The figures are put together from pre-existing policy proposals from international organizations, think tanks, academics and social movements. Some of these estimates are generally conservative and easier to implement. Meeting commitments to justice and fairness would require higher tax rates, more debt cancellation and further fiscal spending. Other proposals are more ambitious, and are only in their embryonic stages of development. These proposals reflect the orders of magnitude of potential funds rather than a specific program of action.

Due to low interest rates and a lack of capacity in the economy, even the IMF now agrees that rich governments who control their own currency can increase spending without having to increase taxes. This is a welcome departure from the false austerity narrative of the past 10 years, that the books always need to be balanced. It follows that rich governments should spend whatever is needed today, while designing and coordinating new taxes that in the future can reduce inequality and take purchasing power out of the hands of the rich. This unconstrained ability to spend your way out of a crisis, however, has never been open to countries in the Global South. The recent legacy of neoliberal policies and the longer history of colonial inequality has left many low-income countries unable to properly run their health and economic systems, showing the desperate need for the reforms set out in this report.

Lastly, raising finance is not sufficient to delivering systemic change to our unjust global economy. To ‘build back better’, more than just money will have to be mobilised. This report points throughout to examples of structural change that could start to change the balance of power away from a small financial elite towards a more democratically-controlled economy. The aim of the report is to present aggregate figures while also highlighting real life examples that can act as a blueprint for a future that treats humanity with equity and dignity. Ultimately, the $9.457 trillion a year headline figure drawn from these proposals show that moving towards a just world depends on political power rather than availability of financial resources.

This report addresses six necessary expenditures required to fight the pandemic and transition to a just economy.³ The first two deal with the immediate costs of the pandemic, while the last four deal with costs of preventing climate breakdown, achieving the sustainable development goals and paying reparations for slavery. However, the cost of building a better world following COVID-19 is not limited to them alone, nor can these expenditures compensate for years of structural inequality and a colonial legacy. The pandemic is threatening to push half a billion more people into poverty⁴ and 71–100 million into extreme poverty.⁵ This will increase the total number of women and girls living in extreme poverty to 435 million, with projections showing that this number will not revert to pre-pandemic levels until 2030.⁶ Half of global workers are at risk of losing their jobs.⁷ While these immediate economic costs are devastating, they do not have a clear monetary bill attached and are therefore not included in the aggregate figures below.

Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and Guatemala are just some of the Latin American countries being hit by the investment protection regime in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foreign investors are threatening to bring claims before international arbitration tribunals due to the measures states are taking to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. Arbitrators are refusing to accept states’ requests to postpone ongoing arbitration cases and are obliging governments to disburse millions to investors at a time when public funds are required for more urgent priorities. Once again, the current crisis reveals the perverse consequences of the investor-state dispute settlement system and the urgent need to break free from it.

For decades, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have been suffering the consequences of having signed more than 470 trade and investment protection agreements. Foreign investors have brought nearly 300 known claims before international arbitration tribunals against the region’s states. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the crises it has unleashed could further exacerbate the risks of the investment protection regime by triggering a new wave of claims.

“Investment treaty protections are no longer viewed as remedies of last resort, but important tools in an investors’ armoury.” Simmons and Simmons law firm

“This is no doubt going to lead to six arbitration claims against us at ICSID [the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes]” declared the president of Ositrán, the Peruvian government agency that supervises investment in public transport infrastructure, when Peru’s Congress approved a law at the beginning of April to suspend the collection of tolls on the country’s roads during the emergency caused by the coronavirus crisis. The purpose of this measure was to facilitate the transport of essential goods or workers at a time when so many Peruvians had lost their income.

International law firms have wasted no time in questioning the measures adopted by sovereign states in Latin America and the rest of the world and explaining how they could give rise to international arbitration claims – for which, of course, they offer their specialized services. For example, a lawyer from the firm Alston & Bird (minute 49:20) questioned the proportionality and necessity of the measure adopted by Peru. He stated that the government could have adopted other, less damaging measures to protect public health, such as introducing toll collection technology to replace the people taking payments in toll booths.
The warnings about potential disputes began to materialize in June when it was confirmed that several toll road concession-holders had expressed their intention to initiate international arbitration proceedings.

“It is reasonable to predict that the measures taken by states, and by Peru in particular, will lead to more than one dispute”, Pablo Mori Bregante from the law firm GST LLP

In order to “contain this threat by the concession-holders”, in June Peru’s executive branch initiated unconstitutionality proceedings to overturn the law suspending toll payments. In her justification of this measure, Peru’s Minister of the Economy, María Antonieta Alva, made it clear that the aim is to avoid “the contingencies we’re going to face in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Not only is there the likelihood of claims against us; not only will we have to pay for all the legal costs and lawyers. We’re also going to have to pay compensation”.

The threats of arbitration claims usually seek – in many cases successfully – to deter governments from enacting legislation in order to avoid disputes that may cost them millions of dollars, an effect known as “regulatory chill”. Whether or not the corporations concerned decide to pursue their claims will depend on the ruling by Peru’s Constitutional Court.

Mexico was the second Latin American country to receive threats of investor claims due to measures adopted in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In this case, for imposing restrictions on renewable energy generation due to the fall in demand for electricity caused by the pandemic.

Between 29 April and 15 May, a critical time for the country due to the rapid increase in cases of COVID-19, the government issued two resolutions to postpone when renewable-energy power plants can start to operate and restrict electricity generation by wind and solar energy facilities.

These measures mainly affect major European energy transnationals – such as the Spanish firms Iberdrola, Naturgy and Acciona, Italy’s Enel and France’s Engie – and Canadian and US corporations that have invested in Mexico’s renewable energy sector, taking advantage of highly favourable contracts. The government has argued that the changes introduced, which give it more power to control the Mexican energy market, were necessary during the pandemic and are aimed at “safeguarding energy security and independence” and guaranteeing “the power supply”, especially for essential services such as the health system.

Almost immediately, various international law firms specializing in investment disputes, such as DLA Piper, reacted by warning that “foreign investors in wind and solar electricity generation facilities in Mexico may wish to consider their rights and potential remedies under applicable investment treaties”. The well-known Spanish arbitrator Bernardo Cremades also predicted that “protection for domestic firms may lead to AMLO having to face a number of costly claims […] investors are likely to have recourse to the arbitration mechanisms provided by investment protection treaties”. The law firm Crowell & Moring declared that the measures “imperil foreign investments in renewable energy projects” and were quick to offer their specialized international arbitration services to investors in Mexico.

Some of the Spanish corporations affected by the measures have already started to prepare international arbitration claims against the Mexican government. Canadian firms, including ATCO, the largest energy infrastructure corporation in Canada, have also warned that the government’s measures could infringe NAFTA 2.0.

Three things stand out about the corporations preparing to file claims. First, several of them have ample experience of using investment arbitration against states, including Mexico itself, to obtain profits from failed investments. For example, in 2018 the Canadian firm ATCO brought a claim before the London Court of International Arbitration against the state electricity company – the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) – alleging breach of contract when construction of the Ramal-Tula gas pipeline was suspended due to social opposition to the project. For its part, Naturgy has an ongoing claim against Colombia for US$ 1.6 billion, won US$ 2 billion in an arbitration case against Egypt and is preparing to launch new claims against Algeria and Nigeria, among others. The Spanish firm Iberdrola has also made use of investment arbitration against Bolivia and Guatemala.

Second, even though they have investments in the renewable energy sector in Mexico, most of them are large transnational corporations with portfolios of investments in fossil fuels. Moreover, in some cases such as the energy giant Iberdrola, they have been historic enemies of renewable energy.

“Behind the smokescreen of green capitalism, the major electricity firms see the renewables sector as an opportunity to diversify their capital accumulation strategies” OMAL

Third, they have an amply documented track record of human and social rights violations, which remains unpunished due to the lack of sanctions mechanisms. For example, Iberdrola, which controls a large slice of the Mexican electricity market, has been accused of corruption, criminalization and displacement of local communities, and failing to carry out free, prior and informed consultation, thus infringing ILO Convention 169. Detailed reports on the wind farms in Oaxaca show that the company has avoided paying taxes and has signed contracts detrimental to the farmers who agreed to lease their land.

On 22 May, in the midst of the pandemic, Argentina found itself unable to pay part of its public debt to a group of international bondholders, including BlackRock – the US firm that is the largest investment management corporation in the world. This “default” occurred while tough negotiations were taking place with creditors to restructure US$ 66 billion in debt, a measure considered necessary even by the International Monetary Fund. The government and the bondholders sealed an agreement on 4 August 2020, under which Argentina agreed to pay US$ 54.8 for every US$ 100 of debt. This figure is very close to the US$ 56 demanded by the major bondholders led by BlackRock and much higher than Argentina’s initial offer of US$ 39, making it clear that the pressure exerted by the firms was successful. 

Some of this pressure came in the form of threats to bring international claims. White & Case is the US law firm advising the group of Argentina’s bondholders led by BlackRock. On 17 June it issued a statement containing a direct threat: “our group is now considering all available rights and remedies”. One of the potential legal remedies is to bring an investment arbitration claim. 

The possibility of bondholders bringing an investment arbitration claim against Argentina is not a far-fetched idea. White & Case is not just any law firm: it is one of the elite law firms specializing in investment arbitration, and has been involved in at least 73 investor-state disputes brought before ICSID. Even more relevant, however, is that White & Case was the law firm that represented 60,000 Italian bondholders that brought a claim against Argentina in 2007 (the Abaclat case) as these bondholders refused to accept the debt restructuring that followed the 2001 crisis. In 2016, this law firm was instrumental in securing a payment of US$ 1.35 billion for the 60,000 bondholders. 

Other law firms specializing in international arbitration, such as Dechert, wasted no time in identifying “impending sovereign bond disputes”.

“The protections offered by international investment law may provide creditors means of recourse against a State […] following sovereign debt defaults or restructurings – even when they are necessary or unavoidable.” Dechert law firm⁴

Although Argentina has avoided these “impending” claims for the moment, the bondholders’ threat to use them is an effective intimidation tactic and presumably influenced the government to concede and make a more favourable offer.

While the country undergoes the worst political crisis in a decade, the government of Bolivia not only has to deal with the health and economic crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also has to continue to fight four lawsuits brought before international arbitration tribunals by private companies, where there are millions of dollars at stake.

“Between them, these four international arbitration claims amounting to more than 3 billion dollars are under the jurisdiction of international arbitrators, who unfortunately refused to put them on hold despite the pandemic.” José María Cabrera, Solicitor-General of the Plurinational State of Bolivia

In this context, the government of Bolivia requested the suspension of arbitration proceedings in two of the ongoing cases related to mining: one is the dispute with the Swiss firm Glencore and the other a dispute with the US investor Julio Miguel Orlandini Agreda. It based these requests on the “grounds of force majeure, in relation to the COVID-19 health crisis” (p.2) and argued that the various measures applied by countries in response to COVID-19 had made it “materially impossible” (p.5) to deliver the required documents. It also explained that “quarantine-related measures have severely hindered its ability to prepare” (p.3) the documents it is required to present.

The arbitrators in both cases refused to suspend the proceedings. Arbitrators in the Glencore case, for example, stated that the tribunal “does not consider that there is any sufficient basis on which to suspend these proceedings” (p.6). In the Orlandini Agreda case, the arbitrators took the view that suspension was not necessary because in other cases “the proceedings have not been suspended or ruled impossible to continue” (p.9).

“… the Tribunal cannot ignore the effects of the current global health crisis and, on the other hand, it must also […] adhere to its duties to avoid unnecessary delay”, arbitrators in the Glencore vs Bolivia case.

The government argues that, as a result of the tribunal’s decision, “Bolivia has been prevented from exercising its right to defence” (p.8).

The US electricity corporation TECO, represented by the law firm White & Case, is engaged in a legal battle to collect the US$ 21 million it was awarded by an arbitration tribunal in a dispute against Guatemala. Taking account of interest, it is estimated that this award would be worth US$ 36.5 million today.

Payment of the arbitration award to TECO must be confirmed in the US courts. Having declared a state of national calamity due to the pandemic, Guatemala has asked for the payment to be suspended, arguing that “payment of this award would worsen the economic situation in the country at a time when it has to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.” Despite this, a US judge in a District of Columbia court rejected Guatemala’s request.

For Guatemala, the second poorest country in Latin America, where the hospital system has collapsed as a result of COVID-19, the millions at stake are significant. For example, the government could use that money to buy 108,000 extra beds for COVID-19 patients.⁴ This amount is also equivalent to 24% of the additional budget given to the Ministry of Health to tackle the current health crisis.⁵

The region’s countries are under pressure to deal with the health, social and economic crisis resulting from the current pandemic, but the reaction by foreign investors has not been to ease up on their host states. On the contrary, the filing of new arbitration claims has continued during the pandemic, putting extra pressure on governments’ already stretched capacities. 

From the beginning of March 2020 to the end of July, at least 16 new arbitration claims have been filed worldwide, and nine of them are against countries in Latin America and the Caribbean – three claims have been brought against Colombia, two against Mexico, two against Peru and two against Panama. 

Although these disputes are not directly related to the measures taken by states in response to the pandemic, they divert funds and efforts from where they are most needed: to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-economic consequences. 

Since the start of the pandemic, international law firms have begun to speculate about potential international arbitration claims related to the measures taken by states in response to COVID-19. The law firm Ropes & Gray, for example, asserts that “for companies with foreign investments, investment agreements could be a powerful tool to recover or prevent loss resulting from COVID-19 related government actions”.

In dozens of written communications to their corporate clients, the law firms identify measures taken by governments, including in Latin America, that could give rise to claims that invoke the ample safeguards provided by the investment protection agreements currently in force.

“With this new generation of claims, arbitrators are going to be scrutinizing the limits on a state’s ability to regulate and manage crisis situations, and the proportionality and reasonableness of the measures adopted”, Aníbal Sabater, partner in the law firm Chaffetz Lindsey.

For example, Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay and Argentina have adopted measures that provide direct support to water service users, such as making it unlawful to cut off the supply due to a failure to pay bills during the crisis. The law firm Hogan Lovells warned that these measures “may encourage foreign investors to seek recourse under protections found in investment treaties”.

