Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA — Thousands of children across the US and Canada are turning the traditional Halloween ritual on its head:  They are the ones handing out the chocolate.  Reversing the trick or treat model, these youths will give away more than a quarter million pieces of Fair Trade Certified^TM chocolates.   Now in its second year, the “reverse trick or treating” program is involving many more schools and partners than when it first kicked off for Halloween 2007.

The campaign is designed to raise awareness of the extensive use of exploited child labor in the cocoa fields of countries like Cote D’Ivoire, which produces 40 percent of the world’s cocoa; the persistent problems of poverty in cocoa-growing communities; and environmental damage from unsustainable farming practices used to raise cocoa.  This Halloween is the first since the industry’s failure to meet the July 1, 2008 self-imposed deadline of the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol to end abusive child labor in cocoa production.

How big a problem is the North American sweet tooth for chocolate from suspect sources?  The US State Department estimates that 284,000 children work in abusive conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa - and that 64 percent of those children are under 14 years old.  U.S. consumers eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate annually, representing nearly half of the world’s supply.

Among the growing list of organizations helping to spread the word about how Fair Trade Certified^TM chocolate provides a solution to these problems are Global Exchange, International Labor Rights Forum, Co-op America, and the Fair Trade Federation, Fair Trade companies Equal Exchange, La Siembra and Alter Eco.

Hundreds of schools, congregations and youth groups across North America are helping to raise awareness about the impact of consumer’s choices in the chocolate industry.   By giving out Fair Trade Certified chocolates, children know that farmers abide by international labor laws that prohibit illegal child labor while also ensuring farmers receive a fair, stable price and that environmentally sustainable farming practices are applied.

Co-op America Fair Trade Program Coordinator Yochanan Zakai said:”It has been seven years since signatories to the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol acknowledged that child labor exists in the cocoa industry.  They pledged to stop it then and it is unconscionable that these child labor abuses continue to this very day. As Americans, we can play a role in creating a more responsible chocolate market by choosing Fair Trade Certified? chocolate year round.”

“Chocolate connects the millions of Americans who eat it daily to the growers around the world who depend on cocoa for their livelihoods,” says Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, director, Global Exchange’s Fair Trade Campaign.  “It is unthinkable that our children are eating chocolate made with illegal child labor or slave labor, especially when a viable solution, Fair Trade Certified^TM chocolate, exists right now.”

This Halloween, the distribution of Fair Trade Certified^TM chocolate is intended to demonstrate that there already exists at least one reliable, transparent tool that the cocoa and chocolate companies may adopt to fight poverty in cocoa growing communities. It also seeks to raise the profile of chocolate made available by companies who have committed to using only Fair Trade Certified^TM cocoa and put public pressure on large chocolate companies to follow suit.

For more information, including a statement released by 47 organizations and fair trade companies around the world: “Commitment to Ethical Cocoa Sourcing: Abolishing Unfair Labor Practices and Addressing Their Root Causes,” visit http://www.reversetrickortreating.org/.

The Reverse Trick-or-Treating campaign was crafted by human rights advocacy group Global Exchange, which has a long track record of successfully encouraging major corporations to adopt new business practices.

The 225,000 Fair Trade Chocolates and informational cards have been provided in the United States by Equal Exchange and Alter Eco, and in Canada by La Siembra.

Co-op America is the leading green economy organization. Founded in 1982, Co-op America provides the economic strategies, organizing power and practical tools for businesses and individuals to solve today’s social and environmental problems.

Other organizations with a lead role in Reverse Trick-or-Treating are Americans for Informed Democracy, Fair Trade Federation, International Labor Rights Forum, Oasis, Slow Food, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, United Students for Fair Trade, and United Methodist Committee on Relief.

Reprinted from Co-op America.

OSLO (15 October 2008)-Unless based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and forest communities, efforts by rich countries to combat climate change by funding reductions in deforestation in developing countries will fail, and could even unleash a devastating wave of forest loss, cultural destruction and civil conflict, warned a leading group of forestry and development experts meeting in Oslo this week.

The experts are gathering in Oslo with policymakers and community leaders for a conference on rights, forests and climate change. The conference was organized by two non-profits, Rainforest Foundation Norway and the US-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

Speaking at the meeting, Norway’s Minister of Environment and International Development, Erik Solheim, says efforts towards reduced emissions from deforestation in developing countries should be based on the rights of indigenous peoples to the forests they depend on for their livelihoods, and provide tangible benefits consistent with their essential role in sustainable forest management.

“In addition to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, early action, pilot projects and demonstrations should safeguard biodiversity, contribute to poverty reduction and secure the rights of forest dependent communities in order to achieve any degree of permanence, legitimacy and effectiveness,” said Solheim.

Deforestation is responsible for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing it is seen as one of the quickest and cheapest ways of cutting emissions.

“Moves to finance reductions in tropical deforestation and forest degradation are necessary and welcome,” said Andy White, Coordinator of RRI. “But on their own they won’t solve the problem. Poorly devised, they could even make it worse. If such initiatives are well designed they can not only secure carbon but present a global opportunity to address the underlying causes of poverty and conflict in many developing countries.”

Globally, climate change negotiators are considering the introduction of a new financial mechanism, known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), that could generate billions of dollars for reducing forest loss in the tropics. Meanwhile, the Government of Norway has already pledged up to 3 billion Norwegian kroner annually (US$ 500 million) to cut emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical countries.

