first an onion crisis now an incoming egg shortage...are none of the core tenets of my diet safe

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

UN chief warns China, US to avoid Cold War (AP) Warning of a potential new Cold War, the head of the United Nations implored China and the United States to repair their “completely dysfunctional” relationship before problems between the two large and deeply influential countries spill over even further into the rest of the planet. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke to The Associated Press this weekend ahead of this week’s annual United Nations gathering of world leaders. Guterres said the world’s two major economic powers should be cooperating on climate and negotiating more robustly on trade and technology even given persisting political fissures about human rights, economics, online security and sovereignty in the South China Sea. “Unfortunately, today we only have confrontation,” Guterres said.

Canada votes in pandemic election that could cost Trudeau (AP) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gambled on an early election in a bid to win a majority of seats in Parliament, but now faces the threat of being knocked from power in Canada’s election on Monday. Polls indicate Trudeau’s Liberal Party is in a tight race with the rival Conservatives: It will likely win the most seats in Parliament, but still fail to get a majority, forcing it to rely on an opposition party to pass legislation. “Trudeau made an incredibly stupid error in judgement,” said Robert Bothwell, a professor of Canadian history and international relations at the University of Toronto. Trudeau entered the election leading a stable minority government that wasn’t under threat of being toppled.

Biden easing foreign travel restrictions, requiring vaccines (AP) President Joe Biden will ease foreign travel restrictions into the U.S. beginning in November, when his administration will require all foreign nationals flying into the country to be fully vaccinated. All foreign travelers flying to the U.S. will need to demonstrate proof of vaccination before boarding, as well as proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within three days of flight, said White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients, who announced the new policy on Monday. Biden will also tighten testing rules for unvaccinated American citizens, who will need to be tested within a day before returning to the U.S., as well as after they arrive home. Fully vaccinated passengers will not be required to quarantine, Zeints said. The new policy replaces a patchwork of travel restrictions first instituted by President Donald Trump last year and tightened by Biden earlier this year that restrict travel by non-citizens who have in the prior 14 days been in the United Kingdom, European Union, China, India, Iran, Republic of Ireland, Brazil and South Africa.

Recall vote highlights California’s geopolitical divisions (AP) The California recall election was a blowout win for Gov. Gavin Newsom that reinforced the state’s political divisions: The Democratic governor won big support in coastal areas and urban centers, while the rural north and agricultural inland, with far fewer voters, largely wanted him gone. “It’s almost like two states,” Menlo College political scientist Melissa Michelson said. Though California is a liberal stronghold where Democrats hold every statewide office and have two-thirds majorities in the Legislature, it is also home to deeply conservative areas. Those residents have long felt alienated from Sacramento, where Democrats have been in full control for more than a decade. A conservative movement in far Northern California has for years sought to break away and create its own state to better reflect the area’s political sensitivities.

US launches mass expulsion of Haitian migrants from Texas (AP) The U.S. is flying Haitians camped in a Texas border town back to their homeland and blocking others from crossing the border from Mexico in a massive show of force that signals the beginning of what could be one of America’s swiftest, large-scale expulsions of migrants or refugees in decades. More than 320 migrants arrived in Port-au-Prince on three flights Sunday, and Haiti said six flights were expected Tuesday. In all, U.S. authorities moved to expel many of the more 12,000 migrants camped around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after crossing from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. The U.S. plans to begin seven expulsion flights daily on Wednesday, four to Port-au-Prince and three to Cap-Haitien, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Madrid street party (Reuters) Roughly 25,000 Spaniards joined in an illegal mass drinking party on the streets of Madrid on Friday, which took police until 7 a.m. the following day to break up. The huge outdoor parties, known as “macro-botellon,” have been resisted by Spanish authorities for years, and have taken on renewed significance as coronavirus restrictions limit public interactions. Police may find quieter streets next weekend as closing times for Madrid’s bars and clubs are finally extended to 6 a.m. from their previous 2 a.m. limits.

Thousands flee as lava spewing from volcano on Spain’s La Palma island destroys houses (Reuters) Authorities have evacuated about 5,000 people from villages in the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma as lava spews from an erupting volcano, local officials said. The 15-meter high lava flow has already swallowed 20 houses in the village of El Paso and sections of roads, Mayor Sergio Rodriguez told TVE radio station on Monday morning. Since erupting on Sunday afternoon, the volcano has shot lava up hundreds meters into the air and poured flows of molten rock towards the Atlantic Ocean over a sparsely populated area of La Palma, the most northwestern island in the Canaries archipelago. La Palma had been on high alert after more than 22,000 tremors were reported in the space of a week in Cumbre Vieja, which belongs to a chain of volcanoes that last had a major eruption in 1971 and is one of the most active volcanic regions in the Canaries.

Shooting at Russian university leaves at least 6 dead, 24 injured (Washington Post)  At least six people were killed and 24 were wounded after a gunman opened fire at a university in the northwestern Russian city of Perm, the government in the region said Monday. President Vladimir Putin called the shooting at Perm State University “a tremendous tragedy, not only for the families who lost their children, but for the entire country.” Such a rampage, which sent students hurling themselves from windows in a bid to escape the gunfire, is extremely rare for Russia, which has little experience of the kind of mass shootings routinely seen in the United States. Russia’s Investigative Committee, a law enforcement agency, said the attacker was a student who had purchased a hunting rifle in May. The agency said he had been apprehended and is in the hospital for treatment of wounds suffered while resisting arrest. Russia has strict laws on civilian gun ownership and requires people to pass psychological exams before obtaining a license for hunting and sport firearms.

Evergrande debts (NYT) Once China’s most prolific property developer, Evergrande has become the country’s most indebted company. It owes money to lenders, suppliers and foreign investors. It owes unfinished apartments to home buyers and has racked up more than $300 billion in unpaid bills. Regulators fear that the collapse of a company Evergrande’s size would send tremors through the entire Chinese financial system. Yet so far, Beijing has not stepped in with a bailout, having promised to teach debt-saddled corporate giants a lesson. Evergrande is on the hook to buyers for nearly 1.6 million apartments, according to one estimate, and it may owe money to tens of thousands of its own workers. As Beijing remains relatively quiet about the company’s future, those who are owed cash say they are growing impatient.

Pacquiao for president? (Foreign Policy) Manny Pacquiao, the former professional boxer and Philippine senator, has said he would run for president in next year’s election, accepting the nomination put forward by a faction of the ruling PDP-Laban party. His decision comes after Christopher “Bong” Go rejected a presidential nomination from a rival PDP-Laban faction earlier this month, although his running mate, President Rodrigo Duterte, accepted the nomination for vice president. If electoral authorities recognize Pacquiao’s nomination, he may still face competition from Sara Duterte-Carpio, the mayor of Davao and daughter of the president. Duterte-Carpio has topped recent opinion polls but has been cagey about her plans for higher office, saying last week that she would run for another term as Davao mayor in 2022.

Talibanning Women From Work (Guardian, BBC) In mid-August, with American troops still present, the Taliban vowed to respect women’s rights, forgive those who fought against them, and ensure that Afghanistan won’t become a haven for terrorists. Zabihullah Mujahid, long-time Taliban spokesman, gave his first ever public news conference, saying leaders had encouraged women to return to work and girls to return to school. He promised women would retain their rights, but qualified that as being “within the framework of Islamic law”—specifically, Sharia law. To no one’s surprise, it was just ‘happy talk’ meant to allay suspicions of world powers and the fears of Afghans. Soon there were ample reports of Taliban soldiers going house to house, searching for “traitors” and executing them. Working women were told to stay home and schools were shut down, although it was labeled a temporary security measure. In Kandahar, women bank tellers were forced out of their jobs at gunpoint. In the next days and weeks the group’s new government issued decrees restricting more rights of girls and women. Female students in middle and high schools were told they couldn’t return to classes, although boys were allowed to. Female university students were informed studies would now take place in gender-segregated settings, and they must abide by a strict Islamic dress code. Other crippling measures from when the Taliban ruled in the 1990s surfaced unofficially, including a requirement that Afghan women have a male guardian accompany them in any public place. On Friday, female employees in Kabul city government were told they couldn’t return to work if their job could be performed by men, meaning almost 1,000 women who were part of the city’s workforce of nearly 3,000 lost their jobs. The Taliban shut down the Women’s Affairs Ministry, replacing it with a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” tasked with enforcing Islamic law.

The Taliban vs. ISIS (Washington Post) After years of waging a holy war to overthrow the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have struggled to adjust to their new day job: the mundane task of securing a city. “All of my men, they love jihad and fighting. So when they came to Kabul they didn’t feel comfortable. There isn’t any fighting here anymore,” Taliban commander Abdulrahman Nifiz told The Post. But the Taliban still faces a violent foe: the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, which claimed responsibility Sunday for a series of blasts over the weekend in the country’s east that reportedly killed several people and injured tens more. The improvised explosive devices were set off Saturday and Sunday around the city of Jalalabad, known as a stronghold for the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K).

Troll Farms (MIT Technology Review) A report produced by a Facebook employee details the enormous impact troll farms—that is, organized networks designed to spread misinformation—have on the social network. The October 2019 report identified that the most popular pages for Christians and Black Americans were, in fact, operated out of Kosovo and Macedonia. As of October 2019, 15,000 Facebook pages with a predominantly American audience were operated out of those countries, reaching 140 million U.S. users every month. Troll farms operated the fifth-largest women’s page, the second-largest Native American page, 10 of the top 15 African-American interest pages, and every single one of the 15 top pages targeting Christian Americans.

Coronavirus update: With over 81,000 new cases, India's coronavirus tally has reached 4,926,914. The death toll has risen by 1,073 to 80,827. India now has 973,175 active cases, while 37,80,107 people have recovered. Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have reported the highest number of cases. However, infections are rising rapidly in states like Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia has tested positive for Covid-19. Meanwhile, the national capital recorded 3,229 new corona cases, pushing the tally to 221,533. The worst-hit states are Maharashtra (1,077,374) Andhra Pradesh (575,079), Tamil Nadu (491,571), Karnataka (467,689), and UP (317,195). Coronavirus vaccine update: The United Arab Emirates has granted emergency approval for use of a coronavirus vaccine, six weeks after human trials in the Gulf Arab state started. A phase III trial of a Covid-19 inactivated vaccine developed by Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopham began in the UAE in July and is yet to be completed. Meanwhile, Serum Institute of India's CEO Adar Poonawalla has warned there won’t be enough Covid-19 vaccines available in the world till 2024 at the earliest, according to a media report on Monday. “It’s going to take four to five years until everyone gets the vaccine on this planet," said Poonawalla to Financial Times. World coronavirus update: The global tally of coronavirus cases stands at 29,433,091. While 21,264,646 have recovered, 932,390 have died so far. The US, the worst-hit country, 6,748,618 cases. It is followed by India, which has 4,926,914 cases, Brazil (4,349,544) and Russia (1,068,320). Stay tuned for coronavirus LIVE updatesCATCH ALL THE LIVE UPDATESAuto Refresh02:36 PM Covid-19 battle far from over, Harsh Vardhan tells RSSounding a note of caution, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Tuesday told the Rajya Sabha that the battle against Covid-19 is far from over, at a time when India's total tally has neared the five million-mark. "I would urge all Members of Parliament that the coronavirus battle is still far from over. On one hand, when we are in an Unlock stage to revive the Indian economy, and have a balanced approach, it is important that sustained community support is ensured to control the spread of the virus and break its chain of transmission," Vardhan said in the Upper House.02:24 PM India's role in production of Covid-19 vaccine critical in containing pandemic: Bill GatesBillionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has said India's willingness to play a "big role" in manufacturing Covid-19 vaccine and allow it to supply to other developing countries will be a critical part in containing the pandemic globally. In an exclusive interview to PTI, Gates, whose foundation is focusing on fighting the pandemic, called it the "next biggest thing" the world has been confronted with after the World War. The Microsoft co-founder said the world is looking to India for large scale production of Covid-19 vaccine once it is rolled out.02:15 PM Scheduled tribe panel asks Odisha to submit report on Covid-19 spread among PVTGsThe National Commission for Scheduled Tribes has sought a report from the Odisha government after six members of two primitive tribes in the state contracted the Covid-19 disease, officials said. According to media reports, one member of the Bonda tribe and five from the Didayi tribe tested coronavirus positive in August end. The commission said it is a matter of grave concern and the chief secretary, Odisha, should submit a factual report and an action taken report by September 25. Besides Bonda and Didayi, there are 11 more particularlyvulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs) in Odisha which arecharacterized by declining or stagnant population, low level of literacy, pre-agricultural level of technology and economic backwardness.02:00 PM Rajasthan reports 799 fresh Covid-19 cases, 7 more deathsRajasthan recorded 799 fresh Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, taking the state's tally to 1,04,937, while seven more fatalities pushed the toll to 1,257, according to a health department bulletin. Of the total cases, 17,468 people are under treatment. So far, 84,688 people have been discharged after recovery, the bulletin said. Jaipur has reported the maximum number of deaths so far at 302, followed by 123 in Jodhpur, 96 in Bikaner, 88 each in Kota and Ajmer and 73 in Bharatpur.01:49 PM UK jobless rate rises for first time since Covid-19 lockdownBritain's unemployment rate rose for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown began in March but data published on Tuesday also suggested the increase in joblessness was, so far at least, not surging. The unemployment rate increased to 4.1% in the three months to July from the 3.9% it had clung to since early 2020, in line with the median forecast in a Reuters poll of economists. The government's huge coronavirus job subsidy scheme, which is now being wound down, has prevented many layoffs. Experimental figures showed the number of staff on company payrolls fell by a monthly 36,000 in August.01:40 PM UN Secy-General urges global community to assist WHO's fight against Covid-19United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the global community to support the UN system, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in particular, in its effort against the coronavirus pandemic.This summer, the United States formally notified Guterres of its intention to withdraw from the WHO in July 2021, after repeatedly criticising the organisation's pandemic response. Earlier in September, the US Department of State spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus expressed the belief that the WHO "failed badly" not only regarding the coronavirus but in its response to other health crises in recent decades. Ortagus slammed the WHO for declining to adopt reforms and failing to demonstrate its "independence from the Chinese Communist Party."01:33 PM Tripura's Covid-19 tally rises to 19,718 with 531 fresh casesAt least 531 more people tested positive for COVID-19 in Tripura on Tuesday, pushing the tally in the state to 19,718, a health department official said. The death toll rose to 207 with seven more fatalities, he said. West Tripura district, which also comprises state capital Agartala, accounted for 115 of the 207 coronavirus deaths, the official said. 01:17 PM Nepal to resume domestic flights from September 21The Nepal government on Tuesday announced its decision to allow resumption of domestic flights and long-haul public transportation services from September 21 onwards, after a hiatus of nearly six months due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The government had suspended these services in the wake of the pandemic in late March, reports Xinhua news agency. 01:03 PM 40 lakh people kept under surveillance as part of Covid contact-tracing: CentreAround 40 lakh people have been kept under surveillance as a part of the contact-tracing efforts in the country and 5.4 crore samples were tested for coronavirus till September 10, Union minister Ashwini Choubey told the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. The minister of state for health said there were 15,290 COVID-treatment facilities with 13,14,171 dedicated isolation beds till September 10. There are also 2,31,269 oxygen-supported isolation beds and 62,694 ICU beds (including 32,241 ventilator beds). 12:52 PM Pakistan reopens schools, universities after near-5 month Covid-19 breakAfter a break of nearly five months, Pakistan on Tuesday began its phased reopening of schools, in view of the falling number of new cornavirus cases in the country. While high schools, colleges and universities reopened on September 15, classes VI to VIII would start from September 23. Primary school will start from September 30, officials said.

Farm Workers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs

Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images

Farm workers work, live, and travel in crowded conditions, and are being allowed few if any safety measures against COVID-19 — which puts them and the food system at risk

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats.

Late last week, Yazmin Alvarado set out for the strawberry fields near Oxnard, California anxious and afraid of catching the novel coronavirus. Part of a crew of more than 100, she knew she was at high risk.

Members of her crew work and take breaks next to each other. They lack access to soap, water, and gloves, give each other rides to the fields in overloaded cars, and many share apartments with multiple families. As a ponchadora —the person who inspects fruit quality and records each harvested box — Alvarado has constant physical contact with others.

What’s more, she and her co-workers don’t qualify for sick pay, most lack health insurance, and they desperately need the paychecks, so they don’t have the option to stay home, she told Civil Eats. And yet, Alvarado’s employer, a large California berry company, hasn’t offered any training about COVID-19, nor taken any measures to protect the crew, said the 26-year-old worker. To top it off, the government and state health departments are offering little to no information in Spanish.

“We don’t have enough information. And we’re afraid to speak out… [we] don’t want to lose any hours,” said Alvarado, whose paycheck supports her 5-year-old twin girls and unemployed husband. But the fear of contracting the virus is pervasive.

“What if someone gets sick with the virus and still comes to work,” she asks.

While California has ordered all of its residents to shelter in place to stop the virus’ spread, Alvarado’s crew and more than 800,000 other agricultural laborers in the state are exempt. Many continue working, with few or no protections, to power California’s $54 billion agriculture sector and supply the nation’s empty supermarket shelves. And while no farmworkers have been confirmed to be carrying the virus, many agricultural areas have seen confirmed cases.

While most Americans stay at home, farmworkers continue to work, designated as “essential workers” by the Department of Homeland Security. But advocates and organizers are sounding the alarm: Agricultural workers are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Nearly half lack legal work authorization and residency status, making them ineligible for essential benefits that could help them stay home when sick.

And yet the value of the agricultural labor force, which has long lived in the shadows, is also becoming much clearer to Americans than it’s ever been. While there is no evidence of COVID-19 spreading through food or food packaging, if (or perhaps when) it spreads among farmworkers, farmers say workforce gaps in the chain could exacerbate pre-existing labor shortages and lead to disruptions in the food supply.

Although consumers and government officials have now deemed immigrant workers “essential,” few resources have been dedicated to help them stave off the virus. The workers say they are confused, anxious, and unsure of how COVID-19 will impact their health, employment, and livelihoods. And with many schools suddenly shuttered, some farmworker families are also facing an impossible choice: continue to work or quit and take care of the children.

“Some farmworkers are panicking,” said Elvira Carvajal, lead community organizer in Florida for Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “There are no safety measures, there are no benefits. Families can’t afford to pay for childcare. They’re leaving [children] alone at home or taking them to the fields and leaving them in their cars. This is very dangerous.”

Risks at work and at home

Across the U.S., about 2.5 million farmworkers, most of whom are Latinx, toil on American farms. In addition, a growing number of foreign guest workers, most hailing from Mexico, are brought to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. More than 250,000 were certified nationwide in 2019, though the State Department last week decided to suspend visa processing at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Mexico, so that only returning guest workers will be allowed to come into the U.S., potentially leaving some growers short.

In some parts of the country, these workers are already busy harvesting produce—whether it’s strawberries in Southern California, citrus, asparagus, and kale in the San Joaquin Valley, or tomato, eggplant, and guavas in Florida. Others are pruning and thinning trees, training vines, transplanting, or weeding. Harvesting typically ramps up later in spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into fields and packing houses.