Similarly, Chile and Ecuador have facilitated the issuing of compulsory licences that seek to prevent patents on medicines and equipment being monopolized by a single company. However, lawyers in the field of investment arbitration believe (webinar minute 6:48) that measures by “governments both forcing producers to sell drugs at significantly discounted prices and/or taking the intellectual property for themselves and/or disseminating that intellectual property to third parties without permission” constitute expropriation and could give rise to claims under the investment treaties.

“Argentina showed the world in 2002 how an economic and political crisis can be a catalyst for investment arbitration claims. If we add a global pandemic to the mix, it seems likely that we will see a new wave of investor claims, especially in the light of recent government measures”, Aníbal Sabater, partner in the law firm Chaffetz Lindsey

The general attitude of these law firms is summed up in the statement made by Alex Yanos from the law firm Alston & Bird, who pronounced (webinar minute 1:01:36) that “some states will end up losing cases to investors, notwithstanding the way that it might come across as unfair.”

Whichever way it is viewed, the treaties protecting foreign investment could aggravate the crisis situation in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. At the very least, they are yet another worry and a source of additional pressure, which is the last thing governments need at this time.

The main negative consequence is that international arbitration disputes will deprive countries of the resources they need to combat the virus and the socio-economic crisis accompanying it. At a time when all efforts should be focused on dealing with this unprecedented situation, Latin American governments are being forced to divert their attention and allocate scarce resources to address the threats of legal action as a result of the measures taken to tackle the COVID-19 crisis. They also have to put up with the indifference of arbitrators and judges to requests to suspend arbitration proceedings and orders to pay investors money that is needed to address immediate priorities.  

In a recent bulletin, the law firm Garrigues pondered “the question that arises therefore is whether COVID-19 is a new break for investment arbitration due to the surge in claims that will arise from it or whether, conversely, it will be a final sweep of the sword by discouraging states from including this dispute resolution mechanism in their treaties.”  

It will be difficult for governments to avoid the wave of claims that this new crisis will unleash. But they do have the power to prevent the same thing happening in the future. The way to do that is to add their voice to the more than 600 social organizations speaking out against the current investment protection treaties and halt all the negotiations now under way. The high costs that investment protection treaties entail can no longer be justified when there is no evidence that they bring any benefits. 

Our webinar Feminist Realities – Transforming democracy in times of crisis explored the ways the pandemic intersects with patriarchy, corporate power and a global division of labour that is both gendered and racialized. Can this crisis provide a window of opportunity to re-organize and shift power to build radical democratic systems that genuinely care for the environment and our collective well-being?

Tithi Bhattacharya

Tithi Bhattacharya Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University and co-author of the manifesto Feminism for the 99%, opened the discussion by sharing two telling images of the crisis, the first of Palestinean farmers leaving free vegetables by the roadside for hungry people and the second of the Indian police hosing down migrant workers with bleach. Embodying two kinds of responses, the images speak of ordinary people engaging in sustaining, life-saving activities, and the carceral ways in which governments and states are attempting to manage the pandemic.

We can thank capitalism – including factory farming that contributed to the origins of COVID-19 – for bringing us to this crisis. A system that in its response is prioritizing profits over life, while remaining reluctantly dependent on the processes and institutions of life making. Capitalism relies on workers to produce commodities that are then sold to make profits and can therefore only survive if workers lives are reproduced continuously and reliably while being replaced generationally. Food, housing, public transport, public schools, and hospitals are all ingredients of life making that socially reproduce workers and their families. The level of access to these processes often determines the fate of working people as a whole, while women still perform the bulk of life making work globally. Despite its dependence on life, capitalism is reluctant to spend any portion of its profits on what sustains and maintains it. Care work is devalued, underpaid, or unpaid while institutions including schools and hospitals are privatized or underfunded.

Our world before COVID-19 was already ravaged when it came to gender. Care work in the home is still mostly done by women whose unpaid labour is worth ten trillion dollars globally. Professions that embody the spirit of care work, including teaching and nursing, employ large numbers of women and provide services and infrastructures that are not only vital to the production of life but also build capacities and attributes essential to the human condition.

Into this world of unequal wages, unenumerated labour and unmitigated gender violence came COVID-19. While temporary field hospitals were created to care for the sick, draconian immigration laws were somewhat temporarily relaxed and hotels were commandeered to house the homeless, governments around the world only responded to the virus once its spread was impossible to control with medical infrastructures. Ignoring years of scientific warnings of the risk of a pandemic, states around the world with the help of big pharma focused rather on building for-profit healthcare systems. In the US, the statistics of 2.7 hospital beds per 1000 people and 120 guns per 100 civilians show clear priorities.

This crisis has revealed what feminists have known all along, that the life making work of care performed mostly by women, including food production, nursing, cleaning and teaching is what sustains society and enables other work. However, in the US women represent 60 per cent of those laid off during the pandemic and nurses have had to work wearing garbage bags and swim goggles to protect themselves. In addition, the death rate is disproportionately skewed towards people of colour. Domestic violence is on the rise globally as women are forced to stay at home with known abusive partners and family members and immigrant women are being airlifted to work on Italian farms with no regard for social distancing rules. The recent opening of the economy has brought the struggle between life and wage. People are being forced to decide whether they can afford to stay safely at home and risk losing their jobs and subsequently healthcare for those living in the US.

As feminists, we must fight the return to capitalist business as usual. The ways we can do this and upend the dynamic of profit-making over life-making are apparent all around us in the mutual aid and solidarity networks led by ordinary people. The flourishing of the many over the prosperity of the few must be a priority over the blind drive to ecological devastation and gender violence that profit-making creates.

Awino Okech

Awino Okech Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, offered her perspective on how the rise and collisions of fascisms, fundamentalism and capitalism have limited and predetermined our practices of democracy and governance.

As we know, the pandemic has dramatically exposed the inequalities underwritten by racialized logics and mapped onto class and gender. The historical theft of races and the gutting of countries through economic processes is now evident for us all globally to see and we are facing a very particular challenge deeply connected to the ways in which our societies are structured. In the Global North, these realities have become much starker in the past five years with the overt mobilization and ascent to power of racist movements across Europe, the US, and parts of Latin America. Those in the Global South, particularly from the African continent, have long since been aware of how those particular government arrangements are propped up by an international political elite. This has been sold to us under the guise of preventing terrorism, dealing with migration issues and the need to have safer secure countries across border zones so we can prevent the movement of people from Africa into Europe. This discourse around terrorism, stable and secure countries is underwritten by the desire for the international political elite in collusion with the local political elite to sustain governance arrangements that benefit them and not the vast majority of citizens. As a result, voting has become a performance and citizen agency diminished due to the decisions of those sitting in parliaments largely determined by other actors, state as well as private and international capital. We now know that British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica intervened in a range of electoral processes and the ways in which the technology platforms we have become so used to using and the data that we willingly submit to them has become manipulated and mobilized for the interests of global capital and international and local elite. Renegotiating the social contract through democracy and location elections is no longer working for the vast majority.

What has been evident in Africa – Sudan, Burkina Faso and Egypt particularly – is that citizens are rising, unwilling to allow the farce of elections to be the core mechanism by which their futures and realities are determined. The anger we are now seeing in the Global North towards governance arrangements and ideas about democratization, elections, and voting has been witnessed in other parts of the world for many years, the narrative shaping undemocratic processes including ideas of cultural and racial faults. In this COVID-19 moment, those in the Global North are acutely aware that those in office are not responding to their needs, but rather to those of global capital and elites.

Feminist analysts and activists observing these global shifts have become aware of the questions of gender and sexuality as pivotal to how fascist movements are organizing and mobilizing. We see particular narratives around the persecution and withdrawal of queer and women’s rights by specific governments as opportunistic measures taken to prevent discussions on corruption and election fraud. The targeting of women, human rights defenders, and queer folk is part of the process by which fascist movements and far-right groups are rethinking the nature of the state. The conservative, ultra-nationalist ideas pursued by these groups are fundamentally informed and shaped by conservative, binary ideas of gender and sexuality. We must now reframe our own activism around the ways in which queer politics and women’s rights have been coopted into larger nationalist ideas and go back to the very foundational feminist idea that gender and sexuality are central to how our societies function.

We know from conflict scholars and literature on the transformation of societies during moments of conflict that these situations provide a tiny window – during the moment of moving from conflict to peace – for transforming and rewiring the ways in which societies think about gendered ideas. How can we as scholars, activists and people interested in visions of society that are grounded in freedom, equality and justice seize this opportunity? Rather than working in isolated pockets we must think critically around transnational solidarity and build stronger narratives and activist related work across the Global South that contextualizes a central narrative of change, transformation, justice and freedom.

Khara Jabola-Carolus

Khara Jabola-Carolus Executive Director of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women (HSCSW), co-founder of AF3IRM Hawaii (the Association of Feminists Fighting Fascism, Imperialism, Re-feudalization, and Marginalization) and author of Hawaii’s Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19, followed on from Awino to speak about the extent to which working within the state is effective in order to transform democracy from an inside government perspective.

In Hawaii, a settler-colonial state that has a long history of devastating impacts of infectious diseases, indigenous or native Hawaiian women have always been the worst impacted. Today Hawaii has been largely rendered unlivable by the ravages of tourism, luxury development and militarism that defines its economy. Most US states have a commission on the status of women, a tool left by feminists in the sixties to help advance the movement. The extent to which these commissions are actually feminist depends on their politics and the laws governing them. The HSCSW is the first and oldest in the US mandated to engage in politics and be a watchdog for women. Aiming to connect scholars with community theory building, the agency works as the main policy consultant for elected officials and government heads as well as fostering a trusting relationship with feminist activists and women in the state.

We are all witnessing the global rise of fascism and in Hawaii, in particular, the political class feels like a juggernaut of capitalism pushing to return to the old normal as quickly as possible. To try to counteract this the HSCSW has modeled a community based participatory process bringing together a group of diverse women focused on those most impacted by this crisis, colonized, native and transnational women who find few answers in western feminism and incrementalist solutions. The group has a shared understanding of the trauma of western colonization and how the pandemic and the ways communities are suffering from it traces back to western colonization, land loss and value and women as a global commodity.

Laura Roth

Laura Roth Lecturer of legal and political philosophy at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, member of Minim Municipalist Observatory and co-author of the practice-oriented report Feminise Politics Now! gave an intervention focusing on radical possibilities of feminist democracy, political cooperation, and governance.

Practices to this end are already taking place in many cities and towns on different continents, shifting focus from states towards local politics as a strategy not only to find answers to this crisis but also to deeper systemic issues. The municipalist and feminist movements are key to achieving global change as both aim to change the structure of politics as well as influence policies.

Around the world, the pandemic responses show a trend towards centralization, top-down decision making and militarized discourses. Many responses we suggest propose decentralization and sharing power with communities and social movements, however in times of crisis fear makes people more willing to give up their freedoms and worry less about who is making decisions. We do see community responses multiplying in many countries and local governments dealing with most of the practical and complex consequences and impacts on the most vulnerable people.

Municipalism, although it has different meanings, does not suggest simply more autonomy for cities and towns to decide what’s best but is a political strategy aiming to build power from the bottom up enabling collaboration between social movements, communities and local governments. In Spain, municipalism implemented by many cities in 2015 was connected not only to new more democratic and feminist policies but also to changing political processes, linking to the anti-austerity movement. We see an incapacity of traditional representative politics to engage people and right-wing populism unfortunately able to mobilize people. How can we address this problem and bring people back to politics?

Feminism and municipalism focus on building power from the bottom up rather than trusting existing structures that reproduce existing privileges. Both movements treat people as subjects not objects of politics and recognize the complexity of the issues of this crisis not simply as matters of concrete policies or economic responses. In practice, we must think about how we can implement new structures of politics. Minim Municipalist Observatory has been gathering and publishing a series of reports on practices and discussions that are happening on the ground. Key issues regarding gender equality include not only in having more women in politics but also sharing responsibilities in terms of visibility and collective leadership. It is important to consider how we talk about issues in politics and move away from confrontative discourses towards collective discussions that resemble how communities speak and address their issues. Work on participatory democracy is taking place in many domains aiming to implement horizontal decision making structures that incentivize decentralization and in turn generate diverse ways of engaging people in politics, removing mechanisms that tend to favor the privileged.

A central issue in feminist politics is putting care at the forefront of our practices. Not only shifting the care work already being done to a public issue with more evenly distributed responsibility, but also bringing care into political relationships and every discourse and practice of political relations.

Felogene Anumo

Felogene Anumo of Building Feminist Economies and The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) presented the #feministbailout campaign, an idea that emerged as soon as the scope and scale of the pandemic began to push corporations to align closely around bailout demands.

A critical message we see at this moment is a call to bail out people, not corporations. The #feministbailout campaign aims to interconnect feminist solutions and proposals that focus on the women, trans, and gender diverse people supporting the economy as part of a comprehensive global economic recovery agenda. The campaign builds on the feminist realities that already exist in the ways we live and the day to day struggles of our communities. The co-creation plan has involved coordinating a series of actions in English, French, and Spanish with over 1000 international feminist collectives, organizations, and individuals starting with a virtual street rally at the beginning of June. This action week connected and amplified existing campaigns and messages under the feminist bailout umbrella including climate justice, bodily autonomy, governance, resourcing, racial and economic justice. Demonstrating our collective power is key to making use of this crucial narrow window we have to ensure our diverse demands are better seen, heard, and taken on board. Fundamentally, the campaign aims to build and strengthen transnational solidarity and reframe feminist economies as the solution, not an alternative.

Further discussion

Moving on to consider the relationship between states and capitalism, Tithi provided a background of the early days of capitalism in the Global North. It is important to remember that original funding for the development of the industrial capitalist center of Manchester in the UK came from the slave trade, disregarding the stolen lives of Africans, as well as the British families who were put to work for fourteen-hour days. The result was a system with short term vision focusing on profit but also dependent on working lives. As states stepped in to regulate profits, ensuring they increased, social reproduction functions were stripped including public funding for health while carceral state functions escalated. Immigration borders were hardened and police violence increased. Playing a double role within the system, capitalism attempts to guarantee the reproduction of life in disproportionate ways while it militarizes and guarantees death in the same way, valuing life only to increase profit while reinforcing heteronormative families and racialized social logic. Until we can reach an ideal socialist society we must put pressure on the state to prioritize life over profit – funding more hospitals and schools over prisons – while taxing corporations properly. Work on the ground by movements of the marginalized is vital to shift state priorities.