“To achieve long-term reductions in deforestation and forest degradation, it is absolutely necessary to respect and strengthen the rights of indigenous and other forest dependent communities,” says Lars Løvold, director of Rainforest Foundation Norway. “Many of these schemes are still being developed, and major decisions on how to spend the money will be made in the next few years. For us, the question is whether this money will result in a great deal of good or a great deal of harm to the environment and forest communities.”

Previous attempts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation have largely failed, often due to a lack of attention to human rights, property rights and transparency.

“There are growing conflicts between indigenous peoples and both forestry companies and conservation organizations. Imposed forest management initiatives are only viable if they respect the customary rights of forest peoples and ensure they have control about what happens on their lands. Indigenous peoples must be accepted as full and fair participants in all climate negotiations,” said Joji Carino, Director of TEBTEBBA, the Indigenous Peoples’ International Center for Policy Research and Education.

Conference organizers worry that REDD could fuel corruption and provoke tensions and land grab situations unless good governance, policies and the rule of law are first put in place.

“Indigenous peoples are rightly concerned about how these new investments could affect their access to the forests that they depend on for their livelihoods,” Solheim noted. “This is precisely why we are fully supportive of a role for indigenous peoples and other forest dependent communities in the development and monitoring of climate plans and investments at the national and global level. These rights need to be respected, not just for moral reasons, although that is vital. It is also a matter of pragmatism and effectiveness.”

Experience from Brazil, the country in the world with the most advanced monitoring of its forests, gives valuable insight to the discussion on how forests can be protected. According to research from the Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental, 19 percent of unprotected forest areas in Brazil have been deforested, while deforestation inside federal national parks is 2 percent. In indigenous territories, however, only 1.1 percent have been deforested.

The Oslo conference will discuss the Four Foundations for Effective Investments in Climate Change:

1. Recognize rights - establish an equitable legal and regulatory framework for land and resources.
2. Prioritize payment to communities - ensure that benefits and payments prioritize indigenous and local communities, according to their potential role as forest stewards.
3. Establish independent advisory and auditing processes to guide, monitor and audit investments and actions at national and global levels.
4. Monitor more than carbon to keep track of the status of forests, forest carbon, biodiversity and impacts on rights and livelihoods. Secure a role for indigenous peoples in monitoring of emissions, making full use of their knowledge of the state of forest ecosystems, something which could be particularly relevant to keep track of forest degradation.

New research to be presented at the conference demonstrates that the costs of recognizing local rights and tenure systems are low relative to the projected costs of REDD, and that indigenous and other forest communities own or manage a major portion of the global forest carbon stock. The research also shows that communities have proven to be good stewards of the forest.

A new study by RRI and Intercooperation, a Swiss development organization, finds that the average direct cost to legally recognize traditional community tenure rights is around $3 per hectare - an insignificant investment to make when the minimum estimates needed to pay for elements of a global REDD scheme are somewhere between $800 and $3500 per hectare each year for the next 22 years.

Another study that will be released at the conference, by Professor Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan, uses data from 325 sites in 12 countries to show that community ownership of forests provides the best possibility for increasing carbon stocks and improving livelihood outcomes. This is the most robust research to date at a global scale on the relationship between forest tenure and carbon sequestration, livelihood benefits and biodiversity.

Agrawal’s study also finds that the larger the property owned by communities, the better the chances for maintaining and sequestering carbon. This research shows the tremendous scope for cost-effective investments that strengthen local land rights, reduce poverty and conflict, and protect remaining natural forest areas.

To help ensure effective investments to combat in climate change, Rainforest Foundation Norway and RRI have called for the formation of independent bodies to advise and monitor the UN Convention on Climate Change.

“We believe that such advisory functions should be given serious consideration,” said Solheim. The conference will take up this recommendation and consider how to best move forward in its deliberations.

Major decisions on REDD, as well as other measures to combat climate change, are likely to be made at the 15th Conference of the UN Convention on Climate Change, which will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009.

“In the next fifteen months, the world will have to make a choice,” said Løvold. “We can continue to ignore the legitimate rights of forest dwellers, which will exacerbate conflict in forests and make REDD ineffective. Or we can learn from the lessons of the past, recognize the property and human rights of forest dwellers, and almost immediately start reaping the benefits.”

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Interested readers can find background information and follow the conference discussions at http://www.rightsandclimate.org/.

The mission of the Rainforest Foundation is to support indigenous peoples and traditional populations of the world’s rainforests in their efforts to protect their environment and fulfill their rights by assisting them in: securing and controlling the natural resources necessary for their long-term well-being and managing these resources in ways which do not harm their environment, violate their culture or compromise their future; and developing the means to protect their individual and collective rights and to obtain, shape, and control basic services from the state. http://www.rainforest.no/, www.rainforest.no/html/180.htm

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) in a new coalition of organisations dedicated to raising global awareness of the critical need for forest tenure, policy and market reforms, in order to achieve global goals of poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and forest-based economic growth. Partners currently include ACICAFOC (Coordinating Association of Indigenous and Agroforestry Communities of Central America), the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Civic Response, the Foundation for People and Community Development (FPCD), Forest Peoples Programme, Forest Trends, the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), Intercooperation, the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Federation of Community Forest Organisations of Nepal (FECOFUN), and the Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC). For further information, visit the Web site at: http://www.rightsandresources.org/

The report, “Alcohol and Violence: Exploring Patterns and Responses,” examines the association between alcohol and violence through the disciplines of anthropology, clinical psychology, human rights law, gender, and public health.

“We need to look more closely at the meaning attached to both drinking and violence in different cultures, without assuming that the one causes the other,” writes Anne Fox, PhD, a contributor to the report and founding director of Galahad SMS Ltd. in England.

