugee status on non-refugees in the first instance has created a situation that cannot be ignored but removing it exposes the Agency to unwarranted and unfair criticism from the misinformed public as well as fanatical opposition on the part of the undeserving recipient and his friends and supporters.

Mitchell Bard’s view is that the unique definition of a “Palestinian refugee” as applying to all those descended, however many generations have passed, from an original “Palestinian refugee” who did indeed leave Mandatory Palestine/Israel, will be difficult to undo but, at the very least, ought to be attempted. Were UNRWA forced to impose the universal definition of a refugee in the case of the Palestinians, that misinformed public Bard mentions might indeed heap “unwarranted and unfair criticism” on the agency. But UNRWA should not shirk its duty to end this state of affairs; it deserves plenty of criticism – not for now wishing to end the special status –, but for having allowed it in the first place, and having let it continue, unchallenged, for 70 years. Besides, why should we care if UNRWA is subject to criticism; it is solely responsible for the current absurdly inflated rolls of recipients of benefits, by not having firmly opposed that unique definition of who can claim to be a “Palestinian refugee” in the first place.

Photo: AFP

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/five-million-palestinian-refugees-hugh-fitzgerald/

Spectacular photos of Augrabies Falls in flood

 

South Africa: Spectacular photos of Augrabies Falls in flood

“Place of Great Noise” lives up to its name

11 February 2021   By John YeldPhoto Essay | UpingtonThe Augrabies Falls in the Augrabies National Park near Kakamas in the Northern Cape at the weekend were in full flood. John Yeld captured the spectacular sight.

Visitors on a viewing platform take pictures of the mighty Orange (Gariep) River in full flood as it plunges down the Augrabies Falls in the Augrabies National Park near Kakamas in the Northern Cape at the weekend

The Falls on Thursday evening (4 February) when water levels in the Orange (Gariep) River were still building towards the weekend’s peak.

The Falls in the dawn light on Friday, ahead of peak flow on Saturday and Sunday.

A slow shutter speed on the camera transforms Friday morning’s wild flow through the Falls into dream-like ribbons of water.

Dawn breaks over the Falls.

“Hi Mom!” Sign language is useful because conversation is all but impossible over the deafening noise. The original KhoeSan inhabitants called the area Aukoerebis, or Place of Great Noise, and the name became converted to Augrabies over time.

A rainbow forms in the dense spray.

Rising waters late on Friday afternoon break over the safety barrier.https://www.groundup.org.za/article/photos-spectacular-augrabies-falls-floods/

Expropriation Bill threatens most important path to better life for all – IRR

 

South Africa: Expropriation Bill threatens most important path to better life for all – Institute for Race Relations (IRR)

Anthea Jeffery - Hermann Pretorius | 

10 February 2021

Anthea Jeffery says the Institute’s warnings are not ‘scaremongering’

Expropriation Bill threatens most important path to better life for all – IRR

The ANC government’s Expropriation Bill will close the door to a better life for millions of South Africans unless its draconian provisions that empower the state at the cost of ordinary people are successfully resisted.

So says IRR Head of Policy Research Dr Anthea Jeffery in a wide-ranging livestreamed conversation on YouTube with IRR Head of Strategic Initiatives Hermann Pretorius. (You can watch it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxICJk0aKEk)

The bill’s provisions are at odds with the common law and with the right to fair and just administrative action, and pose a grave risk to South Africa’s economic wellbeing. It must be asked, with the economy in crisis, whether the government really wants to further impoverish the country. The bill will put the kibosh on any post-Covid reconstruction and recovery.

Jeffery points out that the draft law, in combination with the moves to amend the Constitution, ‘vastly empowers the state to take custodianship of land and other assets’. Government policy is not to transfer ownership, but provide access at most through leases or land-use arrangements that can be terminated by the state in wide-ranging circumstances.

‘People will lose what is the most important way to developing a better life: acquiring an asset, building it up, seeing its value appreciate over time, transferring it to their children, so that they have a head start compared to where their parents began – that’s the way in which people around the world are able to build up individual prosperity, and property is vital to it. And they are in many instances going to lose that option. ‘This is what the bill will pave the way to and we know unfortunately that the ANC is heavily committed to the NDR … to push South Africa from a free market to a socialist and ultimately a communist one.

‘The ANC cannot achieve that aim with property rights and with millions who own their own assets. So the government has an ideological incentive to go this way … and the experience of Zimbabwe and Venezuela show how badly things can go wrong.’

Jeffery explains that expropriation procedures in the bill are heavily skewed in favour of the state and the ‘long list’ of expropriating authorities, ranging from the Presidency, provincial premiers and national departments, to all municipalities and state-owned enterprises such as Eskom.

‘These organs have the power to take property for nil compensation or less than market value, using a procedure which allows the state to expropriate and argue later, which is extraordinarily unfair and is against the Constitution.’