In her final intervention, Awino spoke about stronger solidarity in concrete terms and how we can support real internationalism and coordinated anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic movements. Feminist funds in particular are providing less project and program-based funding and more strategic support of initiatives in the context which they work. This is a vital move away from feminist ideas that position those in the Global North with access to funds as the determinants of the agendas and initiatives in other parts of the world. How we are experiencing COVID-19 and other structural inequalities that preceded this moment are not felt in the same way, so being able to act as an ally while recognizing the ways in which privileges and position impacts conversations is an important step forward. Autonomous organizing is critical in allowing people to regroup, heal and care for themselves and has strengthened in this moment in terms of the ways communities have responded to funding initiatives, care and support. Building meaningful international solidarity means moving away from generalized ideas about capitalism and white supremacy. While borders are closing there are many examples of how activists have been able to work remotely, offering a chance to break out and build movements outside the development agenda and NGO logic.

Khara noted the many ways in which we can bring about cultural change across national and political differences. Advocating for legal change can set the tone and send a clear message from the government while emphasizing community education enables people to recognize gender inequality. We must educate in a ways that ties into empathy and storytelling in spaces that can facilitate these methods and create the conditions that help people understand the plight of women, femme identified, and nonbinary people.

Laura concluded the webinar by highlighting the importance of giving people a voice and trusting them to make the change themselves, facilitating learning by empowering people to become part of processes, and take responsibility. A more democratic culture develops by implementing and experiencing democracy in practice. Changing politics on the local level is a powerful way to engage people in a meaningful way to take part in the real practice of democracy connected to their lives and experiences.

Our webinar States of Control: the dark side of pandemic politics focused on the securitization of COVID-19. Measures such as the expansion of powers for military, police, and security forces and increased digital surveillance are being rolled out with little or no democratic oversight. How can we prevent the normalization of these practices and ensure that COVID-19 doesn’t become a new milestone in authoritarian states of control?

Fionnuala Ni Aolain

Fionnuala Ni Aolain, UN Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism, began by noting the importance of the speed of mobilization, global awareness, and exchange of information about the scale and scope of the powers being exercised by states during this pandemic. Following 9/11, the human rights and critical community took much longer to respond to a whole range of legal, political and administrative measures that were taken.

An emergency by definition denotes an unexpected event that poses a high burden or challenge to the state and in that context allows the state to take certain measures to protect the public. Under the human rights framework of international law, there are three specific contexts in which emergency powers – meaning the power of the state to limit rights – can be used: public safety, health and national security. The idea is that rights can only be limited for tailored specific purposes. International law includes divisions called derogation provisions in human rights treaties, meaning a state must formally inform other states and its own public that it is taking exceptional measures to respond to a crisis. However, there are a number of constraints on the state. The powers used must be necessary, so in this context of a pandemic, necessary to advance health. Any use of emergency powers must be proportionate, meaning every single measure must be exercised in order to assess if it is appropriately used. Any measures taken must be equality driven and cannot disproportionally or negatively affect one group over another.

Historically, the practices of emergency international law go back hundreds of years. In both civil and common law systems, powers of emergency have been used by states to aggregate their power over long periods of time. In addition to the high correlation between states of emergency and the abuse of human rights, temporary powers also have a persistent tendency to stick and states have rarely given them back at the point where the emergency is over. These powers also change the political cultures of states, removing many of the oversight mechanisms that constitute ordinary law. Subsequently, we tend to see a greater accumulation of executive powers, restrictions on parliamentary power, and an increase in the capacity and power of the security sector including the police. These resulting system-wide issues and the restriction of rights is why we must pay close attention when states use emergency powers.

In this moment, parallel to the medical pandemic is an epidemic of emergencies and extraordinary use of emergency powers. In a few cases, states are formally derogating and letting other states know that they are restricting rights but most are not. This corresponds to a major pattern of non-notification that has emerged post 9/11. These powers are being hidden in health and sanitation bills, making it hard for lawyers to find them and for NGOs and civil society organizations to know what these states are doing and therefore to hold them accountable.

Another pattern to consider is complex emergencies. In many countries, there is already an arsenal of post 9/11 counter-terrorism and security emergency powers that states are now adapting to the sphere of health. Private technology and security firms are also offering their services to states on how to use this arsenal of power and information.

Fionnuala concluded her introductory intervention by emphasizing the challenge that those of us speaking for liberty and human rights now face. It is not just the power of governments but also the power of fear and how it affects the rights we are prepared to give away in the face of a pandemic to save ourselves and our families.

Arun Kundnani

Arun Kundnani author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror, discussed the racialized aspects of this emergency legislation for certain populations, reiterating the context of 9/11 as a very clear example of what was presented as a temporary emergency becoming a permanent state of affairs. The terrorism acts that were rolled out around the world have not been repealed, and the authorization for the use of military force that was rushed through the US congress – in effect declaring the whole world as a battlefield for the US military – is still with us. The various forms of anti-Muslim racism that was generated by the war on terror have been intensifying around the globe, in countries including India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.

Fundamentally, two agendas are being rolled out by ruling elites. The first, the state dream of diminishing unruly populations including protesters, poor, migrants, and marginalized groups. The second, the neoliberal dream of creating a society in which our lives are entirely determined by market-based digital algorithms. Opposing these agendas means defending the very idea of humanity.

We are already seeing disproportionate effects of the pandemic on racialized groups as a result of institutional racism of various kinds. In the UK more than a third of deaths are people of colour even though they make up just 15 percent of the population. in Chicago, African Americans account for 64 percent of deaths even though they make up 15 percent of the population. These numbers are massively disproportionate and the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that there will be an additional 100,000 deaths in the US from COVID-19 as a result of mass incarceration. The impact on the global poor will also be hugely disproportionate and racialized. Frantz Fanon talked about the phrase I can’t breathe as a description for the basis of anti-colonial revolt that became a slogan for the Black Lives Matter movement and is also an apt phrase to capture the disparities in access to ventilators that we are seeing.

The new licenses that have been given to police around the world to enforce quarantines and lockdowns are intensifying existing forms of violence that have long been normalized. In France, Parisian suburbs are seeing measures enforced three times as much compared to other areas of the city. In Greece, police forces are strip-searching migrants and in Bulgaria, Roma settlements are being walled off and drones with thermal sensors being used to track temperatures.

During a pandemic, it is reasonable to expect some restrictions on freedom of movement but we are seeing an increased clampdown on migrants placed in immigration detention centers where there is no possibility of isolation and where infection rates of 75 percent are predicted. In Qatar, migrant workers are being offered testing and instead being placed in detention and deported. This is very worrying as we need trust in the medical process to encourage people to participate in the testing we need. Various EU countries are turning away refugees across the Mediterranean in newly violent ways and Malaysia is refusing to accept refugees from Myanmar. In Hungary there was already an unwarranted state of emergency declared surrounding migration that cast this situation in a different light. Right-wing forces around the world are mobilizing around this virus with new forms of racism. Both Trump in the US and Orban in Hungary talk about ‘the Chinese virus’, implying a coordinated response.

Anuradha Chenoy

Expanding on the idea of the war narrative and the notion of creating an enemy, Anuradha Chenoy author of Militarisation and Women in South Asia continued by focusing on the idea of states using the ideology of militarization to accumulate power.
COVID-19 undoubtedly marks an authoritarian moment in world history in which regimes in power have used the virus to expand their control over citizens and centralize power even within democratic systems. When the virus started spreading almost all states had a similar reaction of panic, unpreparedness, lack of confidence in citizens, and taking emergency steps without declaring an emergency. India like many third world countries is hugely dependent on a working-class based on internally migrant labor who come from villages into towns. A complete lockdown was decided in a few hours and the state panic spread to these workers with about 700,000 returning to their villages knowing they could not sustain themselves without their daily wages while living in cramped conditions with little access to basic amenities and sanitation. It remains completely undocumented how many people got lost and died of fatigue and hunger. In South Africa, despite a moratorium on evictions, many municipalities used this moment to evict informal workers. We can see a new kind of protectionism within states where invisible borders are being imposed on communities, between villages and towns and gated communities and outsiders.

The lockdown is actually a lock-in for women in abusive relationships and the use of force on citizens has increased. In many countries including Israel, Philipines, Iraq, and Yemen, the military took to the streets, using force to exacerbate fear and anxiety. Vigilantes linked to many of the right-wing populist regimes and governments in power took on the role of stigmatizing particular communities.

Regarding the enemy narrative, India did not blame China as the US, Hungary and several others did. However, a congregation of a particular Muslim sect in Dehli was linked to the spread of the virus, further stigmatizing the Muslim community, while there were many similar congregations of other religions held at the same time. We have also seen a surge of Islamophobia in Myanmar and many southeast Asian countries as well as a clampdown on Palestinian communities by Israel.

Militarized discourse is being used to frame the pandemic as a war with leaders of many regimes referring to themselves as war presidents. The President of Uganda openly stated that the pandemic is like a war and people should not insist on their freedoms. This discourse transformed into practice in many countries, with terms such as herd immunity and COVID co-morbidity essentially used to refer to collateral damage during wartime. In India, non-violent students and protestors involved in a long struggle against discriminatory new citizenship laws have been detained under draconian laws and incarcerated at a moment where increasing jail populations risk escalating the spread of the virus. The recent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report shows no decrease in defense expenditure that many social communities, as well as NGOs and the UN, have been calling to spend on health. Regional and international organizations, including The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and the European Union, seemed far more concerned with closing borders than solidarity and assistance.

María Paz Canales

María Paz Canales of Derechos Digitales (Digital Rights campaign), Chile went on to discuss the role of technology in the rollout of authoritarian measures, linking its use to points made by the other panelists and emphasizing the fundamental part technology has played in the evolution of counter-terrorism military strategies and militarization.

In the current situation, many civil rights restricting technologies that were deployed to fight crises in the past are being repurposed by states and corporations under the pretext of helping to combat the spread of COVID-19. As previous panelists have mentioned, fear not only drives people to assign blame on a specific group but also to find shortcut solutions to tackle the problem in a more efficient way. Technology is a commonly regarded solution that many authoritarian, as well as democratic states, are tempted to use. However, extraordinary deployment of technology that can have any impact on human rights must be regarded and evaluated according to the international human rights standard. Principles of legality, necessity and proportionality are essential to consider. As mentioned, past emergency powers, as well as technologies, have the tendency to stick and we are now seeing the repurposing of surveillance technologies in the context of the pandemic. Many of these invasive technologies have hugely impacted the civil rights of vulnerable groups and did not prove significantly effective for their original purposes.

Specifically, civilian communication geolocalization technology has been proposed to help track the spread of COVID-19 but there is not enough discussion about the details of the fundamental capacities of these technologies. The type of data used in localization has a variability between five and 500 meters, and neither the granularity or precision needed to measure the possibility of viral transmission that spreads in contact situations of one to two meters. This implies the surveillance of people rather than the virus, and will unnecessarily expose marginalized groups to the risk of discrimination. The same can be said for facial recognition technology that has been used for national security counter-terrorism purposes to limited effectiveness due to lack of precision. We should be looking at these technologies far more critically and working towards resisting the appeal of techno solutionism as a response to fear, rather exploring alternative technologies that are compatible with human rights.

Further discussion

The discussion moved on to consider the future and how the world might look once the medical emergency subsides. Fionnuala continued by underlining the importance of thinking about this crisis as a process rather than an event. In an Orwellian outlook, we might imagine empowered authoritarians and weakened democracies and multilateral systems as an outcome. We may see narrower civil society space, a struggle for such organizations to survive, and an empowerment of states in ways that are profoundly discordant. However, this is also a potential for opportunity in the sense of crisis as innovation where disruption and pain brings extraordinary opportunity to rewrite the status quo. The pandemic illustrates structural failure and the lack of enforcement for fundamental rights like health, water, housing. These systemic issues are what we must focus on in order to emerge from this crisis in a better situation.

The world has shut down on the basis of the protection of the right to health so the question now is how do we proceed, assuming we have won the argument that health is a basic human right. Opportunities are presenting themselves for new ways of organizing, being intentional as a community, and finding innovative ways of calling our leaders to account and forcing them to consider rights. The global effect of the pandemic allows us to mobilize in a way we haven’t before. Although some are clearly affected more than others, every person’s rights are being impinged upon in some way and this allows us to reclaim the language of rights for all in a way that is both rhetorical and profoundly practical.

Arun agreed with Fionnuala that we may have won the argument that healthcare is a right but not the battle for the kind of global public health care system that we need. What we will be up against is corporations trying to exploit this situation to create their version of a new agenda and new world order. Once we are used to conducting much more of our lives digitally via dependencies on corporations, this is where they will want to keep us. Delivering healthcare and higher education via video link for people who cannot afford in-person interactions could become a new standard. The Institute for Policy Studies recently released a report showing the wealth of billionaires in the US increased by ten percent in April alone. These findings are in line with Naomi Klein’s idea of the shock doctrine, where such opportunities arise in crises.

How do we start thinking about social life in ways that are possible in this situation of a pandemic? How can we avoid freezing our lives in a moment where we are scared and isolated? Harsh authoritarian measures such as those inflicted on people in India and South Africa protesting because they have no food can seem legitimate in a situation of quarantine, but we must remember that we can protest and organize now. Our strength comes from the streets and we must not give up public space – it is likely safer for you to protest then be at work in an Amazon warehouse. It will be vital to defend our sense of human connection and the sense of collective movement building. In essence, the revolution will not be quarantined.

Many questions came through from the audience around mobilizing and organizing in a safe way that doesn’t put people at risk. Anuradha went on to elaborate on participatory democracy and how we can push back on the shut down of democratic structures.
Alternate paradigms have shown themselves during this crisis within states, particularly those led by women that have worked properly through democratic procedures. In India, some states such as Kerala have handled the situation well and treated their migrant labor as guests, providing them with facilities enabling them to stay.

During this crisis, civil society in many southeast Asian countries as well as Africa and especially Europe, has shown its strength at a time states have failed to deliver, providing food packets from communities to migrants.

