I’ve been looking at New Labour’s security strategy(pdf file) recently and there appears to be a strange omission – what will the government do when food shortages start to bite at home and when the rising human cost of globalisation and climate change pushes more and more desperate refugees to flee starvation, only to wash up drowned on the shores of Fortress Europe?
In Sierra Leone, the price of rice has risen 300 per cent and in Senegal and much of the rest of West Africa by 50 per cent. Palm oil, sugar and flour, all imported, have also surged.
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Food riots have been reported in recent weeks in several countries. At least 40 people were killed in protests in Cameroon in February. There have also been violent demonstrations in Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal and Burkina Faso, where a nationwide strike against any more food price increases started yesterday.
Rice shortages in the Phillippines Thailand and Vietnam, long queues for Indian imports in Bangladesh simmering violence in Egypt over inequality and the price of bread: soon unrest over food prices and global inequality will begin to get closer to the borders of the developed world. If prices rise high enough and staples become scarce it may even infect those countries themselves.
Many commentators think that food price hikes and resulting civil unrest may not be temporary events or restricted to poor countries. They say this is a crisis: it’s not just about markets or cyclical recession or inflation, but results from more long-lasting causes, such as globalisation, subsidies, spreading desertification and the growing demand for grain-fed meat from unchecked, exponentially increasing populations.
In Brown’s security strategy
There is to be a significant increase in anti-terrorism police capability, new regional intelligence units, disruption of violent extremist activity, unified border controls, compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals, stronger action against those who stir up tensions and – yes – an extension of preventative detention to 42 days.
Blair and Brown have imposed ever tighter controls on the liberty of the UK population and abrogated unprecedented emergency powers to themselves via the Civil Contingencies Act, in the name of fighting terrorism, but we won’t really feel the full force unless and until there’s public unrest, whether it’s over fuel or taxes or floods or food prices.
The styrategy may not mention it overtly, but possibility of unrest due to food and commodity shortages, complicated by an influx of starving refugees from the rest of the world, is really what New Labour’s oppressive laws have been passed to deal with; the orchestrated fear of terrorism is a convenient fiction to manufacture consent for the oppressive laws that are really there to control us, not some unknown idiot jihadi with a bottle of peroxide. Those biometric databases and ID cards do actually have a purpose other than faciliating the natural tendency of civil servants to commit petty oppressions.
Take entitlement to rations: how can you ration anything, whether it’s carbon, gas, rice or water, if you don’t know who’s entitled to it – or more importantly, who’s not entitled? Much easier for each citizen to get his or her allotted minimum share – and no more – if all their fingerprints or iris scans are on file. Much easier to control who’s entitled and who’s not. But the manipulation of entitlement to food and fuel is a known political weapon: you only have to look at Zimbabwe. Do we want New Labour’s clever boys and girls to have similar power over us?
It’s notable that the UK Resilience website has a section dealing with public protest, but not with food shortages. DEFRA studies show that the UK food chain is not well-prepared for any emergency at all, let alone food shortages.
British civil defence types would point out they’ve been planning for disasters for a long time. Well, they might call it planning, but it’s more about who’s in charge. Rather than making sure infrastructure is sound, commodity stockpiles are sufficient and the population is informed enough to weather a world food crisis, (much more likely to happen than some idiot schoolboy with a dirty bomb) they’ve concentrated on consolidating their own political power. It’s clear that the future that the government has in mind is a dystopia in which we’re all considered criminals, potential terrorists and a threat to the state.
Why might any one of us be considered a terrorist? The prospect of food shortages also puts another twist to the antiterror laws: in a time of scarcity anyone who interferes in any way with the food supply must ipso facto be a terrorist. This could include battery farming protestors (we may yet see a time when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are banged up without trial for 42 days) and anti-GM agitators, anti-globalisation activists, potentially even Granny, who’s obviously an antisocial hoarder putting the nation at risk with her cupboard full of flour and sugar.
Environmentalists have been warning politicians of the potential for a food supply catastrophe for years and yet the government and prime minister seem to have spent little time considering that threat to public well-being. What they’re actually worried about is the threat to their grip on power.
Brown’s spent the last 7 years wasting our national resources and public goodwill in spending billions ‘fighting’ the chimaera of terrorism; he’s obsessed with the idea of subversive enemies without and within, when in fact the real enemy of the people has been the political and economic system we live under.
Brown’s very fond of quoting Churchill so perhaps he should think on this:
” One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.
