27/12/2025
Severe flooding in Sri Lanka has been most concentrated in the area of tea plantations. Consequently, crops of tea have been lost and plantation workers with nowhere to go.
Congolese refugees, mostly women and children, fleeing the city of Uvira violently grabbed by another natural resource (crucial metals) grabbing group of armed men, the M23, to Burundi have been without food for days.
While a headline during the 2008 financial “crisis” read CREDIT CRUNCH BRINGS BIG RISE IN SUPRERMARKET OFFERS ON SUGARY FOODS, obesity has always been stigmatized by the High & Mighty as a lack of self-discipline among poor people. Now free market innovation has seen fierce competition over sales of a pharmaceutical cure for obesity requiring no self-discipline. The Danish based Novo Nordisk and the US-based Eli Lilley are battling for market share.
In Britain Four prisoners long awaiting trial, and with the prospect of long prison sentences if the government can carry out its project of selective abolition of jury trials, for non-violent disruption of Israeli armaments production in the country are entering the stage of hunger strike where they are likely to die. They are part of a group accused of Terrorism. The lack of any sense of proportion nurtured by the lack of any sense of decency involved indicates among many things the successful Israeli export of “Terrorist” to describe all and any opposition to its power.
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11/12/2025
Two “wild boar” were found dead in Cerdanyola del Vallès on the outskirts of Metropolitan Barcelona, analysis showing they had died from African Swine Fever. This unlike Swine Flu is a virus that is fatal to both species of pig, the wild Boar and the “farmyard”/industrialized pig. In China in 2018 and 2022 and in Vietnam, both then and once again earlier this year, tens and thousands of pigs were killed by the Fever or by being culled. That is, they were strategically killed to halt the Fever’s spread or perhaps just to assure export pork markets that everything was being done to stop the spread.
Spain’s pork export business is worth 10 billion Euros and there are rules to ensure massive industrial farms are “biosecure”. Yet the “wild boar” population has risen exponentially, and they are identified as likely repositories of many viruses. The two deaths were investigated, and the results provoked the mass deployment of police and army in the area as well as quarantined areas in Barcelona’s hills that humans could no longer access. Explanations for the outbreak soon settled on wild boar having eaten dodgy meat from foreign-sourced sandwiches. Soon thereafter it was discovered that a laboratory in the very area where the two died was working on a vaccine against the Fever. Then 5 more laboratories fell under suspicion.
Vietnam claims to have produced a vaccine but its cost has prevented its widespread application. In other parts of the world similar outbreaks have brought other issues to light. In Canada, having faced a USA ban on Canadian pork, the question of what a wild boar is was entertained and questions arose whether they are in fact hybrids produced by capitalist logic and then made into a hazard by capitalist carelessness. Some claim the hybrids had been bred by farmers to produce more meat per animal but were then released into the wild when market conditions were no longer profitable.
In Spain the laboratory’s ‘secure methods’ suggested that if the virus had come from there it would have been due to a deliberate act of sabotage. A similar idea was also articulated in Poland. Meanwhile capitalist A-to-B logic wonders about the possibility of reintroducing wolves to control the wild boar. A suggested ban on hunting to stop the immediate spread of the Fever was attacked by the now openly Francoist PP and fascist VOX parties as an act of “climate fanaticism”.
In Greece a goat and sheep cull was taking place nearly simultaneously in response to the outbreak of another animal disease, sheep and goat pox, which is also a viral infection. As of ten days ago there were 1700 infected and 417,00 animals killed. This it is said will starkly curtail Greece’s 785 million feta cheese export market across the EU.
Unlike African Swine Fever, Avian Flu has the potential to infect & kill humans. There have been deaths reported in multiple countries. Now in Spain the death of a fox has been caused by this Avian (bird) flu. This would be the first time in Spain it has been openly declared that a mammal has been killed by it but in the USA and elsewhere numerous mammal species have already succumbed.
This “jump” across species barriers has massive implications and so far considerations of profitability trump any fears around new pandemics and public health. The USA is suspected of simply not counting human cases since RFK became head of the USA’s health bodies. In Ontario, Canada where 100, 000 birds were culled in October, the country’s food inspection agency has refused to even answer any questions on Avian flu.