We have seen emerging alternative media including the Wire in India to counter toxic press like Fox News in the US. Many of these online newspapers are speaking truth to power and are involved in critical thinking with engaged scholars. Some universities have also resisted the clampdown. We need to connect ideas and show that the paradigm of civil society, critical scholars, and thinking individuals is the one we need to crack the dominant hegemony. Instead of globalization, we must focus on international solidarity.
Maria went on to discuss using technology to mobilize, highlighting the opportunity to finally mainstream the question of the development of technology as well as our online lives in general. How can we find alternative ways to develop technology that really serves the principles of solidarity and the social movements we are discussing? There is currently a very limited variety of tools that digital rights activists can recommend as being more secure and aligned with the principles of social movements. We must, therefore, use this increased awareness of what we need to collectively organize and create new technology that will better serve our purposes. As we see the use of technology by governments and the private sector in healthcare provision as well in the welfare state, it is clear that the human rights perspective must be considered from design to deployment. We cannot wait for this kind of crisis to confront us with the false dilemma of having to choose between which rights we want to keep in place. The awareness we have gained must fuel social movements to be more critical in their interactions with governments and companies for the future.
In her final intervention, Fionnuala responded to the question of what might happen if health goes beyond being seen as a human right and is interpreted as an issue of national security. The language of the indivisibility of rights is seeing a new moment where we understand the links between civil and political rights and economic and social rights, providing a moment to re-own that space of indivisibility. Historically it is also interesting to note that during previous health emergencies, such as H1N1, the use of powers taken by the state was actually returned.

Securitization must be robustly defended against as we have already seen in the counter-terrorism space where the term extremism infiltrated security into the home, doctors’ offices, and classrooms, making everyone a watcher for extremism. We must push back on the unacceptable securitization of health spaces through exceptionality.

In his final word, Arun spoke about a collaborative project with TNI investigating progressive alternative ways to use the billions spent on security in the UK. Security should be as much about healthcare as anything else. When militarized nation-states like the US are confronted with a global public health care crisis, their goal is to turn it into something that fits with what they are good at, therefore framing it as a matter of inter-nation state violence and rivalry.

As well as the dangers of militarization is the point at which people start asking why this happened and how we can stop it happening again. Assigning blame, whether that’s on China or Muslims, enables us to avoid the very important realization that these kinds of viruses are the product of capitalist agriculture, industrial production of meat and environmental destruction. Capitalist globalization is unsustainable without the global public health infrastructure that we need right now.
Anuradha’s final note was on approaching the crisis from a feminist perspective, considering intersectionality as well as a care economy with livelihood and living wages recognized as well as health.

Maria then concluded the discussion with a point on data rights, clarifying that not all data is the same in terms of value and the harm it can cause. We should be demanding that our authorities be more critical about what type of data is useful for what purposes considering the data that can be helpful in combatting the pandemic can be aggregated without identifying individuals. To allow governments to assists the most vulnerable people and make better strategies within allocating resources, testing capacities and health services it is not necessary to put those groups of people at risk of discrimination by collecting individual identities. This will be pervasive for the future with relevant consequences in the possibilities of employment and migration status. We must establish controls to make sure this type of data truly alleviates the crisis and does not harm people at risk of discrimination and violation of their human rights

Our webinar Taking Health back from Corporations: pandemics, big pharma and privatized health brought together international activists and healthcare experts at the forefront of struggles for equitable universal public health. What needs to change in terms of access to medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, and the global governance of health?

Susan George

Susan George author and President of TNI, opened the discussion with background on the strength of the pharmaceutical lobby. The ten biggest pharma companies in the world amass a total sum in capital of US$1.8 trillion. Using the US as an example, the health industry including various chains of profit-making hospitals, clinics and nursing homes as well as pharma companies, is at the center of the world’s financial lobbying. In Brussels, there are around 30,000 lobbyists pushing for deregulation, lower taxes for the rich, and privatization. Tied up with the neoliberal economic framework, the ‘just in time’ structure of the health system leaves no reserves of supplies to deal with epidemics and is the blueprint of what lobbyists want for global health. A system clearly not aimed at helping people but rather at maximizing profit. We are struggling to fight this pandemic because we have allowed our health systems to become neoliberalized. However, progress can be made by paying attention politically to legislation influenced by the health lobby and putting pressure on creating laws that will serve the people. Healthcare workers are underpaid and under-equipped but wealthier countries can rectify this through proper taxation to have social security systems worth the name.

Baba Aye

Baba Aye  Health Officer at Public Services International, explained how we got where we are today. The 1978 international conference on primary healthcare organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF proclaimed healthcare for all by the year 2000. The conference attempted to capture and build on that spirit of the factors that led to the emergence of the WHO, giving public health the same importance as healthcare delivery. What followed was the corporatization and marketization of health, starting in the 80s with private finance initiatives (PFIs) in countries like Britain and in developing countries, specifically in Africa, after the World Bank Report of 1981 and the introduction of user fees. The argument essentially centered around involving corporations to address the problem of lack of money for the public healthcare system. PFIs and public-private partnerships amount to subsidizing private interests with public money that could be used to provide universal public healthcare.

An unholy trinity has now emerged between big pharma, health companies and private health demands due to the emergence of so-called innovative means of financing health that in fact only enable these companies to make more money. With big money comes big influence internationally and in governments that help to entrench the power and control of corporate bodies on healthcare delivery. Some 15 years back the British Medical Journal drew attention to the fact that more than half of medical programs in the UK were funded by big pharma.
Most of these corporate bodies are also involved in tax avoidance. Collaborative research by Public Services International and the Centre for Corporate Tax Accountability has shown that these corporations have around $36 trillion in tax havens around the world. A year ago in California, there was a referendum to limit the amount of profit that was hidden to not more than 115 per cent of total costs. The companies involved raised over $130 million for a campaign to oppose this limit against barely $18 million raised by trade unions and civil society organizations in support of it. Unsurprisingly the corporations won with 59 per cent of the votes.

In 2016, following the Ebola outbreak, The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was established. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) pushed for combining such an effort with suspending intellectual property rights on vaccines to ensure their availability to more people. Companies including Johnson and Johnson stood against this and CEPI bent to them resulting in a projected $61 billion profit from vaccines this year. This shows how public money is used to subsidize private interest. Since the 1930s, over $900 billion has been spent by governments on developing pharmaceutical products that are ultimately patented as a source of profit by big pharma companies.

To fight against this Public Services International has been organizing a right to health campaign for the last four years, focusing on these arguments that affiliates in 154 countries have been pushing to their governments as well as organizing civil society support to demand universal public healthcare. Due to this pandemic governments have been forced to take over hospitals, and convert factories to manufacture PPE gear and medical supplies. We must insist that there is no going back, our health is not for sale.

Mark Heywood

Mark Heywood, of Treatment Action Campaign, Section27 and editor at the Daily Maverick,followed on from Baba by taking us back to 1994, the year that South Africa was liberated after 350 years of colonialism and racism under apartheid. Access to life-saving and disease-preventing medicines was a major priority. But the World Tade Organization (WTO) was established shortly after and with it the TRIPS agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which extended an extremely rigid standard of intellectual property around the world, strengthening the hold of big pharma.

As South Africa attempted to amend legislation to make medicines more affordable, the HIV pandemic took hold of the country. Thirty-nine big pharma companies took the government to court as it tried to gain access to medicines and the impacts of TRIPS and the WTO became clear, leaving those medications accessible only to the rich. In the last 20 years, 3 million people have died from AIDS related illnesses in South Africa due to unaffordable medication.

Despite the resources, money and lobbying that these companies command people are powerful when we organize. In 1999, just 10 people started the Treatment Action Campaign to fight for affordable HIV/AIDS medicines. The campaign combined on-the-ground social mobilization of poor and working-class people who needed access to medicines and using the law and constitution to assert that health is a basic human right. Media coverage of the campaign shone a light on big pharma and brought in to question the morality of the industry.
Although South Africa was on the frontline, this was a global struggle, fought with activists in Brazil, India and many other countries resulting in pressure on the WTO to instate the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement that reaffirmed flexibility of TRIPS member states in circumventing patent rights for better access to essential medicines. Particularly important in the context of COVID-19 is the section of this agreement that enables state governments to issue compulsory licenses in the case of public health emergencies that require access to life-saving medicines. Although we need affordable medicines not only in emergency cases, this was an important victory. However, in the mid 2000s we as global activists fell back to our individual fights, allowing pharma companies to regroup and reorganize. In the years following 2006 they once again managed to reassert their power.

Today, while HIV/AIDS drugs and medicines are very affordable in developing countries, people die of preventable illnesses because diagnostics are patented and therefore unaffordable. Mark believes we have found ourselves back in much the same situation as in the late 1990s and it is time to regroup and rebuild our arguments around the critical importance of access to medicines. We must reassert health as a human right, as stated in our constitutions. Governments, therefore, have a duty to guarantee people the fruits of science, medical development, and modern technology and act against profiteering and private interests when they impede the rights of access to healthcare.

With the development of the vaccine and therapies against COVID-19 the question of access, affordability and patents will become the defining issue of the pandemic. We cannot afford to wait until a vaccine is developed to start raising these questions and demanding universal access not only to the vaccine but to the knowledge and understanding behind it. As with HIV/AIDS and cancer drugs and almost all medicines, breakthroughs come from public investments and research that is then taken over for private benefit and profiteering. What we must reassert, once we overcome the immediate COVID-19 crisis, is that healthcare is a basic human right and not for private profit or benefit.

Kajal Bhardwaj

Kajal Bhardwaj continued to elaborate on the impacts of the intellectual property rights regime on health in the context of COVID-19. As was the case during the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we see global attention once again acutely focussed on intellectual property rights that in most countries are now being enforced by international trade rules. Unlike 20 years ago we now have a massive expansion of these regimes in our own national and regional legal systems and we see just how deeply entrenched these intellectual property protections are across all aspects of health products we might need to fight COVID-19 including PPE, diagnosis, medicines and vaccines. During the peak of the outbreak in Italy many 3D printing enthusiasts who printed parts of ventilators were immediately threatened with legal action by companies with patents on the parts.

Currently, there are 145 studies and over 30 potential treatments for COVID-19. Drugs hoping to stop viral entry include Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine, the two Malaria drugs that have had an alarming and controversial push in the US despite lack of evidence of their effectiveness. There is also hope that treatments currently used to treat HIV and Hepatitis C could prevent the virus from replicating within the cell. These are a few examples of what the potential drug targets are. All are existing heavily patented medicines attempting to be repurposed to treat a new illness. Many have expired patents but this has not stopped the companies holding them from applying for new intellectual property protection.

The above image is a snapshot of the patents and applications for Remdesimir and Tocilizumab in China. When multiple patents are filed on the same drugs for new forms and uses this extends the time of exclusivity that companies have over the drug and stops generic companies stepping in to manufacture them at affordable costs.
The tactics pharma typically falls back on to deflect criticism include donations, price cuts, and voluntary licenses. These strategies actually allow pharma to maintain control since they decide who gets the medicines, when, how, and at what cost.

Many believe that in the face of the current emergency, pharma will not behave the way they have over the past 15 years, but we would be fools not to learn from history. Government action or a threat of government action forces good behaviour from companies. We have also seen positive developments from the governments of Germany, Canada, Chile, Columbia and Ecuador who have all put forward measures for issuing compulsory licenses. In Brazil, a proposed bill to warrant automatically granting compulsory licensing on any products or technologies needed during a declared international emergency is being considered. This would remove many of the procedural difficulties of issuing compulsory licenses in the current system. We also know there is a significant generic capacity in many countries. For vaccines, capacity is much more limited but there is at least the possibility to ramp up production of chemical medicines if they are approved.

Thanks to the work of public interest minded academics, a study has been published [link] on the minimum costs of production of a number of treatments currently being trialed. For some, the estimated costs per day is a dollar or less, confirming that these treatments can be made at affordable prices.

Kajal ended by emphasizing the importance of this work in fighting corporate control over health. Histories are carried across generations, countries, and written in blood and stone. Whether it is for this pandemic or indeed the everyday pandemics that we see in the struggle for health.

Kajal Bhardwaj

David Legge  of People’s Health Movement, detailed the role of the WHO in the governance of global health, beginning by underlining the importance of understanding the two sides of the organization. The governing bodies, particularly the World Health Assembly are where the member states come together to govern. The secretariat is the staff, led by the director-general.

Working over the last 30 years under increasing donor control, the program funding of the WHO is now essentially entirely dependent on tied voluntary contributions from wealthy countries, the World Bank, and big philanthropies. The World Health Assembly adopts a notional budget but the work that can then be implemented is completely dependent on what the donors are willing to fund. In addition to restrictive funding conditions, donors – the US in particular – also use the threat of defunding as a means to control the secretariat.
The US has advanced the interests of big pharma through bullying and donor control, including by trying to block the essential medicines list providing advice to countries on the minimal medicines needed in the face of marketing efforts of corporations. Fortunately, this list is now standard. A further example concerns the WHO’s attempt to adopt a binding code on the ethical promotion of pharmaceuticals. The US and a number of wealthy countries used their power in the assembly and capacity to refuse donor funding to prevent any action on the rational use of medicines, effectively leaving the marketing strategies of big pharma unchallenged.
The most relevant case is the use of bullying to prevent the WHO from advising countries on how they pass into law the principles of the TRIPS agreement and how they accept propositions on intellectual property in various free trade agreements. Although the assembly passed resolutions on giving such advice, the secretariat faced severe pushbacks from donors, particularly the US, when implementing it. Proposals for publicly funding the research and development of pharmaceuticals to allow lower costs have been supported in various ways by member states in the assembly but prevented from them being enacted.

Also important to note is the scaremongering carried out in direct cooperation between wealthy countries and big pharma, arguing that any medicines not tightly controlled by intellectual property are likely counterfeit and therefore dangerous. These false allegations encourage states to adopt medicines legislation which in effect helps to police pharma’s severe intellectual property claims.

Fundamentally, the way in which the WHO is controlled is critical to setting the conditions for effective action on COVID-19. Past failure to continue research following the epidemics of the other two coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, will result in a delay in developing a COVID-19 vaccine. Barriers to low and middle-income countries establishing their own manufacturing capacity will be created by the extreme intellectual property laws and associations with trade liberalization. The WHO’s lack of skepticism regarding early Chinese advice on person-to-person transmissibility contributed to delays in implementing initial more-targeted travel restrictions resulting in the rapid spread of the virus and consequent need for harsher restrictions with deeper economic consequences.