Dr. Fox writes that the presence of certain cultural features can largely predict levels of homicide, spousal abuse and other forms of violence. Violence-reinforcing cultures tend to share the following features:

• Cultural support (in media, norms, icons, myths, and so on) for aggression and aggressive solutions;
• Militaristic readiness and participation in wars-societies that are frequently at war have consistently higher rates of interpersonal violence as well;
• Glorification of fighters;
• Violent sports;
• Corporal and capital punishment;
• Socialization of male children toward aggression;
• Belief in malevolent magic;
• Conspicuous inequality in wealth;
• A higher than normal proportion of young males in the society;
• Strong codes of male honor-in general, societies and subgroups that actively subscribe to strong codes of honor tend to have higher rates of homicide;
• A culture of male domination.

In her paper, “Sociocultural Factors that Foster or Inhibit Alcohol-related Violence,” Dr. Fox argues that efforts to counteract a “culture of violence” and “the male propensity for aggression” should be channeled toward altering “beliefs about alcohol” and “social responses to violence and aggression.”

The report includes other papers including “The Role of Drinking Patterns and Acute Intoxication in Violent Interpersonal Behaviors” which looks at patterns of violence at the individual level. The paper “Working with Culture to Prevent Violence and Reckless Drinking” studies alcohol and violence from a gender perspective and identifies strategies used to respond to analogous social problems. “Practical Responses: Communications Guidelines for First Responders in Cases of Alcohol-related Violence” presents international guidelines for enhanced communication among first responders (police, emergency room staff, social workers) to alcohol-related violence, particularly between the health and law enforcement sectors.

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ICAP has been engaged in the relationship between alcohol and violence since 1998, including a literature review and a report on violence in licensed premises. The organization has engaged in discussions with a variety of international bodies, including the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the International Center for the Prevention of Crime, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. In 2005, the World Bank hosted a meeting organized by ICAP and co-chaired by UNIFEM to discuss how best to move forward on the issue through some form of public-private cooperation. This report is a result of ongoing international collaboration to contribute to greater international understanding on the intersection between alcohol and violence.

The full report may be found at ICAP’s web site:

http://63.134.214.153/Portals/0/download/all_pdfs/Violence%20Monograph.pdf

Alcohol and Violence: Exploring Patterns and Responses was commissioned by the International Center for Alcohol Policies. ICAP is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote the understanding of the role of alcohol in society through dialogue and partnerships involving the beverage alcohol industry, the public health community, and others interested in alcohol policy, and to help reduce the abuse of alcohol worldwide. ICAP is supported by major international producers of beverage alcohol. The views expressed in this book are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of ICAP or of its sponsoring companies.

By Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director

Published in Salon.com

Aug. 20, 2008 | GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — One of the youngest detainees at Guantánamo Bay, a 23-year-old Afghan named Mohammed Jawad , spent two days in a courtroom here last week as his defense lawyer argued that his case should never go to trial. The attorney, Maj. David Frakt, claimed that his client was repeatedly tortured and abused in U.S. custody, charges that were supported by the testimony of a senior U.S. Army criminal investigator.

Perhaps just as troubling, Frakt also asserted that partisan politics played a role: Prosecutors handling the case, he said, were pressured by a Pentagon lawyer to bring charges against Jawad quickly — before the next American presidential election drew too close.  
 
Jawad is accused of attempted murder for allegedly throwing a grenade into a U.S. military vehicle in Afghanistan in December 2002. Two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan translator were injured in the attack. Jawad was 16 or 17 years old at the time (he doesn’t know his exact birth date). Given that he was an adolescent at the time of his capture, arguably he has been treated illegally under international law by his American captors.  
 
Prosecutors for the U.S. military commissions say Jawad is a dangerous terrorist. But Frakt says that Jawad was a naive, illiterate teenager who was duped into joining a militia group and was coerced into signing a false confession after the attack and his capture.  
 
The U.S. government concedes that Jawad was neither a member of al-Qaida nor part of the Taliban, and shortly after his arrival at Guantánamo, it concluded he had no intelligence value. Yet among approximately 260 Guantánamo detainees, he is one of only 20 whom the U.S. has currently slated for trial by the U.S. military commissions.  
 
During last week’s hearing, Frakt argued that Jawad was charged as a result of the political interference of the military commissions’ legal advisor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann. Testimony in this and other cases lends credence to Frakt’s argument: The former chief prosecutor for the commissions, Col. Morris Davis — who resigned late last year claiming that Hartmann had pressured him to bring charges against detainees before the presidential campaigns got too far under way — testified in June that Gen. Hartmann has pressed his office to prioritize Jawad over other cases.  
 
Davis said that Hartmann was frustrated with the slow pace of prosecutions at Guantánamo, and believed that Jawad’s alleged attack against U.S. soldiers would “capture the American imagination” with him as a trial subject. Unlike many other pending cases at Guantánamo, which are based on charges of conspiracy or material support for terrorism, Hartmann was reportedly drawn to Jawad’s case because, as he put it, the young man had “blood on his hands.”  
 
Testifying before a different judge in another case on Aug. 13, Davis stated that “Jawad went from the freezer to the frying pan, thanks to General Hartmann.” He said that during a three-month period after Hartmann became legal advisor for the military commissions, Jawad rose from approximately “number 25 or 30″ on the prosecution’s list of priorities to “number one.”  
 
