Mammoth Landholdings: The Kleptogarchy part 23

Posted: September 10, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Land ownership, Planning, Social inequality | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Mammoth Landholdings

The 20 largest landowners[1] in the UK own more than 11% of the entire land area. Just the top five possess over 8%. They are the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence, the Crown Estate, the National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The major private landowner in 2018 was the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, with over a quarter of a million acres, but the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen may have caught him up. Mr Povlsen, owner of clothing chain Bestseller and the largest shareholder in fashion company ASOS, is a dedicated rewilder and acquires land to return it to its natural state. There are eight individuals and family holdings in the largest 20, including five ancient dukedoms – Buccleuch and Queensberry, Atholl, Westminster, Cornwall and Beaufort.

Mammoth landholdings are built up through conquests, advantageous marriages, favourable laws, and deference among the landless classes, who are often fed the thought that if only they worked hard and achieved financial success, they too could join the landed gentry. Hard work is not inevitably the route to landed proprietorship. Financial riches accompany birth in or marriage into affluent families, luck in speculation, or genius in invention. Wealth brings land, homes, trust funds, and influence to protect ownership of these and other assets into the future. Social reformers or agitators, depending on your point of view, protested against the privatisation of the countryside, but with very little success. In the 19th century radicals like Herbert Spencer referred to the removal of land rights as a crime:

“It may by-and-by be perceived that equity utters dictates to which we have not yet listened; and men may then learn that to deprive others of their rights to the use of the earth is to commit a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties.”[2]

Spencer reasoned that access to land is an inalienable right, a viewpoint that most politicians of the time disregarded. And still do. Communist revolutions in the 20th century led to land nationalisations notably in the USSR, China and North Korea, but control lay not with the farm workers but with the government chain of command. The changes by and large did not benefit the rural proletariat. In China between 1958 and 1961 over 15 million died of starvation, perhaps up to 55 million. Stalin’s enforced collectivisation led to severe famine in Ukraine, where maybe four million died. Cuba collectivised too after the 1959 revolution, but private farmers were able to hold up to 160 acres each, and independent co-operatives involved all members in decision-making. This model would surely have achieved greater prosperity had it not been for the continuing embargo by the United States, starving the island nation of funds for investment.

While wholesale land nationalisation is unlikely to succeed because it is too dramatic, too divisive, there need to be routes into farming for newcomers whose families are not landowners. In the UK, now separated from the European Union, the exorbitant price of rural land is a steep barrier. Land is a tax shelter if it is farmed or has commercially managed woodland on it. Favourable tax treatment generally extends to the farmhouse too, and to cottages even if they are let, provided the letting business is subsidiary to the land-based activities.

The argument for exempting farmland from Inheritance Tax, particularly, is so that farmers can leave their acres and buildings to their legatees without also leaving a bill for up to 40% of everything above £325,000. While favourable to existing farmers, the policy does nothing immediate to encourage aspiring new entrants, whose problems are summarised by the Access to Land Network:

“New entrants in the UK face a range of problems in relation to land that are exacerbated by the UK’s highly priced and unregulated land market. Typically (although not always), the demand from new entrants is for smallholdings as entering on a small scale can allow an individual to test a business model and slowly build markets.

— Land prices prohibit new entrants from buying land

— The lack of a comprehensive land registry means it is difficult to identify owners

— Land in rural areas is often not advertised, so without family or community connections new entrants find it hard to access ‘word of mouth’ opportunities

— New entrants often start out on very small areas of land limiting the potential to earn a sustainable livelihood

— Smaller areas of land are often more expensive

— New entrants tend to look for land in their own locality, due to lack of funds to move, or dependency on alternative (or partner’s) incomes.

— Local authority land in rural areas is managed along very conservative lines so new entrants with alternative plans (organic, CSA, niche markets) are not taken seriously

— Lack of affordable housing in rural areas is a major issue for new entrants (indeed for farmers generally).[3]

Planning law in England, particularly, has a presumption against ‘development’ in the countryside. This presumption, combined with the chronic shortage of affordable homes, limits the creation of new farms. The restrictive regulations also work against farmers who want to retire but stay living on the land, because it is often a costly and complicated process to obtain permission to build a new home for the successor farmer. There used to be old farm buildings suitable for conversion, but few remain. They have been converted for alternative uses under official farm diversification policies.

[1] The compilation of landholdings is from a list drawn up by abcfinance.co.uk and cross-referenced. https://abcfinance.co.uk/blog/who-owns-the-uk/, accessed January 27th 2022.

[2] ‘The Right to Use the Earth’ p.143 in Social Statics by Herbert Spencer, 1865, D Appleton & Co, New York.

[3] ‘The United Kingdom’ by Rachel Harries and Tom Carman, in Europe’s New Farmers, Access to Land Network, September 2018. https://www.accesstoland.eu/Access-to-land-for-new-entrants, accessed April 27th 2022.

Landless Billions: The Kleptogarchy part 22

Posted: September 5, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Land ownership, Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment
English nursery rhyme, about 1764. Kleptocrats have been with us for a very long time!

Land is the foundation of resilience. Most people cannot be fully resilient because they do not have any land. One of the few countries where government is trying to resettle people back on the land is Cuba, where individuals can own and bequeath up to 65 hectares as long as they continue to farm it. But there’s a labour shortage, saline water ingress near the coasts, infestations of thorny Marabu shrubs, droughts and hurricanes, and ancient farm machinery held together on a wing and a prayer.

On our planet now, the majority of people are crammed into tiny spaces: by 2020 more than 55% of Earth’s population were squashed into cities, while huge private estates extend over thousands of acres, up to 14,000 square miles in the case of the Anna Creek cattle station in South Australia. No surprise that people in power sanctify personal property – it’s happened through history. Powerful people take land from less powerful ones, as the ‘steals the common from the goose’ nursery rhyme laments. That’s always been the case, and population pressure leads to greater competition. Yet our collective future demands a more equitable distribution of land, so that families can become more resilient and produce more of their own needs.