Some work shoulder-to-shoulder, while others are spread out in the fields, depending on the speed and the crops. Working outside may minimize the risk, experts say, but that’s not the case for packing houses and canneries, since the virus is spread by respiratory droplets and can survive on surfaces for up to three days. Those who work alone on machines seem to be the least exposed.

And while the average age for field workers is just 38 years old — and older adults and people with serious underlying medical conditions seem to be at the highest risk for severe symptoms from COVID-19 — if young farmworkers get infected (with or without symptoms) they can become vectors for the virus.

Advocates say it’s the conditions outside of work that place farmworkers in most danger. Many workers carpool to work — with four to six workers sharing a single car — or are bused to work on packed buses. And their crowded living conditions pose perhaps the biggest challenge, said Norma Ahedo, community health worker coordinator for the Salinas-based Center For Community Advocacy.

Earlier this month, Ahedo said, she did a health check at an apartment in Salinas where four farmworker families — including seven children — were living in three small bedrooms and the living room. It’s typical for an entire family to live in a room, she said. It’s also not uncommon to see two families sharing a single room with a divider down the middle, she said.

“These are small spaces, very closed in, with few windows and many people living on top of each other,” Ahedo said. “And if someone does get sick, where will they go?” (Medical experts recommend that people sick with coronavirus use a separate bedroom and bathroom, or even just maintain the safe distance of six feet.)

H-2A guest workers also live in shared grower-provided communal housing camps or cheap motels where they can easily spread the virus to each other. When a few guest workers got the mumps in Washington state last spring, the entire labor camp had to be quarantined.

Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

Celery harvesters work in close proximity on a farm in California

High anxiety, food insecurity, lack of childcare

In addition to the threat of physical illness, advocates say the virus is causing huge emotional stress in the farmworker community. Ahedo said she’s worried for the families who have to shelter in place for long periods in overcrowded living conditions.

“This is causing high anxiety in both adults and children,” she said.

Though some workers may not fully grasp their risks or know how to prevent the spread, many are very worried about how the virus will affect their jobs and livelihoods. Already, some farmers who have lost markets due to restaurants, farmers’ market, and schools closing, have reduced working hours.

Farmworkers’ financial instability is compounded by the fact that many have family members who work in other low-wage, hourly jobs hard-hit by coronavirus closures, especially in the food service industry, said Daniel Gonzales, executive director of the Center For Community Advocacy. “It’s a time of great insecurity and much anguish and anxiety for these families,” he added.

Food scarcity is also looming as several rural communities in California and Washington are reporting a lack of basic necessities, said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “They’ve told me, ‘We have nowhere to get food. The corner markets and dollar stores have empty shelves (and they aren’t restocking).’ This is creating anxiety and despair.”

An open letter to growers: Help protect your workers

Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) sent an open letter to agricultural employers and organizations urging them to take “proactive steps to ensure the safety of farm workers, protect buyers and safeguard consumers.”

The need for action is dire because most non-union farmworkers do not have health care coverage or other benefits, said Armando Elenes, the UFW’s secretary treasurer. The California Farm Bureau Federation says it’s working with ag employers to “adjust on-farm practices to account for social distancing and other measures” to assure the safety of their employees.

But a poll the UFW just completed on its Spanish-language social media platforms showed more than 90 percent of the farmworkers who responded had not been advised by their employers on best practices to resist the virus. And a UFW Facebook Live event last week attracted 18,000 views, with hundreds of farmworkers commenting that their employers had provided no information at all.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes.

Language is a major barrier to accessing information about the virus and its prevention, said Elenes. Many workers speak only Spanish, while some primarily speak Indigenous languages such as Triqui and Mixteco. And since they’re not getting information from their employers, workers turn to social media, which is ripe with conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes, said Elenes. Three states—California, Oregon, and Washington — currently offer farmworkers a limited number of sick-pay hours, he added. Despite these laws, many growers and labor contractors require doctors’ notes from workers, making it difficult for workers to access the benefit, he said. And some flat out refuse to give workers sick pay.

“If they stop working because they’re feeling ill, they no longer have a job. The growers do not guarantee their positions,” said Treviño-Sauceda. Some, she added, may also avoid doctors because they fear questions about immigration status or the Trump administration’s new public charge rule, which bars people who use certain benefits, including Medicaid, from converting their temporary immigration status into a green card.

The UFW’s open letter advocates extending state-required sick pay to 40 hours or more and removing the caps on accruing sick pay, eliminating the 90-day waiting period for newly employed farmworkers to be eligible for sick pay, and placing workers who are infected or whose family members are infected with COVID-19 on paid administrative leave for the duration of their illnesses.

The letter also asks growers to provide basic information and training to workers, such as encouraging them to wash their hands and avoid touching their faces.

Training offered to some, others are on their own

Some farmers are starting to provide training and are instituting additional safety measures. Last week at Del Bosque Farms on the west side of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, grower Joe Del Bosque and his wife held a tailgate meeting in Spanish for about 60 workers in his asparagus harvest crew to discuss coronavirus prevention and food safety measures. The grower said his company received resources from AgSafe, a nonprofit in Modesto that provides health and safety training.

Del Bosque, who farms about 2,200 acres of mostly organic produce — including several kinds of melons and asparagus — said his employees are his greatest concern. His business, after all, depends on them showing up.

“We’re an essential industry, at this time and always, so we need to make sure our workers are comfortable knowing they can come to work and still be protected,” he said.

Del Bosque’s company offers clean restrooms with fully equipped hand-washing stations. It advises workers to regularly scrub their hands with soap, to sneeze into their elbows, and to stay home when ill — measures that have been part of the company’s food safety program since before the pandemic. In addition, Del Bosque said he has instituted new social distancing measures and a rule about not touching other workers.

“We understand how diseases can be transmitted not just from one worker to another, but also through the produce,” he said. “We simply want to reinforce what we’ve already been doing for many years.”

Del Bosque said rows of asparagus are spaced 5 feet apart, but the workers harvest at their individual speeds and can maintain the required 6-foot social distancing guideline in the fields. In June, when the melon harvest begins, he may have to add more distancing measures, especially for the packers.

Del Bosque can’t prevent his workers from car-pooling because many have no other way to get to work. He can’t tell them to live with fewer people either. And while the company asks workers to stay home when sick — farmworkers in California can acquire between three and eight sick pay days per year, depending on the hours they work — sick leave doesn’t kick in for three months, so some new members of the crew aren’t protected.

Del Bosque said he offers Obamacare-level free health insurance to both his seasonal farmworkers and year-round crew after 30 days. Some also qualify for MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid, which is available to legal residents or U.S. citizens.

According to workers and their advocates however, other employers aren’t nearly as diligent.

California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) told Civil Eats it continues to respond to complaints and serious injuries and illnesses of field agricultural operations during the pandemic. Inspectors verify compliance with the field sanitation requirements and personal protective equipment, if applicable, said spokesman Frank Polizzi. He encouraged workers to call in complaints and said Cal/OSHA plans to post guidance for agricultural employers and workers on preventing the spread of COVID-19, in English this week and soon after in Spanish.

On Friday, after Monterey County issued a shelter-in-place order with sweeping exemptions for agriculture, officials in the region issued a farmworker protection advisory that was applauded by the area’s agricultural industry. And in North Carolina, another state with many guest workers and migrant workers, the health department has also issued guidelines for ag employers.

Few other counties or states have followed suit, but many workers have begun taking their own protective actions.

Alvarado, the Oxnard farmworker, said she and the others cover their faces with bandanas when they cough and buy their own gloves. After work, she changes in the car so as not to bring her clothes into the house. To learn more about COVID, she tunes in to Spanish-speaking radio stations. Last week, when she came down with a dry cough, she immediately went to the emergency room, where she was told it probably wasn’t the virus.

“I hope they can find a solution that would let farmworkers with coronavirus symptoms stay at home without losing the day’s salary or our jobs,” she said.

Education in the time of social distancing

Organizations that work directly with farmworkers have also been working on education campaigns. But the organizations are struggling with how to reach the workers because most immigrant farmworkers prefer face-to-face conversations to online ones, and some are illiterate or lack access to the internet.

For now, UFW, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, and the Center For Community Advocacy have all been turning to social media, including Facebook Live and apps such as Skype and Zoom. They’re also working with local legislators and doctors to provide more information in Spanish.

Radio Bilingue, a national Spanish-language radio network headquartered in Fresno, has been running information spots in Spanish, English, and Mixteco about coronavirus protection, COVID-19 symptoms, and what to do when a person falls ill, said broadcasting director Maria Eraña. The network has also dedicated its flagship talk show program, Linea Abierta, to discussing the pandemic, as well as producing regular updates for its public affairs talk shows and newscasts.

“Our main message,” said Eraña, “is that it’s not the time to panic. It’s time for prevention. And it’s not the time to be afraid of going to the doctor.”

• Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs [Civil Eats]

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Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images

Farm workers work, live, and travel in crowded conditions, and are being allowed few if any safety measures against COVID-19 — which puts them and the food system at risk

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats.

Late last week, Yazmin Alvarado set out for the strawberry fields near Oxnard, California anxious and afraid of catching the novel coronavirus. Part of a crew of more than 100, she knew she was at high risk.

Members of her crew work and take breaks next to each other. They lack access to soap, water, and gloves, give each other rides to the fields in overloaded cars, and many share apartments with multiple families. As a ponchadora —the person who inspects fruit quality and records each harvested box — Alvarado has constant physical contact with others.

What’s more, she and her co-workers don’t qualify for sick pay, most lack health insurance, and they desperately need the paychecks, so they don’t have the option to stay home, she told Civil Eats. And yet, Alvarado’s employer, a large California berry company, hasn’t offered any training about COVID-19, nor taken any measures to protect the crew, said the 26-year-old worker. To top it off, the government and state health departments are offering little to no information in Spanish.

“We don’t have enough information. And we’re afraid to speak out… [we] don’t want to lose any hours,” said Alvarado, whose paycheck supports her 5-year-old twin girls and unemployed husband. But the fear of contracting the virus is pervasive.

“What if someone gets sick with the virus and still comes to work,” she asks.

While California has ordered all of its residents to shelter in place to stop the virus’ spread, Alvarado’s crew and more than 800,000 other agricultural laborers in the state are exempt. Many continue working, with few or no protections, to power California’s $54 billion agriculture sector and supply the nation’s empty supermarket shelves. And while no farmworkers have been confirmed to be carrying the virus, many agricultural areas have seen confirmed cases.

While most Americans stay at home, farmworkers continue to work, designated as “essential workers” by the Department of Homeland Security. But advocates and organizers are sounding the alarm: Agricultural workers are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Nearly half lack legal work authorization and residency status, making them ineligible for essential benefits that could help them stay home when sick.

And yet the value of the agricultural labor force, which has long lived in the shadows, is also becoming much clearer to Americans than it’s ever been. While there is no evidence of COVID-19 spreading through food or food packaging, if (or perhaps when) it spreads among farmworkers, farmers say workforce gaps in the chain could exacerbate pre-existing labor shortages and lead to disruptions in the food supply.

Although consumers and government officials have now deemed immigrant workers “essential,” few resources have been dedicated to help them stave off the virus. The workers say they are confused, anxious, and unsure of how COVID-19 will impact their health, employment, and livelihoods. And with many schools suddenly shuttered, some farmworker families are also facing an impossible choice: continue to work or quit and take care of the children.

“Some farmworkers are panicking,” said Elvira Carvajal, lead community organizer in Florida for Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “There are no safety measures, there are no benefits. Families can’t afford to pay for childcare. They’re leaving [children] alone at home or taking them to the fields and leaving them in their cars. This is very dangerous.”

Risks at work and at home

Across the U.S., about 2.5 million farmworkers, most of whom are Latinx, toil on American farms. In addition, a growing number of foreign guest workers, most hailing from Mexico, are brought to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. More than 250,000 were certified nationwide in 2019, though the State Department last week decided to suspend visa processing at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Mexico, so that only returning guest workers will be allowed to come into the U.S., potentially leaving some growers short.

In some parts of the country, these workers are already busy harvesting produce—whether it’s strawberries in Southern California, citrus, asparagus, and kale in the San Joaquin Valley, or tomato, eggplant, and guavas in Florida. Others are pruning and thinning trees, training vines, transplanting, or weeding. Harvesting typically ramps up later in spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into fields and packing houses.

Some work shoulder-to-shoulder, while others are spread out in the fields, depending on the speed and the crops. Working outside may minimize the risk, experts say, but that’s not the case for packing houses and canneries, since the virus is spread by respiratory droplets and can survive on surfaces for up to three days. Those who work alone on machines seem to be the least exposed.

And while the average age for field workers is just 38 years old — and older adults and people with serious underlying medical conditions seem to be at the highest risk for severe symptoms from COVID-19 — if young farmworkers get infected (with or without symptoms) they can become vectors for the virus.

Advocates say it’s the conditions outside of work that place farmworkers in most danger. Many workers carpool to work — with four to six workers sharing a single car — or are bused to work on packed buses. And their crowded living conditions pose perhaps the biggest challenge, said Norma Ahedo, community health worker coordinator for the Salinas-based Center For Community Advocacy.

Earlier this month, Ahedo said, she did a health check at an apartment in Salinas where four farmworker families — including seven children — were living in three small bedrooms and the living room. It’s typical for an entire family to live in a room, she said. It’s also not uncommon to see two families sharing a single room with a divider down the middle, she said.

“These are small spaces, very closed in, with few windows and many people living on top of each other,” Ahedo said. “And if someone does get sick, where will they go?” (Medical experts recommend that people sick with coronavirus use a separate bedroom and bathroom, or even just maintain the safe distance of six feet.)

H-2A guest workers also live in shared grower-provided communal housing camps or cheap motels where they can easily spread the virus to each other. When a few guest workers got the mumps in Washington state last spring, the entire labor camp had to be quarantined.

Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

Celery harvesters work in close proximity on a farm in California

High anxiety, food insecurity, lack of childcare

In addition to the threat of physical illness, advocates say the virus is causing huge emotional stress in the farmworker community. Ahedo said she’s worried for the families who have to shelter in place for long periods in overcrowded living conditions.

“This is causing high anxiety in both adults and children,” she said.

Though some workers may not fully grasp their risks or know how to prevent the spread, many are very worried about how the virus will affect their jobs and livelihoods. Already, some farmers who have lost markets due to restaurants, farmers’ market, and schools closing, have reduced working hours.

Farmworkers’ financial instability is compounded by the fact that many have family members who work in other low-wage, hourly jobs hard-hit by coronavirus closures, especially in the food service industry, said Daniel Gonzales, executive director of the Center For Community Advocacy. “It’s a time of great insecurity and much anguish and anxiety for these families,” he added.

Food scarcity is also looming as several rural communities in California and Washington are reporting a lack of basic necessities, said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “They’ve told me, ‘We have nowhere to get food. The corner markets and dollar stores have empty shelves (and they aren’t restocking).’ This is creating anxiety and despair.”

An open letter to growers: Help protect your workers

Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) sent an open letter to agricultural employers and organizations urging them to take “proactive steps to ensure the safety of farm workers, protect buyers and safeguard consumers.”

The need for action is dire because most non-union farmworkers do not have health care coverage or other benefits, said Armando Elenes, the UFW’s secretary treasurer. The California Farm Bureau Federation says it’s working with ag employers to “adjust on-farm practices to account for social distancing and other measures” to assure the safety of their employees.

But a poll the UFW just completed on its Spanish-language social media platforms showed more than 90 percent of the farmworkers who responded had not been advised by their employers on best practices to resist the virus. And a UFW Facebook Live event last week attracted 18,000 views, with hundreds of farmworkers commenting that their employers had provided no information at all.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes.

Language is a major barrier to accessing information about the virus and its prevention, said Elenes. Many workers speak only Spanish, while some primarily speak Indigenous languages such as Triqui and Mixteco. And since they’re not getting information from their employers, workers turn to social media, which is ripe with conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes, said Elenes. Three states—California, Oregon, and Washington — currently offer farmworkers a limited number of sick-pay hours, he added. Despite these laws, many growers and labor contractors require doctors’ notes from workers, making it difficult for workers to access the benefit, he said. And some flat out refuse to give workers sick pay.

“If they stop working because they’re feeling ill, they no longer have a job. The growers do not guarantee their positions,” said Treviño-Sauceda. Some, she added, may also avoid doctors because they fear questions about immigration status or the Trump administration’s new public charge rule, which bars people who use certain benefits, including Medicaid, from converting their temporary immigration status into a green card.

The UFW’s open letter advocates extending state-required sick pay to 40 hours or more and removing the caps on accruing sick pay, eliminating the 90-day waiting period for newly employed farmworkers to be eligible for sick pay, and placing workers who are infected or whose family members are infected with COVID-19 on paid administrative leave for the duration of their illnesses.

The letter also asks growers to provide basic information and training to workers, such as encouraging them to wash their hands and avoid touching their faces.

Training offered to some, others are on their own

Some farmers are starting to provide training and are instituting additional safety measures. Last week at Del Bosque Farms on the west side of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, grower Joe Del Bosque and his wife held a tailgate meeting in Spanish for about 60 workers in his asparagus harvest crew to discuss coronavirus prevention and food safety measures. The grower said his company received resources from AgSafe, a nonprofit in Modesto that provides health and safety training.

Del Bosque, who farms about 2,200 acres of mostly organic produce — including several kinds of melons and asparagus — said his employees are his greatest concern. His business, after all, depends on them showing up.

“We’re an essential industry, at this time and always, so we need to make sure our workers are comfortable knowing they can come to work and still be protected,” he said.

Del Bosque’s company offers clean restrooms with fully equipped hand-washing stations. It advises workers to regularly scrub their hands with soap, to sneeze into their elbows, and to stay home when ill — measures that have been part of the company’s food safety program since before the pandemic. In addition, Del Bosque said he has instituted new social distancing measures and a rule about not touching other workers.

“We understand how diseases can be transmitted not just from one worker to another, but also through the produce,” he said. “We simply want to reinforce what we’ve already been doing for many years.”

Del Bosque said rows of asparagus are spaced 5 feet apart, but the workers harvest at their individual speeds and can maintain the required 6-foot social distancing guideline in the fields. In June, when the melon harvest begins, he may have to add more distancing measures, especially for the packers.

Del Bosque can’t prevent his workers from car-pooling because many have no other way to get to work. He can’t tell them to live with fewer people either. And while the company asks workers to stay home when sick — farmworkers in California can acquire between three and eight sick pay days per year, depending on the hours they work — sick leave doesn’t kick in for three months, so some new members of the crew aren’t protected.

Del Bosque said he offers Obamacare-level free health insurance to both his seasonal farmworkers and year-round crew after 30 days. Some also qualify for MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid, which is available to legal residents or U.S. citizens.

According to workers and their advocates however, other employers aren’t nearly as diligent.

California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) told Civil Eats it continues to respond to complaints and serious injuries and illnesses of field agricultural operations during the pandemic. Inspectors verify compliance with the field sanitation requirements and personal protective equipment, if applicable, said spokesman Frank Polizzi. He encouraged workers to call in complaints and said Cal/OSHA plans to post guidance for agricultural employers and workers on preventing the spread of COVID-19, in English this week and soon after in Spanish.

