( Tomdispatch.com ) – My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.

In our South Bronx apartment, given the lack of food, there was no breakfast. It was simply a missing meal, so my sisters, brother, and I never expected it. Lunch was usually a sandwich and sometimes a can of juice, though none of us used the whole can. We knew enough to just put a little juice in our glass and then fill it with water. Dinner, which one of my sisters called the “real food,” would invariably be cheap and starchy servings meant to fill us. There wasn’t any cooked fish, salad, or fresh fruit. Rarely was anything left over. Most of our neighbors faced similar food scarcity and many suffered physical problems at relatively young ages: dizziness, fatigue, loss of strength, and other maladies, including asthma and diabetes.

Why Food Should Be a Basic Right

Food is to health as air is to breathing. One thing I learned from the world I grew up in was that if you get little or no food for long periods of time, medical attention is likely to be needed. Children, in particular, must have enough food to thrive, grow, think, and perform then as well as later in life.

Only recently, we saw how a pandemic of unwellness — thanks to Covid-19 — could overwhelm a hospital system, leaving doctors, nurses, and health services in general overworked and in danger of collapse. Think of hunger as another kind of pandemic that, however little noticed, can also overwhelm a health-care system (or at least that modest part of ours devoted to the neediest among us). Without enough nutritious food, emotional and physical needs only continue to proliferate along with a growing demand for ever more health care.

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For working poor and uninsured people, however, health services are often difficult to come by or afford. Should you pay for a prescription or an ER visit or much-needed new glasses or buy the necessary food for the next two or three days? In Black and Brown communities, in particular, where racism, poverty, and under-employment continue to be realities of daily life, food deprivation regularly sends people into a cycle of illnesses that only make working more difficult and disability more likely.

Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger. And hunger has continued to be an all-American reality decade after decade, in good economies and bad, even though food should be a basic right. It’s a problem that, in possibly the world’s richest country, no one has been able to solve. Why is that?

Food is certainly plentiful in the United States. And yet enough of it never reaches the tables of those who struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, by almost any measure, income inequality has only increased in the past 30 years. And as succinctly demonstrated by the all-too-long-ago protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, high wages have been and continue to be concentrated among the top earners. In fact, as of 2019, three Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of American society and things have not gotten better since.

Food Inequity in America

In 1969, the Black Panther Party responded to food scarcity in its communities by introducing a breakfast program for children. One aim was simply to fill their stomachs, the other to help them do well in school, since those who are hungry find it difficult to concentrate.

Having visited their Harlem Breakfast Program in New York City, I was moved then by the sense of joy in the room and the healthy food being offered, which most of the children seemed to be eating with delight. At the time, recognizing the deep-seated need for food and finding a way to meet it seemed like a revolutionary act. Unfortunately, when the political winds changed in the early 1970s, the program ended. Many children of color there once more went to school hungry as so many still do in communities across this country.

Decades later, during the Covid pandemic, the Brotherhood Sister Sol organization began providing food to people in Harlem. Once a week, boxes of it were available to anyone who came to pick them up and many did. Recognizing an emergency, that group acted to try to resolve it, something deeply appreciated by the community. Eventually, however, money and contributions ran out and the effort ended. In Harlem today, there is still hunger.

During the pandemic, at a national level, Congress acted in a significant fashion to increase the Supplemental Nutrition (SNAP) benefits to households already receiving food assistance. Effective March 1, 2023, however, depending on family size and income, the monthly allowance of an extra $95 to $200 in food stamps for tens of millions of households, a majority of which have children, ended. The loss of that extra money and so of nutritional upgrades comes at a time when inflation has sent food prices soaring. As if that weren’t bad enough, the federal law passed to provide free school lunches during the pandemic ended last year. (Pre-pandemic free lunches were offered in some schools, but not everywhere.) If the government was able to provide such free meals as well as extra food subsidies in those pandemic years, the question is (or at least should be): Why won’t it continue doing just that?  After all, wealthy people ate well before and during the worst of the pandemic and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Available food pantries and food banks gather supplies from farms, shops, and contributions. They then package and deliver them to the needy or provide places where such food can be picked up. Helpful as they are to many, though, they aren’t accessible to so many others in need. Even more important, they, too, represent temporary fixes that rise and fall in relation to the political and economic moment. Sadly, people’s food needs in this country are anything but temporary and should be assured in the same way social security (so far) is for seniors and those unable to work. That drugs like heroin and fentanyl are sometimes easier to come by in poor communities than nutritious, affordable food should be considered deeply shameful.

For a country that projects itself as the richest in the world, hunger remains hidden by design. It’s true that the United States doesn’t have the in-your-face version of malnutrition seen in countries like Somalia and Afghanistan (to name just two of the food-desperate lands in this world). Yet according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2020, more than 34 million people in this country, including nine million children, were food insecure, including 1,280,000 adults 65 or older who lived alone.

There Is No Medicaid of Food

Having enough food shouldn’t be a matter of charity. Food, like healthcare, should be a basic and necessary human right in a wealthy country like ours, which, of course, lacks a food version of Medicaid. Being able to put enough on the table is treated as anything but a right here. Instead, food is, at best, doled out to the needy in weekly or monthly packages, one at a time, no guarantees for the future and no midnight snacks allowed or the food will be gone before the month is up.  