The history of my own family shows the impact of external events on access to land. The ancestors I know about who lived before the Industrial Revolution were prosperous in the main. In the case of my father’s paternal line, two early deaths changed everything. William Dod(d) was a vintner in the mid 17th century, a Citizen of London, married to Francis Clarke whose brother Cornelius was High Sheriff of Derbyshire after the restoration of the monarchy to King Charles II. William lived in style in Kingstreete, Westminster, paying a rent of £100 a year, equivalent to over £20,000 a year in 2020, for a house with 16 hearths.[1] A labourer in London in 1675 would earn about 20 pennies a day, about £103 a year in 2020 money: inequality is nothing new, nor is precariousness. William died in 1675 leaving three children aged 7, 3 and 6 months. As they were all minors (and women did not count), most of his assets disappeared into the Court of Orphans, which was sliding into bankruptcy. John, the eldest of the surviving children – an older sister, Elizabeth, died in infancy – married Mary Crannage in 1689 when he was 21 and they already had a baby son, William. Their second son Cornelius appeared in 1690, and in 1692 John died. The Court of Orphans had collapsed, Mary was on her own and London was expensive, so the little family moved to a small farm in Essex, Dial House at Birds Green, Willingale Doe. They could be called downshifters, escapees to the country with what was left of their town resources. There Cornelius stayed, farming 45 acres according to a survey in 1734, and his descendants remained for around 150 years until the farming disaster that unfolded after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. From 1815 to 1846, tariff walls protected British grain crops from price competition. Great for farmers, awful for the landless who struggled to afford food. Cornelius Dodd, my great-great-great-grandfather, was a farmer and publican in Essex in 1841 but in 1851, after the repeal of the Corn Laws, he is described in the census as ‘farmer out of business’ and was in Surrey County Prison for debt. He became a brewer, and that is how he supported his family until he died in 1878. His only child William was never a farmer in his own right. William, born in 1827, was a bailiff in 1851, a haulier in 1861, and by 1891 he was a confectioner in Shepherds Bush, London, living with his wife Mary, their youngest daughter Amanda and two of their son William Matthew’s boys. William Matthew emigrated to Australia, but that’s another story.

William’s eldest son Charles was a carpenter, his son Cyril rented a smallholding in Chertsey in 1934, and his son, my father Lionel, bought a farm of his own in 1956, with a loan from mum’s brother-in-law George Stanford, a dairy farmer with a milk pasteurisation plant and a milk delivery business. It was pure luck that mum had a brother-in-law able and willing to provide a loan.

Bad luck killed vintner William in 1675, bad luck saw his assets pass into the ‘protection’ of the Court of Orphans, bad luck left his grandchildren William and Cornelius orphans as babies. Four generations later, it may well have been bad luck that prevented farmer Cornelius from meeting his debts after the repeal of the Corn Laws. But it was good luck for mum and dad that George had the wherewithal for them to buy a farm.

I had another great-great-grandfather who lost his farm in Victorian England. Solomon Crowhurst was born in 1819 in Ash, Kent, and at the 1861 census was farming 34 acres at Hodsell Street, Ash, living with his wife Harriet, children Mary and George, and employing two labourers and a boy. By 1881 he was a servant and ostler in The Vigo Inn, Stansted, near Malling in Kent. He died in North Aylesford Union Workhouse on February 13th 1895, aged 78. No old age pensions in those days; if you had no money and either no children, or children who could not look after you, you went into a workhouse.

Solomon’s daughter Mary Ann married Thomas Warinton, whose astute daughter-in-law Lavinia probably helped persuade her son-in-law George to make a loan to her other son-in-law Lionel.

When did markets in land develop? For thousands of years, humans wandered, seeking sustenance. In the 21st century (according to Christian counting) land is essentially private property. In what is now the United Kingdom, the first codified record of land ownership that has come down to us is the Domesday Book, completed 20 years after the Norman invasion of 1066. King William I seized vast tracts of land for himself and his followers, creating a pattern of landed estates that has characterised English society to this day. By the 19th century concentration of land ownership had become a hot political issue. The 1861 census indicated that there were just 30,000 landowners in the population of 30 million, wrote J V Beckett in ‘The Pattern of Landownership in England and Wales, 1660-1800’.[2] This was apparently incorrect: doubts over the accuracy of the census led to a new survey, the Return of Owners of Land, in 1872-73, which found that just 7,000 or so landowners possessed four-fifths of the total acreage, but also that more than one million people owned some land. Between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries, roughly, law had a bigger impact than money on landholdings. Owners often entailed their property on their closest male heir, to avoid the splitting up of estates. In addition, Parliament was controlled by landowners, who enlarged their estates by Acts of Parliament permitting them to enclose land classed as common, i.e. without a recorded owner, but used by local communities to provide food and fuel. Beckett commented that “if the magnates were increasing their acreage someone had to suffer, and the corollary to large estates was seen to be the expropriation of the small owner “.[3] Landowners who did not want to be bothered with day-to-day management let their estate farms to tenants, who formed a substantial stratum of the rural population in England and Wales for around 200 years, some making the switch to ownership when high death taxes led to forced sales. Death taxes peaked at 85% on sums over £750,000 in 1969, subject to a maximum take of 80% of an estate’s total value. Labour was in power, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, and Rupert Murdoch started buying UK newspapers. Elevated death tax rates, high since the late 1940s, encouraged landowners to create trusts and companies as tax shelters, and no subsequent government has tried such aggressive wealth redistribution. Progress towards a more equal pattern of wealth ownership on the island of Great Britain happened between the end of the First World War and the era of Margaret Thatcher, slowly until 1945 and then rapidly, but since the late 1980s/ early 1990s, the process has reversed.[4] Between April 2018 and March 2020 the richest 1% of the UK population owned more than the least wealthy 80% combined. [5]

While many in the 1% can afford to dabble in the land market, most in the 80% cannot. The price of land in the United Kingdom became divorced from its likely economic return during the 18th century, when the rise of capitalism and alternative investments – whether in mines, factories, transport, money-lending, speculative housing, wealth extraction from colonies, and so on – meant that the nouveau riche were looking for estates to bring them social standing. By the 1860s, Beckett concluded, “it was only incomers from the business world who could afford to purchase” the estates that came onto the market.[6]

The differences between families and classes are profound. Members of individual families move up, down and across the social spectrum, from one class to another. Good luck, bad luck, it’s a game of snakes and ladders, more of a game of chance than we are encouraged to recognise. The greater the distance between the most and least affluent, the less mingling there is between the extremes, and this helps families with large landholdings to retain them. Classes are more stable socially than individuals in families. The ruling class, whether composed of kings, aristocrats, plutocrats, oligarchs, theocrats, or any other -arch or -crat, remains. Revolutions may change the personnel and the source of their authority, but in nearly all complex societies, power is a force appropriated by a hierarchy. Soviet Russia was supposed to be a people’s state but the people were still bossed around, and in Stalin’s time maybe seven million to over nine million inhabitants of Mother Russia died because of repression, cruel policies and Stalin’s persecution complex.