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29/11/2025
Chinese and European industrial fishing fleets operate close to the 200 mile coast of Gambia resulting in local fishermen having to voyage further for depleted stocks and putting them in danger of being run over by the giant trawlers as has happened. The work of these fleets is often illegal for being so close to the coast, but the law is not enforced. The fine mesh of their nets makes for indiscriminate fishing contrary to a raft of unenforced rules and laws on seafood conservation. The catch goes to Hausen Seafood owned by the Spanish conglomerate Congelados Maravilla, with its headquarters in Vigo, a Galician seafood hub and sold across Europe where the notion of Sustainability is still common currency.
Not surprisingly the USA Trump Administration has withdrawn its 40% tariff on imported Brazilian beef. Not surprising given the prominence on the manly virtues of beef in its ideology and the stirrings of discontent at the rise in food prices in general. and when Brazil is such an important producer. The tariffs were anyway part of a vindictive measure against Brazil and its Supreme Court for convicting former President Bolsinaro, a soulmate of the US Administration of planning a coup d’etat against Brazil’s election winner and President Lula. It has not prevented politicized financial threats elsewhere in the Southern half of the Americas as at present against Honduras. The Trump government has also backed down from threats to the major agribusiness corporations over beef prices. Tangling with for example Cargill, “the most evil company in the world” was seen as perhaps not wise.
Bird flu which can quickly spread through chicken and other bird populations and can jump species as known from deaths in Vietnam and other Asian countries has jumped continents and cannot be seen as someone else’s problem by Europeans. Tens of thousands of turkeys and chickens have been culled in the Northern Europe autumn. following a spate of cases in mid, west and north Wales.
Human-caused climate change is having a transnational effect on coffee growing. Prices are at a fifty-year high and the type of bean grown are changing because of extreme weather conditions in the world’s largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam. Brazil’s traditional coffee growing regions, which largely produce arabica beans, have hit by more intense and frequent droughts, and hotter temperatures. Many farmers have shifted to Robusta beans which may accelerate but not prevent a further price increase because the robusta harvest of Vietnam has been badly damaged by the typhoon and flooding that have assaulted the country as reported in WATER. of 25/11/2025
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14/11/2025
The officially declared Famine in Sudan especially in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, and in the displaced peoples’ camps like those in Chad is real; real people really die from hunger. It is not the result of a civil war but between two sets of military men from Omar al-Bashir’s autocratic rule. Both were involved in overrunning the popular uprising that brought down the dictator’s long-term rule in 2019 until they fell out. One set, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), besiege cities, burn crops and food warehouses while the other, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF ) stop aid getting into RSF controlled areas. Seeing what military forces can do to civilian populations, it is discouraging that the politically powerful military of Pakistan have now taken even more power for themselves. WealthofNegations does not believe this will at all help the flood-devastated farmers of the country or their consumers. The military are not equipped to win a war with catastrophic and continuing climate change.
To appease the soya farmers of the USA the Trump Administration, having used food as a weapon against its own poorer inhabitants, has claimed that in negotiations over trade and tariffs with China, the $12 billion of soy exports to China will resume. There is however nothing formally agreed. Meanwhile it also worries about the effect of food prices on the electorate. This is especially true of beef that had previously been identified as a MAGA value in itself. In political support of the former authoritarian President of Brazil the US Administration slapped 50% tariff on all Brazilian exports when Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef, cattle raised equally on legal and illegal land. At the same time, cattle ranchers in the USA, the real MAGA self-imagery, are in decline. They complain of the power of an oligarchy of meat-packer-processors. Although the Administration is favourable to oligarchies, the President has turned his ire on these particular ones. The largest, JBS, is nominally Brazilian but it is also a source of investment revenue for major USA banks. For a moment, the President suggested tariff-free imports of beef from chainsaw Milei’s dependent Argentina but US ranchers didn’t like it at all. As with the conflict between real blackshirts like Stephen Miller and large-scale farmers in need of “migrant” labour, Trump will hope to bulldozer over the contradictions Israeli-style as with the dependence of beef slaughterouses built on such “migrant” labour.
It is without doubt that Israel has broken so much International Law for it to become regular and normalized and with Famine officially declared in Gaza, it now strategically reduces aid getting in. Yet another act of state violence and contempt just as winter establishes itself.
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4/11/2025
Food price rises in Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti have followed the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa. Not surprising when fields were flooded, crops and barns blown away. It has been clearly established that warmer seas augmented the velocity of the winds. The price rises are the most dramatic example of the impact of climate change on food production and prices.