On Friday, after Monterey County issued a shelter-in-place order with sweeping exemptions for agriculture, officials in the region issued a farmworker protection advisory that was applauded by the area’s agricultural industry. And in North Carolina, another state with many guest workers and migrant workers, the health department has also issued guidelines for ag employers.

Few other counties or states have followed suit, but many workers have begun taking their own protective actions.

Alvarado, the Oxnard farmworker, said she and the others cover their faces with bandanas when they cough and buy their own gloves. After work, she changes in the car so as not to bring her clothes into the house. To learn more about COVID, she tunes in to Spanish-speaking radio stations. Last week, when she came down with a dry cough, she immediately went to the emergency room, where she was told it probably wasn’t the virus.

“I hope they can find a solution that would let farmworkers with coronavirus symptoms stay at home without losing the day’s salary or our jobs,” she said.

Education in the time of social distancing

Organizations that work directly with farmworkers have also been working on education campaigns. But the organizations are struggling with how to reach the workers because most immigrant farmworkers prefer face-to-face conversations to online ones, and some are illiterate or lack access to the internet.

For now, UFW, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, and the Center For Community Advocacy have all been turning to social media, including Facebook Live and apps such as Skype and Zoom. They’re also working with local legislators and doctors to provide more information in Spanish.

Radio Bilingue, a national Spanish-language radio network headquartered in Fresno, has been running information spots in Spanish, English, and Mixteco about coronavirus protection, COVID-19 symptoms, and what to do when a person falls ill, said broadcasting director Maria Eraña. The network has also dedicated its flagship talk show program, Linea Abierta, to discussing the pandemic, as well as producing regular updates for its public affairs talk shows and newscasts.

“Our main message,” said Eraña, “is that it’s not the time to panic. It’s time for prevention. And it’s not the time to be afraid of going to the doctor.”

• Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs [Civil Eats]

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Alex de Waal, www.transcend.org July 5th, 2017 

excerpt

NOTE: Starvation is a tool used throughout history to weaken and destroy opponents. In 1779, General George Washington ordered his troops to wipe out Native Americans in New York, saying, “Destroying not only the men but the settlements and the plantations is very important. All sown fields must be destroyed and new plantations and harvests must be prevented. What lead can not do will be done by hunger and winter.” S. Brian Willson refers to the genocide of Native Americans as the “original holocaust.” Some say it was the original holocaust that was the model for the Jewish Holocaust. I raise this because it is an important history that we need to recognize in the United States. -Margaret Flowers

15 Jun 2017 – In its primary use, the verb ‘to starve’ is transitive: it’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase ‘man-made famine’ as if such events were unusual.

Over the last half-century, famines have become rarer and less lethal. Last year I came close to thinking that they might have come to an end. But this year, it’s possible that four or five famines will occur simultaneously. ‘We stand at a critical point in history,’ the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the former Tory MP Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council in March, in one of his last statements before stepping down: ‘Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.’ It’s a ‘critical’ point, I’d argue, not because it is the worst crisis in our lifetime, but because a long decline – lasting seven decades – in mass death from starvation has come to an end; in fact it has been reversed.

O’Brien had no illusions about the causes of the four famines, actual or imminent, that he singled out in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. In each case, the main culprits are wars that result in the destruction of farms, livestock herds and markets, and ‘explicit’ decisions by the military to block humanitarian aid.

[...]

The organisation I work for, the World Peace Foundation, has compiled a catalogue of every case of famine or forced mass starvation since 1870 that killed at least 100,000 people. There are 61 entries on the list, responsible for the deaths of at least 105 million people. About two thirds of the famine deaths in this period were in Asia, about 20 per cent in Europe and the USSR, just under 10 per cent in Africa.

The biggest killers were famines that resulted from political decisions, among them the Gilded Age famines, the Great War famines in the Middle East, including the forced starvation of a million Armenians, the Russian Civil War famine, Stalin’s starvation of Ukraine from 1932 until 1934 (now known as the Holodomor), the Nazi ‘hunger plan’ for the Soviet Union, the famines during the Chinese Civil War, the starvation inflicted by the Japanese during the Second World War, and by Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958-62, the largest famine on record, which killed at least 25 million.

*

These political famines seem scarcely to register in our collective imagination. They are strikingly absent too from the books which construct theories of famine and policies for food security. Even Amartya Sen did not take them into account when developing his ‘entitlement theory’ of famine causation in Poverty and Famine (1981), which overturned explanations of famine based exclusively on food shortage. In the WPF’s catalogue of great famines, 72 million deaths occurred when famine was being used as an instrument of genocide or recklessly inflicted by government policy. Ignoring these famines, or ascribing them to natural disasters, is a major error.

Another blind spot is even more remarkable: the neglect of starvation on the part of genocide scholars. It’s striking because the intellectual father of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, was keenly interested in the politics of food and famine. In fact, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) he devoted more space to starvation and related deprivation than to mass killing. 

Elaborating on the physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide, he began by describing ‘racial discrimination in feeding’ and detailed Nazi guidelines specifying the portion of basic nutrients allocated to different groups, ranging in the case of carbohydrates from 100 per cent for Germans to 76-77 per cent for Poles, 38 per cent for Greeks and 27 per cent for Jews.

The second mechanism Lemkin described was the endangering of health by overcrowding in ghettos, withholding medicine and heating fuel, and transporting people in cattle trucks and freight cars.

The third was mass killings, which he described in a single paragraph.

When Lemkin began writing his book, starvation was the Nazis’ most effective instrument of mass murder. The rationale for Operation Barbarossa was that the Ukraine and southern Russia were resource-rich lands that would provide Lebensraum for the German people. Central to the planning of Barbarossa was the question of how to feed the Wehrmacht. At the post-Nuremberg trial of senior civil servants in 1947, the prosecution reproduced a document entitled ‘Memorandum on the Result of Today’s Conference with the State Secretaries concerning Barbarossa’, dated 2 May 1941, just a few weeks before the invasion. It begins: ‘1. The war can only be continued if the entire armed forces are fed from Russia during the third year of the war. 2. As a result, there is no doubt that “x” million people [zig Millionen Menschen] will starve to death if we take out from the country whatever we need.’ It was written by Herbert Backe, state secretary of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus eaters’ – should be starved to death.

The Hungerplan, to give it its German proper name, began with the forcible starving of Soviet prisoners of war. Crowded into vast camps without any shelter, 1.3 million died in the four months after the invasion. About 2.5 million had died this way by the end of the war. But the Hungerplan proved impossible to implement fully. Starving people in large numbers is extremely hard work. Stalin’s administration of famine in Ukraine a decade earlier had called on the entire apparatus of the Communist Party, and the German invaders had no such infrastructure. They besieged Leningrad, where a million died. In the occupied cities of Kiev and Kharkov they restricted food supplies and similar numbers perished. But the peasants, who had honed their survival skills in two post-1917 famines, didn’t succumb easily. German soldiers also relied on locally grown food, and so Backe’s office ordered that peasants be permitted to carry on producing crops. The hunger planners fell short of their original target by more than twenty million. [TEN MILLION DIED]

Even at this reduced scale, the Hungerplan was a crime comparable in numerical terms to the Final Solution. Indeed, forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust. Eighty thousand Jews starved to death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz from May 1940 to December 1943, testifying before the Nuremberg Tribunal, estimated that ‘in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time 2,500,000 persons were exterminated and that a further 500,000 died from disease and starvation.’ In The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Lizzie Collingham makes the point that the failure to starve ‘useless eaters’ in sufficient numbers, sufficiently quickly, became a rationale for expediting their mass murder by killing squads and gas chambers.

Backe was interrogated but by the time the Ministries Trial began in 1947, he had committed suicide, fearing he would be handed over to the Soviets. His predecessor as minister for food and agriculture, Walther Darré, an ideologue of ‘blood and soil’ and aggressive eastward expansion, was found guilty of plunder and despoliation, and sentenced to seven years in prison but released after two. Though Backe’s memo was produced as evidence, the Hungerplan was not mentioned by name. The Allies were in no hurry to criminalise famine or economic warfare.

[WESTERN CRAP THINKING] The legal difficulties in prosecuting starvation as a crime included the need to determine whether starvation was itself unlawful, and if it was what sort of a crime it might be, and how guilt might be proved. The laws of war did not prohibit starvation in pursuit of a military goal: it was legitimate to starve a besieged city into submission, or to blockade an entire country. In the post-Nuremberg High Command Trial, American prosecutors brought charges against Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb for crimes committed during the siege of Leningrad. But there was no legal basis on which to find Leeb guilty of starving the city, or even of sustaining the pressure of hunger on the residents by firing at civilians trying to leave. The judges found Leeb’s orders extreme but not criminal, though they added that they wished the law were otherwise. They cited the Lieber Code – drawn up for the Union army in the American Civil War – which permitted starvation if it hastened military victory. In October 1948, Leeb was sentenced to time served, for transmitting the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order, and released.

By the time of the war crimes trials, the British navy was already a seasoned exponent of maritime bockade. In 1909 the House of Lords refused to ratify the London Declaration on the laws of naval war, on the grounds that doing so would restrict the navy’s ability to block the flow of foodstuffs to an enemy. Establishing an international court to determine the legality of intercepting ships on the high seas, the Lords felt, would amount to a contravention of British sovereignty. Britain blockaded Germany during the First World War, and about 750,000 German civilians died of hunger. That blockade was kept in place (and tightened) for eight months after the Armistice in order to compel the Germans to sign the Versailles Treaty. In 1942 Churchill came under heavy pressure to lift the blockade on Greece, and only reluctantly and minimally relented – an episode that resulted in the foundation of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, now known as Oxfam. The following year, the cabinet made feeding the British Isles a higher priority than preventing famine in Bengal, a decision that cost as many as three million lives. Most tellingly, the name chosen for the aerial mining of Japanese harbours in 1945 by the US Air Force was Operation Starvation. [F: white people deaths noted under Churchill]

The Nuremberg Charter didn’t (despite Lemkin’s urging) make genocide an indictable offence, but it did include ‘crimes against humanity’. Starvation-related prosecutions were possible under Article 6, which classed ‘inhumane acts’, ‘extermination’ and ‘persecution’ as ‘crimes against humanity’. There’s a rationale for this: depriving someone of food can be a form of torture, an infliction of suffering pure and simple or with some ulterior goal in mind (such as forcing hungry persons to abandon their villages). Had the drafters of the charter made starvation a crime in its own right, there would have been uncomfortable implications for the Allies, given their own use of blockades. The final judgments at Nuremberg use the term ‘starvation’, but it is ancillary to the wider crimes committed by the Nazi leadership.

There are extraordinary evidentiary problems in prosecuting cases of starvation as murder (or extermination). Only in the case of prisoners, where the victims and their food supplies are entirely controlled by the jailer, can there be proof beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator is responsible for the death of the victim. In other instances, the defence could argue that the victim failed to avail himself of opportunities to find food or that he might have survived were it not for other factors over which the defendant had no control, such as crop failures, high food prices, or infectious disease. Yet no charges were brought at Nuremberg for the killing by forced starvation of millions of prisoners of war.

More: Popular Resistance

As US Meat Workers Fall Sick and Supplies Dwindle, Exports to China Soar

U.S. President Donald Trump ordered meat processing plants to stay open to protect the nation’s food supply even as workers got sick and died. Yet the plants have increasingly been exporting to China while U.S. consumers face shortages, a Reuters analysis of government data showed.

Trump, who is in an acrimonious public dispute with Beijing over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act on April 28 to keep plants open. Now he is facing criticism from some lawmakers, consumers and plant employees for putting workers at risk in part to help ensure China’s meat supply.

“We know that over time exports are critically important. I think we need to focus on meeting domestic demand at this point,” said Mike Naig, the agriculture secretary in the top U.S. pork-producing state of Iowa who supported Trump’s order.

Processors including Smithfield Foods, owned by China’s WH Group Ltd, Brazilian-owned JBS USA [JBS.UL] and Tyson Foods Inc temporarily closed about 20 U.S. meat plants as the virus infected thousands of employees, prompting meatpackers and grocers to warn of shortages. Some plants have resumed limited operations as workers afraid of getting sick stay home. 

The disruptions mean consumers could see 30% less meat in supermarkets by the end of May, at prices 20% higher than last year, according to Will Sawyer, lead economist at agricultural lender CoBank.

While pork supplies tightened as the number of pigs slaughtered each day plunged by about 40% since mid-March, shipments of American pork to China more than quadrupled over the same period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. https://tmsnrt.rs/2YLF1XN

Smithfield, which China’s WH Group bought for $4.7 billion in 2013, was the biggest U.S. exporter to China from January to March, according to Panjiva, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Smithfield shipped at least 13,680 tonnes by sea in March, Panjiva said, citing its most recent data.

Smithfield, the world’s biggest pork processor, said in April that U.S. plant closures were pushing retailers “perilously close to the edge” on supplies.

The company is now retooling its namesake pork plant in Smithfield, Virginia, to supply fresh pork, bacon and ham to more U.S. consumers, according to a statement. The move is an about-face after the company reconfigured the plant last year to process hog carcasses for the Chinese market, employees, local officials and industry sources told Reuters.

The Virginia facility currently serves export markets like China and domestic customers, according to Smithfield. Most U.S. pork processors routinely export products to more than 40 international markets, company spokeswoman Keira Lombardo said.

The virus infected about 850 employees at another Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Across the U.S. industry, about 5,000 infections and 20 deaths occurred, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That tragic outcome is all the worse when the food being processed is not going to our nation’s families,” said U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut. “That is what the Defense Production Act is all about: protecting America’s national interests, not China’s.”

Pork processor Fresh Mark resumed making bacon and ham for global customers at a Salem, Ohio, plant it shut in April over coronavirus cases.

“If we start having a shortage in America, I think it should stay here,” said Bruce Fatherly, a maintenance worker at the plant and member of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

Fresh Mark said exports are a small part of its business.

WHOLE HOGS

The supply concerns could not have been foreseen when Trump signed a deal in January to ease a trade war he started with Beijing two years earlier. China promised to increase purchases of U.S. farm goods by at least $12.5 billion in 2020 and $19.5 billion in 2021, over the 2017 level of $24 billion.

The White House declined to comment. The USDA and U.S. Trade Representative’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

China increased its purchases because of its dire need for protein after a pig disease called African swine fever led to the death of half the country’s herd over the past two years. Beijing lifted a nearly five-year ban on U.S. chicken imports in November and also waived retaliatory tariffs on meat shipments to help boost supplies.

Year-to-date, about 31% of U.S. pork has been exported, totaling about 838,000 tonnes, according to the U.S. Meat Export Federation. One-third of that volume went to China, accounting for more than 10% of total first-quarter production, the industry group said.

Carcasses, which include most of the pig, were the top product shipped to China in January and February, according to USDA. Loads also include feet and organs that many Americans do not eat.

Exports to China set a record for the period from January to March, and shipments to all destinations in March set a record for any month, according to USDA.

JBS, which produces pork, beef and chicken, told Reuters it reduced exports to focus on meeting U.S. demand during the pandemic. About 280 employees at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, have been infected with the virus, and seven died, union officials said.

“I think we need to take care of our country and our needs first,” said Kim Cordova, president of the local United Food and Commercial Workers International Union that represents plant employees.

Tyson Foods did not respond to requests for comment about exports.

Suppliers like Tyson have limited meat products for retailers because of plant closures. Kroger Co and Costco Wholesale Corp, meanwhile, restricted shoppers’ meat purchases.

U.S. farmers, who struggled financially during the trade war with Beijing, say they still need importing countries, including China, to buy their pork. Prior the pandemic, they grappled with an oversupply of hogs.

“There’s enough meat for all channels if we could get these plants back up and rolling,” said Brian Duncan, a hog farmer and vice president of the Illinois Farm Bureau.

(Additional reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago and Dominique Patton in Beijing; editing by Caroline Stauffer and Edward Tobin)

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Farm Workers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs added to Google Docs

Farm Workers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs

 Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images

Farm workers work, live, and travel in crowded conditions, and are being allowed few if any safety measures against COVID-19 — which puts them and the food system at risk

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats.

Late last week, Yazmin Alvarado set out for the strawberry fields near Oxnard, California anxious and afraid of catching the novel coronavirus. Part of a crew of more than 100, she knew she was at high risk.

Members of her crew work and take breaks next to each other. They lack access to soap, water, and gloves, give each other rides to the fields in overloaded cars, and many share apartments with multiple families. As a ponchadora —the person who inspects fruit quality and records each harvested box — Alvarado has constant physical contact with others.

What’s more, she and her co-workers don’t qualify for sick pay, most lack health insurance, and they desperately need the paychecks, so they don’t have the option to stay home, she told Civil Eats. And yet, Alvarado’s employer, a large California berry company, hasn’t offered any training about COVID-19, nor taken any measures to protect the crew, said the 26-year-old worker. To top it off, the government and state health departments are offering little to no information in Spanish.

“We don’t have enough information. And we’re afraid to speak out… [we] don’t want to lose any hours,” said Alvarado, whose paycheck supports her 5-year-old twin girls and unemployed husband. But the fear of contracting the virus is pervasive.

“What if someone gets sick with the virus and still comes to work,” she asks.

While California has ordered all of its residents to shelter in place to stop the virus’ spread, Alvarado’s crew and more than 800,000 other agricultural laborers in the state are exempt. Many continue working, with few or no protections, to power California’s $54 billion agriculture sector and supply the nation’s empty supermarket shelves. And while no farmworkers have been confirmed to be carrying the virus, many agricultural areas have seen confirmed cases.

While most Americans stay at home, farmworkers continue to work, designated as “essential workers” by the Department of Homeland Security. But advocates and organizers are sounding the alarm: Agricultural workers are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Nearly half lack legal work authorization and residency status, making them ineligible for essential benefits that could help them stay home when sick.

And yet the value of the agricultural labor force, which has long lived in the shadows, is also becoming much clearer to Americans than it’s ever been. While there is no evidence of COVID-19 spreading through food or food packaging, if (or perhaps when) it spreads among farmworkers, farmers say workforce gaps in the chain could exacerbate pre-existing labor shortages and lead to disruptions in the food supply.

Although consumers and government officials have now deemed immigrant workers “essential,” few resources have been dedicated to help them stave off the virus. The workers say they are confused, anxious, and unsure of how COVID-19 will impact their health, employment, and livelihoods. And with many schools suddenly shuttered, some farmworker families are also facing an impossible choice: continue to work or quit and take care of the children.

“Some farmworkers are panicking,” said Elvira Carvajal, lead community organizer in Florida for Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “There are no safety measures, there are no benefits. Families can’t afford to pay for childcare. They’re leaving [children] alone at home or taking them to the fields and leaving them in their cars. This is very dangerous.”

Risks at work and at home

Across the U.S., about 2.5 million farmworkers, most of whom are Latinx, toil on American farms. In addition, a growing number of foreign guest workers, most hailing from Mexico, are brought to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. More than 250,000 were certified nationwide in 2019, though the State Department last week decided to suspend visa processing at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Mexico, so that only returning guest workers will be allowed to come into the U.S., potentially leaving some growers short.