[1] Inflation calculator from the Bank of England. Labourers’ wages from ‘The pay of labourers and unskilled men on London building sites, 1660–1770’ by Judy Stephenson, https://www.academia.edu/23668168/The_pay_of_labourers_and_unskilled_men_on_London_building_sites_1660_1770, re-accessed July 4th 2022.

[2] In The Economic History Review, second series Vol.37, No.1, February 1984, pps.1-22.

[3] Ibid p.2.

[4] The History of Inequality: the Deep-Acting Ideological and Institutional Influences, by Simon Szreter, Institute for Fiscal Studies, November 2021. https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IFS-Deaton-Review-The-history-of-inequality-1.pdf, accessed June 13th 2022.

[5] ‘Household Total Wealth in Great Britain: April 2018 to March 2020’, Office for National Statistics, January 7th 2022. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2018tomarch2020#:~:text=The%20wealthiest%2010%25%20of%20households,of%20%C2%A315%2C400%20or%20less, accessed June 13th 2022.

[6] Ibid p.15

Why Don’t They Care? The Kleptogarchy part 10

Posted: August 20, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Law, Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Don’t They Care?

It’s a head scratcher. When the science is now so well understood, why do the planet’s most powerful people not do more to protect their, our, only home?

The geographical and experiential distances between the wealthiest and the poorest, who might as well be in different galaxies, are among the culprits. The Industrial Revolution in the UK, a source of pride during my schooldays, set fossil fuel use on an explosive trajectory. The new industrialists needed workers, who migrated into cities, pushed by the distress of the rural economy after ‘free trade’ became the leaders’ cry, enacted from 1846 onwards. Farmers fell into debt, a trap worsened by landlords’ enclosure of commons that had provided pasture and timber. One of my great-great-great-grandfathers, a farmer on about 40 of his own acres, was in prison for debt when the 1861 census was taken. He had to reinvent himself as a brewer. Britain became the workshop of the world, extracting raw materials from colonies and exporting finished goods. The model was failing after the chaos of the First World War and in terminal decline by the 1980s, when most nations of the British Empire had achieved independence.

The 1980s were years of de-industrialisation, under Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. The British miners’ strike of March 1984 to March 1985, in which Mrs Thatcher and the police defeated the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill, was a turning point. Coal is a source of cognitive dissonance for me, because despite its harmful contributions to the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating up the world, since the miners’ defeat in 1984, work on the archipelago of Britain has become more impermanent and precarious. Although demand for industrial workers is slack, even if they wanted to, they cannot return to the self-sufficient agricultural life of pre-Victorian Britain because they cannot afford land.[1] The top-dog elites have less need of workers than hitherto, because robots and artificial intelligence can labour on indefinitely, provided there is power, and they do not require industrial relations departments. If global elites in wealthy countries have less need of workers, why would they want to pay taxes to maintain the public services for and shore up the living standards of people who are no longer central to their world view? They seem to forget that workers are often customers for the producers of goods and services in which they invest.

“Trespassing scum”, thundered an annoyed Robert Venables QC, tax barrister, in an elite gathering in 2012 to mark the retirement of Dave Hartnett from his role as chief executive of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Mr Hartnett, a proponent of individually negotiated tax payments for multinational corporations, was the target of protestors against tax evasion. To call people who oppose tax evasion “scum” to my mind reveals the gulf between masters of the financial universe and citizens who depend on public services funded from taxation.

The encounter featured in The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, a 2017 documentary by independent film maker Michael Oswald. I watched it on Netflix in June 2022. At its height the British Empire governed a quarter of the world’s landmass and a fifth of the population. The agents of empire extracted resources from the colonies and exported finished goods, at a nice profit. The colonies mostly achieved independence by the end of the 1970s. but a few small territories remained, and these became vital to a new form of empire – the ghost financial empire.

The British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Hong Kong, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are all among the ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ with links to the United Kingdom. Secrecy jurisdictions, known as tax havens, enabled the shadow banking system, unregulated by central banks like the Federal Reserve in the USA and the Bank of England in the UK, to inflate into a many-headed, dangerous Hydra. Dangerous, that is, to people outside the realm of masters of the financial universe.

The UK has thousands of clever accountants. Of the world’s 2.5 million or so professional accountants when the film was made, 330,000 were based in the UK, The Spider’s Web reported. That is more than one in eight, when the UK’s population amounted to about one in every 113 across the globe. An over-concentration of crack number-crunchers, one can argue, but a huge shadow banking system requires accountants galore. Money itself does not travel, transactions are digital through secrecy nodes, via anonymous trusts and shell companies.

The Spider’s Web calculated that about half of the global wealth ‘kept’ offshore is in overseas jurisdictions of the UK, like the Cayman Islands south of Cuba. The Caymans have a population of about 66,000, but some 80,000 companies are registered there, and it is home to about 75% of the world’s hedge funds.

“The Cayman Islands imposes no taxation on the income or capital gains of investment funds or their investors, and no transfer taxes on the transfer of interests in investment funds. Exempted companies, LLCs, limited partnerships and unit trusts can obtain undertakings from the government that if any such taxation is introduced during a 20-year period (companies) or 50-year period (limited partnerships, LLCs and unit trusts), as applicable, from the date of the undertaking (or date of creation of the unit trust), such taxation will not apply to the entity to which the undertaking is given”, according to The Asset Management Review in September 2001. [2]

Quite an incentive. How much money is sheltered in the Cayman Islands? In 2019 there were US$4.229 trillion just in mutual funds, according to the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. For comparison, the entire annual GDP of the United Kingdom in 2020 was $2.76 trillion, the World Bank reported.[3] If even 0.5% tax were paid on the Cayman Islands’ $4.229 trillion, it could yield more than $21 billion, or nearly 25 times more than the UK spends annually on fighting economic crime. But who should tax the funds recorded as lodged in tax havens? How should such a tax be distributed? Theoretical questions, because if funds in tax havens were disclosed and routinely taxed, they would be considerably less attractive to investors and their agents. Investors who use tax havens can accumulate money faster than people who do not try to escape tax, and the chasm between the two groups yawns wider.

Author Nicholas Shaxson, who appears in The Spider’s Web, has made a deep study of tax havens and their wider impacts. In his view, the tax haven circuit works against the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises because:

“It subsidises multinationals by helping them cut their taxes and grow faster, making it harder for the innovative minnows to compete. And when small innovative firms do emerge they become targets for predators who seek to ‘unlock value’ from ‘synergies’ created by bringing the small firm into the bigger, more diversified one. Some synergies may be useful – economies of scale, for instance – but too often the predator unlocks value simply by being better at obtaining abusive, unproductive offshore tax privileges.”[4]

When escaping tax is a priority, no surprise that there is resistance to the abandonment of a currently lucrative system in favour of measures to mitigate global heating impacts, for which the costs and effectiveness would be unknown.