The irony or, better said, the tragedy of our situation is that food insecurity, no less hunger, needn’t occur, especially in a country as wealthy as ours. But to change the situation would involve altering far more than the way food is both distributed and priced. A move to greater economic equality would certainly be a starting point, since the ultimate health of a society depends on the health of its populace and a lack of adequate food on a daily basis will continue to affect all aspects of a social order that only continues to fray.

For a while now, progressive mayors and other government officials have been trying to introduce a guaranteed (or basic) annual income into their communities. At present, these are just pilot programs being tested out in various parts of the United States and Canada. They guarantee perhaps $500 to $1,000 dollars a month annually to low-income individuals and/or families. In some areas, this is run as a lottery, in others not. Individuals or families accepted into such a program receive a prepaid Mastercard once a month that allows them to buy food as needed (as well as other essentials) without going to a food bank.

Los Angeles has created one of the country’s largest basic-income pilot projects. It provides 12 no-strings-attached monthly payments of $1,000, which, unsurprisingly enough, low-income recipients report to be helpful and genuinely reassuring. However — and there always seems to be a however, doesn’t there? — these are just experimental pilot programs and so subject to the political or economic winds of the moment. The word “guaranteed,” even when used, should be considered a misnomer until the temporary becomes permanent, making it a guaranteed right like social security.

For those who presently benefit from such programs, there appears to be no downside, except of course the fear that they will end, as the SNAP program just did, returning so many impoverished Americans to their earlier level of need.

In truth, however, food equity for all should be on everyone’s political agenda, even if it is a goal that won’t be reached without a struggle. This should not be a country filled with empty tables. Unfortunately, short of a loud and continuous hue and cry from the rest of us, hunger will continue apace and only those who experience it will see its effects.

I regularly pass many homeless men and women on the streets of New York City where I live. Recently, I was stopped by a woman who held out her hand and said that she was hungry. I believed her. The homeless are the least hidden example we see of food insecurity.

Copyright 2023 Beverly Gologorsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The Taliban waged an impressive military campaign and removed the prior government in August 2021. They know how to fight, but they clearly do not know how to run a government. The new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has not been able to get international recognition. Western nations have suspended most humanitarian aid while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments. In February 2022, the United States seized the frozen reserves of the Afghan central bank, severely crippling the overall banking system. Just last month, the United States used part of these frozen funds to set up the Afghan Fund at the Bank for International Settlements in an effort to kickstart the economy without financially supporting the Taliban government, which has been systematically diverting international support to its own favored recipients.

The situation in Afghanistan is dire. Saad Mohseni, who has managed media operations in Afghanistan for 20 years, notes that it is difficult to overstate the multiple crises facing the country, including food shortages and sky-high food prices. According to the World Food Program, more than a third of the population is “marching to starvation,” and an astonishing 97 percent of the population risks falling below the poverty line by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, through its profound disenfranchisement of women—girls older than 12 have been banned from school—the Afghan government has become the most gender repressive in the world. Western intelligence experts are also concerned that the country is once again becoming a haven for terrorist groups. In the opinion of UN expert Richard Bennett, reprisals targeting opponents and a clampdown on freedom of expression amount to a further descent towards authoritarianism.

Via Pixabay.

The Taliban have been totally unresponsive to pressures to change their fundamentalist policies despite the steadily worsening internal situation. One result is a growing resistance movement that encompasses the National Resistance Front (NRF) and the Afghanistan Freedom Front. So, the one positive aspect of the Taliban takeover—the secession of fighting—is in danger of disappearing, compounding the already dire situation.

In terms of alternatives, Anna Larson at the U.S. Institute of Peace sees stable democracy as an elusive prospect. Anatol Lieven at the Quincy Institute sees some potential for Taliban pragmatism and recommends that the Biden administration provide basic food and humanitarian assistance while keeping a watchful distance. Both Adam Weinstein and Saad Mohseni recommend sustained interaction with the Taliban to encourage moderating tendencies and help empower the realists.

The Taliban are notoriously fragmented. They had barely consolidated control in late 2021 when reports emerged of friction within the leadership. A more recent assessment notes that many policies still vary greatly from one province to the next as Taliban officials react to local community expectations. Many issues are still resolved via personal connections with influential Taliban figures, regardless of their official position in government. Opportunities abound to influence Taliban policies, not with pressures from outside but from within.

No international actor is interested in promoting new warfare in Afghanistan. The United States withdrew its troops. Russia is distracted by its intervention in Ukraine. China is involved in trade with Kabul but is not in any way promoting insurgency. Pakistan is presently overwhelmed with natural disasters. Turkey has been supportive of efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and promote development. There is some friction with Central Asia, especially low-level fighting on the Tajik border area, but none of these states has any interest in promoting the renewal of active hostilities.

On the contrary, there remains strong international interest in stabilizing Afghanistan. UN agencies and other international organization are working hard to prevent the country from slipping back into war and chaos.

Concrete Assistance

The United States and the international community want to support the Afghan people but without providing legitimacy to the repressive Talban government. There are no easy ways to help people at the bottom without helping the government at the top. The challenge is to develop projects that provide direct support to the Afghan people with a maximum impact at the lowest levels. These projects must be compatible with the Taliban’s basic principles and, where possible, satisfy the Taliban’s general interest in overall economic development. At the same time, these projects must meet international standards of transparency so that external support does not get diverted to the Taliban’s preferred projects.