The issue of travel and trade restrictions has been fiercely debated between public health and trade officials since 1851. The debate centers around concerns of whether travel restrictions are sufficiently effective in disease control to justify the economic effects, if health protection is being used to justify protectionism, and trade aggression and whether the economic damage from travel and trade restrictions impacts the resilience of the affected countries in coping with epidemics. International health regulations forbid restrictions on trade and travel unless approved by the emergency committee. In the context of ebola in 2014, many wealthy countries were challenged by the WHO for implementing unapproved travel and trade restrictions. The implementation of severe travel restrictions in relation to COVID-19 has had a devastating impact, particularly on those countries least able to draw on their own resources to confront the virus. Earlier sharing of evidence from Wuhan about transmissibility and the implementation of targeted trade and travel restrictions could have limited some of the harm.

Ways Forward

Panellists and participants identified further ways forward:

Learning from the lessons of previous pandemics we need to strengthen work on the ground. A convergence of people’s movements around the world is vital to drive not only progress on COVID-19 and the WHO but fundamental structural and systemic change. This pandemic has shown the interconnectedness of public health with the social-economic system. A human-made crisis created by policies that enforce underlying inequities and place economic interests above health and environmental concerns. We need to organize internationally and consider our collective networks and capabilities as well as the issues we can draw on to affect a new global consensus that covers health issues and puts people over profit.

Fearful individualism and insecurity is driving a new form of fascism in many countries during this crisis. Promoting a sense of solidarity instead will be important. We need to reframe corporate control in terms of the transnational capitalist class, including corporate and political leaders of wealthy, imperialist countries. Considering their control, tied into neoliberalism as a strategy to defend such elites against instabilities of their own making, must be a way to help us build a consolidated global movement.

How can we begin to understand the complex relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and our food systems? How is this crisis impacting communities and transformative strategies for a future founded on international solidarity, agroecology and food sovereignty? Our recent webinar A Recipe for Disaster: Food systems, inequality and COVID-19 addressed these questions and more.

Rob Wallace

Rob Wallace outlined the situation so far and posed a number of questions that served as starting points for the discussion that followed.

More than a quarter of current recorded global cases of COVID-19 are in the US with large outbreaks in Europe and the Middle East. Cases in the Global South are on the rise, in a context of lesser public health capacity, fewer household resources to shelter in place and a greater number of underlying health conditions. In the most impoverished areas of the Global North and South matters including access to food are becoming arguably more pressing than the virus itself.

We are seeing reversals including Britain accepting shipments of masks from Vietnam, Cuba sending doctors to Italy and Senegal turning around tests in four hours, while the same tests take ten days to process in the US. These telltales are underway during what world-systems theorists describe as a major shift in the cycles of capital accumulation which have structured much of the world order for the past 500 years. The US is on the tail end of its cycle of accumulation, cashing out and turning capital back to money for the wealthiest. Rob described the recent US defunding of the World Health Organisation (WHO) not as an exercise in imperial might but a capitulation of the American role of keeping the global system on the same developmental path despite the unsustainable destruction this path represents. With its individualized public healthcare, the US now barely has enough hospital beds and equipment for normal operations let alone the resources necessary to pursue the scale of disease suppression that this outbreak demands.

China, in contrast, having invested in building the infrastructure it needs to turn money into capital, moved to eradicate COVID-19 from Hubei by deploying 40,000 medical staff and conducting comprehensive contact tracing and testing.

Addressing why some countries have escaped the worst of the outbreak, Rob noted successful government responses that both prepare a country during the advanced warning stage and sees the shared commons as still part of the purview of governance. Taiwan and Iceland have been effective by means of aggressive testing, tracing and isolation of cases. Vietnam provides most of its population with comprehensive health care and has doctors and nurses in every community. Unlike in the US where the federal government set off a black market bidding war for ventilators between states, there are few if any reports from Vietnam of price gouging, panic buying or hoarding.

Economically, disease and deficits are interacting. Those countries worst affected will find themselves further in the fiscal hole once the economic fallout begins in earnest. Efforts to fix the outbreak and economy simultaneously see attempts to push the two crises onto the indigenous and poorest workers worldwide. Brazil and the US are already planning to reduce the criminally low wages of immigrant farm workers as a ‘pandemic relief’ for agricultural companies.

These cycles of accumulation – the US cashing out while China ramps up – have impacted the very origins of COVID-19. Over the past 40 years China chose to engage in massive shifts in land use and migration to feed and pay its population. These shifts had a considerable impact on decoupling and then recoupling traditional ecologies into new configurations that have had a profound effect on both the economy and epidemiology. Post-economic liberalization in China has seen the rise of multiple strains of new influenza including H5N1, H6N1, H7N9, H9N2 as well as SARS1 and now African Swine Fever which killed half of China’s hog last year. The genetics of the virus SARS2 show it to be a recombinant of a bat coronavirus and a pangolin strain that subsequently attuned to the human immune system either before or during the Wuhan outbreak.

Clearly agriculture had a role to play in this process, despite China moving towards an official position that it did not. Somehow the virus got from the many coronaviruses circulating among a variety of bat species in central China into Wuhan. How do you explain a move from bats to pangolins through perhaps another intermediary species such as hog into humans without bringing up agriculture or logging or mining? In all likelihood, an expanding regional circuit of production maneuvered both the increasingly formalized wild food sector and industrial livestock production further into China’s hinterlands where both sectors increasingly encountered bat reservoirs. These peri-urban loops are growing in the extent of population and can increase the interface and spillover between wild non-human populations in newly urbanized rural areas. These new geographies also reduce the environmental complexity within forests that help to disrupt the transmission of deadly viruses.

This regional circuit of production of COVIDs likely origins – forest to peri-urban to city – is reproduced around the world, offering a broader framework by which to consider outbreaks. SARS1 and SARS2, Ebola, Zika, Yellow Fever, African Swine Fever, Avian Swine Influenza, Nipah virus and Q fever among others all originated or reemerged somewhere along such expanding circuits of production, whether in the forest or the new peri-urban continuum or in factory farms and processing plants near or in cities. Many such new ecologies are driven by imperial or neoliberal imposition. Infectious diseases are not merely the matters of the virus itself but also the context in which they emerge. Coronaviruses are only one of many pathogens developing in such an agro-economic context.

We must protect the forest complexity that keeps deadly pathogens from infecting livestock and human hosts that then enter the world’s travel network. We need to reintroduce livestock and crop diversities and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in deadliness. We must allow our food animals to reproduce on farms, restarting the natural selection that allows immunities evolution to track pathogens in real-time. These are many of the very practices that the indigenous and smallholders of the world engage in as a matter of course in their everyday cultivation. Can we scale these out specific to the needs of people around the world and as a consequence make a world in which there are many worlds?

Arie Kurniawaty

Arie Kurniawaty of the Indonesian feminist organization Solidaritas Perempuan (SP), working with women in grassroots communities across the urban-rural spectrum described how, in Indonesia, the population is particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 due to impoverished living conditions, inaccessible health services and the high number of people with tuberculosis and diabetes. Due to a lack of medical personnel that can provide sexual and reproductive health services since the pandemic, there are also reported cases of pregnant women feeling anxious and having to postpone their routine checks. Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to natural and ecological disasters including floods and volcanic eruptions. Following the 2018 earthquakes, tsunami and liquefaction in Sulawesi, survivors are still living in temporary shelters with poor water and sanitation facilities. Despite being very rich in agriculture and fishing resources, Indonesian food producers – particularly small scale and traditional – are constantly threatened by corporate power, land grabbing and extractive industries. Even amid the pandemic these damaging infrastructure projects continue and workers do not have enough protection. Solidaritas Perempuan is documenting the impacts of COVID-19 as well as the government policies to address the crisis that are proving biased towards the middle class and do not take into consideration the diversity of the population. Physical distancing and large scale restrictions recently implemented in some big cities have already resulted in millions of people losing their jobs. Traditional markets have no support from the government to implement safety protocols and are subsequently labeled as harmful and unhygienic. Women make up most of these market sellers and buyers. In coastal villages, fish markets have been closed so women are struggling to sell their fish and shells. In turn this economic difficulty has created an increase in domestic violence.

At the same time, people are showing solidarity and building collective action including several initiatives focusing on connecting the needs of urban and rural people. Some villages have rebuilt their food barns in anticipation of a food crisis, while others are monitoring local distribution of government aid packages to combat corruption. Unfortunately, the government has reallocated budget from village empowerment and education to the military and the country is close to martial law since the government believes people will not follow regulations due to their need to sustain their livelihoods.

Moayyad Bsharat

Moayyad Bsharat of Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), began by outlining the geopolitical situation. According to the Oslo agreement, the West Bank is divided into areas A, B and C. Area C is under total Israeli administrative and security control and forms more than 63 per cent of the entire West Bank with 95 per cent of productive agricultural land for Palestinian food production and more than 300,000 people living there in marginalized conditions. Despite international law, Israel is failing to take responsibility for the care and health of the people under their occupation. Many vulnerable Palestinians are therefore at increased risk from COVID-19, also considering the lack of accessible hospitals and Israel’s refusal to contain the growing number of infections within Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Since 2007, the Gaza strip has been under an Israeli blockade. The population are trapped in terrible conditions with weakening health and increased vulnerability to infection. In addition, the Palestinian Authority’s neoliberal policies of privatization have left small scale farmers and impoverished families unable to cover their primary healthcare.

Since the outbreak, UAWC has been campaigning for farmers and marginalized families who have a lack of healthcare support from Palestinian authorities as well as due to Israeli restrictions and occupation. In a bid to assist farmers in returning to their land to cultivate, UAWC is distributing 350,000 vegetable seedlings in support of nourishing food production that does not depend on the commercial and chemical processes of agribusiness. The organization also supplies herding communities in marginalized areas with hygiene kits to deal with COVID-19.

Moayyad, like Rob, cited the pandemic as the result of capitalism and a basic disregard for humanity and the environment as well as the small scale farmers who are producing the healthy and nourishing food needed during this crisis.

Paula Gioia

Paula Gioia, a peasant farmer and beekeeper in Germany and a member of the Coordination Committee of the European Coordination Via Campesina, provided a perspective on the situation in Europe.

Agriculture in Europe has been structured over the past decades on an industrialized model that feeds corporations, labor exploitation, human rights violations, loss of diversity and animal diseases. However, 95 per cent of farms in Europe are small or mid-scale feeding local populations with fresh and healthy food beyond the long supply chains of supermarkets. In times of the pandemic, peasant agriculture continues to be threatened by globalization and international markets including increased difficulty in accessing public peasant markets. In Spain, Italy and France the closure of the food service industry, limitation of direct sales and the increase in the concentration of food trade in large supermarkets represents huge economic losses for small scale farmers. This comes during Easter, a time of year when many small scale meat producers make most of their annual income. The good news is that direct sales through consumer cooperatives, shopping groups, community-supported agriculture and the open-air markets still allowed is proving to be a resilient strategy.

Another consideration is the aging of European farmers. With an average age of 65, the core of the sector is very vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and faces extra difficulties regarding delivering their produce and accessing fields. Field access is also proving difficult in the context of lockdown policies designed for urban areas. In a rural context housing and farms are not always in the same place so many cannot access their place of work. Considering the waged work structure of Western European agriculture, many seasonal migrants already forced to accept poor working standards are now facing dangerous health and safety conditions as well as reduced labor rights due to longer working hours. These are just a few of the developments impacting not only the existence of small scale farmers but also our entire populations right to food and nutrition.

Sai Sam Kham

Sai Sam Kham of Metta Foundation in Myanmar,saw many parallels in Myanmar. In the context of likely inaccurate numbers of infected due to limited testing capacity, there has been a panic reaction stemming from a deep-rooted and justified mistrust in the government and its healthcare capacity. As mentioned by other panellists, the social distancing measures and lockdown policies in place are a difficult idea for many people, not only culturally but in the context of wage laborers and much of the rural population now unable to make a living. There is a rise of xenophobia as the large numbers of migrant workers returning from Thailand and China are vilified. The government quarantine plan addresses people returning by air but not via border areas. By the end of March some 75,000 people returned from the Thai-Myanmar border with no capacity for accommodation in quarantine facilities. After a simple temperature check they were sent home and advised to self-isolate but there is no monitoring or regulatory system in place. Despite imposing class blind interventions, the government is also attempting to provide food for those in need. However, there is much public criticism over the organization of this aid.

The de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, is using an official Facebook account to communicate with the public daily, a welcome communications effort, however, more strategic interventions are needed. Hospitals have insufficient PPE gear and medical supplies while much of the population have no access to healthcare. Suu Kyi recently made a plea to the public to be more compassionate to the victims and each other while her government has banned internet access in the conflict-ridden western part of Rakhine and Chin states. People are in need of access to information to fight the pandemic as well as to survive the conflict. Humanitarian aid in many areas is difficult to access and in March alone, more than 100 civilians were killed by indiscriminate air raids and mortar shelling. Over 800,000 vulnerable people are displaced in Rakhine, Kachin, Chin, Shan and Kayin states across the country as well as the one million Rohingya people in the refugee camps of Bangladesh.

Civil society organizations in Myanmar and the general public are trying to do as much as they can. Organizations demand immediate cessation of the conflict while the public are mobilizing to the same effect. China is providing much appreciated medical teams and support, however, their overt strategic economic and political interest in Myanmar is cause for concern of dependency. Sai Sam concluded that conflict, land grabs, dispossession and migration, are all linked to and very important to consider while dealing with this pandemic.

Further discussion

Small scale farmers and fishers are heavily involved in acting as agents of historical change not only locally but globally. We may be in a better position now to strike forward against agribusiness and reestablish the story of food in such a way that it is not an industrial economy but rather a part of the natural economy, involving the sun, the soil, the life cycles of animals and the health and welfare of communities. It is fundamental to put small scale farmers and fishers in a position to teach us how to heal this metabolic rift that is dividing ecologies and economies and subsequently driving the worst emergence of pathogens.

This clearly also extends to politics on the national and global stage. A divide between the urban and rural must be repaired in a way that connects the welfare of everyone.

The pandemic has exposed the obvious, that our global health and welfare is connected and the divide between the Global North and South must be addressed. Unequal ecological exchanges in which the North entirely extracts the resources and labor from the South must end. Practices supplied by centers of capital including New York, Hong Kong and London have pushed the development of deforestation that has led to the spillover of these new pathogens.

Panellists and participants identified several ways forward:

The pandemic could be a turning point to show that emerging grassroots initiatives are providing a solution that we already have, our sovereignty. A solution in terms of solidarity, in that knowledge and practices of the people work and therefore agribusiness is unnecessary. If governments carry on with a business as usual approach nothing will change. We need a consolidated movement among the people on the ground to express our demands.