Leaders are far more likely than the population at large to show psychopathic personality traits, such as a will to dominate regardless of the consequences. Désiré G C Palmena, Emile W KolthoffbJan and J L Derksenc proposed in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior that:

“…we hypothesize that the need for domination may be the core motivational trait for those psychopathic individuals who pursue positions of leadership in business and politics. Because for psychopathic leaders the need for domination may have value in of itself [sic], we hypothesize that this motivational trait may best clarify the estimated high prevalence of psychopathic leaders.”[5]

The authors point out that “[s]tudies on those high in psychopathy have shown that they are not motivated by moral traits such as honesty, consideration for others, and fairness”. Their struggles to the top are for their perceived benefit, not for humanity in general:

“…those high in psychopathy score low on appreciating moral values and collective values and instead value the enhancement of oneself. What are the goods, aspirations, and goals psychopathic individuals want for themselves? Studies have found that they are looking for rewards, they enjoy risk-taking, are in need of stimulation, are looking for thrills and adventures, and are experience seekers.”

Leaders are less likely than those they dominate to prioritise a liveable planet. As many as 20% to 25% of leaders are reckoned to show psychopathic traits, compared with 4.5% in the general population (including leaders).[6] The threat of total war, as Earth and its life forms suffer from climate breakdown, shortages and unrest, is dangerously close. Kleptocracy and war are closely aligned, because the whole point of a kleptocracy is to acquire resources that others also need or want. Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, studied governance in South Sudan, leading to a paper titled ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’.[7] South Sudan exhibited a neo-patrimonial system of governance, in which “political office is used primarily for personal and factional advantage”, wrote de Waal. Quoting Stanislav Andreski, author of the 1968 book The African Predicament: a Study in the Pathology of Modernisation,[8] de Waal added that the “essence of kleptocracy is that the functioning of the organs of authority is determined by the mechanisms of supply and demand rather than the laws and regulations”. Economics before law – a similar concept to the ‘law and economics’ viewpoint that decisions based on justice are subordinate to those informed by economic cost-benefit analyses. (See ‘The Cold Philosophy of Law and Economics’, The Kleptocracy part 7.)

South Sudan seceded from Sudan on July 9th 2011 after civil war and a referendum, but without strong institutional checks and balances. According to de Waal, South Sudan’s president since independence, Salva Kiir Mayardit, rewarded aides’ loyalty with “licence to commit fraud” and the new country was a kleptocracy from the beginning. In 2012, the president “acknowledged that at least $4 billion and possibly much more had been diverted by leading figures in government and taken abroad”.[9]

Tax havens are, of course, ideal for laundering funds obtained dishonestly. South Sudan is one example among many, where sequestration of funds by elites is accompanied by force, or the threat of it, and by instability that elites attempt to regulate through force.

“There may be bubbles of integrity, due to the efforts of committed and influential individuals to carve out a sphere of public spiritedness, but they are fragile and subordinate to the kleptocratic operation of the broader system,” de Waal concluded.[10]

Kleptocrats don’t care, because they can achieve economic dominance through force, and they often value wealth for themselves and their circle above a liveable planet for the populations they control.

[1] See Chapter 4 in The Kleptogarchy, to be published here later.

[2] The Asset Management Review: Cayman Islands, by Tim Coak, Malachi Sweetman and Michael Richardson, Maples Group, September 27th 2021. https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-asset-management-review/cayman-islands, accessed June 23rd 2022.

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/country/united-kingdom?view=chart, accessed June 23rd 2022.

[4] Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, by Nicholas Shaxson, 2011. Quote from p.190 of the 2012 Vintage Books edition.

[5] ‘The Need for Domination in Psychopathic Leadership: a clarification for the estimated high prevalence of psychopathic leaders’ in Aggression and Violent Behavior Vol.61, November–December 2021. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135917892100104X, accessed June 26th 2022.

[6] Estimate of psychopathy in the general population from ‘Latest Estimate of Psychopathy in the General Population’, Sapien Journal, November 28th 2021. https://sapienjournal.org/latest-estimate-of-psychopathy-in-the-general-population/, accessed June 26th 2022.

[7] In African Affairs Vol.113 No.452 pps.347-369.

[8] The African Predicament was published in New York by Atherton Press.

[9] ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’ by Alex de Waal, p.358.

[10] Ibid p.349.

Hard Up Nation

Posted: February 25, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Finance, Social inequality | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

by PDR

I was lucky. Lots of job opportunities when I graduated, and a defined-benefit (final salary) pension. So much tougher for the debt-burdened 20- and 30-somethings of today, who may not be able to accumulate enough to fund a retirement. Why is the Westminster government not showing more concern? Who will pay taxes in what is looking like a future of insecure, low-wage work? Does it matter?

For it not to matter, change in the global financial network would have to be revolutionary, not a popular word in Westminster!

Yet in the interests of social cohesion, it is surely vital to halt the impoverishment of a good third of the UK population. I am not arguing for much more cash to buy stuff, but for more dignity – decent energy-efficient housing, enough nutritious food, time for leisure and interesting hobbies, dependable public services for all.

Financial lives are tough for millions in the UK — and getting tougher.

Financial Lives 2020

The story told in the ‘Financial Lives 2020’ survey from the Financial Conduct Authority, published on February 11th 2021, is alarmingly different. In October 2020 almost four in 10 – 38% — of all adults in the UK were not feeling financially stable. They experienced one or other, or all of these:

  • Expectation of struggle to make ends meet.
  • Higher levels of debt.
  • Worry about being unable to pay domestic bills, mortgage, rent, or interest on loans, in the next six months.

There are huge differences by age: over six in 10, 61%, of young adults aged 18 to 24 felt financially unstable, and 55% of the 25 to 34s, down to 11% of over-75s, who would nearly all have at least a basic pension.

Property prices are far too important in the financial mix, to the detriment of young people. Mortgage-payers depend on the value of their home going up and up, for a fall could see them in negative equity. No less than 20%, one fifth, of all mortgagees have an outstanding home loan exceeding four times their annual income, according to the survey. Even among the 65-74-year-olds with mortgages, 19% of them owed over four times their yearly income.

But for high numbers of young adults, of course, low incomes and high property prices mean that owning their own home is an impossible dream.