Agriculture, the main component of the Afghan economy, is badly in need of basic improvements. One obvious possibility is providing better seed stocks, increasing crop diversity, and returning to traditional crops in areas where they have been deemphasized. Water usage is also a challenge as increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall impact many areas of Afghanistan. This may require introducing more resilient crops, but even simple measures making water usage more efficient can provide significant benefits. Urban agriculture with hydroponic or aquaponic systems could also be introduced into Afghanistan, with facilities run entirely by women, which would be compatible with Taliban restrictions.

Agriculture needs a smoothly functioning support system. At the operational level, this means creating a network of reliable equipment providers and professional maintenance operations at the village level. This local network has to connect to reliable supply chains, both in supplying key ingredients such as fertilizer and in providing a route from farmer to customer, including export markets. At the high end, the support system needs to include agricultural processing. It is distressing, for example, that Afghanistan produces so much wheat but, because it has to send it abroad for processing, ends up buying foreign flour.

Opium remains a serious challenge. The previous Taliban government forbade it, but it became an important source of funds during the time of insurgency. Now that they have returned to power, the Taliban has officially condemned the drug, although practically it is difficult for them to destroy production. Fifteen years ago, there was a concerted efforted to turn opium into legitimate pharmaceutical products that are badly needed in the region. But both the U.S. and Afghan governments were against giving any legitimacy to opium, so the effort collapsed. But a new version of this approach to opium could be very attractive to sections of the current Taliban leadership as well as to international supporters.

Power generation remains a major challenge for the government, with almost total dependence on imported electricity. The most cost-effective approach is to reduce power use through increased efficiency in cities and in industries. Although earlier efforts to promote distributed local hydropower in Nangarhar province gradually faded away, the project could be revived. Solar, too, is a promising alternative for large sections of the country, as is biofuel, with a whole range of possible applications.

Education also provides a wide range of possibilities. Two are of particular interest. Afghan Education for a Better Tomorrow (AEBT) is an organization that links professors in the United States with universities in Afghanistan to provide classroom instruction at a professional level. AEBT and the Raqim Foundation also provide tele-medicine support with a satellite connection.

Transport is another area of potential foreign investment, particularly railroad expansion. A rail connection from Uzbekistan to Mazar-e-Sharif was established with help from the Asian Development Bank in 2010, but it was little used and associated rail developments languished. In 2020, another short rail link, this time from Iran into Herat, was established. Other efforts include a Five Nations Railway Corridor in the northern part of Afghanistan.

Finding Partners

There is a huge potential for projects that would directly benefit Afghans, be acceptable to the Taliban, and serve to empower local leaders and managers. The necessary starting point is assembling a local project team to identify specific projects. This team needs to discuss potential projects with local authorities and then build out a business plan, Then the team can discuss the project with potential supporters, including NGOs and international organizations. This effort needs to provide specific project outlines in some detail and with a clear route to implementation.

U.S. organizations, such as the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, the Society of Afghan Engineers, the Society for International Development, United States, and the Grand National Movement of Afghanistan could be very helpful in this regard. Such organizations could obviously provide technical and business support. They could also assemble working groups in specific areas of interest to identify potential projects, as well as possible staff and operational support, and assist them in the development of business plans. Finally, they could publicize projects to a wider audience including the Afghan diaspora.

Watching Afghanistan slip into greater poverty, hunger, and war is not the only alternative for those outside the country. In fact, outsiders can still partner with Afghans themselves in promoting development projects that provide concrete benefits to the population but also help to empower them to pressure the Taliban for internal change.

Ed Corcoran is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He was a strategic analyst at the U.S. Army War College, where he chaired studies for the Office of the Deputy Chief of Operations.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

In a world with an increasing human population, climate change may have a serious impact on our ability to grow enough food.

Research from as far back as 2007 found that around 30% of year-to-year fluctuations in tonnes of crops grown per hectare were due to changes in the climate. It is remarkable under these circumstances that the global agricultural system has managed to remain fairly robust, and that major food shortages have been rare.

On the other hand, food prices in recent decades have become increasingly volatile. While there are many influences on food prices – including crop yield, weather variations, international trade, speculation in food commodity markets, and land management practices – mostly open trading systems have allowed food shortages in some places to be offset by surpluses, and increased production, elsewhere.

Now that the world seems to be moving toward more trade barriers at a time when climate change is intensifying, these stabilising effects may start to fail. Prices could rise sharply, putting pressure on poor countries and on the budgets of poor people in rich countries.

While crop growth per hectare has increased considerably over the last 50 years, recently the rate of this growth has slowed compared to previous decades.

Recent research suggests that up to 30% of the expected increase in growth of European crops has been cancelled out by adverse weather.

But it is worrying that the most pronounced changes tend to be in countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, that are at high risk of climate impacts on food availability and affordability.

Rising temperatures

This is particularly clear in the case of barley, maize, millet, pulses, rice and wheat. It seems that the countries most at risk of food shortages are also worst affected by rising temperature. This seems to bear out the finding from the world’s premier climate science advisers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the higher average global temperatures and more extreme weather events associated with climate change will reduce the reliability of food production. The latest IPCC report also supports these conclusions.