Agroecology is a solution for agribusiness and this should be an opportunity to let people, not only in Palestinian territories but around the world, return to their land to cultivate and prove this. Considering that the neoliberal policies of governments are the main cause of vulnerable communities, they must take responsibility to support small scale farmers and impoverished families. As the slogan of Vía Campesina says we must globalize the struggle. This is a global fight against capitalism and neoliberal policies and a chance for international solidarity to make humanity not profit our priority.

Immediate next steps must be measures from policymakers to guarantee the mobility of small scale food producers to their fields, meadows, waters and markets. In terms of agriculture, Via Campesina demands that all European countries advance the common agricultural policy subsidy payments for 2020 and that small scale food producers who face losses now have tax reductions to be able to guarantee the upcoming sowing and harvest season. The health and safety of these producers and land workers must be guaranteed in the fields as well as at local markets. Longer-term public policies to support new entrants into European agriculture and ensure a generational renewal are also important.

We must finally step down from a model in which large scale animal production, already shown to be far more vulnerable to infections, contributes to climate change and exploiting labor. This is an opportunity for measures to develop local, healthy and sustainable food production in the hands of small scale producers at fair prices.

Concluding the webinar, Rob stressed that what climate change and this pandemic indicate is that we are at a profound historical moment. Our troubled path is largely controlled by sociopaths who believe we can engage in capitalist accumulation as if people are things and can be thrown away as products and there is an infinite supply of resources to burn through without consequence. Somehow we need to break this command of the planet – a huge generational project that will require a total reversal of the present power dynamics. This will extend from immediate tactics under the constraints of how we are operating now to understanding that agribusiness is opposed to public health as a matter of principle and externalizes its costs of production onto animals, crops, local environments, labor and wildlife, all in the name of profit. This must be broken in order for agroecology and regenerative agriculture to reconfigure ecologies back in a way that inputs and outputs speak to each other. If we continue to offload the worst of the damage onto the planet and people we will reach a point where the system will collapse under its own weight, bringing everybody down with it. Can we cycle out of this mode of production to a place where we return to the planet that we walk on? If we alienate the means by which we grow food and produce, we destroy the planet and people on which we depend in order to persist as a species. A profound shift in the very nature of our relationships with each other and the planet is required to be able to address climate change as well as the coming pandemics.

It was late July, off the coast of Libya during a late-night fishing session that they heard the desperate cries. Once he saw more clearly, Captain Carlo Giarratano realised quickly that the small dinghy was gaining water, and the 50 refugees aboard, with no fuel or food, had only a few hours until the precarious craft lost all of its air. ‘No human being – sailor or not – would have turned away.’ Reflecting on the situation Carlo understood that, ‘If you decide to cross the sea in those conditions, then you’re willing to die. It means that what you’re leaving behind is even worse, hell.’¹

The Italian fishers gave the stranded passengers what little food and water they had aboard and set to work coordinating the rescue of their boat, which was eventually brought to port in Sicily. This gesture of humanity put Carlo at risk of a fine of up to €50,000, or even jail time, because of then Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini’s ban on bringing refugees to shore without permission.² But in his words, ‘No seaman would ever return to port without the certainty of having saved those lives. If I had ignored those cries for help, I wouldn’t have had the courage to face the sea again.’³ This third generation fisher lives by the law of the sea: the life of another person at sea has the same value as your own.

Not all fishing boats operate by these principles however. According to investigative reporting by the Guardian, ‘exploitation of foreign labour is an open secret in the Irish seafood sector’ and, ‘illegal “black” overfishing and “modern slavery” were putting the future of the industry at risk.’⁴ Meanwhile the Migrant Rights Centre, Ireland found, ‘The high-risk environment is linked to exploitation: long hours and exhaustion affect a worker’s ability to react and respond to dangerous situations. The experience of verbal abuse and racism of fishers at the hands of some skippers is indicative of an unequal value for the safety and life of migrant fishers.’⁵

How do we make sense of the diverse realities that exist at the intersection of migration and fisheries in Europe? This brief article is an initial attempt to understand the different ways that people who migrate interact with the European fisheries sector, and to contextualise this question by providing some background about the structural changes in the European fisheries sector which may shape who migrates, who fishes and under what conditions? While this short exploration is in no way able to provide definitive answers to all of these questions, the hope is to nonetheless shed some light on the issues and political opportunities at the intersection of migration and fisheries in Europe, as a first step for future research and organising.⁶

Changing migration flows reflect shifts in opportunities, the push of poverty and the drive towards something better for one’s family and loved ones. These changes have been conditioned by European fisheries and border policy, which has opened up western African fishing grounds for overfishing by European trawlers and at the same time, militarised ocean space by externalising border control.

By some accounts, as early as the 1970s irregular immigration from Africa to Europe took place on large fishing trawlers. Those who could pay €2500-3000 would make deals with the trawler owners to take them to Spain at the end of the fishing season, and others would seek the aid of the workers on the trawlers for a lesser fee (€500-1000) to make the passage as a stowaway.⁷ Others would take overland routes through the desert to Spanish protectorates Ceuta and Melilla. However migration flows have shifted over the years in response to increased border controls, and the externalisation and militarisation of EU borders led by Frontex, the EU border control and coast guard agency which was established in 2004. Further, entry into Europe via Ceuta or Melilla declined after the highly publicised 2005 brutality against migrants attempting to cross the border, and the increase of the border fence height from 3 to 6 meters. So new opportunities were identified further and further south along the West African coastline from which point boats could take people on the move across the Atlantic to the Canary Islands. The Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou became a transit hub, until strengthened border controls pushed efforts further south to Saint Louis in Senegal, Mbour, Joal, Casamance and eventually Guinea-Bissau.⁸ According to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, some 31,678 people were stopped as they landed on the shores of the Canary Islands in 2006 alone.

From 2006 onwards, coordinated by Frontex, the EU effectively began to subcontract its border security tasks to West African countries, via operations like Hera I, II, and III, in hopes of catching people in the first steps of their migration journey. ‘Through this cooperation, European member states such as Portugal, Italy and Spain supplied 2 helicopters, 2 ships and around 10 patrol boats to Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia and Cape Verde.⁹ As controls were ramped up, the Atlantic sea route to Spain dwindled in importance and in 2012 only 173 new arrivals were arrested. Of course this number excludes, the many hundreds, if not thousands who did not survive the journey.¹⁰ After this point, however, Mediterranean sea routes saw renewed importance, and once more diversified and expanded rapidly.¹¹

Border security is not the only thing that the EU has externalised. A collapse of fish stocks due to overfishing by European vessels has also been exported to West African coastlines. European fisheries agreements have given highly industrialised European fishing boats access to foreign waters, notably those of West African countries, thus putting extreme pressure on local fishers in those places. This has made it impossible for many small-scale fishers to compete, as trawlers overfish and fish stocks decline. The collapse of West African fisheries is a key ‘push’ factor for migration. Many who embark on treacherous journeys across the Atlantic or the Mediterranean in search of work and opportunities to support their families do not make it.

For those who do make it, upon arrival they face institutional racism, xenophobia and the threat of deportation limiting their ability to make a decent life. Industrial fishing is one of the sectors in Europe that increasingly employs migrant labour. This tragically ironic circuit, in which European trawlers generate the conditions that force people to migrate and benefit from their precarious position upon arrival by hiring them in exploitative labour arrangements, is one of the central processes shaping the way migration intersects with fisheries in Europe today. One fisher describes how he was brought to tears when he had to return to Senegalese waters on an industrial fishing boat, unable to set foot on land to visit his family, and continuing the pillage of his native coastal fishery which caused him to migrate in the first place.¹⁴

Of course, not all West African fishers migrate, people from a range of different backgrounds migrate to Europe, and not all non-local people who end up working in the European fisheries sector are former fishers. We pay special attention to the case of Senegalese migration to explore the multiple ways that people are pushed and pulled into this circuit and how strategies of social reproduction, including food provisioning, are being reshaped in the process.

When asked what it feels like to arrive in Europe as a Black African woman, Nicole Ngongala of Asociación Karibu responded: ‘It’s raining, you have an umbrella in your hand, but you are getting wet.’²⁶ The promise of opportunity and the ability to find work and send some support home to family who stayed behind is the umbrella that inspires thousands to risk their lives to make the journey in search of a little more shelter and protection in tumultuous times. However upon arrival, many find that the umbrella they are able to find is in fact riddled with holes by racism and exploitation, providing little protection at all.

Many European nationals find the protection against risk and precarity offered by the fisheries sector insufficient. Increased pressure and uncertainty among fishers, compounded by high levels of risks and accidents at sea, mean that European youth are choosing not to continue fishing in the family tradition. Increased regulatory and financial barriers impede access to boats and necessary qualifications, making entry into fishing challenging. Strictly regulated or limited fishing periods drive fishers to stay out longer hours or in bad weather in order to catch enough to earn a living.²⁷ European nationals generally have more educational and professional opportunities than their parents, thus causing, ‘recruitment through a father-to-son pathway to become less common.’²⁸ At the same time,

As one young Belgian apprentice fisher explains, ‘It’s unpredictable how much you can earn sometimes. That’s why a lot of people are uncertain if they really want to do it. And also because it’s really hard work. And a lot of people have kids and stuff, and they don’t want to leave them behind.’³⁰ Indeed, ‘it is fishers who are paying the price for the growing economic and environmental pressures in today’s fishing industry. Over the past three decades liberalization, unfair competition and inadequate regulation have led to a squeeze on the wages and working conditions of fishers.’³¹

Indeed the number of fishers in Europe has steadily declined in recent decades. Data varies but,

In France recruitment is most difficult on medium and larger vessels.³³ Declining fish stocks combined with rising consumer demand for fish products especially incentivises industrial trawlers to cut costs on wages in order to compensate for decreases in catch and maximise profits.

On larger vessels that stay out at sea for days on end fishing distant waters, boat owners hire workers as employees rather than as independent contractors. While on many smaller boats, fishers are paid an equivalent to a portion of the catch. According to Seafarers’ Rights International it is this large-scale part of the industry that is primarily turning to non-local labour.³⁵ ‘Migrants – including those from non-EU countries – are often viewed as the solution to difficulties in recruiting from the local population who sometimes regard fishing or fish processing jobs as low wage work with unpleasant working conditions.’³⁶

Fishing has always been a dangerous profession.

However, fishers not working in their country of origin face even higher levels of risk and injury. ‘For example, 75 per cent of deaths on UK fishing vessels in 2008 were migrant fishers from either Eastern Europe or the Philippines. The Filipino death rate of 350 per 100,000 was more than three times the UK death rate of 102 per 100,000.’³⁸

Of course, those who end up working in the Western European fisheries sector face very diverse circumstances and challenges. Many non-local fishers are highly sought after for their excellent skills at sea. Some migrant fishers, who work for companies that are sensitive to migration issues, can achieve comfortable working and living conditions, even if fishing is still hard and dangerous work. But unfortunately, many end up in fishing jobs that take advantage of their immigration status, particularly when they are in an irregular administrative situation. A variety of exploitative labour arrangements and mechanisms enable boat owners to pass losses on to workers.

Human trafficking and near or actual slavery conditions are a reality today in Western European fisheries. According to an investigation by the Guardian, ‘some boat owners and crewing agencies are smuggling African and Filipino workers into Ireland through entry points at London Heathrow and Belfast airports, and then arranging for them to cross from Northern Ireland into the Republic by road, bypassing Irish immigration controls.’ Fishers interviewed by the Guardian indicate that crewing agents set up deals in advance in the fisher’s country of origin, lending money for the passage and charging for the visa, which ultimately doesn’t exist. Though not explicitly told they would end up working without papers when promised by recruiters that a job awaited them in Europe, upon arrival fishers are shouldered with debt to hiring agents and, ‘[m]any workers describe subsequently living in fear of deportation and being told to stay on their boats in port because the owners would be fined if they were spotted and stopped by the authorities.’⁴⁰

The International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), which has spearheaded the campaign for regulatory change in Ireland⁴¹, has also denounced similar practices in Galicia, Spain.⁴² Our fieldwork found that in Brittany, one boat owner is well known for confiscating the papers of migrant workers, in order to put pressure on them to accept low salaries. These situations trap non-local fishers in exploitative work arrangements, where they suffer from psychological pressure, lack of sleep, dangerous work conditions and limited time on land, all of which limit the extent to which they are able to organise collectively or even make contacts that could help them to escape or push for better working conditions.

People migrating within the EU may also face unjust and irregular employment conditions. The system of posted workers makes it possible for European companies to hire workers without following all the regulations of the country in which they work. Typically workers are subject to the labour law of the country where their work is carried out. However, in the EU there are a few exceptions:

This essentially allows a worker employed in one EU member state to be posted to work temporarily in a different member state. This means that the worker is subject to the employment conditions of the ‘sending’ country, where they remain formally employed. In 2017, a total of 2.8 million posted worker agreements were issued. Workers in agriculture, hunting and fishing only make up some 0.8% of total posted workers, but this nonetheless represents some 10,972 workers in that year alone. Notably, 6,911 (63% of posted workers in agriculture, hunting and fisheries) came from Poland.⁴⁴ And, in the case of French fisheries, our field work indicates that such workers are hired by industrial boats in order to cut costs and pay wages lower than French fishers expect. In this case, we also found some Spanish boat owners who had bought old French trawlers to access French fishing quotas, and who rely on lower wages of posted workers to recoup the cost of the investment. Taken together these practices reveal the ways that some boat owners leverage the mobility of capital and labour within the EU to increase profits. The European Commission has described this as ‘social dumping,’ a situation ‘where foreign service providers can undercut local service providers because their labour standards are lower.’⁴⁵

Although reliable data for legally employed migrant labour in fisheries across EU members states doesn’t exist, a 2016 European Commission study attempts to compile existing data sources. Authors claim that:

Much of this labour comes from workers moving between EU countries, as is the case for 86.1% of non-local workers in France, for example. However, countries like Spain and Portugal rely much more heavily on non-local workers coming from outside of the EU, as the table below demonstrates.

In many cases the diversity within the European fishing fleet is an opportunity for cultural exchange on board and generational renewal in a sector which many local young people have preferred not to work in. However, our fieldwork suggests that on some boats racialised workers, despite having work permits, face ongoing racism and discrimination at sea, which can make already tough working conditions unbearable. Senegalese fishers working on big trawlers in Brittany explained they face harassment at sea because of the racism of some white crew members. This can lead to depression or to tensions among the crew. Some of those interviewed explained that this can be a motive for leaving a boat or an enterprise, to find a place where they feel more accepted, even though finding another job may be very difficult.