Scant reward for saving

Saving is unrewarding, given the near-zero interest rates offered in 2021, and indeed most people have little to squirrel away. The survey reports that between 41% and 49% of adults have less than £5,000 in ‘investible assets’, which are cash, savings accounts, shares, bonds and similar products.

More than half, 53%, of over-18s in the UK had at least one ‘characteristic of vulnerability’ in October 2020, during the havoc of Coronavirus. This covers poor health, or experience of a negative life event (such as a family death, or losing their job), and 20% were not highly capable of managing their financial affairs in the new digital world.

The survey report is reinforced by figures from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). This is older data, as the most recent figures for incomes are for 2017-18, when the median pre-tax income for all 31.2 million UK taxpayers was £24,400. Now 31.2 million is a lot of taxpayers, but the 2018 population was 66.3 million and if we exclude under-18s, few of whom pay income tax, the figure was 52.4 million people, so about 21.2 million adults had incomes too low to be liable to tax.

Missing middle

A median income of £24,400 means that half of taxpayers had a lower income than this, and half had more. It is not a figure that would cover food, housing, utilities, clothing, a holiday, all the expenses of modern life, and leave anything much over for saving. Indeed, median pre-tax incomes for under-30s were under £23,000 overall, slightly more (£23,700) for men aged 25-29 but less (£21,800) for women. There is no longer much of a ‘middle’. In 2017-18, 95% of taxpayers had a pre-tax income of under £76,800. The median income of the next 4% was £175,000. Those above this, in the highest-earning 1% (of taxpayers, not people), had stratospheric incomes compared with the vast majority of the population, but their median is excluded from the table (no. 3.1 in HMRC’s series on personal incomes).

In such an unequal society, and one becoming more unequal by the year even before the disaster of Coronavirus, how will it be possible to achieve the change to sustainable communities where everyone can feel secure, valuable and included?  

Is it possible at all?

Gross Income Inequalities Shame Britain

Posted: January 13, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Corporations, Social inequality | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

The shock of understanding that a huge multinational group treats children from hard-up families as a profit opportunity is awful, but not a surprise. That’s what capitalism does, especially  when profits elsewhere are thin on the ground.

Social media has been awash with photos of meagre, barely edible parcels meant to provide ten days of packed lunches for children who normally receive free meals when their schools are open.

Widely circulated photo of a week’s worth of packed lunches, sourced from Chartwells, for one child. Source: Twitter

One of the suppliers has been identified as Chartwells, a division within Compass Group plc.

Compass, which claims 10% of the £220 billion global food services market, had a disappointing year in 2020, substantially due to Corona virus, and shareholders did not receive a dividend. Operating profit fell 82% to £294 million in the year to September 30th. Post-tax profit of £135 million was 88% below the previous year. In May the group raised £2 billion in new equity, but still ended the year with net debt exceeding £3 billion, not a brilliant prospect for shareholders, four of whom owned almost 25% of the group at end-September 2020: BlackRock Inc, 9.99%; Artisan Partners Ltd Partnership, 5.01%; Invesco Ltd, 4.95%; and Massachusetts Financial Services Co, 4.60%.

Chief executive Dominic Blakemore noted in the group’s report for the year to September 30th that: “In response to the pandemic, we are innovating and evolving our operating model. By innovating and adapting our offer and operations to the ‘new normal’, this will allow us to reduce costs and increase our flexibility, so that we can provide our clients and consumers an exciting offer that is delivered safely and provides great value”.

Lower costs and increased flexibility. The workforce has to be more flexible and to be pooled “across sectors to better accommodate volume volatility on site”. Lean and mean. But becoming leaner and meaner cannot continue indefinitely.

The food parcels for children receiving free school meals appear extremely lean and mean, and illustrate the gulf between brochure rhetoric and experienced reality. Mr Blakemore stated in the Compass annual report that “In Education, our expertise in nutrition means we are able to provide delicious food that supports learning at every stage of the education journey”.

There’s a big gap between ‘we are able’ and ‘we always do’.

Inadequate lunch packs have damaged Chartwells’ public image. Source: Twitter

Chartwells has a website — “Here To Help!” — asking “Are you looking for school meal options through lockdown?”

A number of ‘packages’ are listed, including Option A, daily packed lunch, costing £2.30. This is supposed to contain:

  • 1 ‘Deli sandwich’, either cheese, tuna, chicken or halal chicken
  • 1 portion of fresh fruit
  • 1 portion of ‘crudities’ – 50g cucumber, 50g peppers, 50g carrots
  • 1 snack – yoghurt, custard pot, dried fruit, jelly, malt loaf or ‘strawberry YoYo bear’.  

Option B is a food parcel for two weeks, costing £23, and supposedly containing

  • 1 loaf (not likely to be palatable after two weeks)
  • 2 of 200g blocks of cheese, type unspecified
  • 1 kilo of wholemeal pasta
  • 4 tins of chopped tomatoes
  • 2 tins of tuna chunks in brine
  • 16 vegetable portions – carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce, tomato, cucumber.
  • 14 fruit portions – 6 apples, 4 bananas and 4 oranges
  • 9 “healthy snacks”

Perhaps there should be a TV cookery show inviting chefs to whip up two-weeks’ worth of delicious meals from these ingredients (which I could buy from a supermarket for less than £15, if selecting the basic lines).

To add further insult, Compass put out a news release before Christmas 2020, saying:

“Chartwells, have recently joined the Marcus Rashford Child Poverty task force which is campaigning to expand holiday food provision for the children who need it the most. Over the Christmas period, we know that many children around the UK may go hungry and so we want to help as part of #CompassChristmas, to ensure that we can feed as many hungry tummies as possible with our Christmas Food Hampers.” The release went on to solicit donations towards the £20 cost of each hamper, either the full cost or a contribution.

Chartwells responded to the Twitter futore with this statement. Vicky Ford MP is actually Parliamentary Under-Secretary, not a Permanent Secretary (who would be a civil servant, not a politician)

Compass Group’s top brass are most unlikely to need donated food. They are exceedingly well rewarded for their efforts to serve shareholders. Even in the dreadful year 2019-20 Dominic Blakemore was rewarded with £1.162 million. In 2018-19 it was a great deal more, £4.659 million. (And Gary Green, head of US operations, received even more still, about £1.569 million in 2019-20 and £6.031 million the year before, converted into sterling from US dollars.) It’s all in the annual report, a delight for people interested in financial architectures, the plethora of available accounting measures, and the wide spread of resulting figures.