Another change noted by the IPCC is how rising heat and rainfall associated with climate change is increasingly degrading land, making soil less productive. This is due to the loss of soil nutrients and organic matter and has negative effects on crop yields. In addition, accelerating rises in sea levels will compound these negative impacts by increasing saltwater intrusions and permanently flooding crop land.

Recent modelling of soil loss in wheat and maize fields shows large variations between tropical climate regions and regions with a large proportion of flat and dry land, with losses ranging from less than 1 tonne per hectare in central Asia to 100 tonnes per hectare in south-east Asia. The strong impact of climate and topography on simulated water erosion is clearly shown in the five largest wheat and maize producing countries: in Brazil, China and India, where a large proportion of cropland is in tropical areas, water erosion is relatively high, while in Russia and the United States annual median values are much lower.

However, historically poor management of lands in Europe and the US has been largely remedied through the increased use of chemical fertilisers and irrigation, which has been able to offset a massive amount of soil degradation. For example, one study has shown that, without fertiliser, US yields of corn over the past 100 years would have fallen from around seven to a little over one tonne per hectare, due to soil quality decreasing. However, fertiliser has enabled yields to be broadly maintained, although at an annual cost to farmers of over half a billion dollars.

Fertiliser and food

These results have worrying implications for poorer parts of the world where soil quality is decreasing, but which do not have the resources to compensate for this with fertilisers. And the results become more worrying still if this is exacerbated by climate change.

Many aspects of land management for food production have changed in recent decades, including growing different crops, or the same crops in different places, in response to increased temperatures. The overall result of these changes has been greatly increased food yields in many parts of the world, and land managers may be expected to adapt their strategies for changes in the climate.

But if climate change results in simultaneous failure of major crops such as wheat, maize and soybeans in two or more major breadbasket regions (the areas of the world that produce most food) then the risks of price rises making food too expensive in poorer parts of the world could become acute.

Paul Ekins, Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Some 2 million children are under a worse threat, of actual malnutrition. Food insecurity is where you will be malnourished if any little thing goes wrong, like you miss one paycheck. For those 2 million children, things have already gone wrong and they’re unlikely to get enough to eat starting in September.

At least some people in 27 of 34 provinces are facing severe malnutrition even now.

Some 389,000 people have been displaced, i.e. made homeless, by fighting since January 1 of this year — about 1 percent of the 38 million Afghans. That would be the equivalent of over 3 million Americans, as though everyone in Connecticut or Iowa was suddenly homeless in the past eight months. And that is before the dramatic events of the past two weeks, which will likely spur more large population movements.

It had been expected last spring that the problem of food insecurity in Afghanistan would lessen substantially this coming fall, but the conquest of the country by the Taliban has created a new humanitarian emergency, in part because it is expected that billions in foreign aid will be cut off by Europe and North America.

Some 75 percent of public spending in Afghanistan was financed by foreign grants, and that has just evaporated. A country of 38 million is suddenly going to have to get along on 25 percent of its former public spending. Foreign grants also paid for the security forces, who were about 2 percent of the work force of 14.5 million, and now all those jobs are suddenly lost and the money won’t be coming in. The country was running a structural trade deficit, importing a third more than it exported, which was paid for by, you guessed it, foreign grants.

Alexander Cornwell at Reuters quoted WFP head Peter Beasely as saying, “There’s a perfect storm coming because of several years of drought, conflict, economic deterioration, compounded by COVID . . .”
Not to mention the Taliban takeover.

The WFP is saying it needs $200 million to avert famine in the war-torn country. The majority of UN aid workers remain in the country, though some have left for Kazakhstan. The WFP accepts tax-deductible donations here.

Things will get much worse now, since the Afghan economy has just gone off a cliff. The U.S. has frozen $9.5 billion in Afghanistan government money held in the National Bank but reposited in U.S. financial institutions. The Afghan news service Tolo reports that the World Bank has cut off Afghanistan, halting the $5.3 billion it had committed to development projects in that country on the grounds that women’s rights there are now being rolled back.

Afghanistan is not an ordinary country with an ordinary economy. As noted above, it was deeply dependent on foreign grants for almost everything beyond simple subsistence, and apparently even for some of that.

The World Bank observes,

“Afghanistan’s economy is shaped by fragility and aid dependence. The private sector is extremely narrow, with employment concentrated in low-productivity agriculture (44 percent of the total workforce works in agriculture and 60 percent of households derive some income from agriculture). Private sector development and diversification is constrained by insecurity, political instability, weak institutions, inadequate infrastructure, widespread corruption, and a difficult business environment (Afghanistan was ranked 173rd of 190 countries in the 2020 Doing Business Survey). Weak institutions and property rights constrain financial inclusion and access to finance, with credit to the private sector equal to only three percent of GDP. Weak competitiveness drives a structural trade deficit, equal to around 30 percent of GDP, financed almost entirely from grant inflows. Grants continue to finance around 75 percent of public spending. Security expenditures (national security and police) are high at around 28 percent of GDP in 2019, compared to the low-income country average of around three percent of GDP, driving total public spending of around 57 percent of GDP. The illicit economy accounts for a significant share of production, exports, and employment, and includes opium production, smuggling, and illegal mining.”