In some parts of the country, these workers are already busy harvesting produce—whether it’s strawberries in Southern California, citrus, asparagus, and kale in the San Joaquin Valley, or tomato, eggplant, and guavas in Florida. Others are pruning and thinning trees, training vines, transplanting, or weeding. Harvesting typically ramps up later in spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into fields and packing houses.

Some work shoulder-to-shoulder, while others are spread out in the fields, depending on the speed and the crops. Working outside may minimize the risk, experts say, but that’s not the case for packing houses and canneries, since the virus is spread by respiratory droplets and can survive on surfaces for up to three days. Those who work alone on machines seem to be the least exposed.

And while the average age for field workers is just 38 years old — and older adults and people with serious underlying medical conditions seem to be at the highest risk for severe symptoms from COVID-19 — if young farmworkers get infected (with or without symptoms) they can become vectors for the virus.

Advocates say it’s the conditions outside of work that place farmworkers in most danger. Many workers carpool to work — with four to six workers sharing a single car — or are bused to work on packed buses. And their crowded living conditions pose perhaps the biggest challenge, said Norma Ahedo, community health worker coordinator for the Salinas-based Center For Community Advocacy.

Earlier this month, Ahedo said, she did a health check at an apartment in Salinas where four farmworker families — including seven children — were living in three small bedrooms and the living room. It’s typical for an entire family to live in a room, she said. It’s also not uncommon to see two families sharing a single room with a divider down the middle, she said.

“These are small spaces, very closed in, with few windows and many people living on top of each other,” Ahedo said. “And if someone does get sick, where will they go?” (Medical experts recommend that people sick with coronavirus use a separate bedroom and bathroom, or even just maintain the safe distance of six feet.)

H-2A guest workers also live in shared grower-provided communal housing camps or cheap motels where they can easily spread the virus to each other. When a few guest workers got the mumps in Washington state last spring, the entire labor camp had to be quarantined.

 Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images Celery harvesters work in close proximity on a farm in California High anxiety, food insecurity, lack of childcare

In addition to the threat of physical illness, advocates say the virus is causing huge emotional stress in the farmworker community. Ahedo said she’s worried for the families who have to shelter in place for long periods in overcrowded living conditions.

“This is causing high anxiety in both adults and children,” she said.

Though some workers may not fully grasp their risks or know how to prevent the spread, many are very worried about how the virus will affect their jobs and livelihoods. Already, some farmers who have lost markets due to restaurants, farmers’ market, and schools closing, have reduced working hours.

Farmworkers’ financial instability is compounded by the fact that many have family members who work in other low-wage, hourly jobs hard-hit by coronavirus closures, especially in the food service industry, said Daniel Gonzales, executive director of the Center For Community Advocacy. “It’s a time of great insecurity and much anguish and anxiety for these families,” he added.

Food scarcity is also looming as several rural communities in California and Washington are reporting a lack of basic necessities, said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “They’ve told me, ‘We have nowhere to get food. The corner markets and dollar stores have empty shelves (and they aren’t restocking).’ This is creating anxiety and despair.”

An open letter to growers: Help protect your workers

Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) sent an open letter to agricultural employers and organizations urging them to take “proactive steps to ensure the safety of farm workers, protect buyers and safeguard consumers.”

The need for action is dire because most non-union farmworkers do not have health care coverage or other benefits, said Armando Elenes, the UFW’s secretary treasurer. The California Farm Bureau Federation says it’s working with ag employers to “adjust on-farm practices to account for social distancing and other measures” to assure the safety of their employees.

But a poll the UFW just completed on its Spanish-language social media platforms showed more than 90 percent of the farmworkers who responded had not been advised by their employers on best practices to resist the virus. And a UFW Facebook Live event last week attracted 18,000 views, with hundreds of farmworkers commenting that their employers had provided no information at all.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes.

Language is a major barrier to accessing information about the virus and its prevention, said Elenes. Many workers speak only Spanish, while some primarily speak Indigenous languages such as Triqui and Mixteco. And since they’re not getting information from their employers, workers turn to social media, which is ripe with conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes, said Elenes. Three states—California, Oregon, and Washington — currently offer farmworkers a limited number of sick-pay hours, he added. Despite these laws, many growers and labor contractors require doctors’ notes from workers, making it difficult for workers to access the benefit, he said. And some flat out refuse to give workers sick pay.

“If they stop working because they’re feeling ill, they no longer have a job. The growers do not guarantee their positions,” said Treviño-Sauceda. Some, she added, may also avoid doctors because they fear questions about immigration status or the Trump administration’s new public charge rule, which bars people who use certain benefits, including Medicaid, from converting their temporary immigration status into a green card.

The UFW’s open letter advocates extending state-required sick pay to 40 hours or more and removing the caps on accruing sick pay, eliminating the 90-day waiting period for newly employed farmworkers to be eligible for sick pay, and placing workers who are infected or whose family members are infected with COVID-19 on paid administrative leave for the duration of their illnesses.

The letter also asks growers to provide basic information and training to workers, such as encouraging them to wash their hands and avoid touching their faces.

Training offered to some, others are on their own

Some farmers are starting to provide training and are instituting additional safety measures. Last week at Del Bosque Farms on the west side of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, grower Joe Del Bosque and his wife held a tailgate meeting in Spanish for about 60 workers in his asparagus harvest crew to discuss coronavirus prevention and food safety measures. The grower said his company received resources from AgSafe, a nonprofit in Modesto that provides health and safety training.

Del Bosque, who farms about 2,200 acres of mostly organic produce — including several kinds of melons and asparagus — said his employees are his greatest concern. His business, after all, depends on them showing up.

“We’re an essential industry, at this time and always, so we need to make sure our workers are comfortable knowing they can come to work and still be protected,” he said.

Del Bosque’s company offers clean restrooms with fully equipped hand-washing stations. It advises workers to regularly scrub their hands with soap, to sneeze into their elbows, and to stay home when ill — measures that have been part of the company’s food safety program since before the pandemic. In addition, Del Bosque said he has instituted new social distancing measures and a rule about not touching other workers.

“We understand how diseases can be transmitted not just from one worker to another, but also through the produce,” he said. “We simply want to reinforce what we’ve already been doing for many years.”

Del Bosque said rows of asparagus are spaced 5 feet apart, but the workers harvest at their individual speeds and can maintain the required 6-foot social distancing guideline in the fields. In June, when the melon harvest begins, he may have to add more distancing measures, especially for the packers.

Del Bosque can’t prevent his workers from car-pooling because many have no other way to get to work. He can’t tell them to live with fewer people either. And while the company asks workers to stay home when sick — farmworkers in California can acquire between three and eight sick pay days per year, depending on the hours they work — sick leave doesn’t kick in for three months, so some new members of the crew aren’t protected.

Del Bosque said he offers Obamacare-level free health insurance to both his seasonal farmworkers and year-round crew after 30 days. Some also qualify for MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid, which is available to legal residents or U.S. citizens.

According to workers and their advocates however, other employers aren’t nearly as diligent.

California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) told Civil Eats it continues to respond to complaints and serious injuries and illnesses of field agricultural operations during the pandemic. Inspectors verify compliance with the field sanitation requirements and personal protective equipment, if applicable, said spokesman Frank Polizzi. He encouraged workers to call in complaints and said Cal/OSHA plans to post guidance for agricultural employers and workers on preventing the spread of COVID-19, in English this week and soon after in Spanish.

On Friday, after Monterey County issued a shelter-in-place order with sweeping exemptions for agriculture, officials in the region issued a farmworker protection advisory that was applauded by the area’s agricultural industry. And in North Carolina, another state with many guest workers and migrant workers, the health department has also issued guidelines for ag employers.

Few other counties or states have followed suit, but many workers have begun taking their own protective actions.

Alvarado, the Oxnard farmworker, said she and the others cover their faces with bandanas when they cough and buy their own gloves. After work, she changes in the car so as not to bring her clothes into the house. To learn more about COVID, she tunes in to Spanish-speaking radio stations. Last week, when she came down with a dry cough, she immediately went to the emergency room, where she was told it probably wasn’t the virus.

“I hope they can find a solution that would let farmworkers with coronavirus symptoms stay at home without losing the day’s salary or our jobs,” she said.

Education in the time of social distancing

Organizations that work directly with farmworkers have also been working on education campaigns. But the organizations are struggling with how to reach the workers because most immigrant farmworkers prefer face-to-face conversations to online ones, and some are illiterate or lack access to the internet.

For now, UFW, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, and the Center For Community Advocacy have all been turning to social media, including Facebook Live and apps such as Skype and Zoom. They’re also working with local legislators and doctors to provide more information in Spanish.

Radio Bilingue, a national Spanish-language radio network headquartered in Fresno, has been running information spots in Spanish, English, and Mixteco about coronavirus protection, COVID-19 symptoms, and what to do when a person falls ill, said broadcasting director Maria Eraña. The network has also dedicated its flagship talk show program, Linea Abierta, to discussing the pandemic, as well as producing regular updates for its public affairs talk shows and newscasts.

“Our main message,” said Eraña, “is that it’s not the time to panic. It’s time for prevention. And it’s not the time to be afraid of going to the doctor.”

• Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs [Civil Eats]

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/3/26/21194074/coronavirus-risk-farm-workers-farmers

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Thursday, April 8, 2021

Study: Drought-breaking rains more rare, erratic in US West (AP) Rainstorms grew more erratic and droughts much longer across most of the U.S. West over the past half-century as climate change warmed the planet, according to a sweeping government study released Tuesday that concludes the situation is worsening. The most dramatic changes were recorded in the desert Southwest, where the average dry period between rainstorms grew from about 30 days in the 1970s to 45 days between storms now, said Joel Biederman, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Southwest Watershed Research Center in Tucson, Arizona. The consequences of the intense dry periods that pummeled areas of the West in recent years were severe—more intense and dangerous wildfires, parched croplands and not enough vegetation to support livestock and wildlife. The study comes with almost two-thirds of the contiguous U.S. beset by abnormally dry conditions. Warm temperatures forecast for the next several months could make it the worst spring drought in almost a decade, affecting roughly 74 million people across the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

Survey: Even as schools reopen, many students learn remotely (AP) Large numbers of students are not returning to the classroom even as more schools reopen for full-time, in-person learning, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Biden administration. The findings reflect a nation that has been locked in debate over the safety of reopening schools. Even as national COVID-19 rates continued to ebb in February, key measures around reopening schools barely budged. Nearly 46% of public schools offered five days a week of in-person to all students in February, according to the survey, but just 34% of students were learning full-time in the classroom. The gap was most pronounced among older K-12 students, with just 29% of eighth graders getting five days a week of learning at school. With the new findings, President Joe Biden came no closer to meeting his goal of having most elementary schools open five days a week in his first 100 days. Just shy of half the nation’s schools offered full-time learning in February, roughly the same share as the previous month.

Off Grid (Pew Research Center) Despite increasing access across the country, still 7 percent of U.S. adults say they do not use the internet, according to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center. This includes about 25 percent of people aged 65 and up, about 14 percent of people in households earning less than $30,000 per year and about 10 percent of rural households. In 2000, 48 percent of Americans said they didn’t use the internet, which fell to 32 percent in 2005, 24 percent in 2010 and 15 percent by 2015.

Global COVID-19 death toll surpasses 3 million amid new infections resurgence (Reuters) Coronavirus-related deaths worldwide crossed 3 million on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally, as the latest global resurgence of COVID-19 infections is challenging vaccination efforts across the globe. Worldwide COVID-19 deaths are rising once again, especially in Brazil and India. Health officials blame more infectious variants that were first detected in the United Kingdom and South Africa, along with public fatigue with lockdowns and other restrictions.

Devastation From Storms Fuels Migration in Honduras (NYT) Children pry at the dirt with sticks, trying to dig out parts of homes that have sunk below ground. Their parents, unable to feed them, scavenge the rubble for remnants of roofs to sell for scrap metal. They live on top of the mud that swallowed fridges, stoves, beds—their entire lives buried beneath them. “We are doomed here,” said Magdalena Flores, a mother of seven, standing on a mattress that peeked out from the dirt where her house used to be. “The desperation, the sadness, that’s what makes you migrate.” People have long left Honduras for the United States, fleeing gang violence, economic misery and the indifference of a government run by a president accused of ties to drug traffickers. Then last fall, two hurricanes hit impoverished areas of Honduras in rapid succession, striking more than four million people across the nation—nearly half the population—and leveling entire neighborhoods. “People aren’t migrating; they’re fleeing,” said César Ramos, of the Mennonite Social Action Commission, a group providing aid to people affected by the storms. “These people have lost everything, even their hope.”

Leaders of Russia and China tighten their grips (AP) They’re not leaders for life—not technically, at least. But in political reality, the powerful tenures of China’s Xi Jinping and, as of this week, Russia’s Vladimir Putin are looking as if they will extend much deeper into the 21st century—even as the two superpowers whose destinies they steer gather more clout with each passing year. What’s more, as they consolidate political control at home, sometimes with harsh measures, they’re working together more substantively than ever in a growing challenge to the West and the world’s other superpower, the United States. This week, Putin signed a law allowing him to potentially hold onto power until 2036. The 68-year-old Russian president, who has been in power for more than two decades—longer than any other Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin—pushed through a constitutional vote last year allowing him to run again in 2024 when his current six-year term ends. He has overseen a systematic crackdown on dissent. In China, Xi, who came to power in 2012, has imposed even tighter controls on the already repressive political scene, emerging as one of his nation’s most powerful leaders in the seven decades of Communist Party rule that began with Mao Zedong’s often-brutal regime. Under Xi, the government has rounded up, imprisoned or silenced intellectuals, legal activists and other voices, cracked down on Hong Kong’s opposition and used security forces to suppress calls for minority rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia.

US military cites rising risk of Chinese move against Taiwan (AP) The American military is warning that China is probably accelerating its timetable for capturing control of Taiwan, the island democracy that has been the chief source of tension between Washington and Beijing for decades and is widely seen as the most likely trigger for a potentially catastrophic U.S.-China war. The worry about Taiwan comes as China wields new strength from years of military buildup. It has become more aggressive with Taiwan and more assertive in sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea. Beijing also has become more confrontational with Washington; senior Chinese officials traded sharp and unusually public barbs with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in talks in Alaska last month. A military move against Taiwan, however, would be a test of U.S. support for the island that Beijing views as a breakaway province. For the Biden administration, it could present the choice of abandoning a friendly, democratic entity or risking what could become an all-out war over a cause that is not on the radar of most Americans. The United States has long pledged to help Taiwan defend itself, but it has deliberately left unclear how far it would go in response to a Chinese attack.

Myanmar teeters toward state collapse and civil war (Washington Post) On Tuesday, protesters spilled metaphorical blood on the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city. They sprayed and splashed red paint on roads, pavement and bus stops across town to mark the death toll exacted by security forces on demonstrators standing against the Feb. 1 coup carried out by the country’s junta. At least 570 people, including more than 40 children, have been killed in two months of unrest. More than 2,720 politicians, activists and civil society figures have been detained by authorities. At least 25 journalists are in detention, while others covering protests have been brutalized by state forces. On Tuesday, police and soldiers in Yangon carted off Zarganar, the country’s most well-known comedian, in an army vehicle on unspecified charges.      Last week, authorities further tightened curbs on broadband access, ordering private providers to suspend wireless data services. According to one research firm, Internet shutdowns over recent months in Myanmar may have already cost the local economy close to $1 billion. That’s a price the regime appears happy to pay to deter protesters from coordinating their actions and disseminating further information. Undaunted, dissidents have taken to older forms of communication, launching rogue radio stations and spreading leaflets urging a national boycott of next week’s official state celebration of Thingyan, Myanmar’s traditional new year.      Still, the resilience and determination of the protesters “is not unambiguously good news, because the military junta also will not give up, no matter the cost, leaving little hope of salvaging Myanmar’s political liberalization, economic reform, and development progress during a decade of civilian rule,” wrote Thitinan Pongsudhirak, an esteemed political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. “Instead, the country faces the imminent threat of economic collapse, state implosion, and internal strife—perhaps even full-fledged civil war.”

A Murky, Violent Limbo in Syria (NYT) Among the millions of Syrians who fled as the government bombed their towns, destroyed their homes and killed their loved ones are 150 families squatting in a soccer stadium in the northwestern city of Idlib, sheltering in rickety tents under the stands or in the rocky courtyard. More than 1,300 similar camps dot Syria’s last bastions under rebel control, eating up farmland, stretching along irrigation canals and filling lots next to apartment buildings where refugee families squat in damaged units with no windows. On a rare visit to Idlib Province, examples abounded of shocked and impoverished people trapped in a murky and often violent limbo. Stuck between a wall to prevent them from fleeing across the nearby border with Turkey and a hostile government that could attack at any moment, they struggle to secure basic needs in a territory controlled by a militant group formerly linked to Al Qaeda. Few of them are likely to return as long as Assad remains in power, making the fate of the displaced one of the thorniest pieces of the war’s unfinished business. “The question is: What is the future for these people?” said Mark Cutts, the United Nations deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria. “They can’t continue living forever in muddy fields under olive trees by the side of the road.”

Israel hits Iranian ship (Foreign Policy) An Iranian military vessel in the Red Sea was damaged by an Israeli mine on Tuesday in the latest naval confrontation involving the two countries. The incident follows a number of attacks against Iranian vessels suspected of shipping oil to Syria. Iran has responded with strikes of its own, hitting an Israeli container ship in March. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the ship struck in Tuesday’s attack had been stationed in the Red Sea to combat pirates in the area.

Chinese Blockchain-Based Mobile Payment Revolution: How Is the Biggest CO2 Polluter Becoming Leading World Solar Panels Producer

Chinese Blockchain-Based Mobile Payment Revolution: How Is the Biggest CO2 Polluter Becoming Leading World Solar Panels Producer:

Society is now witnessing the implementation of digital currencies, AI and blockchain technology worldwide. These new digital technologies require a high consumption of electric energy, which is currently produced with coal and fossil fuels that adversely impact the environment. A global shift toward green energy will require the removal of the technological, infrastructural, regulatory and tax policy barriers. In a series, my articles evaluate the tax, digital technology and solar policies (including space power satellites) of the top-CO2-emitting countries.

For the last three decades, China has been on an economic and technological growth path unequalled in size and duration in human history. Its government is playing an active role in shaping the global digital economy, serving as one of its biggest backers and building a world-class infrastructure to support digitization by acting as an investor, green-developer and consumer.

China’s leadership role in the digital payment area comes as no surprise and includes establishing the world’s first blockchain-based central bank issued digital currency — a stablecoin and mobile payment system called DCEP. After all, China pioneered the issuance of paper money during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618–907), which finally caught on in Europe and the United States during the 17th century, and still remains at the foundation of the modern economy.  

The world’s first central bank issued digital currency

The chairman of the China International Economic Exchange Center, Huang Qifan, explained that the organization has been working on DCEP for five to six years now, and he is fully confident it can be introduced within the next few months by the People’s Bank of China to seven institutions: 

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

China Construction Bank

The Bank of China

The Agricultural Bank of China

Alibaba

Tencent 

Union Pay

DCEP will eventually be available to the general public in 2020. 

The DCEP’s partial blockchain-based design will provide the PBoC with unprecedented oversight over money flows, giving them a degree of control over the Chinese economy that most central banks do not have. DCEP will be pegged 1:1 to the Chinese yuan, with the overall objective that it will eventually become a dominant global currency like the United States dollar. 