The total costs of employing the 548,143 persons in the Compass Group, including the directors and senior managers, were £9.975 billion. This is an average cost per employee, including salary, of £18,197.81.

Some of those at the lower end of Compass’s income scale may be eligible for free school meals for their own children. Low-paid households receiving Universal Credit are eligible, as are those receiving many other welfare benefits. Across England and Wales in 2020, more than 1.63 million children were known to be elegible for free school meals. Almost one schoolchild in every five.

A revenue opportunity for Compass Group, and all the other companies in the market, is a warning that the newly Brexited group of nations is afflicted by endemic low pay that erodes children’s chances from the moment they are born.

PDR

Techno Tories and Green Left Diverge Sharply over UK’s Future

Posted: November 22, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Eco Politics, Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

£12 billion over ten years for Boris Johnson’s ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ is a drop in the ocean. Different minds, in the Transition Economics consultancy, want a huge amount more –£85 billion of public investment in the next TWO YEARS.

The All Party Parliamentary Group on the Green New Deal is more sympathetic to the latter figure, and quotes it in its new report How to Reset: policies to deliver on the public desire for a fairer, greener Britain after Covid —

“The think-tank Transition Economics propose a two-year clean infrastructure stimulus which they calculate would replace the projected jobs lost from Covid and are designed to benefit the people and sectors hit hardest by its economic impacts. Using 10 World Bank-derived criteria including long-term job creation, resilience and sustainability, they recommend 19 infrastructure projects totalling an £85 billion public investment that would deliver structural transformation and create 1.2 million jobs over the next two years, comprising 735,000 jobs in housing construction and energy efficiency retrofits; 289,000 jobs in transport upgrades; 98,000 jobs in energy, waste, and manufacturing infrastructures; 81,000 jobs in land, forestry, and agriculture improvements; 42,000 jobs in broadband upgrades.”

Aircraft trails, all contributing to climate change. The Westminster Government is hoping for zero-emission planes, but they are not yet a commercial reality.

The All Party Parliamentary Group does not have the power to introduce such policies (a pity, speaking personally!) but makes strong arguments for them. Their ideas, apart from the infrastructure transformation, include Universal Basic Income; a jobs guarantee extending to “work that is socially useful, organised around community need” and paying at least a national living wage; creating a new National Nature Service to “employ and train thousands of people in environmental work”; and establishing another national service, for social care.

The group calls for reform of the planning system “to empower local authorities to develop 15-minute neighbourhoods designed to ensure that people’s needs for shops, entertainment, education, healthcare and green spaces can all be met within a short walk or cycle of their home”. This means a lot more green spaces!

A National Investment Bank, and significant re-allocation of current spending to help create a society with “a broader set of human and ecological health and wellbeing objectives” than GDP growth, are also among the group’s ambitions.

The Johnsonian Conservative vision of a Green Industrial Revolution focuses on technologies – current and still-to-be-invented – to achieve emissions reductions while still trying to ratchet up industrial growth. The All Party Parliamentary Group, responding to its surveys of public opinion, concentrates on equity, fairness, and restoration of damaged environments.

The group’s composition helps to explain the contrasting objectives. There are no Conservative MPs in the group of 22, and only two Conservatives in total, both peers. The Conservatives are outnumbered by Green Party (3) and Labour (12) politicians.

PDR

British Public is Greener than the Government

Posted: November 16, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , | Leave a comment
A greener UK after Coronavirus?

The British public are way ahead of the Westminster Government in their wish for a rapid greening of lifestyles and the economy.

This is the message in the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Green New Deal’s autumn 2020 public report, Time to Reset: the public desire for a fairer, greener Britain after Covid.

The 22 members of the All Party group include only two Conservatives, both members of the House of Lords: Baroness McIntosh and Lord Randall. Baroness McIntosh, formerly Anne McIntosh, MP for Thirsk and Malton, was chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, and Lord Randall of Uxbridge was previously MP for Uxbridge and environment advisor to Theresa May when she was Prime Minister.

The chairs of the group are MPs Caroline Lucas of the Green Party and Labour’s Clive Lewis. There are 12 Labour/Labour Co-operative members, three for the Green Party, and one each from the Liberal Democrats, Scotland’s SNP, Plaid Cymru (Liz Saville Roberts), and from the Alliance, and Social Democratic and Labour, parties in Northern Ireland. With the two Conservatives, that makes 22.

The group commissioned polling agency Opinium to carry out three representative surveys across the UK, and organised several workshops. Almost 60 organisations and individuals gave evidence, including the Institute for Public Policy Research, Local Government Association, the National Farmers Union, and Tax Justice UK.  Supporters of the lobby organisation 38 Degrees also gave their opinions.

The results, in Time to Reset, reveal a public rediscovering the natural world in Covid-19 lockdowns, appreciating cleaner air, bird song, green spaces and their own localities. “The people we brought together had differences, but all of them wanted life in Britain to be fairer and had a renewed sense of the value of nature, and most people also wanted life in the UK to be greener,” the report notes.

The Government, meanwhile, is talking Green but actions like weakening the new Office for Environmental Protection before it starts work give a message that is decidedly Sludge-coloured.

More people want TIME, and working from home has helped by removing commutes. No less than 82% of those who worked from home in 2020 want to continue, the All Party group found. Half of the population would like a shorter working week, and only 18% oppose less work. Over 90% want NHS and care workers to have better conditions and over 70% say they deserve more pay. More than 80% think delivery drivers and supermarket workers also deserve better working conditions.  In fact, there is a groundswell of support for greater equality, for those currently on low pay and often in insecure work to be valued more highly.

A Green society has to be far more equal than our current structure, so the thinking revealed in the report is a positive sign. Two people in every three think that the government should focus more on the health and well-being of the population than on economic growth.

The urgent need for more equality is clear from the findings that the poorest 10% of UK households would need to spend 74% of their ‘after housing’ disposable income on food if they were to meet the government’s own healthy eating guidelines, while the richest 10% have to spend just 6% of theirs. Researchers found widespread worry about high housing costs, and poor housing quality. Indeed, two people in three support caps on rents.

As for food, fewer than one person in five, 19%, think the UK’s food supply is safe and secure. Over six in ten, 61%, want more food produced within the UK, and nine in 20, 45%, actively try to source British food.

In an ideal world, people would like to live in ’15 minute neighbourhoods’, where all their immediate needs, including green spaces, can be met within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride. Rural areas require far better public transport, people say. New investment in roads is unpopular, backed by just two people in every 15. In contrast, four in ten want better local bus networks, and more than one in four favour investment in local train services.