For many people who migrate to Europe, continuing to fish may not be an option. One striking example of this trajectory is the case of Barcelona’s street vendors, known as ‘Manteros’. Given the impact of European fisheries policy on Senegalese coastal areas, an important portion of the people engaged in street vending to make a living – selling clothes, bags, shoes, etc. in the touristic parts and next to the recently gentrified Port Vell of Barcelona– are former Senegalese fisher people. However, they are often criminalised both by the police and sometimes by local people for selling informally on the street. The Barcelona Municipality has been trying to improve the situation of street vendors and to better welcome refugees, but so far there has not been any real solution to the issue.

However, as a way of combatting the precariousness and social stigma that they face in Barcelona, the primarily Senegalese community of street vendors formed a cooperative in 2015 called the ‘Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes,’ commonly known as the ‘Sindicato de Manteros’ (Union of Manteros). A year later they created their own brand, ‘Top Manta’ and began to sell their own t-shirts and sweat-shirts under the brand of the cooperative in an old shop in the Raval neighborhood. After the establishment of the cooperative, many social movements took notice of the struggle and began looking for ways to collaborate. The Sindicato de Manteros has thus participated in many assemblies, events, and cooking workshops in order to explain their stories and their struggle, opening the way for further collaborations with other collectives and movements. In one such encounter former fishers and members of the collective participated in the ‘Food Sovereignty and Small Scale Fisheries encounter’ organised in Barcelona in June 2019. This was an important opportunity for people from different food sovereignty movements to understand their struggle, and helped to make their case more visible and establish bridges of solidarity. In the context of the Coronavirus crisis, the collective has organised the collection of food and donations to distribute among families in need. Still, they continue to face harassment from police threatening to fine them up to €60,000 for ensuring the basic food security of over 300 of the city’s most vulnerable families.⁴⁷

Besides those who leave or enter formal employment in fisheries, many refugees use recreational fishing as a way to meet part of their household/community protein needs. In France, for example, recreational fishing is legal and important for many families who suffer from racist immigration policies, as well as social and economic exclusion. In Douarnenez, in Brittany, recreational fishing is a widely used community subsistence activity among immigrant populations from nearby cities. The, so-called ‘pier of shame’ attracts locals, Africans, Asians and Roma people en masse to fish mackerel or squid. Especially in summer and autumn when these fish are in season, the dock is shoulder to shoulder, filled with hundreds of people fishing. Fishing gear ranges from professional poles to a simple hook and line thrown by hand. Recently, conflicts between these ‘recreational fishers’ and the professional fishers working in Douarnenez have arisen, and the municipality wants to prohibit all recreational access to avoid conflicts. This criminalisation of recreational fishing would significantly impact the families who count on it for subsistence. Fishing on this pier is a lively social activity, seen as a way for communities to meet and support each other. If this prohibition goes through, the intercultural value of this dock in Douarnenez would be lost. This type of prohibition could also fuel divisions and scapegoating of immigrants for supposedly triggering the closure of the pier. Realising this, local people organised a movement to defend ‘the right to fish for everyone,’ demanding universal access to the pier.
Artisanal fishers on the French Atlantic coast are also working to create access to fishing for migrant youth with a focus on decent working conditions, and support for acquiring necessary training certificates. In Saint Jean de Luz, in the French Basque Country, one ex-fisherwoman involved in small-scale fisher movements is now retired and involved in organisations supporting refugees. When one young man showed interest in the fisheries sector, she decided to ask her former colleagues to take him on board so that he could discover what fisheries are about. In this French fisher’s words, ‘When he told us about his story and the way he had to cross the Mediterranean Sea while seeing his friends dying, we realized how lucky we were. It is clear that we should help these people to get saved at sea and have proper living conditions afterwards.’ This young man is now studying in the fisheries school of Ciboure, in order to go to sea as soon as possible, which would provide him a decent livelihood.

As explained in the introduction, Sicilian fisher people are currently helping refugees in the Mediterranean Sea. But these fishers and the NGOs organising rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea are constantly criminalised by the repressive arm of the European Union, often referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’. The EU funds and trains Libyan Coastal Guards or local militias to prevent refugees from entering European territory by returning them to Libya. ‘Today solidarity with migrants is a crime. Save people from drowning in cold waters and you are a human trafficker.’⁴⁸

Because of this political climate and their precarious living conditions, refugees often struggle to organise politically and many are trapped in the paternalism of some charity organisations. However, 2019 saw the creation of the collective ‘Les Gilets Noirs’ (‘Black vests’, in reference to the yellow vests, another French social movement). This collective has organised massive actions in Paris to defend the rights of refugees seeking asylum, with the slogan ‘rights and papers for all’.

In parallel, fishers often struggle to organise collectively, as we can see from the declining membership in small-scale and artisanal fishers’ organisations. Generational renewal and recruitment into the sector is a key issue. Thus the refugee crisis and the support that fishers want to give to people who migrate could be an opportunity for fishers and refugees to learn from each other and strengthen political mobilisation in each area—something that will be increasingly necessary to counter policies that undermine small-scale fishing and criminalise refugees.

As the space for saving people at sea is currently shrinking because of a broad far right discourse in the European Union, the role of fishers in these moments is crucial. And despite widespread measures to criminalise rescue and solidarity efforts, collective autonomous action is emerging and winning nonetheless. ‘When the migrants were safely aboard the coastguard ship, they all turned to us in a gesture of gratitude, hands on their hearts. That’s the image I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, which will allow me to face the sea every day without regret.’⁴⁹

In recent decades the situation for Turkish small-scale fishers (SSFs) has become critical, threatening their economic and physical survival. Overfishing and illegal fishing have led to the collapse of important fish stocks. Pollution due to high levels of urbanisation and industrialisation, and insufficient environmental controls has contributed to falling fish stocks and catastrophic biodiversity loss, especially in the Marmara Sea. Finally, the marketing structure of fish and seafood has trapped many SSFs and their co-operatives in a cycle of accumulating debt. Current fish and seafood markets are based on intermediaries and commissioners (as well as bigger fish businesses concentrated in few hands) which utilise their market power to pressure SSFs to accept too-low prices, leading to a spiral of indebtedness. As a result of these pressures, small-scale fisheries became more and more marginalised. Younger generations lost interest in fishing and civil society was largely ignorant about fishers’ identity and culture.

In the face of these difficult conditions, SSF are finding their voice and highlighting the role of fisheries in broader food system change. The Association of Istanbul Fishing Cooperatives has become key fisher voice in global conversations about food sovereignty and agroecology. They participate in FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and IPC (International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty) meetings with other organizations fighting for food sovereignty such as La Via Campesina, and play an important role representing regional and global fisher movements in the international arena. These meetings and gatherings have facilitated a process of collective learning among a range of Small-Scale Fisher (SSF) movements, as well as other agroecology and food sovereignty movements composed of peasants, pastoralists, beekeepers, and global and regional climate justice movements. How did these Turkish fishers come to play such a central role in giving agroecology and food sovereignty meaning in the context of fisheries?¹

Small-scale fishing cooperatives in many regions are important social and political actors in strengthening localized food systems, sustainability of fish stocks, and just food regimes. The Association of Istanbul Fishing Cooperatives (henceforth “Istanbul Birlik”²) is one of these actors. It represents 34 fisheries cooperatives with about 2,500 members mostly consisting of small-scale fishers around the Istanbul region in Turkey. It was founded in 1980, and the fishing areas of its members are mostly on the coastlines of the Marmara Sea or the (South Western) Black Sea.³

Istanbul Birlik also forms part of SÜR-KOOP, which is the national central association of fishing cooperatives in Turkey. Founded in 2004 SÜR-KOOP is made up of 15 regional members. Istanbul Birlik, which has about 243 cooperative members representing approximately 19,000 individual fisher members⁴, is a very active regional member. SÜR-KOOP, however, consists of both industrial and small-scale fishers. Therefore, the regional associations have distinctive characteristics, and their own positions and activities.

Historically, industrial fishers and industrial fisher cooperatives have been economically and politically influential actors, active in meetings with policy-makers, especially with the General Directorate of Fisheries and Aquaculture under the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. However, small-scale fishers were previously less represented in these spaces and processes. The active participation and organisation of small-scale fisher cooperatives has made them stronger and more visible especially since 2012, ‘when around 200 Istanbul Birlik fishers attended the fishery notification meeting in Ankara to the surprise of industrial fishers and policy-makers. […] This was the first time that such a meeting was attended by any small-scale fisher organisation.´⁵

In Turkey, the vessels of small-scale fishers are usually between 5 and 12 meters long. Most are wooden boats using gillnets and/or longlines. Small-scale fishing boats form 90% of the country’s fishing fleet, but their total catch is usually less than 10% of the total yield of the fishing sector.⁶ Thus, there is a significant discrepancy between the catch obtained by industrial fishers, and that caught by small-scale fishers. This discrepancy also takes the form of a dramatic difference in the environmental impact and pressure on fish populations created by the two kinds of fisheries.

Istanbul Birlik was established in 1980, but it has been especially active in the last decade. In this time Birlik focused on building its members’ capacity, participating in different social and political circles, and building alliances with other social actors like universities, NGOs, municipalities and journalists to confront the situation they have been facing as a SSF community. The election of a new board and a new head of Istanbul Birlik in 2011 was a key step in this process. The new leadership took a more active approach, focused on community-building, active participation, defining structural and political goals, and strengthening communication between fisher people from different cooperatives; with policy-makers at different administrative levels; and with other social actors such as researchers, NGOs, journalists, and municipalities.

In this period, conflicts between small-scale and industrial fishers have also become more visible, especially in debates over the law that stipulates the legal distance from the coast where purse seiners and trawlers are allowed to fish. On November 3^rd, 2011, purse seiners and trawlers organised a protest in the Bosphorus Strait, with their vessels, claiming that they should be allowed to fish closer to the coastline. Meanwhile, small-scale fishers and NGOs like Greenpeace and Slow Food Istanbul branch (Fikir Sahibi Damaklar) openly denounced trawlers fishing illegally in the Bosphorus, as well as the sale of illegally caught juvenile fish.⁷ Industrial fishing actors and other powerful intermediaries colluded closely in well-organised networks which, during this time, used increasingly violent and illegal tactics in defense of their interests. Intimidation and coercion were directed against outspoken groups of environmental defenders which included SSF communities, ecologists, consumer groups, and NGOs. These intimidation tactics even included an attack on the head of a cooperative in Istanbul.⁸

In such an environment, the cooperation of Istanbul Birlik with a range of civil society actors – including NGOs such as Greenpeace and Slow Food; consumer groups; restaurant chefs; journalists; and academics from different fields including biology, fisheries economics, fisheries and aquaculture engineering and the social sciences – became an important inflection point for their visibility, helping to strengthen their voice in different political and social spaces. Istanbul Birlik co-organised campaigns with other organisations which included: (i) a campaign against illegal fishing in order to prevent the catching and selling of juvenile fish with the slogan, promoted by Greenpeace, “How many centimetres is yours?”⁹, and (ii) a 2011-2015 campaign¹⁰ to protect the traditionally and culturally significant blue fish species of the Bosphorus called “lüfer” with the slogan “Lüfer protection team”.¹¹

Internally, Istanbul Birlik also organised ongoing capacity-building activities among its members. Each year they host 2-3 multi-day workshops, which are attended by the boards of member cooperatives, who attend in order to then share information with their own cooperative members. These workshops have aimed at: improving the management structure of cooperatives by sharing the principles, legal structures and responsibilities of cooperatives; promoting sustainable fisheries; and discussing how to improve the situation of their members. Improvements are understood both in terms of the infrastructure and facilities provided to fisher members, but also more holistically through protecting the SSF identity. These workshops have facilitated a fisher-to-fisher learning system, strengthened collaboration among members of Istanbul Birlik, and developed their internal organisational structures. Meanwhile, they also allowed cooperatives and their members to communicate and collaborate more closely with researchers and university professors. Fishers were able to get feedback and support from academics by exchanging ideas on a range of topics including legal structures, cooperativism, the relation of fisheries and aquaculture, marine plastics, and Blue Growth, among others.

Despite the previous political and economic dominance of industrial fishers, Istanbul Birlik has succeeded in making small fishers ever more visible in the last decade. During this period, they achieved recognition as important actors in this sector, and have slowly been included in discussions about the amendments of national fisheries legislation, which is renewed every 4 years, with the last one in effect until 31^st of August, 2020.

While Istanbul Birlik has been strengthening its collaborations in Turkey, it has also entered existing international networks, and built new relationships and collaborations. In particular, it has worked with other local, regional and global actors ranging from social scientists and scholar activists to the peasant movement La Via Campesina and other SSF movements striving for agroecology and food sovereignty. This international activism and network-building has helped to raise awareness of fisheries issues within the broader international movements for food sovereignty and agroecology, strengthened the political voice of SSFs, and given rise to new opportunities for collaborations and joint work.

After participating in the ICAS-Etxalde conference and an associated ocean grabbing workshop in Vitoria/Gasteiz in the Basque Country in April 2017, Istanbul Birlik hosted a workshop of SSF organisations from Europe in September of that year. Regional members of World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) and representatives from Spain (APROAMAR), France (Plateforme de la Petite Pêche Artisanale Française), Russian indigenous platform (Aborigen Forum) and Saami (Saami Council) SSF representatives participated. This exchange became an important moment facilitating a deeper understanding of problems and struggles common to fishers throughout Europe, and encouraged the fishers to look for ways to further collaborate in international spaces. These collaborations led Istanbul Birlik to attend the 7th General Assembly of WFFP held in New Delhi, India, in which the WFFP celebrated their 20th anniversary. In this General Assembly, Istanbul Birlik became a member of WFFP coming together with more than 50 other country representatives.

Another key gathering was the 7th Urgenci International Symposium in Thessaloniki, Greece in November 2018, which brought together 324 participants from 40 different countries representing agroecological consumer groups, food justice networks and small-scale food producers. This network and its meetings have historically focused on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups, but Community Supported Fisheries (CSF) and related initiatives were also featured in this year. A panel on SSFs and food sovereignty stimulated discussions about how to strengthen the collaboration between CSAs and CSFs, and how to form a joint movement around food sovereignty. The main panelists – Local Catch Network (and Fish Locally Collaborative) from USA and Istanbul Birlik from Turkey – shared experiences, ongoing projects, and lessons learned about how to construct stronger networks of collaboration among agroecological consumption cooperatives or consumer groups and local fishers, and how to increase public awareness and attention regarding the situation at sea and in local fisheries. Although both initiatives mentioned significant challenges that they have faced and are still facing, learning from each other’s experiences and seeking new ways to collaborate further was an important outcome of this meeting.