It will not be possible to mine or stake on the DCEP network. 

Stablecoins

Despite concerns from G-7 and G-20 regulators, Tether recently launched an offshore yuan-pegged stablecoin dubbed CNHT after launching a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, which is blamed for causing the world’s largest cryptocurrency bubble during 2017 by several class action attorneys in the U.S. who are suing the company for trillions of dollars in damages. Steven Mnuchin, secretary of the U.S. Treasury, supports the launch of stablecoins, including Facebook’s Libra — as long as U.S. financial regulations are followed. EU finance ministers, on the other hand, banned the launch of stablecoins in the region until the bloc has a common approach to regulation, since the EU parliament acknowledged in its latest report on “Financial crimes, tax evasion and tax avoidance” that cross-border cryptocurrency transactions remained a very high risk in terms of money laundering, financing of terrorism and tax evasion in the EU.

Users all over the world are able to earn stablecoins by mining. 

Related: Is US Environmental Tax Policy Hindering Solar Power to Fuel Digital Technologies?

Blockchain-based mobile payment system

Recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping passed a cryptography law and called on his country’s tech community to accelerate efforts in blockchain adoption. So far, China dominates in global blockchain patents, and according to a study conducted by the Central Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, there are over 700 blockchain companies in China. But according to the PBoC, the number of Chinese black market blockchain companies are about 40 times higher — at 28,000 — with 25,000 of these companies issuing their own crypto assets valued at over 110 billion yuan ($15 billion). 

In its latest report, CipherTrace estimated crypto crime activity at $4.4 billion for the first nine months of the year, noting that it had risen 150% compared to a year earlier. According to the global monetary watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, this sharp increase is due to criminals constantly developing new and more sophisticated methods to obfuscate the flow of illicit funds via blockchain-based mobile devices.

Crypto assets can be earned by mining, even on cell phones

For better or worse, mobile blockchain payment technology adoption seems unstoppable. Huawei — currently the only company in the world that can offer the fifth generation of cellular network technology, or 5G — has boldly implemented the world’s first channel coding scheme (polar codes), pioneered by professor Dr. Erdal Arikan, and is collaborating with the PBoC on mobile blockchain payment projects.

China Telecom is actively developing blockchain-enabled 5G SIM cards to become one of the world’s leading platforms for mobile-based crypto asset transactions. At the end of October, 5G services were launched in more than 50 Chinese cities, creating one of the world’s largest 5G networks, with as many as 110 million 5G users. 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive free-trade plan involving over 130 other countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America, is creating the Digital Silk Road of the 21st century and transforming China into a cyber-superpower. Chinese tech behemoths Alibaba and Tencent have already led the way in cross-border mobile digital payments by driving the shift away from cash, and now collectively control 90% of the $17 trillion mobile payments market, sharing a combined 1.5 billion users between them. Traders of the Digital Silk Road are sending cross-border payments from Hong Kong to the Philippines in mere seconds using blockchain-based, mobile digital wallets from Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Crypto asset mining

Inspired by its new focus on blockchain, China is committed to maintaining its world-leading position in cryptocurrency mining and keeping its massive mining farms in business. The specialized processors used for mining crypto (the world’s supply of which is largely provided by China) consume large amounts of electricity, mostly fueled by coal — a resource that has been fundamental to China’s unparalleled economic growth. China burns about half of the coal used globally each year. Between 2000 and 2018, its annual carbon emissions nearly tripled, now accounting for about 30% of the world’s total. China emerged as the world’s top CO2 polluter starting in 2017, when cryptocurrencies experienced an unprecedented global bubble, and continues to maintain this ranking to date. 

China currently accounts for roughly 60% of the global Bitcoin hashrate, down from a previously estimated high of 90% in 2017. In a private email, Tsou Yung Chen, Global CEO of RRMine — a cloud mining company — explained, “Our platform doesn’t own data centers, we are a Hashrate service provider. We cooperate with global data centers, convert Hashrate into liquid asset and provide it to investors. Most of our cooperative data centers are in Southwest China, which has abundant hydropower for cryptocurrency mining.”

Inner Mongolia is home to the world’s largest “Ordos” solar power plant, together with Xinjiang and Sichuan, constitute the big three Bitcoin mining bases in China. All three provinces also have the worst air quality. Susanne Köhler and Massimo Pizzol at Aalborg University in Denmark found that coal-heavy Inner Mongolia accounted for 12.3% of Bitcoin mining, but resulted in more than a quarter of the total country’s CO2 emissions, which has only increased since countries signed on to the Paris agreement. 

Liu Cixin, the celebrated Chinese science fiction writer, has advocated for “abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power.” During the past 25 years, China went from having virtually no solar panels to leading the world by a margin of more than 100%. The country surpassed Germany to become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic power based on its 2011 five-year plan for energy production in 2015, became the first country to surpass the 100 GW of installed capacity in 2017. Estimates see China’s photovoltaic panel installations hitting a cumulative total of 370 GWdc by 2024 — more than double the projected capacity for the U.S.

During the past 10 years, China has also ranked number one in terms of the sums invested in renewable energy capacity by committing $758 billion between 2010 and the first half of 2019, with Chinese companies emerging as technology leaders in green transport and energy as well as digital infrastructure. Currently, China accounts for around 24% of global investment in renewables, with solar and wind capacity in BRI countries surging from 0.45 GW to 12.6 GW between 2014 and 2019 as a result.

According to an Energy Transitions Commission report, it is technically and economically feasible for China to become a fully decarbonized and green-developed economy by reaching a net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century, with solar energy comprising 44% of all renewable capacity additions until 2040, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report. Subsidy-free solar projects can be built not only in most Chinese cities — and at a significantly cheaper price than coal, hydropower, nuclear and other grid-fed generation-sources — but also in the nations covered by the BRI.  

The reality is, wind and solar only accounted for 5.2% and 2.5%, respectively, of China’s national power generation in 2018, and during May, the Chinese National Energy Administration announced that it would stop providing subsidies for onshore renewable energy projects, which must now compete directly at auction with other forms of power generation. Solar energy also competes with the thick, gray air pollution that dims Chinese sunlight by about 13%. Renewable energy investment in China already dropped by 39% in the first half of 2019 compared to a year earlier, and starting Jan. 1, 2020, the pricing of electricity underwent a seismic change that may impact the competitiveness of renewable energy pricing in favor of coal.

Related: Green Policy and Crypto Energy Consumption in the EU

China’s Space Power Satellites (SPS) 

China is very serious about the idea of building renewable-energy projects in space to beam the sun’s energy back to Earth, fundamentally reshaping the way grids receive electricity. If scientists can overcome the formidable technical and economical challenges involved, SPS projects could represent a monumental leap in combating China’s addiction to coal power sources, which worsen air pollution and global warming.  Pang Zhihao, a researcher from the China Academy of Space Technology Corporation, described SPS as an “inexhaustible source of clean energy for humans.”

China’s solar power station plans under contemplation include the launch of small solar power stations into the stratosphere between 2021 and 2025 to generate electricity, followed by a space-based solar power station that can generate at least a megawatt of electricity in 2030, as well as a commercial-scale solar power plant in space by 2050. A receiving station will be built in Xi’an — the region’s space hub — to develop the world’s first SPS power farm.

The China National Space Agency has been collaborating with India Space Research Organization in fields such as lunar and deep space exploration. On Jan. 2, 2019, China made a historic first landing on the far side of the moon. The milestone marked a turning point for China’s space exploration and may factor into China’s SPS ambitions.

Related: Japan to Solarize Its Burgeoning Digital Economy, Expert Take

China’s tax policies

China is the world’s most populous country and number one in CO2 emissions as well as coal consumption. It is number two in the consumption of oil products, and number three in natural gas consumption. The country taxes 8% of CO2 emissions from energy use.

According to an IMF report, China ranks number one in subsidies to the hydrocarbon industry, at $1.4 trillion, and is world-third in terms of total coal reserves behind the U.S. and Russia. Fossil subsidies are used as a tool to influence the energy mix and energy prices in both China and at coal-fueled electricity plants across the BRI countries it heavily lends to and invests in. 

Conclusion

It is undeniable that China is once again taking the lead, this time by providing the world with a new blockchain-based mobile payment system, with the steep energy requirements that come with this new payment system being electrified by coal. Taking a proactive stance on the matter, Ziheng Zhou, partner and chief scientist at blockchain company VeChain, explained:

“We recognize that traditional carbon reduction is mainly driven by administrative orders. To counter this, we rolled out a market oriented Digital Carbon Ecosystem (DCE), the world’s first blockchain-based program that incentivizes people for protecting the environment.”

Only time will tell whether VeChain’s blockchain-based, market-oriented approach will end up contributing to environmental protection and reversing the effects of climate change as China takes the global lead in the wake of U.S. President Trump’s administration formally beginning the year-long process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement. In the interim, the failure of free markets to consider environmental costs and damages is being addressed by climate change-based class-action lawsuits against governments and corporations — originally a uniquely American undertaking and historically prohibited in most other countries — have ramped up and spread across 28 countries, including China, where public interest claims for such damages have seen some success.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Selva Ozelli, Esq., CPA is an international tax attorney and CPA who frequently writes about tax, legal and accounting issues for Tax Notes, Bloomberg BNA, other publications and the OECD.

Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images Farm workers work, live, and travel in crowded conditions, and are being allowed few if any safety measures against COVID-19 — which puts them and the food system at risk This story originally appeared on Civil Eats. Late last week, Yazmin Alvarado set out for the strawberry fields near Oxnard, California anxious and afraid of catching the novel coronavirus. Part of a crew of more than 100, she knew she was at high risk. Members of her crew work and take breaks next to each other. They lack access to soap, water, and gloves, give each other rides to the fields in overloaded cars, and many share apartments with multiple families. As a ponchadora —the person who inspects fruit quality and records each harvested box — Alvarado has constant physical contact with others. What’s more, she and her co-workers don’t qualify for sick pay, most lack health insurance, and they desperately need the paychecks, so they don’t have the option to stay home, she told Civil Eats. And yet, Alvarado’s employer, a large California berry company, hasn’t offered any training about COVID-19, nor taken any measures to protect the crew, said the 26-year-old worker. To top it off, the government and state health departments are offering little to no information in Spanish. “We don’t have enough information. And we’re afraid to speak out… [we] don’t want to lose any hours,” said Alvarado, whose paycheck supports her 5-year-old twin girls and unemployed husband. But the fear of contracting the virus is pervasive. “What if someone gets sick with the virus and still comes to work,” she asks. While California has ordered all of its residents to shelter in place to stop the virus’ spread, Alvarado’s crew and more than 800,000 other agricultural laborers in the state are exempt. Many continue working, with few or no protections, to power California’s $54 billion agriculture sector and supply the nation’s empty supermarket shelves. And while no farmworkers have been confirmed to be carrying the virus, many agricultural areas have seen confirmed cases. While most Americans stay at home, farmworkers continue to work, designated as “essential workers” by the Department of Homeland Security. But advocates and organizers are sounding the alarm: Agricultural workers are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Nearly half lack legal work authorization and residency status, making them ineligible for essential benefits that could help them stay home when sick. And yet the value of the agricultural labor force, which has long lived in the shadows, is also becoming much clearer to Americans than it’s ever been. While there is no evidence of COVID-19 spreading through food or food packaging, if (or perhaps when) it spreads among farmworkers, farmers say workforce gaps in the chain could exacerbate pre-existing labor shortages and lead to disruptions in the food supply. Although consumers and government officials have now deemed immigrant workers “essential,” few resources have been dedicated to help them stave off the virus. The workers say they are confused, anxious, and unsure of how COVID-19 will impact their health, employment, and livelihoods. And with many schools suddenly shuttered, some farmworker families are also facing an impossible choice: continue to work or quit and take care of the children. “Some farmworkers are panicking,” said Elvira Carvajal, lead community organizer in Florida for Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “There are no safety measures, there are no benefits. Families can’t afford to pay for childcare. They’re leaving [children] alone at home or taking them to the fields and leaving them in their cars. This is very dangerous.” Risks at work and at home Across the U.S., about 2.5 million farmworkers, most of whom are Latinx, toil on American farms. In addition, a growing number of foreign guest workers, most hailing from Mexico, are brought to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. More than 250,000 were certified nationwide in 2019, though the State Department last week decided to suspend visa processing at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Mexico, so that only returning guest workers will be allowed to come into the U.S., potentially leaving some growers short. In some parts of the country, these workers are already busy harvesting produce—whether it’s strawberries in Southern California, citrus, asparagus, and kale in the San Joaquin Valley, or tomato, eggplant, and guavas in Florida. Others are pruning and thinning trees, training vines, transplanting, or weeding. Harvesting typically ramps up later in spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into fields and packing houses. Some work shoulder-to-shoulder, while others are spread out in the fields, depending on the speed and the crops. Working outside may minimize the risk, experts say, but that’s not the case for packing houses and canneries, since the virus is spread by respiratory droplets and can survive on surfaces for up to three days. Those who work alone on machines seem to be the least exposed. And while the average age for field workers is just 38 years old — and older adults and people with serious underlying medical conditions seem to be at the highest risk for severe symptoms from COVID-19 — if young farmworkers get infected (with or without symptoms) they can become vectors for the virus. Advocates say it’s the conditions outside of work that place farmworkers in most danger. Many workers carpool to work — with four to six workers sharing a single car — or are bused to work on packed buses. And their crowded living conditions pose perhaps the biggest challenge, said Norma Ahedo, community health worker coordinator for the Salinas-based Center For Community Advocacy. Earlier this month, Ahedo said, she did a health check at an apartment in Salinas where four farmworker families — including seven children — were living in three small bedrooms and the living room. It’s typical for an entire family to live in a room, she said. It’s also not uncommon to see two families sharing a single room with a divider down the middle, she said. “These are small spaces, very closed in, with few windows and many people living on top of each other,” Ahedo said. “And if someone does get sick, where will they go?” (Medical experts recommend that people sick with coronavirus use a separate bedroom and bathroom, or even just maintain the safe distance of six feet.) H-2A guest workers also live in shared grower-provided communal housing camps or cheap motels where they can easily spread the virus to each other. When a few guest workers got the mumps in Washington state last spring, the entire labor camp had to be quarantined. Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images Celery harvesters work in close proximity on a farm in California High anxiety, food insecurity, lack of childcare In addition to the threat of physical illness, advocates say the virus is causing huge emotional stress in the farmworker community. Ahedo said she’s worried for the families who have to shelter in place for long periods in overcrowded living conditions. “This is causing high anxiety in both adults and children,” she said. Though some workers may not fully grasp their risks or know how to prevent the spread, many are very worried about how the virus will affect their jobs and livelihoods. Already, some farmers who have lost markets due to restaurants, farmers’ market, and schools closing, have reduced working hours. Farmworkers’ financial instability is compounded by the fact that many have family members who work in other low-wage, hourly jobs hard-hit by coronavirus closures, especially in the food service industry, said Daniel Gonzales, executive director of the Center For Community Advocacy. “It’s a time of great insecurity and much anguish and anxiety for these families,” he added. Food scarcity is also looming as several rural communities in California and Washington are reporting a lack of basic necessities, said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “They’ve told me, ‘We have nowhere to get food. The corner markets and dollar stores have empty shelves (and they aren’t restocking).’ This is creating anxiety and despair.” An open letter to growers: Help protect your workers Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) sent an open letter to agricultural employers and organizations urging them to take “proactive steps to ensure the safety of farm workers, protect buyers and safeguard consumers.” The need for action is dire because most non-union farmworkers do not have health care coverage or other benefits, said Armando Elenes, the UFW’s secretary treasurer. The California Farm Bureau Federation says it’s working with ag employers to “adjust on-farm practices to account for social distancing and other measures” to assure the safety of their employees. But a poll the UFW just completed on its Spanish-language social media platforms showed more than 90 percent of the farmworkers who responded had not been advised by their employers on best practices to resist the virus. And a UFW Facebook Live event last week attracted 18,000 views, with hundreds of farmworkers commenting that their employers had provided no information at all. The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes. Language is a major barrier to accessing information about the virus and its prevention, said Elenes. Many workers speak only Spanish, while some primarily speak Indigenous languages such as Triqui and Mixteco. And since they’re not getting information from their employers, workers turn to social media, which is ripe with conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus. The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes, said Elenes. Three states—California, Oregon, and Washington — currently offer farmworkers a limited number of sick-pay hours, he added. Despite these laws, many growers and labor contractors require doctors’ notes from workers, making it difficult for workers to access the benefit, he said. And some flat out refuse to give workers sick pay. “If they stop working because they’re feeling ill, they no longer have a job. The growers do not guarantee their positions,” said Treviño-Sauceda. Some, she added, may also avoid doctors because they fear questions about immigration status or the Trump administration’s new public charge rule, which bars people who use certain benefits, including Medicaid, from converting their temporary immigration status into a green card. The UFW’s open letter advocates extending state-required sick pay to 40 hours or more and removing the caps on accruing sick pay, eliminating the 90-day waiting period for newly employed farmworkers to be eligible for sick pay, and placing workers who are infected or whose family members are infected with COVID-19 on paid administrative leave for the duration of their illnesses. The letter also asks growers to provide basic information and training to workers, such as encouraging them to wash their hands and avoid touching their faces. Training offered to some, others are on their own Some farmers are starting to provide training and are instituting additional safety measures. Last week at Del Bosque Farms on the west side of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, grower Joe Del Bosque and his wife held a tailgate meeting in Spanish for about 60 workers in his asparagus harvest crew to discuss coronavirus prevention and food safety measures. The grower said his company received resources from AgSafe, a nonprofit in Modesto that provides health and safety training. Del Bosque, who farms about 2,200 acres of mostly organic produce — including several kinds of melons and asparagus — said his employees are his greatest concern. His business, after all, depends on them showing up. “We’re an essential industry, at this time and always, so we need to make sure our workers are comfortable knowing they can come to work and still be protected,” he said. Del Bosque’s company offers clean restrooms with fully equipped hand-washing stations. It advises workers to regularly scrub their hands with soap, to sneeze into their elbows, and to stay home when ill — measures that have been part of the company’s food safety program since before the pandemic. In addition, Del Bosque said he has instituted new social distancing measures and a rule about not touching other workers. “We understand how diseases can be transmitted not just from one worker to another, but also through the produce,” he said. “We simply want to reinforce what we’ve already been doing for many years.” Del Bosque said rows of asparagus are spaced 5 feet apart, but the workers harvest at their individual speeds and can maintain the required 6-foot social distancing guideline in the fields. In June, when the melon harvest begins, he may have to add more distancing measures, especially for the packers. Del Bosque can’t prevent his workers from car-pooling because many have no other way to get to work. He can’t tell them to live with fewer people either. And while the company asks workers to stay home when sick — farmworkers in California can acquire between three and eight sick pay days per year, depending on the hours they work — sick leave doesn’t kick in for three months, so some new members of the crew aren’t protected. Del Bosque said he offers Obamacare-level free health insurance to both his seasonal farmworkers and year-round crew after 30 days. Some also qualify for MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid, which is available to legal residents or U.S. citizens. According to workers and their advocates however, other employers aren’t nearly as diligent. California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) told Civil Eats it continues to respond to complaints and serious injuries and illnesses of field agricultural operations during the pandemic. Inspectors verify compliance with the field sanitation requirements and personal protective equipment, if applicable, said spokesman Frank Polizzi. He encouraged workers to call in complaints and said Cal/OSHA plans to post guidance for agricultural employers and workers on preventing the spread of COVID-19, in English this week and soon after in Spanish. On Friday, after Monterey County issued a shelter-in-place order with sweeping exemptions for agriculture, officials in the region issued a farmworker protection advisory that was applauded by the area’s agricultural industry. And in North Carolina, another state with many guest workers and migrant workers, the health department has also issued guidelines for ag employers. Few other counties or states have followed suit, but many workers have begun taking their own protective actions. Alvarado, the Oxnard farmworker, said she and the others cover their faces with bandanas when they cough and buy their own gloves. After work, she changes in the car so as not to bring her clothes into the house. To learn more about COVID, she tunes in to Spanish-speaking radio stations. Last week, when she came down with a dry cough, she immediately went to the emergency room, where she was told it probably wasn’t the virus. “I hope they can find a solution that would let farmworkers with coronavirus symptoms stay at home without losing the day’s salary or our jobs,” she said. Education in the time of social distancing Organizations that work directly with farmworkers have also been working on education campaigns. But the organizations are struggling with how to reach the workers because most immigrant farmworkers prefer face-to-face conversations to online ones, and some are illiterate or lack access to the internet. For now, UFW, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, and the Center For Community Advocacy have all been turning to social media, including Facebook Live and apps such as Skype and Zoom. They’re also working with local legislators and doctors to provide more information in Spanish. Radio Bilingue, a national Spanish-language radio network headquartered in Fresno, has been running information spots in Spanish, English, and Mixteco about coronavirus protection, COVID-19 symptoms, and what to do when a person falls ill, said broadcasting director Maria Eraña. The network has also dedicated its flagship talk show program, Linea Abierta, to discussing the pandemic, as well as producing regular updates for its public affairs talk shows and newscasts. “Our main message,” said Eraña, “is that it’s not the time to panic. It’s time for prevention. And it’s not the time to be afraid of going to the doctor.” • Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs [Civil Eats] from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Jihwg4

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/03/farm-workers-are-in-coronavirus.html

Society is now witnessing the implementation of digital currencies, AI and blockchain technology worldwide. These new digital technologies require a high consumption of electric energy, which is currently produced with coal and fossil fuels that adversely impact the environment. A global shift toward green energy will require the removal of the technological, infrastructural, regulatory and tax policy barriers. In a series, my articles evaluate the tax, digital technology and solar policies (including space power satellites) of the top-CO2-emitting countries.