The report findings are evidence for the next stage of the All Party Parliamentary Group’s work, policies for a Green New Deal (more on this coming soon). Their research suggests that there will be considerable public backing for a gentler, greener, more equal Britain.

As for the very affluent people whose taxes would have to help pay for the Reset, how willing will they be back a comprehensive Green New Deal?

PDR

Earnings Up! What’s the Catch?

Posted: November 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Employment, Social inequality | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Earnings are rising faster than inflation, said the UK’s Coalition government triumphantly this week, a claim repeated by the BBC:

“Growth in average pay for UK workers overtook inflation for the first time in five years, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

Wages excluding bonuses rose by 1.3% in the year to September, beating the 1.2% Consumer Prices Index inflation rate.

Including bonuses, earnings rose by 1% from a year earlier, the ONS said.

The ONS also said that UK unemployment in the July-to-September period was down 115,000 on the previous quarter, cutting the total to 1.96 million.

Pay has lagged inflation since the global financial crisis, but in recent months earnings have been rising just as the pace of price growth slows.”*

It sounds wonderful, but the reality is nowhere near as rosy.

Firstly, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) considers only the wages of full-time employees. Most adults in the UK are not full-time employees. The ONS’s survey-based figures for July to September 2014 suggest that there were 19.203 million full-time employees. At the same time, there were a total of 38.865 million men aged 16-64 and women aged 16-59 living in the UK. These are the age ranges still used to describe the population of ‘working age’, although women’s state pension age is already 62 and is rising to 65 by 2018. From October 2020 neither men nor women will be able to claim a state pension until they are 66, if current legislation persists.

Already, the figures for July to September show that 1.119 million over-65s were officially working.

The median earnings for 19.203 million full-time employees between July and September were £481 a week gross, equivalent to £25,012 a year. This was exactly the same as in the previous quarter, April to June. For full-time earners in the lowest 10%, their median wage was £250 a week, £13,000 a year, exactly the same as in the previous four quarters. A slight improvement was reported for full-time workers across the lowest 25% of earnings, up to £334 a week from £327, an increase of 2.1%, but £334 a week is equivalent to only £17,368 a year.

The self-employed are mysterious elephants rampaging about the room. Their numbers surged from 4.141 million in June 2013 to 4.523 million a year later, expansion of 9.2%. Their median earnings are not yet known because they have nearly ten months from the end of the tax year, April 5th, to submit earnings figures to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, and in any case they are excluded from ONS’s earnings data.

The 4.523 million — almost one for every four full-time employees — include successful entrepreneurs, of course, but they also represent a surplus reserve, there to cover peak labour requirements without having to receive holiday pay, or sick pay, or any pay at all when they are not required.

Part-time employees are also a big part of the labour force, 6.824 million between July to September, one to every 2.8 full-timers. Not all want to be part-time, but they cannot find full-time work. Another 123,000 people are unpaid workers in family businesses, and a further 123,000 are on government employment and training schemes.

Far from reflecting rising prosperity, the earnings and employment data show a nation with many more people than well-paid jobs, a nation which is low-paid in relation to demands on incomes. Income tax has been eased for the lower paid, and mortgage rates for home-buyers remain low, but council tax and the costs of privatised utilities — electricity, gas, water, telecoms — squeeze disposable incomes hard. Add in the rents demanded of tenants, and childcare costs for working families with children, and travel costs for commuters on our privatised railways, and the picture is blacker still.

Privatisations have amplified income inequalities which show no sign of easing. and which dim the prospects of today’s generation of children.

*’Pay growth beats inflation as jobless total falls, ONS says’, BBC News business, November 11th 2014

Employment and wages data from the Office for National Statistics, the EARN and EMP data series, June to September 2014

Pat Dodd Racher

Free trade and exploitation: the distress of Guatemala

Posted: May 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Corporations, Land ownership, Social inequality | Tags: | Leave a comment

No population can survive without food, therefore it is a strong argument that governments should prioritise secure food supplies.

Free-trade food policies are based on the belief that food should come from areas of the world that can produce it at the lowest immediate cost. Detrimentally for our future, the lowest immediate cost takes no account of environmental degradation, or fossil energy or water depletion, or the livelihoods of small-scale farmers who are affected by globalised food chains. The proponents of free trade generally claim that tariff barriers and financial support schemes which protect farmers in the affluent world mean that farmers in ‘developing’ countries cannot compete successfully, despite their lower labour costs. Yet small-scale farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia are the last to benefit from free trade. The cash benefits go to large farmers and corporations, for planting crops for export rather than food crops for local consumption.

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Guatemala’s volcanic soils have the potential to feed the 14.4 million population, but much of the best land is foreign-owned, and revenues leave the country.

Guatemala in Central America is a stunning country, both for its memorable peoples and landscapes, and for the corruption of its governments down the years. The indigenous peoples continue to suffer from domination by a tiny number of foreign corporations and their local political enforcers.

I spent six weeks in Guatemala in autumn 2007, staying with a family and helping out at a UK-funded school, Escuela Proyecto La Esperanza, in Jocotenango. On Friday October 12th 2007 I was part of a small group travelling to the Mayan ruins at Tikal, in the forests of the Petén. We had to cross Guatemala City, which I remember for ubiquitous McDonalds; Esso, Shell and Texaco filling stations; and high-rise American hotels, encircled by tin-roofed shacks, unfriendly streets, potholes, rubbish and guns.

We followed the CA9 highway north-east out of Guatemala City to El Progreso, Rio Hondo and Quirigua, where there are intricate Maya carvings. Quirigua is in the Motagua river valley, which reaches the Caribbean at Puerto Barrios, Guatemala’s only significant port on the Caribbean.

Most of the valley land is owned by corporations, with fruit plantations and horticultural crops for export, the latter protected by acre upon acre of plastic. The bananas are plastic-protected too, encased in perforated blue plastic to protect against rain, dust and wind. What a lot of plastic to replace when the oil runs out. At Quirigua the plantations belong to Chiquita Brands — descendent of the infamous United Fruit Company — and to Del Monte.

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Banana plantation in the Motagua valley, owned by Chiquita Brands International of the USA.

North from the Motagua valley through the Petén to the ruined Maya city of Tikal, we passed a succession of shiny new evangelical protestant churches (financed from the USA), set in decrepit villages. The farms visible from the road were either under two hectares or vast, containing much unused land. Most of the land north of the little town of Frontera, where the Lago de Izabal narrows into the Caribbean-bound Rio Dulce, is controlled by a handful of powerful families. They used to run cattle, tended by local labourers, but since the road was hard-surfaced in the years around 2000, the labourers have migrated away, to the slums of Guatemala City and as illegals to the USA.