Hartmann had previously been prevented from acting as legal advisor in a Guantánamo case. In May, another judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, barred Hartmann from that role in the case against Salim Hamdan — the detainee convicted earlier this month for serving as Osama bin Laden’s driver — based on similar complaints that he had improperly interfered with the prosecution in the case.  
 
The military judge in Jawad’s case, Col. Stephen Henley, rejected the argument that Gen. Hartmann had improperly influenced the charges against Jawad. However, he barred Hartmann from playing any role in the post-trial review of the case, reasoning that Hartmann’s public statements aligning himself with the prosecution compromised the objectivity necessary to perform that review. (Under the military commissions’ rules, every trial is automatically reviewed by the convening authority, and Hartmann — as the commissions’ legal advisor — would normally be required to provide advice during the post-trial review.)  
 
Last week’s hearing also focused on defense claims that Jawad has been tortured while in U.S. custody. To make his case, Frakt called Army special agent Angela Birt as a witness. Birt investigated the deaths of detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan in late 2002. Jawad was detained at Bagram at the time, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo in early 2003.  
 
Birt described U.S. soldiers’ abuse of detainees at Bagram as “the worst I’ve ever seen.” She didn’t make the judgment lightly: She has 18 years of experience as an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and has investigated some 2,000 cases over the course of her career.  
 
Birt said she interviewed Jawad in 2004 as part of her investigation of abuses at Bagram. Jawad told Birt that while at Bagram he had been beaten and kicked by guards, shackled and hooded, deprived of sleep, forced to stand for lengthy periods, and shoved down a flight of stairs. Jawad said that military police chained him to the door of his cell, and if he tried to sit or lie down, they would enter his cell and force him to stand. He said he often heard the screams and cries of other detainees. Jawad complained of a broken nose, chest pain and problems in urination as a result of his treatment.  
 
Birt testified that his account was similar to those of many other detainees at Bagram.  
 
In a statement to the military judge last week, Frakt described Bagram “not as a detention camp, but as a torture chamber,” and renewed a motion to dismiss the charges against Jawad because of his alleged torture and mistreatment.  
 
Jawad’s reported abuse did not end at Bagram. On Wednesday, Army Maj. Jason Orlich, formerly an officer with the detainee operations group at Guantánamo, took the stand to answer questions about sleep deprivation tactics used on Jawad at Guantánamo. Known as the “frequent flyer program,” the program entailed moving detainees frequently from cell to cell, typically every two or three hours, to deprive them of sleep. In May 2004, Jawad was moved 112 times during a 14-day period. According to Frakt, Department of Defense guidance limits sleep deprivation to a maximum of four days.  
 
When asked if he believed such treatment was “humane,” Maj. Orlich replied “yes.” He testified that the program was intended to “maintain order and discipline” and to prevent detainees from throwing urine and feces or organizing attacks on guards. Orlich claimed that those subjected to the program were violent detainees — but according to Jawad’s attorney, Guantánamo disciplinary records show no violent behavior by Jawad. The most serious offense recorded against Jawad was “cross-block talking.”  
 
In addition to the “frequent flyer program,” Jawad was reportedly subject to two 30-day periods of isolation. The first occurred in early 2003, just after his arrival at Guantánamo, when he was still not yet 18 (or 17) years old. He was kept in an uncomfortably hot cell, and allowed no copy of the Quran or human contact apart from an occasional interrogation. He was isolated for an additional 30-day period later that year, in September and October. American Correctional Association standards limit isolation for juveniles to five days.  
 
Jawad attempted suicide soon after the second isolation period, in December 2003, but military psychologists reported in both 2004 and 2008 that Jawad had no mental problems. Amazingly, they had determined that for Jawad to be diagnosed with depression, “his condition has to interfere with one of seven ‘major life activities.’” As his attorney remarked wryly: “At Guantánamo, Jawad has no major life activities.”  
 
Judge Henley is expected to announce in late September whether he will dismiss the charges against Jawad on the grounds of torture.  
 
Before recessing on Aug. 14, the judge also surprised observers with an unusual and unprecedented aspect to his ruling. He ordered the senior government official responsible for the military commissions, Susan Crawford, to review the charges against Jawad, consider additional information from the defense and confirm whether she wants to proceed with the case. The basis for the judge’s order was his finding that Gen. Hartmann had failed to include extenuating and mitigating information on Jawad’s case when recommending in October 2007 that Crawford confirm the charges against Jawad.  
 
It’s possible that Crawford will choose not to pursue the case against Jawad at all. According to Maj. Frakt, “This case would never survive scrutiny if they had done a proper pretrial investigation.”  
 
Crawford must decide by Sept. 25 whether the case against Jawad will go forward.

Reprinted from Human Rights Watch.

(Dallas, August 20, 2008) - More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

In the 125-page report, “A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools,” the ACLU and Human Rights Watch found that in Texas and Mississippi children ranging in age from 3 to 19 years old are routinely physically punished for minor infractions such as chewing gum, talking back to a teacher, or violating the dress code, as well as for more serious transgressions such as fighting. Corporal punishment, legal in 21 states, typically takes the form of “paddling,” during which an administrator or teacher hits a child repeatedly on the buttocks with a long wooden board. The report shows that, as a result of paddling, many children are left injured, degraded, and disengaged from school.  
 
“Every public school needs effective methods of discipline, but beating kids teaches violence and it doesn’t stop bad behavior,” said Alice Farmer, Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, and author of the report. “Corporal punishment discourages learning, fails to deter future misbehavior and at times even provokes it.”  
 