For the last three decades, China has been on an economic and technological growth path unequalled in size and duration in human history. Its government is playing an active role in shaping the global digital economy, serving as one of its biggest backers and building a world-class infrastructure to support digitization by acting as an investor, green-developer and consumer.

China’s leadership role in the digital payment area comes as no surprise and includes establishing the world’s first blockchain-based central bank issued digital currency — a stablecoin and mobile payment system called DCEP. After all, China pioneered the issuance of paper money during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618–907), which finally caught on in Europe and the United States during the 17th century, and still remains at the foundation of the modern economy.  

The world’s first central bank issued digital currency

The chairman of the China International Economic Exchange Center, Huang Qifan, explained that the organization has been working on DCEP for five to six years now, and he is fully confident it can be introduced within the next few months by the People’s Bank of China to seven institutions: 

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

China Construction Bank

The Bank of China

The Agricultural Bank of China

Alibaba

Tencent 

Union Pay

DCEP will eventually be available to the general public in 2020. 

The DCEP’s partial blockchain-based design will provide the PBoC with unprecedented oversight over money flows, giving them a degree of control over the Chinese economy that most central banks do not have. DCEP will be pegged 1:1 to the Chinese yuan, with the overall objective that it will eventually become a dominant global currency like the United States dollar. 

It will not be possible to mine or stake on the DCEP network. 

Stablecoins

Despite concerns from G-7 and G-20 regulators, Tether recently launched an offshore yuan-pegged stablecoin dubbed CNHT after launching a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, which is blamed for causing the world’s largest cryptocurrency bubble during 2017 by several class action attorneys in the U.S. who are suing the company for trillions of dollars in damages. Steven Mnuchin, secretary of the U.S. Treasury, supports the launch of stablecoins, including Facebook’s Libra — as long as U.S. financial regulations are followed. EU finance ministers, on the other hand, banned the launch of stablecoins in the region until the bloc has a common approach to regulation, since the EU parliament acknowledged in its latest report on “Financial crimes, tax evasion and tax avoidance” that cross-border cryptocurrency transactions remained a very high risk in terms of money laundering, financing of terrorism and tax evasion in the EU.

Users all over the world are able to earn stablecoins by mining. 

Related: Is US Environmental Tax Policy Hindering Solar Power to Fuel Digital Technologies?

Blockchain-based mobile payment system

Recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping passed a cryptography law and called on his country’s tech community to accelerate efforts in blockchain adoption. So far, China dominates in global blockchain patents, and according to a study conducted by the Central Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, there are over 700 blockchain companies in China. But according to the PBoC, the number of Chinese black market blockchain companies are about 40 times higher — at 28,000 — with 25,000 of these companies issuing their own crypto assets valued at over 110 billion yuan ($15 billion). 

In its latest report, CipherTrace estimated crypto crime activity at $4.4 billion for the first nine months of the year, noting that it had risen 150% compared to a year earlier. According to the global monetary watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, this sharp increase is due to criminals constantly developing new and more sophisticated methods to obfuscate the flow of illicit funds via blockchain-based mobile devices.

Crypto assets can be earned by mining, even on cell phones

For better or worse, mobile blockchain payment technology adoption seems unstoppable. Huawei — currently the only company in the world that can offer the fifth generation of cellular network technology, or 5G — has boldly implemented the world’s first channel coding scheme (polar codes), pioneered by professor Dr. Erdal Arikan, and is collaborating with the PBoC on mobile blockchain payment projects.

China Telecom is actively developing blockchain-enabled 5G SIM cards to become one of the world’s leading platforms for mobile-based crypto asset transactions. At the end of October, 5G services were launched in more than 50 Chinese cities, creating one of the world’s largest 5G networks, with as many as 110 million 5G users. 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive free-trade plan involving over 130 other countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America, is creating the Digital Silk Road of the 21st century and transforming China into a cyber-superpower. Chinese tech behemoths Alibaba and Tencent have already led the way in cross-border mobile digital payments by driving the shift away from cash, and now collectively control 90% of the $17 trillion mobile payments market, sharing a combined 1.5 billion users between them. Traders of the Digital Silk Road are sending cross-border payments from Hong Kong to the Philippines in mere seconds using blockchain-based, mobile digital wallets from Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Crypto asset mining

Inspired by its new focus on blockchain, China is committed to maintaining its world-leading position in cryptocurrency mining and keeping its massive mining farms in business. The specialized processors used for mining crypto (the world’s supply of which is largely provided by China) consume large amounts of electricity, mostly fueled by coal — a resource that has been fundamental to China’s unparalleled economic growth. China burns about half of the coal used globally each year. Between 2000 and 2018, its annual carbon emissions nearly tripled, now accounting for about 30% of the world’s total. China emerged as the world’s top CO2 polluter starting in 2017, when cryptocurrencies experienced an unprecedented global bubble, and continues to maintain this ranking to date. 

China currently accounts for roughly 60% of the global Bitcoin hashrate, down from a previously estimated high of 90% in 2017. In a private email, Tsou Yung Chen, Global CEO of RRMine — a cloud mining company — explained, “Our platform doesn’t own data centers, we are a Hashrate service provider. We cooperate with global data centers, convert Hashrate into liquid asset and provide it to investors. Most of our cooperative data centers are in Southwest China, which has abundant hydropower for cryptocurrency mining.”

Inner Mongolia is home to the world’s largest “Ordos” solar power plant, together with Xinjiang and Sichuan, constitute the big three Bitcoin mining bases in China. All three provinces also have the worst air quality. Susanne Köhler and Massimo Pizzol at Aalborg University in Denmark found that coal-heavy Inner Mongolia accounted for 12.3% of Bitcoin mining, but resulted in more than a quarter of the total country’s CO2 emissions, which has only increased since countries signed on to the Paris agreement. 

Liu Cixin, the celebrated Chinese science fiction writer, has advocated for “abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power.” During the past 25 years, China went from having virtually no solar panels to leading the world by a margin of more than 100%. The country surpassed Germany to become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic power based on its 2011 five-year plan for energy production in 2015, became the first country to surpass the 100 GW of installed capacity in 2017. Estimates see China’s photovoltaic panel installations hitting a cumulative total of 370 GWdc by 2024 — more than double the projected capacity for the U.S.

During the past 10 years, China has also ranked number one in terms of the sums invested in renewable energy capacity by committing $758 billion between 2010 and the first half of 2019, with Chinese companies emerging as technology leaders in green transport and energy as well as digital infrastructure. Currently, China accounts for around 24% of global investment in renewables, with solar and wind capacity in BRI countries surging from 0.45 GW to 12.6 GW between 2014 and 2019 as a result.

According to an Energy Transitions Commission report, it is technically and economically feasible for China to become a fully decarbonized and green-developed economy by reaching a net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century, with solar energy comprising 44% of all renewable capacity additions until 2040, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report. Subsidy-free solar projects can be built not only in most Chinese cities — and at a significantly cheaper price than coal, hydropower, nuclear and other grid-fed generation-sources — but also in the nations covered by the BRI.  

The reality is, wind and solar only accounted for 5.2% and 2.5%, respectively, of China’s national power generation in 2018, and during May, the Chinese National Energy Administration announced that it would stop providing subsidies for onshore renewable energy projects, which must now compete directly at auction with other forms of power generation. Solar energy also competes with the thick, gray air pollution that dims Chinese sunlight by about 13%. Renewable energy investment in China already dropped by 39% in the first half of 2019 compared to a year earlier, and starting Jan. 1, 2020, the pricing of electricity underwent a seismic change that may impact the competitiveness of renewable energy pricing in favor of coal.

Related: Green Policy and Crypto Energy Consumption in the EU

China’s Space Power Satellites (SPS) 

China is very serious about the idea of building renewable-energy projects in space to beam the sun’s energy back to Earth, fundamentally reshaping the way grids receive electricity. If scientists can overcome the formidable technical and economical challenges involved, SPS projects could represent a monumental leap in combating China’s addiction to coal power sources, which worsen air pollution and global warming.  Pang Zhihao, a researcher from the China Academy of Space Technology Corporation, described SPS as an “inexhaustible source of clean energy for humans.”

China’s solar power station plans under contemplation include the launch of small solar power stations into the stratosphere between 2021 and 2025 to generate electricity, followed by a space-based solar power station that can generate at least a megawatt of electricity in 2030, as well as a commercial-scale solar power plant in space by 2050. A receiving station will be built in Xi’an — the region’s space hub — to develop the world’s first SPS power farm.

The China National Space Agency has been collaborating with India Space Research Organization in fields such as lunar and deep space exploration. On Jan. 2, 2019, China made a historic first landing on the far side of the moon. The milestone marked a turning point for China’s space exploration and may factor into China’s SPS ambitions.

Related: Japan to Solarize Its Burgeoning Digital Economy, Expert Take

China’s tax policies

China is the world’s most populous country and number one in CO2 emissions as well as coal consumption. It is number two in the consumption of oil products, and number three in natural gas consumption. The country taxes 8% of CO2 emissions from energy use.

According to an IMF report, China ranks number one in subsidies to the hydrocarbon industry, at $1.4 trillion, and is world-third in terms of total coal reserves behind the U.S. and Russia. Fossil subsidies are used as a tool to influence the energy mix and energy prices in both China and at coal-fueled electricity plants across the BRI countries it heavily lends to and invests in. 

Conclusion

It is undeniable that China is once again taking the lead, this time by providing the world with a new blockchain-based mobile payment system, with the steep energy requirements that come with this new payment system being electrified by coal. Taking a proactive stance on the matter, Ziheng Zhou, partner and chief scientist at blockchain company VeChain, explained:

“We recognize that traditional carbon reduction is mainly driven by administrative orders. To counter this, we rolled out a market oriented Digital Carbon Ecosystem (DCE), the world’s first blockchain-based program that incentivizes people for protecting the environment.”

Only time will tell whether VeChain’s blockchain-based, market-oriented approach will end up contributing to environmental protection and reversing the effects of climate change as China takes the global lead in the wake of U.S. President Trump’s administration formally beginning the year-long process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement. In the interim, the failure of free markets to consider environmental costs and damages is being addressed by climate change-based class-action lawsuits against governments and corporations — originally a uniquely American undertaking and historically prohibited in most other countries — have ramped up and spread across 28 countries, including China, where public interest claims for such damages have seen some success.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Selva Ozelli, Esq., CPA is an international tax attorney and CPA who frequently writes about tax, legal and accounting issues for Tax Notes, Bloomberg BNA, other publications and the OECD.

New top story from Time: ‘They’re Trying to Wipe Us Off the Map.’ Small American Farmers Are Nearing Extinction 

Fremont, Wisconsin — For nearly two centuries, the Rieckmann family has raised cows for milk in this muddy patch of land in the middle of Wisconsin. Mary and John Rieckmann, who now run the farm and its 45 cows, have seen all manners of ups and downs — droughts, floods, oversupplies of milk that sent prices tumbling. But they’ve never seen a crisis quite like this one.

The Rieckmanns are about $300,000 in debt, and bill collectors are hounding them about the feed bill and a repayment for a used tractor they bought to keep the farm going. But it’s harder than ever to make any money, much less pay the debt, Mary Rieckmann says, in the yellow-wallpapered kitchen of the sagging farmhouse where she lives with her husband, John, and two of their seven children. The Rieckmanns receive about $16 for every 100 pounds of milk they sell, a 40 percent decrease from six years back. There are weeks where the entire milk check goes towards the $2,100 monthly mortgage payment. Two bill collectors have taken out liens against the farm. “What do you do when you you’re up against the wall and you just don’t know which way to turn?” Rieckmann says, as her ancient fridge begins to hum. Mary, 79, and John, 80, had hoped to leave the farm to their two sons, age 55 and 50, who still live with them and run the farm. Now they’re less focused on their legacy than about making it through the week.

In the American imagination, at least, the family farm still exists as it does on holiday greeting cards: as a picturesque, modestly prosperous expanse that wholesomely fills the space between the urban centers where most of us live. But it has been declining for generations, and the closing days of 2019 find small farms pummeled from every side: a trade war, severe weather associated with climate change, tanking commodity prices related to globalization, political polarization, and corporate farming defined not by a silo and a red barn but technology and the efficiencies of scale. It is the worst crisis in decades. Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies were up 12 percent in the Midwest from July of 2018 to June of 2019; they’re up 50 percent in the Northwest. Tens of thousands have simply stopped farming, knowing that reorganization through bankruptcy won’t save them. The nation lost more than 100,000 farms between 2011 and 2018; 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone.

Jason Vaughn for TIMEThe Rieckmann’s mantle in their home in Fremont, Wisconsin, on Nov. 20, 2019.

Farm debt, at $416 billion, is at an all-time high. More than half of all farmers have lost money every year since since 2013, and lost more than $1,644 this year. Farm loan delinquencies are rising.

Suicides in farm communities are happening with alarming frequency. Farmers aren’t the only workers in the American economy being displaced by technology, but when they lose their jobs, they also ejected from their homes and the land that’s been in their family for generations. “It hits you so hard when you feel like you’re the one who is losing the legacy that your great-grandparents started,” said Randy Roecker, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who has struggled with depression and whose neighbor Leon Statz committed suicide last year after financial struggles forced him to sell his 50 dairy cows. Roecker estimates he’s losing $30,000 a month.

Even large companies are facing unprecedented challenges; Dean Foods, a global dairy producer that buys milk from thousands of small farmers, filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, November 12, and is seeking a sale, a move that could further hamper farmers looking for places to sell their milk.

Farmers have always talked of looming disaster, but the duration and severity of the current crisis suggests an alarming and once unthinkable possibility — that independent farming is no longer a viable livelihood. Small farms, defined as those bringing in less than $350,000 a year before expenses, accounted for just a quarter of food production in 2017, down from nearly half in 1991. In the dairy industry, small farms accounted for just 10 percent of production. The disappearance of the small farm would further hasten the decline of rural America, which has been struggling to maintain an economic base for decades.

“Farm and ranch families are facing a great extinction,” says Al Davis, a Nebraska cattle producer and former state senator. “If we lose that rural lifestyle, we have really lost a big part of what made this country great.”

Jason Vaughn for TIMEView from the barn into the cow pasture; one of the many farm cats at the entrance to the barn.

A perfect storm of factors has led to the recent crisis in the farm industry. After boom years in the beginning of the 21st century, prices for commodities like corn, soybeans, milk, and meat started falling in 2013. The reason for these lowered prices are the twin forces upending much of the American economy: technology and globalization. Technology has made farms more efficient than ever before. But economies of scale meant that most of the benefits accrued to corporate farmers, who built up huge holdings as smaller farmers sold out. Even as four million farms disappeared in the United States between 1948 and 2015, total farm output more than doubled. Globalization brought more farmers into the international market for crops, flooding the market with soybeans and corn and cattle and milk, and with increased supply comes lower prices. Global food production has increased 30 percent over the last decade, according to John Newton, the chief economist of the American Farm Bureau. If that’s a good thing for feeding the planet, it also reduces what comes back to producers, whose costs don’t fall with prices.

President Trump’s trade war hasn’t helped matters. After the United States slapped tariffs on Chinese goods including steel and aluminum last year, China retaliated with 25 percent tariffs on agricultural imports from the U.S.. China then turned to other countries such as Brazil to replace American soybeans and corn. “This was a market that took years to develop,” says Barb Kalbach, a fourth- generation corn and soybean farmer in Iowa, referring to China. “The president has worked very hard to make our markets unstable.” Her soybeans are harvested and sitting in a grain elevator as she waits to see if China will buy despite the tariffs. Agricultural exports between January and August this year were down 5 percent, or $5.6 billion dollars, from the same period last year. The Trump administration has made $16 billion in aid available to farmers affected by the trade war, though small farmers complain the bulk of the money has gone to huge producers with large crop losses. Around 40 percent of the $88 billion in farm income expected this year is going to come in the form of federal aid and insurance, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Farm income absent that assistance, at $55 billion, is down 14 percent since last year and is half of what it was in 2013.

Smaller farms have found it especially hard to adapt to these changes, which they blame on government policy and a lack of antitrust enforcement. The government is on the side of big farms, they say, and is ambivalent about whether small farms can succeed. “Get big or get out,” Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, infamously told farmers in the 1970s. It’s a sentiment that Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary under President Trump, echoed recently. “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Perdue said, at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin in October. The number of farms with more than 2,000 acres nearly doubled between 1987 and 2012, according to USDA data. The number of farms with 200 to 999 acres fell over that time period by 44 percent.