All the money that flooded into the country because of the European and North American troop presence and support for the country in 2002-2012 caused the GDP growth per annum to soar to 9.5 percent in those years. But from 2012 European countries began getting out and the U.S. much reduced its forces, and the foreign money fell off quite a lot. In 2015-2020 Afghanistan only grew 2.5 percent per annum, and since it has a high population growth rate, the per capita increase was small. In fact, poverty shot up in the past five years, which is one reason the Taliban took over so easily.

Now all those billions in foreign support have abruptly dried up. Afghanistan is on its own. And it is one of the poorest countries in the world. It just got dramatically poorer.

—–

Bonus Video:

United Nations: “Afghanistan: World Food, UNICEF, High Commissioner for Refugees – Press Conference (18 August 2021)”

Between February and May 2020, the number of unemployed workers soared more than threefold — from 6.2 million to 20.5 million. The jobless rate spiked in a similar fashion from 3.8% to 13.0%. In late March, weekly unemployment claims reached 6.9 million, obliterating the previous record of 695,000, set in October 1982. Within three months, the pandemic-produced slump proved far worse than the three-year Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Things have since improved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in December that unemployment had fallen to 6.7%. Yet, that same month, weekly unemployment filings still reached a staggering 853,000 and though they fell to just under 800,000 last month, even that far surpassed the 1982 number.

And keep in mind that grim statistics like these can actually obscure, rather than illuminate, the depths of our current misery. After all, they exclude the 6.2 million Americans whose work hours had been slashed in December or the 7.3 million who had simply stopped looking for jobs because they were demoralized, feared being infected by the virus, had schoolchildren at home, or some of the above and more. The BLS’s rationale for not counting them is that they are no longer part of what it terms the “active labor force.” If they had been included, that jobless rate would have spiraled to nearly 24% in April and 11.6% in December.

Degrees of Pain

To see just how unevenly the economic pain has been distributed in America, however, you have to dig far deeper. A recent analysis by the St. Louis Federal Reserve did just that by dividing workers into five separate quintiles based on their range of incomes and the occupations typically associated with each.

The first and lowest-paid group, including janitors, cooks, and housecleaners, made less than $35,000 annually; the second (construction workers, security guards, and clerks, among others) earned $35,000-$48,000; the third (including primary- and middle-school teachers, as well as retail and postal workers), $48,000-$60,000; the fourth (including nurses, paralegals, and computer technicians), $60,000-$83,000; while employees in the highest-paid quintile like doctors, lawyers, and financial managers earned a minimum of $84,000.

More than 33% of those in the lowest paid group lost their jobs during the pandemic, and a similar proportion were forced to work fewer hours. By contrast, in the top quintile 5.6% were out of work and 5.4% had their hours cut. For the next highest quintile, the corresponding figures were 11.4% and 11.7%.

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Workers in the bottom 20% of national income distribution have been especially vulnerable for another reason. Their median liquid savings (readily available cash) averages less than $600 compared to $31,300 for those in the top 20%.

Twelve percent of working Americans can’t even handle a $400 emergency; 27% say they could, but only if they borrowed, used credit cards, or sold their personal possessions.

Under the circumstances, it should scarcely be surprising that the number of hungry people increased from 35 million in 2019 to 50 million in 2020, overwhelming food banks nationwide. Meanwhile, rent and mortgage arrears continued to pile up. By last December, 12 million people already owed nearly $6,000 each on average in past-due rent and utility bills and will be on the hook to their landlords for those sums once federal and state moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures eventually end.

Meanwhile, low-income workers struggled to arrange child-care as schools closed to curtail coronavirus infections. Women have borne the brunt of the resulting burden. By last summer, 13% of workers, unable to afford childcare, had already quit their jobs or reduced their hours, and most held low-wage jobs to begin with. Forty-six percent of women have jobs with a median hourly wage of $10.93 an hour, or less than $23,000 a year, far below the national average, now just shy of $36,000. In some low-wage professions, like servers in restaurants and bars, women are (or at least were) 70% of the workforce. A disproportionate number of them were also Black or Hispanic.

Before the pandemic, 57% of women in low-wage occupations worked full-time and 15% of them were single parents. Close to one-fifth had children under four years old and contend with full-time care that, on average, costs $9,598 yearly. If that weren’t enough, at least 25% of such low-wage jobs involved shifting or unpredictable schedules.

Much has been made recently of the wonders of “telecommuting” to work. But here again there’s a social divide. People with at least a college degree, who are more likely to possess the skills needed for higher-paying jobs, have been “six times more likely” to telecommute than other workers. Even before the pandemic, 47% of those with college degrees occasionally worked from home, versus 9% of those who had completed high school and a mere 3% of those who hadn’t.

Now, add to the economic inequities highlighted by the pandemic slump those rooted in race. Black and Hispanic low-income workers have been doubly disadvantaged. In 2016, the median household wealth of whites was already 10 times that of Blacks and more than eight times that of Hispanics, a gap that has generally been on the increase since the 1960s. And because those two groups have been overrepresented among low-wage occupations most affected by unemployment in the last year, their jobless rate during the pandemic has been much higher.

Unsurprisingly, an August Pew Research Center survey revealed that significantly more of them than whites were struggling to cover utility bills and rent or mortgage payments. After Covid-19 hammered the economy, a much higher proportion of them were also hungry and had to turn to food pantries, many for the first time.