The report found that in the 13 southern states where corporal punishment is most prevalent, African-American students are punished at 1.4 times the rate that would be expected given their numbers in the student population, and African-American girls are 2.1 times more likely to be paddled than might be expected. There is no evidence that these students commit disciplinary infractions at disproportionate rates.  
 
“Minority students in public schools already face barriers to success,” said Farmer. “By exposing these children to disproportionate rates of corporal punishment, schools create a hostile environment in which these students may struggle even more.”  
 

Students with mental and physical disabilities are also punished at disproportionate rates, with potentially serious consequences for their development. In Texas, for instance, 18.4 percent of the total number of students who were physically punished were special education students, even though they make up only 10.7 percent of the student population.  
 
“A Violent Education” is based on four weeks of on-the-ground research in Mississippi and Texas in late 2007 and early 2008, including more than 175 interviews with children, teachers, parents, administrators, superintendents, and school board members.  
 
The report documents several cases in which children were beaten to the point of serious injury. Since educators who beat children have immunity under law from assault proceedings, parents who try to pursue justice for injured children encounter resistance from police, district attorneys, and courts. Parents also face enormous, sometimes insurmountable, obstacles in trying to prevent physical punishment of their children. While some school districts permit parents to sign forms opting out of corporal punishment for their children, the forms are often ignored.  
 
In the report, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU cite experts on best practices in school discipline, who emphasize traditional approaches such as detention, and modern approaches such as positive behavior support systems. Positive behavior support systems, which are school-wide discipline systems that stress a clear structure of rewards and consequences for student behavior, have been effectively implemented in major US school systems. States and school boards that fail to implement best practices allow the status quo, or school beatings, to remain in place.  
 
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU call upon the US government to prohibit corporal punishment in all public schools and urge state governments, school boards, superintendents, and administrators to eliminate physical punishment in their schools.  
 
Selected Witness Accounts:  
 
“He took me into the office and gave me three licks. … He made me hold onto the wall and he paddled me. … It hurt for about two hours, it felt like fire under my butt.”  
- Matthew S., who was paddled in second grade for throwing food in a school cafeteria in the Mississippi Delta.  
 
“The other kids were watching and laughing. It made me want to fight them… When you get a paddling and you see everyone laugh at you, it make you mad and you want to do something about it.”  
- Peter S., a middle school student in the Mississippi Delta.  
 
“What made me so angry: he’s three years old, he was petrified. He didn’t want to go back to school, and he didn’t want to start his new school. I was so worried that this was going to constantly be with him, equating going to school with being paddled.”  
- Rose T., mother of a 3-year-old boy in Texas who was bruised from physical punishment after he refused to stop playing with his shoes in class.  
 
“I went into the principal’s office. … He gave me a chair and said hold onto the chair. The paddle had holes in it. Then he just did three swats. … I was hit on my buttocks. … There were holes in the paddle to make it go faster. … It hurt very much. There were definitely red marks and then swelling… almost welt-like markings. It didn’t last for more than a couple days. … It left me feeling very humiliated. I think there were several levels of emotion. Physical pain, mental humiliation. … And being a female at that age, it was like there was this older man hitting me on the butt. That’s weird… even at that age I knew it was inappropriate.”  
- Allison G., a recent graduate punished as a teenager in Texas for being late to class multiple times.  
 
“I’ve heard this said at my school and at other schools: ‘This child should get less whips, it’ll leave marks.’ Students that are dark-skinned, it takes more to let their skin be bruised. Even with all black students, there is an imbalance: darker-skinned students get worse punishment.”  
- Account of Abrea T., former teacher in rural Mississippi.  
 
“I see corporal punishment as a form of slavery. Beating on the slaves was how the headman got them to do something… we’re focused so much on making kids do what we want. Think about the mental capacity that this kind of treatment leaves our children with. We are telling them we don’t respect them. They leave that principal’s office and they think, ‘they don’t consider me a human being.’ That young person loses self-respect.”  
- Account from Doreen W., school board member in a Mississippi Delta town.

A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools
Report, August 20, 2008

Audio Link

The Bush administration’s treatment of juvenile prisoners shipped to Guantánamo Bay defies logic as well as international law.

By Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director, published in salon.com

June 24, 2008 | Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - When Mohammed Jawad took the stand in a courtroom at the U.S. Naval base here late last week, he described a litany of abuse he has endured while detained at Guantánamo, including a sleep deprivation regime known colloquially as the “frequent flyer” program.

“Day and night, they were shifting me from one room to another room,” Jawad said. “I don’t remember how much time I slept, but it was only a short time before they were knocking on my door and shifting me from place to place. No one answered me why they were giving me this punishment.”  
 
Military records showed that during a 14-day period in May 2004, Jawad was moved from cell to cell 112 times, usually left in one cell for less than three hours before being shackled and moved to another. Between midnight and 2 a.m. he was moved more frequently to ensure maximum disruption of sleep.  
 
Such tactics used against a detainee would have been severe under any circumstances - Department of Defense guidance limits sleep deprivation to a maximum of four days - but in the case of Jawad, they are particularly disturbing because he was a scared and suicidal teenager at the time. Jawad’s military-appointed lawyer, Maj. David Frakt, described the tactics as “sadistic and pointless,” and moved to dismiss the charges against his client on grounds of torture.  
 
Jawad was arrested by Afghan police in December 2002 after allegedly throwing a grenade into a U.S. army vehicle in Afghanistan that severely injured two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan translator. Frakt argues that Jawad was drugged and forced to fight with Afghan militia. Jawad doesn’t know his exact birth date, but was 16 or 17 years old at the time. In early 2003, he was brought to Guantánamo.  
 