She says the IRR’s warnings are not ‘scaremongering’, highlighting the case of successful Limpopo farmer David Rakgase, who had to go to court to compel the government to honour an agreement to sell him the land he had been working for years. Jeffery says it is ‘extraordinary that the government was prepared to fight so hard to keep land ownership away from a black farmer who seemed to deserve it on every criterion that you could imagine.

Government policy is not to empower people through ownership, but to provide access, which is tenuous, as it can be terminated by the government at any point.

Jeffery notes that South Africa has gone far down the path to extending property ownership to black South Africans – starting in the 1970s, then with the repeal of the Land Acts in 1991, and under earlier ANC administrations. But the 9.7 million black South Africans who now own homes, often don’t have full title deeds, but ownership of an informal kind. The same is true for millions in the former homelands. This ownership needs now to be formalised, not subjected to a law that will potentially take ownership away.

But there is more at risk than land. As defined in the bill, property is not limited to land – it extends even to a licence to sell liquor, and can affect farms, homes, shopping centres, businesses and shares in companies. ‘To pretend it’s limited to land is pulling the wool over people’s eyes.’

Jeffery argues that the risk is of full-scale expropriation without compensation lies in how the government defines expropriation. If it assumes custodianship of all land – as in the case of water and mineral rights – this will not be regarded as expropriation and thus no compensation will be payable. She notes that both the ANC and EFF favour custodianship over all land, and ‘with this bill in place, it would be easier to argue that it does not have to pay compensation. That’s how the government would get to large-scale EWC’.

But it can be thwarted, Jeffery insists.

‘It is absolutely worth fighting.’ Earlier expropriation legislation in 2008, 2013 and 2015 were all recalled in the face of resistance from the IRR and other organisations.

‘There’s a long history of raising objections and pointing out negative consequences, and history shows we can successfully resist and convince the ANC to reconsider.’

South Africans must demand that a comprehensive socio-economic assessment be undertaken and published. No such report has accompanied the Expropriation Bill, and people must insist on this before 28 February.

Challenge to banks

Noting that South Africa’s banks and financial institutions are integral to the debate about property and the fate of property owners, Hermann Pretorius challenges the institutions to speak up.

‘I challenge the banks of South Africa: you have until 28 February to make submissions on this Bill. Be honest corporate citizens and make submissions to Parliament, making it clear what it will mean for your clients to whom you have a legal and moral responsibility, and make it clear to Parliament the consequences of this Bill for your own functioning.

‘If you do not, South Africans will read into it a question of trust; your entire industry is based on asking the South African people to trust you with our assets; now it’s time for you to return the favour and show us that we should.’

Issued by Duwayne Esau, IRR Strategic Communications Officer, 10 February 2021

https://www.politicsweb.co.za/politics/expropriation-bill-threatens-most-important-path-t

Farmer who was attacked and stabbed shoots three attackers dead, Kroonstad

 

South Africa: Farmer who was attacked and stabbed shoots three attackers dead, Kroonstad

Oorgrens veiligheid

February 11, 2021

Farmer who was attacked and stabbed shoots three attackers dead, Kroonstad

A farm attack took place on the morning of 11 February 2021, in Kroonstad, in the Free State province of South Africa. A farmer, Pieter Swart, went outside and was ambushed by at least four attackers. He was stabbed in the neck and chin.

Swart, who is always armed, managed to defend himself and shoot three of the attackers dead. The other attackers fled into the bush. local farmers responded to the attack and managed to arrest a fourth suspect.

Swart was hospitalised and is in a stable condition. Had he not been armed, he would be another statistic on the long list of brutal murders on South African farmers.

The police are investigating the attack. There is no other information available at this stage.

South Africa Today – South Africa News

https://southafricatoday.net/south-africa-news/free-state/farmer-who-was-attacked-and-stabbed-shoots-three-attackers-dead-kroonstad/

Corporate concentration in the US food system makes food more expensive and less accessible for many Americans

FEB. 8, 2021, by Philip Howard and Mary Hendrickson, The Conversation

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-corporate-food-expensive-accessible-americans.html

Between 1996 and 2013 Monsanto acquired more than 70 seed companies, before the firm was itself acquired by competing seed/chemical firm Bayer in 2018.

 Credit: Philip Howard, CC BY-ND

Agribusiness executives and government policymakers often praise the U.S. food system for producing abundant and affordable food. In fact, however, food costs are rising, and shoppers in many parts of the U.S. have limited access to fresh, healthy products.

This isn't just an academic argument. Even before the current pandemic, millions of people in the U.S. went hungry. In 2019 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that over 35 million people were "food insecure," meaning they did not have reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. Now food banks are struggling to feed people who have lost jobs and income thanks to COVID-19.

As rural sociologists, we study changes in food systems and sustainability. We've closely followed corporate consolidation of food production, processing and distribution in the U.S. over the past 40 years. In our view, this process is making food less available or affordable for many Americans.

Fewer, larger companies

Consolidation has placed key decisions about our nation's food system in the hands of a few large companies, giving them outsized influence to lobby policymakers, direct food and industry research and influence media coverage. These corporations also have enormous power to make decisions about what food is produced how, where and by whom, and who gets to eat it. We've tracked this trend across the globe.

It began in the 1980s with mergers and acquisitions that left a few large firms dominating nearly every step of the food chain. Among the largest are retailer Walmart, food processor Nestlé and seed/chemical firm Bayer.

Some corporate leaders have abused their power—for example, by allying with their few competitors to fix prices. In 2020 Christopher Lischewski, the former president and CEO of Bumblebee Foods, was convicted of conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined US$100,000.

In the same year, chicken processor Pilgrim's Pride pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges and was fined $110.5 million. Meatpacking company JBS settled a $24.5 million pork price-fixing lawsuit, and farmers won a class action settlement against peanut-shelling companies Olam and Birdsong.
In 2006, the Community Grocery Store in the small town of Walsh, Colorado, avoided going out of business by selling stock to residents. The store is still in business in 2021.

Industry consolidation is hard to track. Many subsidiary firms often are controlled by one parent corporation and engage in "contract packing," in which a single processing plant produces identical foods that are then sold under dozens of different brands—including labels that compete directly against each other.

Recalls ordered in response to food-borne disease outbreaks have revealed the broad scope of contracting relationships. Shutdowns at meatpacking plants due to COVID-19 infections among workers have shown how much of the U.S. food supply flows through a small number of facilities.

With consolidation, large supermarket chains have closed many urban and rural stores. This process has left numerous communities with limited food selections and high prices—especially neighborhoods with many low-income, Black or Latino households.

Widespread hunger

As unemployment has risen during the pandemic, so has the number of hungry Americans. Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, estimates that up to 50 million people – including 17 million children—may currently be experiencing food insecurity. Nationwide, demand at food banks grew by over 48% during the first half of 2020.

Simultaneously, disruptions in food supply chains forced farmers to dump milk down the drain, leave produce rotting in fields and euthanize livestock that could not be processed at slaughterhouses. We estimate that between March and May of 2020, farmers disposed of somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 hogs and 2 million chickens—more than 30,000 tons of meat.

What role does concentration play in this situation? Research shows that retail concentration correlates with higher prices for consumers. It also shows that when food systems have fewer production and processing sites, disruptions can have major impacts on supply.

Consolidation makes it easier for any industry to maintain high prices. With few players, companies simply match each other's price increases rather than competing with them. Concentration in the U.S. food system has raised the costs of everything from breakfast cereal and coffee to beer.

The combined share of sales for the top four firms (CR4) for selected U.S. commodities, food processing/manufacturing and distribution/retail channels. 

Credit: Family Farm Action Alliance, CC BY-ND

As the pandemic roiled the nation's food system through 2020, consumer food costs rose by 3.4%, compared to 0.4% in 2018 and 0.9% in 2019. We expect retail prices to remain high because they are "sticky," with a tendency to increase rapidly but to decline more slowly and only partially.

We also believe there could be further supply disruptions. A few months into the pandemic, meat shelves in some U.S. stores sat empty, while some of the nation's largest processors were exporting record amounts of meat to China. U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., cited this imbalance as evidence of the need to crack down on what they called "monopolistic practices" by Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and Smithfield, which dominate the U.S. meatpacking industry.

Tyson Foods responded that a large portion of its exports were "cuts of meat or portions of the animal that are not desired by" Americans. Store shelves are no longer empty for most cuts of meat, but processing plants remain overbooked, with many scheduling well into 2021.

Toward a more equitable food system

In our view, a resilient food system that feeds everyone can be achieved only through a more equitable distribution of power. This in turn will require action in areas ranging from contract law and antitrust policy to workers' rights and economic development. Farmers, workers, elected officials and communities will have to work together to fashion alternatives and change policies.

The goal should be to produce more locally sourced food with shorter and less-centralized supply chains. Detroit offers an example. Over the past 50 years, food producers there have established more than 1,900 urban farms and gardens. A planned community-owned food co-op will serve the city's North End, whose residents are predominantly low- and moderate-income and African American.

The federal government can help by adapting farm support programs to target farms and businesses that serve local and regional markets. State and federal incentives can build community- or cooperative-owned farms and processing and distribution businesses. Ventures like these could provide economic development opportunities while making the food system more resilient.

In our view, the best solutions will come from listening to and working with the people most affected: sustainable farmers, farm and food service workers, entrepreneurs and cooperators—and ultimately, the people whom they feed.

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