Many small American farmers are routinely selling their crops for less than it costs to produce them. “It’s very intimidating, you work hard every day, and every day, it seems like you’re just always struggling,” says Rieckmann.

Prices are so low that farmers like the Rieckmanns are trying to figure out other ways to come up with the money to keep their farm going. But like many other rural areas around the country, their town of Fremont does not have a bustling economy. Both a Kmart and another department store, Shopko, closed in Waupaca county this year, costing dozens of workers their jobs. Mary Rieckmann who will turn 80 in January, got a job delivering newspapers; the family also launched a GoFundMe account. But after Mary crashed her car on a foggy night, her husband and sons convinced her to abandon her paper route. In the past, the family has sold calves to raise extra money, but John recently brought two calves to the stock market and got $20 for one and $30 for another—two years ago, those calves would have brought in $300 to $400 each. “If somebody would have told me 20 years ago what it was going to be like now, I think I would have called him a liar,” Rieckmann says.

Jason Vaughn for TIMEA shuttered Mobil Mart in Fremont, Wisconsin, on Nov. 20, 2019.

Heavy rain and unseasonable snow this year have also hurt many Midwestern farmers. This year “has been one of the most significant weather event years,” said John Newton, chief economist of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Portions of Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota experienced record flooding this year, with the upper Mississippi River receiving 200 percent more rain and snow than normal. Unusual rain and snow prevented farmers from planting on 19 million acres this year, the most since the USDA began measuring in 2007. Last year, by contrast, weather prevented planting on just 2 million acres.

Mike Rosmann, a clinical psychologist and farmer from Iowa who works with farmers in distress, says that this spring, he got seven calls per week from farmers who were having mental health problems because of their farm’s finances. One farmer called Rosmann to say he was considering suicide — floods destroyed the corn he had already harvested and stored in a grain elevator, but neither crop insurance nor flood insurance would cover it, since he had already harvested the crop. “When that farm is lost, it’s a huge amount of loss of self,” says Scott Marlow, senior policy specialist at the Rural Advancement Foundation, which runs a hotline for farmers in danger of losing their farms. John Hanson, who runs an assistance hotline in Nebraska, says that this year he has gotten calls at midnight from desperate farmers, including one sitting in his kitchen with a loaded shotgun and the lights out.

“It’s very, very bleak for us, and many farmers I know are in the same boat,” said Brenda Cochran, a small dairy farmer in Pennsylvania who says she knows of nine suicides related to low milk prices over the last two years. “It would take a miracle to sustain us for five years.” Farm Aid operates a 1-800 hotline for farmers facing crisis, and calls to that hotline were up 109 percent last year from the year before, says Alicia Harvie, director of Farm Aid’s Advocacy and Farmer Services. The newest farm bill sets aside $50 million over five years for behavioral health supports for distressed farmers.

Rural America has been shrinking for decades, and the Great Recession accelerated that contraction as rural manufacturing jobs disappeared and people moved to cities and suburbs seeking work. That is indeed where the jobs are. Between 2008 and 2017, metropolitan areas that included central cities of at least 50,000 people accounted for 99 percent of all job and population growth, according to data crunched by David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University. In the Midwest, 81 percent of rural counties saw population declines between 2008 and 2017, and in the Northeast, 85 percent of rural counties shrank over that time period.

Jason Vaughn for TIMESteven Rieckmann loading a bale of hay on Nov. 20, 2019.

Kalbach, the Iowa corn and soybean farmer, says on the square mile of land where she lives, five farm different families used to grow corn, beans, hay, cattle, and pigs. Over the past 15 years, the other four families have given up and moved away. As farmers sold to bigger operations, the local businesses that were dependent on small farmers went belly-up, too. The place where the Kalbachs buy chemicals is now 75 miles away. Her county’s lone pharmacy closed earlier this year. There is no longer a local place where she can get farm equipment repaired. “All the thousands of farmers that have left the land—all the businesses have gone with them,” she says.

So have the institutions that make a community. Around 4,400 schools in rural districts closed between 2011 and 2015, the most recent year for which there is data available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics; suburban districts, by contrast, added roughly 4,000 schools over that same time period. In Wisconsin’s dairy country alone, the Antigo School District, in north central Wisconsin, closed three elementary schools this year, and 44 schools have closed since 2018.

“I used to have a lot of neighbors, now I have almost no neighbors,” says George Naylor, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer who is trying to transition to organic farming to stay afloat.

Cochran is worried about the future of her rural Pennsylvania community as more farmers give up. Two neighbor farm auctions are scheduled soon. The dairy refrigeration supply business where she buys equipment is on the verge of collapse. Young people, seeing economic despair all around them, get out as quickly as they can. “I see this as a wholesale removal — or extermination — of our rural class,” she says.

There’s nothing on the horizon to turn around these rural areas. Americans are increasingly concentrating in a few metropolitan areas — by 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. The regions surrounding America’s family farms may become the country’s next ghost towns. “We have to think about what we really want rural America to look like,” says Jim Goodman, president of the National Family Farm Coalition. “Do we want it to be abandoned small towns and farmers who can’t make a living, and a lot of really big farms that are polluting the groundwater?” (Large farms, which have more animal waste to deal with because of their size, have been found to pollute groundwater and air.)

Most family farmers seem to agree on what led to their plight: government policy. In the years after the New Deal, they say, the United States set a price floor for farmers, essentially ensuring they received a minimum wage for the crops they produced. But the government began rolling back this policy in the 1970s, and now the global market largely determines the price they get for their crops. Big farms can make do with lower prices for crops by increasing their scale; a few cents per gallon of cow’s milk adds up if you have thousands of cows.

Jason Vaughn for TIMEMary Rieckmann on her farm in Fremont, Wisconsin, on Nov. 20, 2019.

Smaller farmers warn that a country without local farmers can create problems in the food supply chain. If one company is providing all the milk or cheese to an entire region, what happens when that plant gets contaminated or a storm isolates it from the rest of the country? “It’s an incredibly fragile supply chain, and when it fails, it fails completely,” says Marlow, of the Rural Advancement Foundation.

Family farmers say concentrating farmland among a few big companies is akin to feudalism, and un-American. It also diverts whatever profits might come from farming to faraway investors, aggravating the economic and geographic divisions that feed the nation’s political divide. “There’s a strong reason to be deeply concerned when instead of having 10 mid-sized dairy farms producing income whose owners spend it in town, you replace that with a large farm owned by a set of investors whose profits go running off to New York and Chicago,” said Peter Carstensen, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin law school.

Farmers say the best solution is government policy that cracks down on consolidation of the grocery stores and food processing facilities that buy food from farmers. Existing antitrust law would allow the government to prevent big mergers that mean farmers have fewer places to sell their crops and that supplies are more expensive, but those laws go largely unenforced, says Carstensen. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin congressman introduced legislation to put a moratorium on large food and grocery mergers. Farmers are advocating for better antitrust enforcement across the country; in October, cattle ranchers held a ‘Rally to Stop the Stealin’!’ to urge Congress to protect family farmers from monopoly power, and in Vermont, dairy farmers have filed a lawsuit alleging that a conglomerate of milk buyers conspired to set low prices on milk.

One category of small farmers is thriving in the current marketplace: organic farms who can charge a premium for their crops and who can sell them locally. There were more than 14,000 certified organic farmers in 2016, up 58 percent from 2011. But switching to organic is expensive, and for farmers like the Rieckmanns who are already deeply in debt, not an option. They haven’t gotten a cent of aid from the government, Rieckmann says, since the assistance goes to the farms with the most farmland and animals. They’re not holding their breath that anything will change. “I sometimes feel,” says Mary Rieckmann, “like they’re trying to wipe us off the map.”

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

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Worries about a U.S.-China trade war hit global markets Tuesday, following a war of words between the Trump administration and Beijing.

It has been a journey of more than two years for the White House’s efforts to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China, which rose to $375.2 billion in 2017 from $347 billion in 2016.

Here’s a rundown of key events up to this point:

May 2, 2016: During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump compared the U.S. trade deficit with China to “rape.”

June 28, 2016: Trump laid out seven steps on trade to bring back American jobs, including labeling China a currency manipulator on day one in the White House and using “every lawful presidential power to remedy trade disputes.” Those tactics included tariffs.

Nov. 2016 – Jan. 2017: Trump won the U.S. presidential election, then selected known China hawks for key positions on trade.

Peter Navarro, author of “Death by China,” was named head a newly formed National Trade Council.

Robert Lighthizer, who previously negotiated restrictions on steel imports and was deputy U.S. trade representative during the Reagan administration, was named U.S. Trade Representative.

April 7, 2017: Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The two-day summit ended on friendly terms. Xi agreed to a 100-day plan for trade talks to increase U.S. exports and reduce the deficit with China, as well as increase cooperation on limiting North Korea’s nuclear threat.

April 12, 2017: Trump told The Wall Street Journal he will not label China a currency manipulator in the Treasury Department’s forthcoming report.

Aug. 18, 2017: At Trump’s direction, the U.S. Trade Representative began its “Section 301” investigation into “China’s acts, policies, and practices related to technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation.”

March 8, 2018: Trump signed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent duties on aluminum, citing national security. Canada and Mexico are initially exempt.

March 22, 2018: Following the conclusion of the Section 301 investigation, Trump announced plans for tariffs, a settlement in a World Trade Organization dispute and investment restrictions on China.

April 1, 2018: China increased the tariff rate on pork products and aluminum scrap by 25 percent. Beijing also imposed a 15 percent tariff on 120 other U.S. commodities ranging from almonds to apples. The duties took effect that week.

April 3, 2018: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a proposed list of tariffs on roughly $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, including products used for robotics, information technology, communications and aerospace. The approximately 1,300 product lines will be open for public comment before any duties are imposed.

April 4, 2018: China’s Ministry of Commerce released its own tariff list covering 106 U.S. products, including soybeans, beef, corn, some aircraft and a range of vehicles. There was no effective date for the tariffs, designed to address $50 billion worth of U.S. goods.

April 5, 2018: Trump said he has asked the U.S. Trade Representative to consider $100 billion in additional tariffs against China.

April 6, 2018: China’s Ministry of Commerce said if the U.S. goes through with those tariffs, Beijing is prepared to fight back immediately.

April 10, 2018: China filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization about Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

On the same day, Xi spokebroadly about China’s plans to increase imports, lower tariffs on automobile imports, open up its financial services industry to foreigners and step up intellectual property protection. The speech at the Boao Forum for Asia did not directly address the trade dispute with the U.S., and did not cover new areas of reform.

Trump said in a tweet he was “very thankful” for Xi’s “kind words on tariffs and automobile barriers.”

April 16, 2018: The U.S. Commerce Department banned Chinese telecom equipment giant ZTE from buying U.S. components for seven years, saying the company has violated a settlement reached over illegal shipments to Iran and North Korea. Trading in ZTE shares was subsequently halted in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

May 13, 2018: Trump tweeted that he and Xi are working together to help ZTE “get back into business, fast” since there are “too many jobs in China lost.” Earlier in the month, the company said it had to halt its main operations as a result of U.S. actions.

May 18, 2018: China announced it is ending an anti-dumping investigation into U.S. sorghum imports. Earlier in the day, U.S. officials familiar with trade talks said Beijing was offering a package to reduce the U.S. trade deficit by up to $200 billion, according to Reuters and other media.

China’s Foreign Ministry subsequently said the reports were not true.

May 19, 2018: In a joint statement, the U.S. and China agreed to “meaningful increases in United States agriculture and energy exports” and “significant” increases in U.S. goods and services overall.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer led a delegation that met in Washington, D.C., with the Chinese, led by State Council Vice Premier Liu He.

May 20, 2018: The trade war is “on hold,” Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday.” “We have agreed to put the tariffs on hold while we try to execute the framework,” he said.

May 22, 2018: China said it will lower tariffs on automobile imports to 15 percent, from 25 percent. The new rate will be effective July 1.

But Trump said that same day he is “not satisfied” with last week’s trade talks with China and that the negotiations are only a “start.”

May 23, 2018: Trump tweeted that trade talks with China will probably have to go in a new direction in order to near a resolution.

May 29, 2018: Trump said in a statement on the White House website the U.S. will go ahead with 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, highlighting products related to the “Made in China 2025” program. The final list of tariffs was set for release by June 15.

May 31, 2018: Ahead of Commerce Secretary Ross’ visit, China announced it will cut tariffs on July 1 for 1,449 product lines. But the items were mostly irrelevant to trade with the U.S., analysts tell The New York Times.

June 4, 2018: Ross concluded meetings in Beijing with no specific agreement on trade. The two sides spoke generally about reducing the U.S. deficit by increasing supply of agriculture and energy products to China, according to a White House statement.

Beijing is willing to increase imports from the U.S. and other countries, but all outcomes of the trade negotiations will not take effect if the U.S. imposes tariffs, according to a statement from the Chinese side published by the state-run newspaper Xinhua.

June 6, 2018: Chinese negotiators proposed a package valued at nearly $70 billion in first-year purchases, if the Trump administration would step back from tariffs, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. The proposal included increased Chinese purchases of soybeans, corn, natural gas, crude oil and coal, the Journal said.

June 7, 2018: ZTE settled with the U.S. to pay up to $1.4 billion for violating a March 2017 agreement. Until it makes the payment, the Chinese telecom equipment company remains banned from buying from U.S. components.

June 12, 2018: ZTE shares plunged more than 40 percent in Hong Kong after trading resumed following a near two-month halt.

June 15, 2018: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a list of 1,102 Chinese imports worth about $50 billion. A 25 percent tariff on 818 of these items, valued at about $34 billion, will take effect July 6.

The other 284 products, worth about $16 billion, will undergo a public comment process before a final decision on implementation.

China responded with its own list of 545 U.S. imports worth roughly $34 billion that will be subject to a 25 percent tariff beginning July 6. These products include soybeans, electric vehicles, a range of hybrid electric vehicles and a variety of seafood. Aircraft was not on the list.

Beijing also said will impose tariffs at an unspecified later date on an additional 114 U.S. goods including crude oil, diesel and magnetic resonance imaging kits. Altogether, the two lists covered 659 U.S. goods, worth $50 billion.

June 18, 2018: The U.S. Senate passed a military funding bill with a provision that reimposes a ban on ZTE buying components from U.S. companies. The House of Representatives’ version of the bill, which passed in May, did not include the ZTE provision. While a committee works out the differences, the White House can still push for changes.

In the evening, Trump said he has directed the U.S. Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for an additional 10 percent tariff. These duties will take effect if China does not change its practices and goes through with the tariffs it has announced, according to a statement on the White House’s website.

China’s Commerce Ministry said the U.S. “has initiated a trade war” and that China will protect its interests.

Note: All dates are based on Eastern Time.

— CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report.

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Breaking News: Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections

New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/05/21/breaking-news-hillary-and-bill-clinton-go-separate-ways-for-2018-midterm-elections/

Breaking News: Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections

For years they dominated the party, brandishing their powerful financial network and global fame to pick favorites for primary elections and lift Democrats even in deep-red states. They were viewed as a joint entity, with a shared name that was the most powerful brand in Democratic politics: the Clintons.

But in the 2018 election campaign, Hillary and Bill Clinton have veered in sharply different directions. Mrs. Clinton appears determined to play at least a limited role in the midterms, bolstering longtime allies and raising money for Democrats in safely liberal areas. Her husband has been all but invisible.

And both have been far less conspicuous than in past election cycles, but for different reasons: Mrs. Clinton faces distrust on the left, where she is seen as an avatar of the Democratic establishment, and raw enmity on the right. Mr. Clinton has been largely sidelined amid new scrutiny of his past misconduct with women.

Mrs. Clinton is expected to break her virtual hiatus from the campaign trail this week, when she will endorse Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York in a contested Democratic primary, her spokesman, Nick Merrill, confirmed — a move sure to enrage liberal activists seeking Mr. Cuomo’s ouster at the hands of Cynthia Nixon, the actress turned progressive insurgent. Mrs. Clinton has also recorded an automated phone call endorsing Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic leader in the Georgia House, who is competing for the party’s nomination for governor on Tuesday.

It is unclear whether Mr. Clinton will be involved in either race.

Mrs. Clinton’s stunning defeat in 2016 delivered a blunt-force coda to the family’s run in electoral politics, and many Democrats are wary of seeing either of them re-engage. They worry that the Clinton name reeks of the past and fear that their unpopularity with conservative-leaning and independent voters could harm Democrats in close races. And among many younger and more liberal voters, the Clintons’ reputation for ideological centrism has little appeal.

President Trump, meanwhile, has continued to level caustic attacks that have made the Clintons radioactive with Republicans. A Gallup poll in December found Mrs. and Mr. Clinton with their lowest favorability ratings in years.

So far, the couple have avoided high-profile special elections in Alabama, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and engaged sparingly in the off-year elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia.

Even in their former political backyard — in Arkansas, where Mr. Clinton was governor — there is scant demand for their help. In Little Rock, Ark., where on Tuesday there is a Democratic primary election for a Republican-held House seat the party covets, none of the four candidates running has reached out to seek the Clintons’ support, their campaigns said.

“I see the Clintons as a liability,” said Paul Spencer, a high school teacher running as a progressive in the Arkansas race. “They simply represent the old mind-set of a Democratic Party that is going to continue to lose elections.”

Still, Mrs. Clinton plainly maintains a following in the party and aims to help in corners of the country where she can. She introduced a political group, Onward Together, after the 2016 election, and has directed millions to liberal grass-roots organizations, like Indivisible and Swing Left. And she is in talks about campaigning for some Democratic candidates in the fall, likely in a cluster of House districts where she defeated Mr. Trump.

“We have to win back the Congress,” Mrs. Clinton said during a seven-minute speech Friday in Washington, at a women’s leadership conference organized by the Democratic National Committee.

Her interventions for Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Abrams are rare steps for the former secretary of state, who has rebuffed other requests for help and signaled even to close allies that she would not meddle in primary elections.

The difference in her approach toward the two races underscores the delicacy of her role: In New York, where Mrs. Clinton is popular and Mr. Cuomo needs help mainly with fellow Democrats, she intends to deliver her endorsement publicly, at a state party convention on Long Island. In Georgia, where Mrs. Clinton’s imprimatur could harm Ms. Abrams in a general election, the endorsement will be delivered only through phone messages to Democratic voters — making the appeal imperceptible to everyone else.

But Clinton associates say the bulk of her activities will be in the fall.

Former Representative Ellen Tauscher of California, a close ally who is on the board of Onward Together, said she expected Mrs. Clinton to campaign later in the season and cited Senator Dianne Feinstein’s re-election campaign in her home state as a likely choice.

“People she has supported for a long time, like Dianne Feinstein and others, know she’s with them,” Ms. Tauscher said.

Mrs. Clinton’s husband appears far less welcome on the trail, with his unpopularity among Republicans compounded by new skepticism on the left about his treatment of women and allegations of sexual assault.

Mr. Clinton is said to remain passionately angry about the 2016 election — more so than his wife — raising concerns that he could go wildly off message in campaign settings, several people who have spoken with Mr. Clinton said.

Democrats have been keeping their distance: During the special election for Senate in Alabama in December, Doug Jones, the Democrat who won the race, considered enlisting Mr. Clinton’s help before abandoning the idea as too risky.