According to government records obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, more than 20 detainees under the age of 18 have been brought to the prison camp since 2002. The treatment of underage prisoners at Guantánamo, largely in defiance of international law, is one of various ways in which the Bush administration’s policies have tainted prospects for Guantánamo detainees ever to be brought to justice under U.S. law.  
 
Although most of the 20 juvenile detainees have now been released, three remain, having spent more than a quarter of their lives at Guantánamo. The other two juvenile detainees were each only 15 years old when they were apprehended. Mohammad El Gharani was arrested at a mosque in Pakistan and brought to Guantánamo in early 2002. Omar Khadr, a Canadian, was apprehended in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of a U.S. soldier. Held for several months in Afghanistan, he was barely 16 when he arrived here later that same year.  
 
The presence of juveniles at Guantánamo first came to light in 2003, when media reports revealed the age of the youngest detainee at Guantánamo - who was only 13 years old. Unable to explain how a 13-year-old could be classified as being among “the worst of the worst,” as top Bush officials had described Guantánamo’s prisoner population, the Pentagon realized it had a PR problem on its hands. It quickly created a special camp for the three detainees between ages 13 and 15. At Camp Iguana, these children received math and English classes and access to a social worker and recreational facilities. Bizarrely and perhaps without any sense of irony, they were permitted to watch movies including “Cast Away.” Defense Department officials proudly gave tours of the special facility.  
 
That year, on behalf of Human Rights Watch, I had several meetings with Pentagon representatives to discuss the fate of these children. In early 2004, they were released to UNICEF in Afghanistan for rehabilitation. But whenever I tried to raise the case of Omar Khadr (we were unaware of El Gharani and Jawad’s cases at the time) I received the same response: “Khadr is off the table; we will not discuss Khadr.”  
 
Unlike with the three boys held at Camp Iguana and released for rehabilitation, the Pentagon has never acknowledged the juvenile status of Khadr, Jawad or El Gharani. Although international law provides that anyone under 18 is a child and entitled to special treatment, the Defense Department created its own standard: Anyone who was 16 would automatically be treated as an adult. When I asked Defense Department officials in 2004 about the rationale for this policy, they had no reply. One official finally admitted to me that it was completely arbitrary.  
 
During last week’s hearing, Frakt, Jawad’s attorney, asked the prosecutor who authorized the charges against Jawad: “You did not believe his age was worthy of bringing to the attention of the convening authority?” Lt. Col. William Britt’s answer: “No, I didn’t.”  
 
The Bush administration’s refusal to treat these prisoners as juveniles has had profound consequences for Khadr, Jawad and El Gharani. They have had no access to education or recreation facilities and have been housed in the same facilities as adult detainees. After five years of imprisonment, Jawad remains functionally illiterate. None of the three have been allowed to see members of their family.  
 
The effects of prolonged isolation have taken a severe toll. El Gharani has tried to commit suicide at least seven times. He has slit his wrist, run repeatedly into the sides of his cell and tried to hang himself. On several occasions he has been placed on suicide watch in a mental health unit.  
 
Jawad also tried to commit suicide about 11 months after arriving in Guantánamo, by hanging himself by his shirt collar. Prison records also state that he “attempted self-harm by banging his head off of metal structures inside his cell.”  
 
On the witness stand last week Jawad referred to his suicide attempt. “Islam never permits [suicide], but when a person is in great trouble, it was beyond my control. That’s why I tried that.” His lawyer says that Jawad seems to have lost touch with reality and suffers from major depression.  
 
At O’Kelley’s bar, an incongruous Irish pub at the naval base here, journalists, defense lawyers and human rights observers gather to talk about the bizarre world of Guantánamo. I’ve heard people express disbelief repeatedly that although the United States has detained nearly 700 suspects at Guantánamo since its inception, it has singled out two juveniles to be among the first detainees prosecuted under the military commissions. Officials associated with the military commissions have suggested that the youths’ alleged direct attacks on U.S. soldiers would “capture the imagination” of the American public.  
 
Strikingly, it was just around the time that Khadr, El Gharani and Jawad were transferred to Guantánamo that the U.S. ratified an international treaty barring the use of children under 18 in armed conflict. The treaty also obligates governments to help rehabilitate child soldiers and help them reintegrate into society.  
 
In some respects, the U.S. has taken its new responsibilities seriously: Each branch of the armed forces adopted new policies to keep American military personnel out of combat until they reach age 18 and to delay deployment of 17-year-old volunteers. Since 2001, the U.S. has also contributed more than $34 million around the globe to prevent the recruitment and use of child soldiers and to demobilize and reintegrate child combatants. Since 2003, $4.5 million in U.S. funds has supported a demobilization program for over 5,000 former child soldiers in Afghanistan.  
 
The commitment to rehabilitation, however, seems to be missing in action when child soldiers engaging U.S. forces are captured.  
 
Khadr’s attorneys argued at Guantánamo in February that as a former child soldier, Khadr should not be tried before a military commission. They claimed that international law obligates the U.S. to treat Khadr as a victim, not to punish him, and that Congress did not give the military tribunals jurisdiction over crimes by juveniles. The military judge rejected their motion.  
 
As the proceedings move forward the U.S. continues to turn a blind eye to Khadr’s juvenile status. Recently, his attorneys requested funding to secure a child psychologist and psychiatrist as expert witnesses at Khadr’s trial. Those requests also were denied.  
 