Staying overnight in Finca Ixobel, a country guesthouse owned by an American widow whose Guatemalteco husband was assassinated by a death squad in the ‘civil war’ between 1960 and 1996, in which some 200,000 people died or ‘disappeared’, I read in Revue magazine for June 2007 that over a fifth of the population, 21%, have to exist on less than $1 (59p) a day, and well over half the people, 58%, subsist on less than $2 (£1.18) a day.

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Forest has reclaimed the massive stone monuments of Tikal.

The Petén is, according to Pablo, who works as a guide in Tikal, the world’s fifth largest forest reserve, and the biggest in Central America. The reserve also functions as a drugs highway. Drug runners are constantly building air strips deep in the forest for the lucrative narcotrafico, which finances grand villas behind high walls, and four-by-fours with tinted windows. Drugs are more important to the local economy than tourism, despite the presence of amazing Mayan monuments. “Each year around 150,000 visitors come to Tikal,” said Pablo. Increasingly, they fly in to Flores Airport, to avoid the hazards to life and limb in Guatemala City. Flores Airport is bringing ‘development’ to the Petén, shopping malls plonked incongruously in the rural landscape. Pablo was pessimistic. He said that poverty is increasing because subsistence farmers do not have enough land. The landlords are opposed to any process of land reform, even though their own land may lie idle. Now they are looking forward to a golden era of biofuels, a scenario in which small farmers, campesinos, do not feature. Fewer families can afford to send their children to school, and in Pablo’s view the illiteracy rate was escalating again, above the low point of 40% estimated in 2002.

In Guatemala the law of the jugular applies. There are courts, and prisons, but legal procedures are slow and uncertain, and extra-judicial killings commonplace.

The apparatus of the state in Guatemala, such as exists, is deployed to protect existing power structures. The welfare of the people comes way down this agenda: politicians and businessmen – the same people, often at the same times – have little interest in working to abolish hunger among the indigenous peoples, to provide affordable healthcare, or to create a thriving countryside where families can produce enough food for themselves and their neighbourhoods.

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Flimsy superstructures are no match for torrential rainstorms. Much housing is in tin shacks, often precariously sited on slopes.

The indigenous Maya believed that man was merely part of the natural order on Earth, a natural order that needed to remain in balance. When their practice departed calamitously from this tidy theory, their civilisation declined. The Maya loved mathematics and astronomy. Even today, Mayan children in school are fascinated by numbers and are skilful in arithmetic. Over a thousand years ago, the results of the Mayan linkage of religion with astronomy was causing catastrophe, as their huge, astronomically-aligned temples and monuments, in socially and occupationally complex cities, absorbed too much of their collective energy, and demanded too much food, fuel and construction materials from the rural hinterlands. The forest was felled.

As resources dwindled, Mayan tribes fought intense wars to try and seize as much as they could of the remaining food and water. The knock-out blow at Tikal was a 30-year drought around 1000AD. The occupants of Tikal walked away, and many of their descendants – still poverty-stricken — live in the western highlands of Guatemala, on steep, infertile land which the European families and the multinational corporations have not wanted.

The relationship between trees and human survival is too often overlooked, ignored. Jared Diamond, in Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive[i] points out that forests

“….function as the world’s major air filter removing carbon monoxide and other air pollutants, and forests and their soils are a major sink for carbon, with the result that deforestation is an important driving force behind global warming by decreasing that carbon sink. Water transpiration from trees returns water to the atmosphere, so that deforestation tends to cause diminished rainfall and increased desertification. Trees retain water in the soil and keep it moist. They protect the land surface against landslides, erosion, and sediment runoff into streams. Some forests, notably tropical rainforests, hold the major portion of an ecosystem’s nutrients, so that logging and carting the logs away tends to leave the cleared land infertile.”

— Diamond 2005, p.469 in 2006 Penguin edition

This is what happened at Tikal. and in exploited lands all over the world, from Norse Greenland to Haiti in the Caribbean, from Easter Island in the Pacific to Rwanda in Africa. Deforestation ends societies, even civilisations.

Once free of human interference, the jungle returned to Tikal and clothed the monuments, which slept undisturbed for centuries, while the Mayans were conquered and later dragged unwillingly into a capitalist economy.

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Culture and tradition often count for a lot more than consumer purchases. The blouses, huipils, are home-woven, and each village has its own designs.

Mayans are relatively indifferent to consumer culture, a ‘failing’ which annoys foreign entrepreneurs:

“An enormous disadvantage for this country is that the Indians [the Mayans] won’t work more than just enough to fill their basic needs, and these are very few. The only way to make [a Mayan] work is to advance him money, then he can be forced to work. Very often, they run off, but they are caught and punished very severely.”

— from the story of a German who emigrated to Guatemala in 1892, told in Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal and Forgetting in Guatemala, p.38.[ii]

This German immigrant, Friedrich Endler, ran a coffee plantation. The plantations struggled to find enough labour, so the government instituted a form of slavery, the labour draft. Daniel Wilkinson explains this system in Silence on the Mountain, a moving and tragic analysis of Guatemala in the 20th century:

“The labor drafts. Upon the request of a plantation owner, the governors of each department would round up a work gang of fifty to one hundred Indians and send them to work on the plantation. An 1894 law provided Indians with one way to escape this form of forced recruitment: become an indebted worker for a plantation.”

— Silence on the Mountain p.76-77.

The pass laws, so hated in South Africa later in the 20th century, already existed in Guatemala:

 “ ‘We were slaves because of the law of Ubico,’ recalled the next elderly peasant we talked to. He was referring to President Jorge Ubico, who had governed the country from 1930 to 1944, and the ‘slavery’ he described was not debt peonage but the vagrancy laws that had replaced it. ‘We had to carry a booklet, like an identity card, which showed what plantation we worked in and how many hours we had worked that year. If you didn’t carry it, the government could jail you and make you work without pay’.”

— Silence on the Mountain p.97.

Land is at the heart of the unhappy history of Guatemala. Immigrants with access to capital claimed it. Government was for them, not for the Mayans, and there was no question of prioritising rights for the indigenous peoples above rights for plantation owners to obtain as much profit as possible. The landowners have benefited financially from colonisation and its successor, free trade, because they have deliberately marginalised the indigenous peoples.

by Pat Dodd Racher

 

[i] London and New York: Allen Lane and Viking Penguin, 2005.

[ii] Silence on the Mountain was published in 2004 by Duke University Press.