In these months Americans who are less educated, hold low-income jobs, and are minorities — Asians excepted, since they, like whites, are underrepresented in low-wage professions — have been in an economic Covid-19 hell on Earth. But isn’t the American social safety net supposed to help the vulnerable in times of economic distress? As it happens, at least compared to those of other wealthy countries, it’s been remarkably ineffective.

Sizing Up the Social Safety Net

In a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015, Bernie Sanders observed that Scandinavian governments protect workers better thanks to their stronger social safety nets. Hillary Clinton promptly shot back, “We are not Denmark. We are the United States of America.” Indeed we are.

This country certainly does have a panoply of social welfare programs that the federal government spends vast sums on — around 56% of the 2019 budget, or nearly $2.5 trillion. So, you might think that we were ready and able to assist workers hurt most by the Covid-19 recession. Think again.

Social Security consumes about 23% of the federal budget. Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program together claim another 25% (with Medicare taking the lion’s share).

Social Security and Medicare, however, generally only serve those 65 or older, not the jobless. With them excluded, two critical areas for most workers in such an economic crisis are healthcare and unemployment insurance.

About half of American workers rely on employer-provided health insurance. So, by last June, as Covid-19 caused joblessness to skyrocket, nearly eight million working adults and nearly seven million of their dependents lost their coverage once they became unemployed.

Medicaid, administered by states and funded in partnership with the federal government, does provide healthcare to certain low-income people and the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) also required states to use federal funds to cover all adults whose incomes are no more than 30% above the official poverty line. In 2012, though, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t be compelled to comply and, as of now, 12 states, eight of them southern, don’t. (Two more, Missouri and Oklahoma, have opted to expand Medicaid coverage per the ACA, but haven’t yet implemented the change.) People residing in non-ACA locales face draconian income requirements to qualify for Medicaid and, in almost all of them, childless individuals aren’t eligible, no matter how meager their earnings.

While Medicaid enrollment does increase with rising unemployment, not all jobless workers qualify, even in states that have expanded coverage. So unemployed workers may find that they earn too much to qualify for subsidies but not enough to purchase private insurance, which averages $456 a month for an individual and $1,152 for a family. Then there are steeply rising out-of-pocket expenses — deductibles, copayments, and extra charges for services provided by out-of-network doctors. Deductibles alone have, on average, gone up by 111% since 2010, far outpacing average wages, which increased by only 27%.

The American health care system remains a far cry from the variants of universal health care that exist in Australia, Canada, most European countries, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. The barrier to providing such care in the U.S. isn’t affordability, but the formidable political power of a juggernaut healthcare industry (including insurance and drug companies) that opposes it fiercely.

As for unemployment insurance, the American version — funded by state and federal payroll taxes and supplemented by federal money — remains, at best, a bare-bones arrangement. Coverage used to last a uniform 26 weeks, but since 2011, 13 states have reduced it, some more than once, while also paring down benefits (especially as claims soared during the Great Recession).

So if you lose your job, where you live matters a lot. Many states provide benefits for more than half a year, Massachusetts for up to 30 weeks. Michigan, South Carolina, and Missouri, however, set the limit at 20 weeks, Arkansas at 16, Alabama at 14. The weekly payout also varies. Although the pre-pandemic national average was about $387, the maximum can run from $213 to $823, with most states providing an average of between $300 and $500.

Except in unusual times like these, when the federal government provides emergency supplements, unemployment benefits replace only about a third to a half of lost wages. As for the millions of people who work in the gig economy or are self-employed, they are seldom entitled to any help at all.

The proportion of jobless workers receiving unemployment benefits has also been declining since the 1980s. It’s now hit 27% nationally and, in 17 states, 20% or less. There are multiple reasons for this, but arguably the biggest one is that the system has been woefully underfunded. Taxes on wages provide the revenue needed to cover unemployment benefits, but in 16 states, the maximum taxable annual amount is less than $10,000 a year. The federal equivalent has remained $7,000 — not adjusted for inflation — since 1983. That comes to $42 per worker.

The $2-trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and the subsequent $900-billion Pandemic Relief Bill did provide federal funds to extend unemployment benefits well beyond the number of weeks set by individual states. They also covered gig workers and the self-employed. However, such exceptional and temporary rescue measures — including the one President Joe Biden has proposed, which includes a weekly supplement of $400 to unemployment benefits and seems likely to materialize soon — only highlight the inadequacies of the regular unemployment insurance system.

Other parts of the social safety net include housing subsidies, the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program), Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and childcare subsidies. After surveying them, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded that they amounted to an ill-funded labyrinthine system rife with arcane eligibility criteria that — the elderly or the disabled aside — actually aids fewer than half of low-income families and only a quarter of those without children.

This isn’t an unfair assessment. The Government Accountability Office reports that, of the 8.5 million children eligible for child-care subsidies, only 1.5 million (just under 18%) actually receive any. Even 40% of the kids from households below the poverty line were left out.

Similarly, fewer than a quarter of qualified low-income renters, those most vulnerable to eviction, receive any Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidies. Because median rent increased 13% between 2001 and 2017 while the median income of renters (adjusted for inflation) didn’t budge, 47% of them were already “rent burdened” in the pre-pandemic moment. In other words, rent ate up 30% or more of their annual income. Twenty-four percent were “severely burdened” (that is, half or more of their income). Little wonder that a typical family whose earnings are in the bottom 20% had only $500 left over after paying the monthly rent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even before Covid-19 hit.