Food as a weapon was used by the UAE-backed RSF with its siege of el Fasher in the Darfur area of Sudan, US President Donald Trump is d toing the same as a threat to millions of poor Americans. His insistence that government-backed health insurance for the poor is removed as part of his Big Beautiful Bill now involves threatening to stop SNAP (Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program) payments to the 42 million Americans who depend on them unless opposition to the healthcare cuts is terminated. Cruelly hampered by a legal decision the President has been reduced to cutting SNAP payments by a half but is compensated by knowing that in many states recipients may have to wait weeks or even months to receive payment.
Pakistan’s inflation hit a !2-month high pf 6.2% with food prices in the lead. Perishable goods led the spike, with tomato prices soaring 127%, sugar up 34.8%, and wheat climbing 22.6%. Flood-damaged farmlands and temporary closure of trade routes along the Afghan border disrupted agricultural supplies, pushing up costs for essential food items nationwide. This is especially when household budgets are already strengthened by slower income growth and rising utility expenses.
Famine is now a reality in Kadugli in the Sudanese South Kordofan province as well as in the besieged and now savaged city of el Fasher in Darfur. Twenty other areas in the regions of Kordofan and Darfur are also at risk,
aitiHaiti
19/10/2025
The 250,000 people trapped in the Sudanese city of Al Fashir are suffering “critical levels of malnourishment”. The city has been besieged for 549 days by one of the military forces fighting for
control of the country, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which, like the Israeli state strategy in Gaza, has prevented humanitarian aid from entering the city. The ancient and medieval tactic of siege was resurrected in our own times in Europe by Serbian forces surrounding the modern city of Sarajevo in the late 1980’s.
In an era of disastrous climate change, trade conflict and land shortage, a statement back in 1974 by the then USA Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz that “Food is a Weapon” has present day resonance and was picked up in 2008 by the Daewoo top executive when securing a 99-year lease for land in Madagascar on the cheap.
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Farming in an an unpredictable climate is “like gambling with nature” says Balochistan, Pakistan farmer Muhammad Hashim, facing faster and more intense cycles drought and flood. Since June, a much heavier monsoon followed by floods and landslides as well as killing 800 people led to widespread destruction of crops across Pakistan and the washing away of 5,500 livestock.
On 31st July Israeli bulldozers rolled through the West Bank city of Hebron with ruthless efficiency, targeting not soldiers or weapons caches, but something deeply vulnerable: Palestine’s only surviving national seed bank, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed multiplication facility. It was left in ruins, its propagation materials scattered, its infrastructure demolished, and with it, generations of Palestinian agricultural heritage reduced to rubble.
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02/09/2025
Imagine a future of unprecedented food inflation due to an intensifying and accelerating number of climate disasters until at least a century or so after C02 levels are arrested, if this is ever to take place- and until the levels are collectively brought back down to pre-industrial numbers. This is our future everywhere- continuous food inflation – and its has arrived now. The dream of averting such a dismal scenario may already be too late given the world’s current realpolitik and the chances of our species not surviving much longer than this current century. Yet the battle for food & water for everyone will be fought successfully only if fossil fuel usage is completely terminated and so any collective action worthy of existing must begin with that knowledge taken to heart.
Extreme weather ALREADY accounts for much of the inflation households have been experiencing in 2025. This is with a planetary temperature rise approaching 1.5 degrees and we are all heading to at least 4 degrees and possibly 8 degrees if fossil use is not banned globally. Each fraction of a degree intensifies and accelerates the number of climate disasters and each fraction of a degree averted or not, means more or less suffering and disasters dispropotionately experienced by the worst off & least responsible amongst us. Just imagine what the cost of living will be in years time! Perhaps what we see so painfully in Gaza, intentionally planned mass starvation, won’t be just their genocidal fate given who rules our planet.
WoN notes this new study from Barcelona: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ade45f “Amongst the examples we identify, recent spikes in the price of food were often associated with heat, drought and heavy precipitation conditions that were so extreme as to completely exceed all historical precedent prior to 2020.”.
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11/08/2025
HSN1 bird flu has so far killed at least 60 people worldwide in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and the USA & it is also present in dairy cows & countless other domesticated and wild animals. With the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 bonfire of precautionary regulations in the USA, the only response has been that workers in milking sheds have been advised to wear protective clothing, RFK’s advocacy of raw milk notwithstanding. In fact months have gone by with no reported cases of birdflu in the USA and this seems to be because reporting is no longer taking place- not because cases don’t exist.