When Mr. Clinton offered to campaign for Ralph Northam, now the governor of Virginia, Mr. Northam’s camp responded cautiously. Rather than headlining a public event, Mr. Clinton was urged to attend a fund-raiser already scheduled in the Washington area — a suggestion that offended the former president, according to people briefed on the awkward exchange. The Northam and Clinton camps discussed a church visit in October but failed to agree on a date.

Yet Mr. Clinton appears eager to engage where he can, holding an event last fall with Phil Murphy, now the governor of New Jersey. This year, Mike Espy, Mr. Clinton’s former agriculture secretary who is running for Senate in Mississippi, told a fellow cabinet alumnus, Rodney Slater, that he was hoping to reach Mr. Clinton. Minutes later, Mr. Espy has told associates, his phone rang: It was the former president, who launched into a monologue advising Mr. Espy on campaign strategy and pledging to deliver fund-raising help.

Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, said the former president has been focused on nonpolitical projects, including the publication of a thriller next month. Noting that Mr. Clinton left office nearly two decades ago, Mr. Ureña called it “remarkable” that questions were being asked about his role in the midterms.

“Candidates from across the country have been in touch about him supporting their campaigns,” Mr. Ureña said. “But we’re not past primary season, and he’s focused on the work of his foundation and his book.”

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said she had been largely focused on her new political group, and promised “there will be more to come.”

“While Republicans are hellbent on focusing on the past, she is focused on the future,” Mr. Merrill said.

But Mrs. Clinton has stirred frustration among Democrats who hope she plays a muted role in 2018. Last year, she chose to focus quite a bit on the past, revisiting the particulars of her 2016 defeat in a memoir, to the consternation of other Democrats. And in a series of public speeches, she has offered cutting criticism of American political culture.

During a visit to India in March, she seemed to suggest that many women who voted for Mr. Trump did so because of pressure from their husbands. This month, Mrs. Clinton declared in New York that her support for capitalism had hurt her in 2016 — because so many Democrats are now socialists.

At least two Democratic women have nearly begged Mrs. Clinton to stay away from their high-stakes red-state Senate races. After Mrs. Clinton said in March that she won parts of America that are “moving forward,” unlike Trump-friendly areas, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri rebuked her.

“I don’t think that’s the way you should talk about any voter, especially ones in my state,” Ms. McCaskill said.

Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota was blunter when asked, on the radio, when Mrs. Clinton might “ride off into the sunset.”

“Not soon enough,” she replied.

Associates of Mrs. Clinton said she is aware of the political pressures that make her unwelcome in red states, and they do not expect her to charge into races where she is undesired. They generally anticipate she will focus on fund-raising.

Her bond with Democratic donors was on grand display last month: In late April, Mrs. Clinton convened a gathering in New York for the liberal groups backed by Onward Together, meeting for hours with organizers and donors at an airy conference center overlooking the East River.

Mrs. Clinton delivered an unsparing critique there of the Democratic Party’s political infrastructure: She said the left had failed to match Republicans’ enthusiasm for party-building and lamented what she called the poor state of Democrats’ electioneering machinery in 2016, according to several attendees.

“On the Democratic side, she talked about how we want to fall in love with the candidate and Republicans will fall in line,” said Cristóbal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project, a group backed by Mrs. Clinton’s organization.

But Mr. Alex said Mrs. Clinton had not taken aim at the man who defeated her.

“I don’t remember her uttering the word ‘Trump,’” he said, “but so many others did and you couldn’t escape that context in this meeting.”

Trump’s mounting confrontation with China also threatens to light a bonfire directly beneath the Republican Party’s last firewall against potentially significant losses in the 2018 midterm elections.

The GOP’s dominance of small-town and rural America has become the indisputable geographic foundation of its power in Washington. And the party is counting on continued strength in those areas to contain its losses this fall, particularly after the repeated indications in a number of special and local elections over the past 15 months that distaste for Trump in urban centers and white-collar suburbs could produce a sharp backlash against Republican candidates in more densely populated areas.

In this volatile dispute, the stakes in rural America are high both economically and politically. No industry is more identified with the American heartland than agriculture, yet few are more tightly integrated into global markets.

Tariffs would hit farming communities harder

Tough talk against China was a big part of Trump’s campaign pitch, but the prospect of an actual trade war with China could weaken that last line of defense for the GOP. No economic sector has raised greater alarms about the potential consequences of a trade war than agriculture, a highly export-dependent industry mired in a years-long slump even as most other economic sectors have revived. That’s sent farm state Republican elected officials and strategists scrambling to criticize the rapidly multiplying threats by Trump to impose punishing tariffs on a wide array of Chinese products — and the Chinese threats to respond in kind, particularly against US agricultural exports.

“For the rural economy in Iowa the forecast is grim, and I think Trump needs to understand what’s going on the ground out there,” says Craig Robinson, a longtime GOP strategist in Iowa. “These people in rural Iowa are already seeing their towns, their people and their population disappear. It is all consolidating in these metropolitan areas. If these tariffs actually happen, it is going to speed that up, and you risk speeding up that change where these are rock solid conservative voters today and in the next election cycle it could be completely different.”

Democrats believe the threatened tariffsare creating new opportunities for them in rural places that have become very stony ground for the party. “He is making a very, very big mistake by doing this,” says Rep. Cheri Bustos, an Illinois Democrat who leads the party’s rural engagement effort for 2018. “Many of the farmers I know, the growers and the producers, they were not only just supportive of President Trump but they were enthusiastically supportive of him. It’s one more indication that he’s treating us like flyover country. When you are messing with someone’s pocketbook at a time when they are already hurting, that does not bode well.”

Agricultural exports now consistently account for about 20% of farm income. That’s considerably higher than exports’ share of the total economy, which has varied from about 11% to just below 14% over the past decade.

China in 2017 passed Canada (which is locked in trade disputes with Trump over renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement) as the largest market for American agricultural exports. And soybeans, which China conspicuously targeted for retaliatory tariffs, this year will surpass corn as the crop that American farmers are planting on the most acres — the first time it has exceeded corn in at least 35 years, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Soybeans and corn rank one-two as the most highly exported American crops; China has tagged both, along with wheat, beef and pork, as targets for offsetting tariffs if Trump implements his threatened levies on a wide array of Chinese imports.

Adding to the pressure, the trade tensions are rising when many farmers are already scuffling. Though the recovery in energy production (particularly natural gas) boosted overall job growth in 2017 across small town and rural communities, agriculture itself has been suffering through a cycle of excessive production and weak prices: The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service recently projected that farm income this year would slump to its lowest since 2006. Ironically, even as Trump is threatening China, one of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s principal responses to the squeeze has been to pledge to increase American agricultural exports.

Republicans’ rural base

All of this pressure is concentrating on exurban, small town and rural communities that have become central to Republican electoral power. As Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Virginia and chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, often says, the GOP’s center of gravity “has moved from the country club to the country.”

The extent of the shift is captured in data analyzed by Bill Bishop, the author of a highly regarded book on geographic and political polarization (“The Big Sort“) and co-founder of The Daily Yonder, a nonprofit website that examines rural issues.

At the presidential level, the Daily Yonder’s analysis ranks counties across seven categories based on their size, from counties of 1 million or more people that are in urban centers down to rural areas. Democrats have won the largest category, of million-plus urban centers, in every presidential election since 2004, and also carried the next two groupings (million-plus counties not located in central cities and metro counties with 250,000 to 1 million in population) in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

Republicans, in turn, have established a commanding advantage on the smallest four groups of counties on the list, including metropolitan areas that range from 250,000 to 1 million in population. Small town America is centered on the bottom three groups: metro areas with less than 250,000 in population, rural counties adjacent to metropolitan areas and rural counties not near any metro areas. Republicans have carried each of those areas comfortably since 2004, but in 2016 Trump still dramatically expanded the party’s advantage in those places. He beat Hillary Clinton by almost exactly 2-to-1 in each of the two smallest areas.

In the House, the GOP hold on small town America is even more overwhelming. The Daily Yonder ranks each House seat based on the share of the population that lives in rural areas (according to census definitions). By its count, Republicans now control 44 of the 50 most rural House seats across the country, and fully 107 of the top 120 — a stunning ratio of nearly 9-to-1. Even looking at all 181 districts where one-fifth or more of the residents qualify as rural, Republicans hold 155 seats and Democrats just 26 (including Bustos’ seat). That means almost 2-in-3 House Republicans represent seats that are at least one-fifth rural, compared with only about 1-in-8 Democrats.

The fight for rural voters

Democrats are targeting very few of the Republican-held seats at the top of that list, generally the places where the rural population reaches at least 45% of the total. (Republican Reps. Bruce Poliquin of Maine, John Faso of New York and Tim Walberg of Michigan are among the few exceptions.)

But the Democrats are aiming at a large number of GOP representatives one rung down the ladder, in districts that mix a substantial rural population (around 15% to 40% of the district) with larger population centers, particularly white-collar suburbs. Republicans in that category range from Andy Barr in Kentucky to Rod Blum and David Young in Iowa; Rodney Davis and Mike Bost in Illinois; Jeff Denham and David Valadao in California; and Cathy McMorris Rodgers and the open seat being vacated by Dave Reichert in Washington state.

Relative to his 2016 vote, Trump’s approval in rural America has declined, just as it has in bigger places. But the President’s culturally conservative and anti-immigrant themes generally find a receptive audience in those communities, and the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll placed his approval rating in rural communities at 51%, 7 points higher than in suburban areas and 13 points higher than in urban centers.

Trump’s relatively stronger standing has fortified Republican hopes of preventing any Democratic rural revival in 2018. But the trade dispute has complicated that picture. While the President’s hard line against China could prove popular in small towns that revolve around manufacturing, it has drawn near universal condemnation from the leading farm groups. “It is the worst kind of news we could get,” John Heisdorffer, an Iowa farmer and president of the American Soybean Association, told the Des Moines Register last week.

Responding to those alarms, a parade of farm state Republican senators and representatives have criticized the proposed tariffs and urged the administration to find other ways to pressure China. But, apart from Sasse, few have personally criticized or distanced themselves from Trump.

Republican Rep. David Young of Iowa, who could face a competitive race this fall, walked that tightrope in an appearance on National Public Radio last week. “I think the President has the best interests of America in mind when it comes to the economy and making sure that farmers and anybody else has great opportunity out there,” Young said. “It’s just so unfortunate that when it comes to the trade issue, and it’s not fair, whatever the issue is first — steel, intellectual property, aluminum — that those foreign countries, China, know where to hit us first, and that’s with agriculture.”

Most important, Trump’s farm state Republican critics have yet to propose any concrete action Congress might take to discourage him from pursuing sanctions if talks with China stalemate; Young’s staff, for instance, says only that he “isn’t ruling out any action available to Congress.” The administration has signaled it may use other federal programs to financially compensate farmers hurt by any eventual tariffs — though the magnitude of the potential losses would be difficult to entirely offset.

In rural America, the cultural barriers for Democrats remain formidable. But the Republican reluctance to confront Trump too forcefully could create a rare opening in farm country for Democrats who are generally challenging Trump much more directly than their GOP counterparts over the tariffs. North Carolina Democrats, for instance, held a press conference Monday to denounce Trump’s saber rattling as a threat to the state’s farmers.

“If the Republican members of Congress don’t start … standing up to this President, I think that November is going to be a very positive election for Democrats,” Bustos says. “Republicans definitely have to own what the Trump administration does. [As the majority] it is on them to allow us to debate these issues. It is on them to make sure we have reasonable legislation we can vote on. It is on all of their backs.”

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Out in the Country, Home Buying Isn’t Idyllic at All

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Country life might seem idyllic compared with the city—there’s a slower pace of life, a stronger sense of community, and way more home for your dollar, even including a nice plot of land. Farm stands with freshly picked fruits and vegetables! Hoedowns! Tractors instead of subways!

But the reality isn’t so simple. Or quite so pretty.

It turns out, affordable housing is tougher to find in much of rural America—home to about a fifth of the nation’s population—than in the country’s big cities and prominent suburbs.

“Rural areas across the country have not recovered from the Great Recession as well as bigger cities [have],” says Bob Rapoza, executive secretary of the National Rural Housing Coalition, a Washington, DC–based membership organization. “There are fewer people who want to live there.”

And those who do face a vicious cycle: The population decline means that no one is investing in these small towns, whether it’s to build houses or offer mortgages. Employers aren’t inclined to move to depressed areas and, of course, the reason that people left in the first place was a lack of good jobs. But rural living still holds a lure primarily for those who grew up there, and for some just looking for a change. Here are the main hurdles that they’ll face.

You’re unlikely to find a turnkey home

Remote areas typically don’t have many well-maintained homes for rent or sale—and even fewer that locals can afford.

Take Pawnee, a small town in north-central Oklahoma that’s been losing residents for decades. The median closing price of homes in the town was just $56,000, according to realtor.com® data. But while that may sound like a bargain, these homes often require extensive—and expensive—renovations and upgrades. That’s because the majority of the housing stock is more than three decades old. (And also because they’ve been ravaged by years of earthquakes due to the region’s fracking and horizontal drilling methods.) Anyone who has the means for something better typically purchases land where their dream home can be custom-built.

And in places where there are plenty of good-value homes to go around, it’s usually because residents have left the area as big employers and good-paying jobs have disappeared.

Without lots of employers, wages in small towns are about a third lower than in cities, at just $44,212 in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.

That’s had a big impact on property values. Home prices have grown only 13.6% in predominantly rural parts of the country since they bottomed out in 2011, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Meanwhile, they’ve risen 25% in more populated areas over the same time period.

Options for financing are limited

In San Francisco, Miami, and New York City, there’s a bank on nearly every corner offering a wide range of loan options. That’s not true in much of rural America. And even when there is a bank, it doesn’t offer the same sorts of mortgages.

In 2010, nearly 30% of all rural and small-town home loans were made by just 10 banks, according to the Taking Stock report from the Housing Assistance Council, a national nonprofit that helps build homes and communities across rural America. That same year, 35.7% of high-cost mortgages were awarded to rural residents.

“It would never occur to some people that a local bank might not offer a 30-year fixed mortgage,” says Jim King, president of Fahe, a Berea, KY–based nonprofit group dedicated to fighting poverty in Appalachia. But this is often the reality. Many rural banks don’t have as much capital to write long-term loans or mortgage specialists to find appropriate loans as big-city financial institutions.

In areas of persistent poverty, it may be extremely difficult to get a loan at all. Many families out in the country don’t make enough money to qualify for a loan. In response, some families are doubling up with multiple generations and even cohabiting with unrelated families. Kids are staying home longer than they (and their parents) might like. There are plenty of roommates.

And it can be difficult to find enough similar properties in more isolated markets to put together the accurate appraisals that lenders want before issuing mortgages.

From 2003 to 2010, when banks seemed to be writing mortgages for just about anyone with a pulse, 56% of home purchase loan applications were declined in rural areas, according to HAC’s report.

Despite the difficulties, homeownership is higher outside of the cities, with about 81.1% of households living in their own abodes, according to 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data. That’s compared with 59.8% in urban areas.

But the lack of lending makes it harder to keep those homes in good repair.

“The supply [of homes] that is there is more likely to be substandard than in other parts of the country,” the National Rural Housing Coalition’s Rapoza says. “People are poorer. … There are fewer banks, [so] there are less options for credit.”

There’s not much building going on in rural America

There are also fewer affordable homes being built in rural America.

Most of the new construction going up since the recession has been big apartment buildings in the 15 largest metros, says Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders. Despite lower land costs, single-family home construction lags in rural areas, he says.

He anticipates just 11% of new single-family homes will be built outside of urban and suburban areas. And more than likely, those are pricey, custom-built dream homes or vacation getaways.

Many of these areas don’t have enough middle-income buyers for new subdivisions stocked with hundreds or thousands of homes. So builders can’t take advantage of economies of scale (e.g., discounts on new flooring or lumber for buying in bulk)—and that nudges prices up.

Development costs are also higher in some parts of the country due to the natural terrain or the cost of putting in infrastructure.

Case in point: Zavala County, TX, not far from the Mexican border, in the Rio Grande Plain. Many of the county’s “border colonias,” or rural settlements, were developed before infrastructure such as water, sewage, or electricity was put in place. And in the sparsely populated area, the cost of installing it after the fact has drastically increased development costs.

A home for sale in Zavala County

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Paired with expensive insurance and building requirements to combat the plain’s frequent floods, affordable housing has become even less accessible to cash-strapped residents, 33.4% of whom live below the poverty line.

The median home list price in the county is $165,000, according to realtor.com data. That’s well under the national average of about $270,000.

Government programs to help rural residents are on the chopping block

There are still some folks who can achieve the dream of deep-country homeownership—with some government assistance. But President Donald Trump‘s proposed budget slashes funding for rural housing programs by almost half.

One of those programs slated to be eliminated, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Mutual Self-Help Housing, gave single mom Christine Tighe, 28, a boost into homeownership.

Tighe was struggling to rustle up $900 each month for her three-bedroom rental home in rural Riverview, FL, on the outskirts of Tampa. But that didn’t stop her landlord from increasing the rent every year. When the price finally hit $1,100 a month in 2011, Tighe, a waitress at a nearby casino, knew it was time to move.

“I didn’t want to spend all my money renting,” she says.

The problem was that there weren’t many available rentals—and even fewer that she could afford on her tight salary.

Frustrated, Tighe filed an application to get her own home through the USDA Mutual Self-Help Housing program, which has helped about 500,000 low-income folks in rural areas build their own homes by contributing their labor. When her application was approved, Tighe and seven other households of soon-to-be-neighbors invested more than 600 hours of sweat equity in their future homes by installing drywall and caulking tile.

In November 2016, Tighe moved into her own four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Ruskin, FL. Putting no money down, she was able to secure a fixed-rate mortgage with payments of just $650 a month.

But such housing assistance programs “are few and far between in rural America,” says Lisa Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in rural poverty. “It often makes it very hard for families to crawl out of poverty.”

The wealthy are squeezing out the rest

Of course, not all rural areas face the same challenges. In some, remoteness is part of the draw for wealthy buyers, spurring the local economy but spelling challenges for those who work there.

In celebrity-studded Jackson Hole, WY,  a scenic ski resort town with a population of about 10,500, even the 1% struggle to buy homes. About 97% of the area’s stunningly beautiful landscape is federally owned. This limits the number of houses, which drives up prices.

For low- and middle-income buyers and renters, trying to find a home is like searching for a lost Apple AirPod in a blizzard. One-bedroom condos there start around $325,000 or so. A 200-square-foot rental studio goes for about $950 a month.

It’s a housing environment that forces many working-class locals to live in neighboring Idaho, driving over the Teton Pass, a high mountain road that sometimes gets shut down for avalanche control.

To make ends meet, waiter and ski instructor Nathaniel Haygood, 30, splits a two-bedroom, roughly 750-square-foot condo with one full-time and one part-time roommate in Jackson Hole. Haygood would like to one day buy a home in his beloved mountain town. But homeownership feels completely out of reach in this market, where the median list price is $1.3 million.

“I want to make it work here,” Haygood says. But “I don’t know if I’ll be able to swallow paying rent for the next 40 or 50 years.”

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