International law does not preclude the possibility of prosecuting former child soldiers for serious criminal offenses. But the standards are very clear: Such cases should be handled as quickly as possible through specialized juvenile justice systems. Rehabilitation must be the primary objective, and conditions of detention must include access to family, education, recreation and other special assistance.  
 
On every count, the U.S. has failed at Guantánamo to meet these requirements.  
 
The judge in Khadr’s case announced last week that Khadr’s trial would begin on October 8. Even if acquitted, however, the U.S. government has said that it may continue to detain him “in order to mitigate the threat posed by the detainee.”  
 
Jawad’s hearings will resume in August.  
 
El Gharani has not been charged, and spends his days languishing in a cell with little more than a mattress, a copy of the Quran and toilet paper.

On October 23, 2006 a U.S. soldier or marine peered through the telescopic sight of his M24 sniper rifle and trained it on the face of Nora, a five-year-old Iraqi girl. Her pretty face was close enough to kiss. Instead, he squeezed the trigger and sent a 7.62 round slamming into her skull. The medical report read, “Nora sustained an explosive bullet injury to her head that smashed the skull bones and ruptured her cerebral membrane.” Nora survived the sniper’s bullet.

During the battle for Falluja in 2004, U.S. snipers positioned themselves on rooftops covering the entrance to the only hospital still in operation, creating what locals called “sniper alley.” Iraqi men, women, and children seeking medical treatment were fired on. Ambulances delivering patients and supplies were fired on. Unlike Nora, many did not survive the sniper’s bullet.

On May 30, 2006 Nabiha Nisaif Jasiam and her cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassen were shot from behind by a U.S. sniper as they drove to Samarra General hospital. Nabiha was about to deliver her third child. Neither survived the sniper’s bullet.

No U.S. president or general or lowly lieutenant acknowledged, much less apologized, for these illegal and immoral shootings. No sniper was held accountable.

On May 19 the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. General Jeffrey Hammond, apologized to community leaders and imams from the Baghdad neighborhood of Radhwaniya after it was discovered that a U.S. sniper used a copy of the Quran for target practice.

Gen. Hammond told the angry crowd, “I come before you here seeking your forgiveness. In the most humble manner … I say please forgive me and my soldiers. The actions of one soldier were nothing more than criminal behavior.”

Sheikh Hamadi al-Qirtani, speaking for the tribal sheiks of Radhwaniya, called the sniper’s behavior “aggression against the entire Islamic world.” The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned “this heinous crime against God’s book” and warned Gen. Hammond, “God preserves his book and [is] the Great Avenger.”

We need some perspective here!

Nora and the other innocent Iraqis shot by snipers are made of flesh and blood and a brain capable of remembering yesterday and hoping for tomorrow. They are their god’s “Islamic World,” the living testament to faith in a sacred covenant. It is these human beings who are the victims of a “heinous crime” and deserve to be avenged by their god, if not at least apologized to by Gen. Hammond.

Holy books, on the other hand, are made of cardboard and paper and ink. They are made for profits (pun absolutely intended). These books are not manna from heaven. They are manufactured here on Earth and there is nothing sacred about their physical presence. Whatever “sacredness” there may be in holy books can, like little Nora, survive a sniper’s bullet. If it cannot, then it is most assuredly the creation of men, not of gods.

To seal his apology at Radhwaniya, Gen. Hammond ordered a soldier to kiss a new copy of the Quran and present it to the community. That done, he assured them, “I have punished this soldier. [He] has lost the honor to serve the United States Army and the people of Iraq here in Baghdad.” The soldier was sent home to his family.

Is it any wonder that the Vietnam War lasted for more than a decade and claimed the lives of 58,200 Americans and over two million Vietnamese? During that war, soldiers and marines had to shoot themselves instead of a book in order to lose the “honor” of serving the U.S. military and the people of Vietnam and get sent home to their families.

With that in mind, consider this proposal for a “holey” workable Iraq peace plan: Mothers write to your son, wives to your husband, and kids to your dad. Beg him to drill a few 7.62 holes into a holy book of his choice, turning it into an instrument of peace. Have him respectfully submit this symbol of peace to his commanding officer with a notarized photograph to the unit chaplain or local imam. He will no longer be allowed to “serve” the people of Iraq and will be safely home in a week. The war will be over by Christmas.

It seems unlikely that either the Peaceful Prophet of Islam or the Prince of Peace of Christianity will have a problem with 140,000 holey holy books if it means saving twice that many lives and the ending of an immoral war and suffocating occupation.

The Peaceful Prophet said, “Whoever kills a single soul … it is as though he had killed all of humanity,” while the Prince of Peace made it clear, “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethrens, ye have done it unto me.

Neither Prophet nor Prince ever said anything about “killing” a book. It is the “living testament” that is sacred to them, not something made of cardboard and paper and profits.

This article was originally published at Dissident Voice.

(Washington, DC, June 6, 2008) - New figures showing that US incarceration rates are climbing even higher, with racial minorities greatly overrepresented in prisons and jails, highlight the need to adopt alternative criminal justice policies, Human Rights Watch said today.

Statistics released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the US Department of Justice, show that as of June 30, 2007, approximately 2.3 million persons were incarcerated in US prisons and jails, an all-time high. This represents an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 US residents, the highest such rate in the world. By contrast, the United Kingdom’s incarceration rate is 152 per 100,000 residents; the rate in Canada is 108; and in France it is 91.  
 
“The new incarceration figures confirm the United States as the world’s leading jailer,” said David Fathi, US program director at Human Rights Watch. “Americans should ask why the US locks up so many more people than do Canada, Britain, and other democracies.”  
 