SNAP does better on food, covering 84% of those eligible, but the average benefit in 2019, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, was $217, “about $4.17 a day, $1.39 per meal.” Mind you, in about one-third of recipient households, at least two people were working; in 75%, at least one. Not for nothing has the term “working poor” become part of our political vocabulary.

Is Change in the Air?

During crises like the present one, our moth-eaten safety net has to be patched up with stopgap legislation that invariably produces protracted partisan jousting. The latest episode is, of course, the battle over President Joe Biden’s plan to provide an additional $1.9 trillion in relief to a desperate country.

Can’t we do better? In principle, yes. After all, many countries have far stronger safety nets that were created without fostering indolence or stifling innovation and, in most instances, with a public debt substantially smaller relative to gross domestic product than ours. (So much for the perennial claims from the American political right that attempting anything similar here would have terrible consequences.)

We certainly ought to do better. The United States places second in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s overall poverty index, which includes all 27 European Union countries plus the United Kingdom and Canada, as well as in its child-poverty-rate ranking.

But doing better won’t be easy — or perhaps even possible. American views on the government’s appropriate economic role differ substantially from those of Canadians and Europeans. Moreover, corporate money and that of the truly wealthy already massively influence our politics, a phenomenon intensified by recent Supreme Court decisions. Proposals to fortify the safety net will, therefore, provoke formidable resistance from armies of special interests, lobbyists, and plutocrats with the means to influence politicians. So if you’re impatient for a better safety net, don’t hold your breath.

And yet many landmark changes that created greater equity in the United States (including the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women voting rights, the New Deal, the creation of Medicaid, and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s) once seemed inconceivable. Perhaps this pandemic’s devastation will promote a debate on the failures of our ragged social safety net.

Here’s hoping.

Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

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Via Tomdispatch.com

There already is widespread malnutrition in Yemen, fueled by the war and more recently by the economic downturn of the coronavirus pandemic.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen largely stems from the war on that country launched in 2015 by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which is backed to the hilt by the Trump administration. This is an American war, and Americans have Yemeni blood on their hands. A third of Yemen’s infrastructure has been destroyed, mostly by Saudi and UAE air strikes, and over 100,000 have been killed.

The United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammed Bin Zayed, is giving nothing to aid Yemen this year, despite its invasion having caused many of the problems the country is facing. The Saudis and Kuwaitis were also called out by Lowcock, and they did proffer new donations, with Kuwait offering $20 million. But the aid effort has fallen from being funded at over 60% of requested contributions to only 42%.

Embed from Getty Images
Huthi rebel fighters inspect the damage after a reported air strike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition targeted the presidential palace in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on December 5, 2017. Saudi-led warplanes pounded the rebel-held capital before dawn after the rebels killed former president Ali Abdullah Saleh as he fled the city following the collapse of their uneasy alliance, residents said. / AFP PHOTO / Mohammed HUWAIS (Photo credit should read MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images).

Lowcock, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said:

“Aid agencies are now reaching only about 9 million people a month in Yemen – that’s down from more than 13 million at the start of the year. What is to be the fate of the 4 million we no longer have the money to help? I said earlier that the window to prevent famine in Yemen is closing.”

The country’s problems are worsening along several fronts, Lowcock reported. The nationalist government of Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, backed by Saudi Arabia, has long contested the insurgent Houthis or Helpers of God for the port of Hodeidah, which is key to the provisioning of the northern part of the country. Its fighters have been preventing gasoline from being offloaded, presumably in a bid to deprive the Houthis of the ability to use armored vehicles. The Houthis are local guerrillas from the northern Zaydi Shiite branch of Islam. Although they are often called “Iran-backed,” the Iranian involvement in Yemen is not extensive, and the Houthis have local Arab grievances. The billions of dollars of high-tech weaponry sold to the Saudis and the UAE for use against Yemen dwarfs the small Iranian contributions to the Houthis by orders of magnitude. Zaydis often feel that Saudi Arabia was trying to dominate them and convert them to its hardline Wahhabi sect.

Lowcock noted, “Only 20,000 metric tons of commercial fuel entered Hudaydah in September – that’s the third lowest figure ever recorded, and 76 per cent less than in August. Currently, 20 commercial fuel ships are waiting to enter the port and discharge the equivalent of three months of imports.”

The problem is that it isn’t only the Houthis who are being starved of fuel, but ordinary people, who need it to drive to market or to hospital when ill, and farmers who need it to deliver their crops to towns.

Embed from Getty Images
Saudi army artillery fire shells towards Yemen from a post close to the Saudi-Yemeni border, in southwestern Saudi Arabia, on April 13, 2015 . Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition of several Arab countries which since March 26 has carried out air strikes against the Shiite Huthis rebels, who overran the capital Sanaa in September and have expanded to other parts of Yemen. AFP PHOTO / FAYEZ NURELDINE (Photo credit should read FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images).

Likewise, the basket-case condition of the country has driven the Yemeni rial down to 850 to the dollar, a historic low. This exchange rate makes it impossible for many Yemenis to afford imports, and much of the country’s food and other staples are imported

Famines are not typically caused by a complete lack of food, but by food prices being too high for people to afford to buy it. If the nationalist government cannot find a way to put back up the value of the rial, large numbers of people could starve.

The war is also getting worse, despite this week’s prisoner exchange between the Houthis and the nationalists.

Lowcock warned, “There are now 47 active front lines across Yemen – the most ever recorded. Over several recent weeks, the heaviest clashes have occurred in Hudaydah, Marib and Al Jawf.”

This year, another 150,000 people were displaced from their homes by the fighting, 80% to homeless shelters, bringing the total in the country to a million. The country’s population is about 30 million.

Last month,the UN announced that it was forced to slash aid to 300 medical facilities in Yemen, after a third of humanitarian programs in the country were closed in spring-summer this year.

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Bonus Video:

Sky News: “Yemen: The world’s worst humanitarian crisis explained”

Estimates suggest that meat and dairy demand will mean agriculture will emit 20 gigatonnes of emission per year by 2050, out of the annual limit of 23 needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s targets.

According to latest figures, the death toll in Puerto Rico caused by the passage of Category 4 Hurricane "Maria" on September 20, 2017, has risen to 45. There are still 113 people unaccounted for. 

Most of the island is still without basic services such as power and running water, nearly three weeks after the storm. As of Thursday, October 12, 83% of the island is still without electricity, 45% of it is without phone service. There are still 107 opened shelters with 5 602 shelterees.

According to a letter obtained by CNN, Governor Ricardo Rosselló, citing an "unprecedented catastrophe," has lobbied Capitol Hill for a significant new influx of money soon as the island perches on the brink of "a massive liquidity crisis."

In a three-page letter sent to congressional leaders, Rosselló is requesting more than $4 billion from various agencies and loan programs to "meet the immediate emergency needs of Puerto Rico."

The governor also pointed to a potential exodus of the island's inhabitants should aid not be available in a timely manner – something he has also emphasized in conversations with lawmakers. Over 400 000 Puerto Ricans have moved to the mainland United States since 2004, according to the Pew Research Center. Puerto Rico now has 3.4 million residents.

Maria made landfall at 10:35 UTC on September 20, as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 250 km/h (155 mph), becoming the strongest to hit the island since the Hurricane "San Felipe" of 1928, as well as the most intense hurricane to hit the territory in recorded history, and the most intense to make landfall anywhere in the United States (including locations outside of the Lower 48) since Hurricane "Camille" in 1969.

It delivered huge amounts of rain and powerful winds that downed trees, ripped roofs and walls off of buildings and soon knocked out power to the entire island. Its electrical grid is being described as having been totally destroyed.

Featured image: San Juan, Puerto Rico after Hurricane "Maria" – September 20, 2017. Credit: Live Storms Media

Via The Watchers

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
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Related Tweets:

As Puerto Rico Struggles With Lack of Drinking Water, Residents Turn to Toxic Waste Sites https://t.co/KwcWi50vko

— Sly Q. Jones (@simplyslycc) October 13, 2017

Just so you can see them side-by-side, here is Trump on Texas vs PR. Wonder what the difference is. Hmmm… pic.twitter.com/5QWEAPgWG7

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) October 12, 2017

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

President Donald Trump: The Federal Government Can’t Keep Helping Puerto Rico ‘Forever’ | CNBC

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 6 2017 (IPS) – Millions of Yemenis could soon face widespread famine if no action is taken to improve food access through humanitarian or trade means, an early warning system has said.

Up to eight million Yemenis are severely food insecure while another 2 million are facing food insecurity at emergency levels, just one phase below famine, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) has found. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that the food-insecure population in the Middle Eastern nation could be even higher at up to 14.4 million, representing half of the population.

This has contributed to rising acute malnutrition and risk of mortality. According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), almost 4.5 million are in need of treatment for malnutrition, including over 2 million children.

The ongoing conflict between a Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis has largely driven the food crisis in Yemen, which FEWS Net describes as the “largest food security emergency in the world.” The two-year civil war has left thousands dead and 3 million displaced, limiting humanitarian access and food availability on the market.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded system highlighted the need to improve humanitarian access in order to continue and increase much needed food and nutrition assistance.

Though current food assistance from organisations such as the World Food Program (WFP) is helping mitigate the crisis, FEWS NET noted that such operations alone have been insufficient to meet the country’s needs.

Action is also needed to ensure sustained commercial food trade. Prior to the conflict, Yemen imported approximately 90 percent of its food. The unrest has since disrupted the government and private sector’s ability to import food. Most recently, wheat imports were suspended in December, a staple grain for Yemenis.

Without such imports, humanitarian actors will also be unable to ensure local food availability.

Though food is still available on local markets, increased prices and reduced income have limited access to goods. WFP found that prices of red bean, sugar and onion were respectively 48 percent, 24 percent and 17 percent higher in November than in the pre-crisis period.

A major reduction in food import levels will only serve to worsen food security in the country.

“In a worst-case scenario, where food imports drop substantially for a sustained period of time or where conflict persistently prevents the flow of food to local markets, famine is possible,” FEWS NET reported.

In 2016, the UN requested almost $1.7 billion towards Yemen’s Humanitarian Response Plan. Approximately 40 percent remains unfunded.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

AP: “Fierce fighting around Yemen town of Naham”