Indonesia’s push to boost food self-sufficiency suffered a setback after the head of a state-owned farming firm resigned six months into the job, saying the company hadn’t received any funding from the government of President Prabowo Subianto. This does not seem surprising since the Indonesian state and its army have supported land grabs for palm oil and its international market.
The government of Chile has put a stop to the import of sheep’s meat from Argentina, which has had put it’s own chainsaw to safety & public health regulations lead by President Milei- the inspiration for Musk’s DOGE and Milei was given ‘the keys to Madrid’ by regional leader Isabel Ayuso, precisely for his savage cuts on pensioners & the poor. Chile has blocked Argentinian meat on the grounds that Foot and Mouth Disease has not been monitored or recorded since the decision by Milei to deregulate the National Service for Agrifood Health and Quality (Senasa).
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11/08/2025
Famine is often directly man-made, resulting from a range of political & economic objectives and rationalisations as it was in Ireland and Bengal in the 19th century; & Ukraine, China and Ethiopia in the last century. In our own time the grab for resources by factions of armed men in Sudan is having a similiar effect. To our shame it is also man-made by the colonial-security “intellectuals” in Gaza & instantiated for the purpose of ethnic humiliation and “cleansing” through both mass death & starvation & the enforced eviction from homes.
Elsewhere across our planet, land grabs are enacted to grow food for export only & somewhat parallel to the 19th century cases, creating shortages or impossibly high prices for domestic consumers; or in other instances, with the taking of farmland for growing crops for bio-fuels and the wishful thinking or even scam logic of carbon credit schemes.
Meanwhile the frequency & intensity of droughts (& crop destroying flash flooding) continue to intensify worldwide. Drought-affected food shortages in which only the rich can buy, is now already a reality in Bangladesh, Algeria, Nepal and Iraq. Extreme heat is also destroying specific traditional crops in Southern Europe, Africa, Latin America & South Asia.
Nearly half (46%) of Argentinians are now using credit cards indicating a growing reliance on debt to cover basic necessities. A study from the University of Buenos Aires describes “stock decumulation” by super markets. This is the reality of the Milai’s government’s economic miracle as described by fans like The Economist and enabled by an exceptionally generous IMF package.
A global report on Food Crisis under the auspices of the United Nations describes how between 2016-2024 the number of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity across our planet almost tripled. This now means 295.3 million people across 53 countries are in this situation.
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07/08/2025
Gazan Health Authority say that nearly 200 people including 96 children have died of hunger in Gaza. World Heath Authority chief, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned of 12,000 children under the age of 5 suffering from acute malnutrition.
The Bola Tinubu Nigerian government’s standard “fiscal stability” package at the end of 2023 has predictably been at the expense of the poor and of Nigeria’s food security. The removal of a fuel subsidy and a significant devaluation of the Nigerian naira has fuelled rampant inflation, especially on food. This is being felt most acutely in rural villages.
Americans get more than half their calories from ultra-processed foods. These are salt and sugar-heavy, relatively cheap and “super-tasty”. This has now become a concern of & recorded by a US Center for Disease Control census. RFK’s constant railing against the USA’s food system however opposes any enforced regulations against big industry to address the poor health being caused by the American diet, instead politely asking the multinationals ‘to voluntarily’ remove individual items like ‘red dyes’. Corporations remain free to respind or not wherever profit motives dictate.
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03/08/2025
Food security is often at risk from land grabs and frequent reports in the GRAB section highlight this.
Residents of the Nirai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo are reclaiming 29,000 hectares that had been grabbed by one of the Italian energy giant ENI’s many subsidiaries. Having taken it to grow biofuels they dumped the project owing to “poor yields”. Biofuels are seen as necessary to maintain use of internal combustion engines where complaints against climate breakdown from CO2 emissions are taken just a wee bit seriously. Even though the region has been called the breadbasket of the DRC despite food production only 30% of what is needed in the country and “chronic malnutrition”- a pressing problem for the under-5s, ENI’s claim was that they were not starving the local population- but only using “degraded” land. “Degraded” is a version of the “marginal land” definition deployed by the World Bank to justify land grabs. WoN is happy to report that the land reclaimed by local residents is being used to grow cassava, the basic local food crop.
In the UK, the managers of London’s Canary Wharf corporate enclave have barred food delivery riders from entering through its boundaries on the grounds that they may be “undocumented” workers. This follows a concerted campaign by fascists with the support of the enclave’s corporate residents against people seeking asylum in the UK stuck in a “hotel” in the privatised enclave.