The new statistics also show large racial disparities, with black males incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white males. Nearly 11 percent of all black men ages 30 to 34 were behind bars as of June 30, 2007.  
 
In May 2008, Human Rights Watch released its report, “Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States,” in which it documented racial disparities in US drug law enforcement, with black men 11.8 times more likely than white men to enter prison on drug charges, despite the fact that blacks and whites use illegal drugs at similar rates. Although whites, being more numerous, constitute the large majority of drug users, blacks constitute 54 percent of all persons entering state prisons with a new drug offense conviction.  
 
“Decisions about drug law enforcement play a major role in creating the staggering racial disparities we see in US prisons,” said Fathi. “The ‘war on drugs’ has become a war on black Americans.”  
 
The US has ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a treaty that requires the US to guarantee, without distinction as to race, color, or national or ethnic origin, “[t]he right to equal treatment before the tribunals and all other organs administering justice.” In May 2008, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which monitors compliance with ICERD, expressed its “concern with regard to the persistent racial disparities in the criminal justice system of [the United States], including the disproportionate number of persons belonging to racial, ethnic and national minorities in the prison population.” The committee called on the United States to undertake “further studies to determine the nature and scope of the problem, and the implementation of national strategies or plans of action aimed at the elimination of structural racial discrimination.”  
 
Human Rights Watch urges public officials in the United States to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offenses and to adopt community-based sanctions and other alternatives to incarceration for low-level drug offenders. Human Rights Watch further calls on the United States to enact legislation that, in accordance with ICERD, prohibits policies or practices in the criminal justice system that have the purpose or effect of restricting the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms on the basis of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin.

Reprinted from Human Rights Watch.

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico’s status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work — many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez sees it, “It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this — to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated.”

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world’s largest importer of rice. Manila’s desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country’s top economists that the “search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one.” Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments — roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines’ road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support — a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines’ 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico’s joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country’s two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines’ joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports — much of it subsidized US grain — farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of “high-value-added” crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. “Our small producers,” he said, “are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment.”

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.”

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls “de-peasantization” — the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: “Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a ‘consumer’ of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.”

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent’s peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank’s wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank’s encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 — 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets [are] crowding out more productive spending.”

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers’ groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO’s Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers’ groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant’s Path). Via not only seeks to get “WTO out of agriculture” and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative — food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via’s platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class for itself,” contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage — and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers’ movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital’s vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

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Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.

“The frequency and the shape of the pulses generated by stun guns are designed to incapacitate the target by electrically overwhelming his or her control of these muscles,” state Dr. K. Nanthakumar and colleagues. “In principle, these pulses are designed to act only on skeletal muscles and to not affect internal organs such as the heart.” The evidence that stun guns do not stimulate the heart is based on “…theoretical studies [that] suggest that stun guns cannot deliver the amount of energy required to stimulate the heart or cause ventricular fibrillation.”

Dr. Nanthakumar and collegues point out that most theoretical and some experimental studies reveal that cardiac stimulation does not occur with stun gun discharges. However, experimental studies on pigs by 3 independent groups of investigators found that “a stun gun discharge can stimulate the heart” depending on the location of the stun gun barbs. Barbs that are located such that they form a vector across the heart have greater effect than those focused on the abdomen. In one study, swine blood pressure was abruptly lost after discharge of a stun gun, and another study “reported the deaths of 2 animals caused by ventricular fibrillation immediately after the stun gun discharge….This suggests that sufficient current density was produced by the stun gun to stimulate the heart, which according to theory should not and could not occur.”

The researchers caution against applying data from pigs to humans, although “most of the basic mechanistic concepts in cardiac fibrillation and defibrillation are derived from animal studies, not humans.”

Recently, there have been several deaths after the use of stun guns, including Robert Dziekanski in Richmond, British Columbia, a Montréal, Quebec man and 24 year-old Chicago, Illionois resident, Kevin Piskura. More than 300 deaths following stun gun use have been documented, 20 of them in Canada.

Regarding arrhythmias long after the discharge of the stun gun, Dr. Nanthakumar, Dr. Paul Dorian and colleagues conclude “…there is no conclusive evidence to show whether stun gun stimulation (under certain electrophysical conditions) can result in cardiac arrhythmias late after stun gun discharge. With regards to deleterious effects on the heart during the discharge they state “In our view, it is inappropriate to conclude that stun gun discharges cannot lead to adverse cardiac consequences in all real world settings.”

Reprinted from the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

By Tim Wise

March 18, 2008

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn’t he say that America “got what it deserved” on 9/11? And didn’t he say that black people should be singing “God Damn America” because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn’t.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and “never batted an eye.” That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and “save American lives.”

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman’s own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we’re the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would “never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

And Wright didn’t say blacks should be singing “God Damn America.” He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn’t happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don’t believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks–and I do, for instance–it is worth pointing out that Wright isn’t the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early ’90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed “undesirable” including gays and racial minorities.

So that’s the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America’s favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those “prosperity ministers” who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock–though make no mistake, they already knew it–is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that “everything changed.” To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded–about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we’re shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation–we’re literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the “shining city on a hill,” for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do–and this is true even for millions of black veterans–for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like “God Bless America,” for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I’ve seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country–when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as “Negro Barbecues,” involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade–an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were–and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the “good old days” to which we wish we could return, still are–from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before “Leave it to Beaver” debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager’s textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon “this great country” as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one’s nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they–the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land–who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfar