NI 418 - December, 2008

Crisis! Crisis! Food... Money... What next?

A note from the editor

Manifesto for a fairer future

Told ye so! There, I said it – but for those of us long sceptical of corporate power and the money machine, it’s hard to resist the temptation. As stock markets tumble, banks plead for public bailout and predictions of a gloomy future cloud the neoliberal sky, we’re no longer prophets in the wilderness. And as usual, the real losers will not be those ‘who can’t afford to fail’ but those for whom failure has been preordained from birth.

This issue deals with the series of crises that have hit so hard this year. The first part concentrates on the hunger crisis provoked by escalating food prices. This is followed by a special section dealing with the debt and credit situation that has plunged the world into the most serious economic downturn since the ‘Dirty Thirties’. In both parts we take an initial stab at what alternatives based on a fairer future might look like, and how to seize this vital moment.

Over the years, the NI has spilt a lot of ink drawing out the common strands of experience (and often exploitation) that link people in the Global North to those in the Global South. But reality is now providing much more graphic lessons. During the 1980s almost every country in the South experienced a wrenching debt crisis as they tried to pay off usurious loans from big international banks recycling petrodollars. With the current ‘First World’ debt crisis, the shoe is on the other foot. Homes are being repossessed and job losses are starting to mount across the North. And who is responsible? Those same pesky financial wheelerdealers.

So far the North has not experienced the widespread hunger and malnutrition that haunts a billion people – and counting – in the South. But we are facing some pretty hard times. What better point to start making the links of our common humanity, so that we can begin to control capital rather than the other way round.

For, in the end, ‘told ye so’ will not build a fairer world.

Richard Swift for the New Internationalist co-operative.
www.newint.org

The big story

Suicide watch for a farmer in India’s Maharashtra State: the escalating food prices of 2008 have done little to ease the distress of the world’s small farmers. Photo by GMB Akash / Panos

Borisheger / Report Digital

NI 418 - December, 2008

Crisis! Crisis! Food... Money... What next?

A note from the editor

Manifesto for a fairer future

The big story

Richard Swift on the hard edge of hunger in a year of perpetual crisis. Action – a new diet for the world food system.

Features

Agribusiness and industrial farming: 10; farmers and the famished: nil. A report from the campaign group GRAIN.

Across the world, popular protest has demanded adequate food and fair prices. Stephanie Boyd reports from Cuzco in Peru.

The NI gives big agribusiness its say.

Chris Brazier makes the case for a green and fair diet.

David R Montgomery on the one thing we can’t afford to run out of.

Ray Burley is caught in the cost/price squeeze.

A new way not only to cook but to organize the whole food economy – Wayne Roberts stirs the pot.

How did we get here? David Ransom takes a global – and historical – look.

With capitalism crashing about our ears, now is the time to make a fairer future. We have asked writers, thinkers and activists from around the world to look at the opportunities presented by the current crises and to propose strategies for radical change.

Late-night meetings between Asian and European social movements produced the beginnings of a manifesto for change – the 'Beijing Declaration'.

Blogs

The UN Finance for Development conference is set to be a betrayal of historic proportions.

Regulars

In the damp, dark winter, Maria Golia finds cold comfort in a pharmacy queue.

Photographer Ernesto Fernandez recalls the dawn of a new age as Cuba celebrates the 50th anniversary of its revolution.

Polyp on female beauty and male laughter.

More than just a boardgame, according to its makers, Andy Sheerin and Andy Tompkins, the War on Terror challenges the terrorism taboo.

Film, Book & Music Reviews

Certainly some of these songs may have once been heard over fields and cradles rather than concert halls, but their translation from private to public music is a beautiful one.

Made in tandem with the Albanian accordionist / composer Dasho Kurti, the 11 songs on Deserted Villages offer a broad palate, and not all of it mournful.

Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's latest is an animated docudrama in which the director and his friends play key roles deciphering a dream that is connected to Israel's war with Lebanon.

John le Carré's latest novel could hardly be more topical or timely, dealing as it does with the seamier reaches of international banking and the nether-world inhabited by the fugitive and the stateless.

There is a company which manufactures and distributes concentrated sugary syrup and the way it conducts its affairs is the subject of Mark Thomas’ enormously readable book.

Lorna, an Albanian working in a Belgian laundry, needs money to open a snack bar. The first step is citizenship, so she marries a very sick heroin addict who no-one expects to live very long.

A stirring film, from the first graphic action scenes, showing police attacking demonstrators, and it never flags, never seems staged.

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Late-night meetings between Asian and European
social movements produced the beginnings
of a manifesto for change – the 'Beijing Declaration'.