These encounters gave rise to a new project: — Urgenci, Pleine Mer (France), Local Catch Network (USA), the Transnational Institute, and Istanbul Birlik will collaborate in a multi-year project on Community Supported Fisheries. The program aims to further develop fisher-to-fisher trainings, to empower SSFs, their communities and their local food systems, and to map and connect regional CSF networks so that they can strengthen their own movements and establish stronger alliances. ‘[T]hese transnational alliances constitute a source of inspiration for Istanbul Birlik in terms of new ideas (e.g., food sovereignty and agroecology), organisational structures, or even procedural details such as how to run an effective meeting and how to ensure participation of a diverse set of stakeholders’.¹²

Facing the ecological and social crisis in their region, especially with falling fish stocks and high levels of indebtededness of SSFs to intermediaries, Istanbul Birlik has initiated a new project focusing on a “Direct Sales Model”. This model aims at increasing SSFs control over the fish they catch and the food they provide to consumers. Instead of depending on intermediaries who buy the fish for very cheap prices and add commissions at several points along the value chain until it reaches the final consumer in supermarkets, fish shops or restaurants, they intend to establish networks of direct sale. These would both give value to the producer and provide fish for cheaper prices to the final consumer, helping to make fish more accessible not only to middle or upper class consumers but also to poor and working class people. According to the head of Istanbul Birlik, the model will help to change the dominant perception in the current (capitalist) market system: “people would perceive fish not as a commodity, but as food”.¹³

The planned Direct Sales Model includes opening Co-op Shops (see Image 2) in different districts in Istanbul. Fish caught by Istanbul Birlik’s SSF members will be bought by the co-operatives themselves, at a fixed and fair price for fisher people. Istanbul Birlik would own its own transportation system with refrigerated trucks, and fish would then be sold in physical Co-op Shops. This direct access to the local markets will improve the economic situation of SSFs, and reduce their dependency on intermediaries who currently decide the price of fish.¹⁴ Co-op Shops would provide not only a market place but also some space for processing, cooking, and sale of the value-added products produced. The objective would be to employ especially women and young people, giving them more visibility and offering employment linked to the SSF sector.

Part of this Co-op’s space would be dedicated to cultural events such as fisher festivals, seminars, exhibitions, activities for children, and debates. These would help to increase awareness about SSF traditions, local species, the specific characteristics of the marine territory (i.e. the Northern Marmara Sea, the Bosphorus, and the Southwestern Black Sea) as well as the idea of CSFs. Design and construction of the space will be undertaken in collaboration with other stakeholders such as agroecological consumer initiatives; researchers; district municipalities; and interested civil society groups.

This project aims first at improving the situation of SSFs, beginning with the co-operative members of Istanbul Birlik. However, at the same time, it is a broader project to improve public knowledge about the seas, traditional ways of fishing, fisher communities, and the dynamics and social actors around fisheries food system. In recent decades thriving organic, agroecological, and/or local food movements have helped communities to discover the many rewards of rebuilding relationship with small-scale food providers.¹⁵ Reconnecting communities to traditional and small-scale fishers can provide many benefits.¹⁶ The name of the project – ‘Know Your Fisher Project’ — (see Image 1 below) alludes to this. The two main goals are: (i) to improve the contribution of SSFs to sustainable fishing, (ii) to improve consumers’ knowledge about SSFs and their practices, as well as to enable the access of consumers to cheap, high quality and just fish.

The experiences of CSF networks from United States and estimates for the alternative seafood marketing project and the proposed Co-op Shops (see Image 2 below) indicate that SSFs could expect a 30% increase in their income by implementing such a model.¹⁷ This would be an important step to overcome the indebted and marginalized economic situation of SSFs based on alternative economic models. To realise this plan, Istanbul Birlik has been meeting with district municipalities over the course of the last year to obtain a physical space with the support of the municipality, avoiding inflated commercial rents.

Since the most recent municipal elections, in Spring 2019, Istanbul Birlik has continued reaching out to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM), aiming to realise Co-op Shop models in 10 to 25 districts. Regular meetings have taken place between the IMM, agroecological consumption co-operatives and initiatives, and fisher co-operatives in order to collectively design such farmer/producer markets.

Today, there are about 30 agroecological consumer groups in Istanbul region. The first one was BÜKOOP (The Consumption Cooperative of Members of Bogazici University) founded in 2009, which was followed by others flourishing especially in the last 5 years. These are key allies to the ‘Know Your Fisher Project’ and SSFs and Istanbul Birlik are joining conversations and debates about how to link these initiatives to construct a social and solidarity economy, and about what kind of a structure would be possible in the context of Istanbul.

Such citizen and consumer initiatives, learning collectively and working to establish broader CSAs and CSFs, are critical players in the movement towards a just and more socially and ecologically sustainable food system, based on shared ideas on food sovereignty. Thus, this project and the initiatives of the Istanbul Birlik are becoming a crucial part of food sovereignty struggles around fisheries in Turkey and beyond.

Istanbul Birlik and the fisher co-operatives that are its members have been working hard to realise this project. They have designed it physically, developed financial estimates, and communicated internally to build consensus with and support from other members and possible allies. One of the main challenges is to find a suitable physical space, which would be in a central district but not impacted by speculative rental prices, which are usually very high within the city limits. This is where good communication becomes even more essential so that the project will be supported by the local municipalities and preferably the metropolitan municipality.

A second main limitation or challenge is related to issues of gender equality since very few fisherwomen are members of fisher co-operatives. Historically, most fisherwomen participating in fishing activities were not co-operative members either because their husbands were members and the structure of the co-operatives were not welcoming them, or because their activities were not recognised as fishing, because they were not going fishing on boats even though they engaged with fishing activities in their households. Recently, there have been attempts to gain more visibility for fisherwomen. For example, a fisherwoman who was not a member of the co-operative before — since her husband was a member — recently became a member of one of the co-operatives in Bosphorus and received a prize from one of the district municipalities for her contribution to the fishing sector. She was also honoured by Istanbul Birlik in its annual workshop in 2019 and was asked to share her story of going to fish secretly with her father and then with her father-in-law even though her husband was not supportive of her fishing.

Gender issues and the move towards gender equality in fisher co-operatives are complicated due to the patriarchal structures that have been very dominant until now. Addressing these issues to better recognise and support fisherwomen will require significant and sustained efforts both within member co-operatives and in Istanbul Birlik. However, being exposed to women in leadership positions, especially among indigenous WFFP members, has had a positive impact on this process. Meanwhile, collaborating with other CSAs and food sovereignty movements that have already been working on gender equality for some decades has had, and will continue to have, a positive impact in raising awareness and in finding ways to implement a gender balance within activities and organisations.

The initiatives and projects of Istanbul Birlik demonstrate the importance of democratic co-operative structures for small-scale fisheries and their dedication to improve members’ situations in order to confront the ecological, social, and economic crisis they are confronting. The alliances with other food sovereignty actors strengthen these movements and reinforce the politicisation that they are undergoing. One key element is the fisher-to-fisher learning enabled by regional and global fisher movements. A second is alliance building with other social actors, such as researchers, consumer groups, and movements for food sovereignty both locally and internationally. Therefore, strengthening internal structures, as well as constructing broader networks of solidarity where CSAs and CSFs intersect, are key tools to empower their movements and reach their goals. By forging this path, Birlik is building new connections between consumers and SSFs that are accessible to people of all economic backgrounds, while protecting traditional fisher cultures, and providing an alternative vision of just, sustainable, fisheries.

Coastal communities around the world base their cultural identity and economic sustenance on fishing. Activities that take place on boats tend to be the main images that come to mind when we think of fishing. These also happen to be the jobs that are dominated by men. However, besides the women who go out to sea, there are a whole range of pre- and post-harvest tasks that primarily women do, which sustain local fishing economies as well as households. From mending nets and gear, to keeping the books, from child care and job training to commercialization, women occupy diverse and essential roles in fisheries around the world. These contributions are important to sustaining households, and ensuring access to healthy diets for fisher families. And, as the FAO has estimated, small-scale fishers who mostly sell to local markets provide some two thirds of the fish destined for direct human consumption. Seen in this way, fishing communities play a crucial role in healthy food systems and the decisions made about fish at the local level: which fish can be caught, and which needs to stay in the water, which gear to use, which to dry and which to eat fresh, which market stand to buy from, how to clean or process them, and which recipe to prepare and how to cook are all important components of food sovereignty¹, and women in particular are regularly making these decisions and keeping these activities going.

In Indonesia, an archipelagic nation comprised of more than 17,000 islands, fishing is a way of life for over 6 million people and some 85-90% of the total catch is brought in by small scale fishers.² However large-scale infrastructure projects in the name of the president Jokowi’s Blue Revolution, that seeks to frame the country as the ‘World Maritime Axis’ are putting pressure on fishing communities and undermining food sovereignty in these places. Fueled by a total reorganization of ocean space under the banner of marine spatial planning, sand from the sea floor is being mined, shipped and piled up to redraw the Indonesian coastline, making space for new ports and logistic hubs, touristic development and high end real estate. This process of turning ocean space into new coastland is referred to as reclamation. As sand is moved from one place to another, ocean currents are disrupted, fish habitats are destroyed, and fishers themselves are being displaced to make way for new infrastructures positioned to integrate Indonesia’s peripheral regions into central trade and transport routes as well as to better position the country for global commerce.

This short article examines these processes through a feminist lens in order to understand the threats and opportunities for food sovereignty in fishing communities. Based on action research³ in these affected fishing communities, and in light of ongoing mobilizations against this kind of large-scale development logic and projects, we argue that women are key protagonists in the struggle for food sovereignty in fisher communities.

Makassar is one of the major port cities, being positioned by Jokowi as a central logistics and commerce hub in Indonesia. The two main infrastructure development projects currently underway in the region are the Makassar New Port (MNP, a national strategic project managed by state owned port management company, PT Pelindo IV), oriented towards shipping set to reclaim 1,428 ha; and the Central Point of Indonesia (CPI, managed by Ciputra Group and PT Yasmin Bumi Asri), which proposes to reclaim 156 ha geared towards tourism. To prevent protest of the CPI, a large mosque has been built on the site, which has limited resistance to CPI; however, the MNP has been the target of ongoing mobilization by fishers and allies.

The development of the MNP prevents fishers from accessing fishing grounds and coastal areas key to local livelihoods, for example around the villages of Tallo, Sengka, Batu and Buloa. In these communities the role of women in the local fishing economy is very important. One of the key fishing activities is only practiced by women: harvesting mussels, lingula and oysters on the sea shore. That said, women are working throughout the value-chain, from harvesting mussels, to washing them and taking them to market. They are also involved in post harvest activities of the boat-based fishery practiced primarily by men who use traps to catch crabs. Women often wash and sell the crab as well. They also dry fish and shrimp, but now with the construction of projects like CPI and MNP have limited access to the raw materials and are left without this important source of income.

The development of the MNP, which began in 2017, has been written into the marine spatial plan, which was approved with little consultation of fishers, even though the process was promised to be participatory. The construction of structures at sea has generated pollution on the shore and increase in mud and coastal erosion due to the waves carrying larger particles from the reclamation means that fishers have to go farther out to catch fish. Before MNP construction began fishers using boats used roughly 1,5 liters of fuel a day, now they use between 5 and 10 liters, and catch less fish. They both eat the fish themselves and sell it in local markets. They use the money to pay for the oil, household food, school and hospital fees for the family. Before they could earn between 300,000 IDR – 1M IDR a day but since the reclamation they do not earn more than 100,000 IDR a day.

While men and women alike are being negatively impacted and excluded from the places they fish and collect mussels, women especially are bearing the burden of a wide range of other consequences. We can see this in terms of the productive role of women (activities generating an income, job opportunities, paid employment), as well as relative to their role in social reproduction (which can be divided into two categories: domestic and care work to reproduce people/workers and ensuring the reproduction of the social system these people/workers live in).

First, in terms of economic production, according to fisherwomen in Tallo, the amount of mussels they collect has also declined by half from two baskets sacks bringing in around 100,000 – 120,000 IDR/day to one sack worth 50,000 IDR/day. Some fishers have stopped fishing altogether, because they don’t have access to their fishing grounds anymore, and therefore there are no possibilities to catch fish or harvest mussels anymore. This means that fisherwomen are forced to seek other jobs as informal warehouse workers where they are hired on a precarious day-to-day basis for 80,000 IDR/day.

Similar situations can be observed in Jakarta and Surabaya, where big infrastructure projects also have gendered impacts. Fadhilah Trya Wulandari interviewed women mussel collectors from the communities of Muara Baru and Kali Baru, in the context of the NCICD project in Jakarta Bay (a sea wall closing the Bay of Jakarta supposedly to avoid flooding). She notices that women observed an increase in the production costs after the projects, particularly because it increases the distance between the areas where mussels are processed and the area where they are sold.⁴ Therefore, the transport costs are increasing. The costs for investments have also increased because the gear used to raise mussels were negatively impacted by the project, and as a consequence, the owners of the aquaculture ponds reduced the salary of the women they employ to compensate those costs.

In parallel, women also observe a decrease in their incomes, because the pollution of the water is changing the growth rate of mussels and they become smaller in average. Women are paid depending on the number of kilogram of mussels they collect, so the smaller mussels are, the longer it takes to collect one kilogram.

To summarize, big infrastructure projects have two direct impacts on the production of women mussel harvesters. The space taken by the infrastructure is increasing production costs and the pollution created by the project is decreasing the availability of appropriate mussels and thus the income of women fish workers.

Second, in terms of social reproductive tasks in the household, the financial impacts are generally shouldered by the women who are traditionally seen as the financial managers of the family. The decline in incomes among fisher families has meant an increase in debts. Some of their children drop out of school, because they cannot pay the fees anymore. Worse still, child marriage (out of economic desperation) is increasingly frequent as a way of earning a dowry and relieving financial pressure from the family. Traditionally, women are seen as responsible for household accounting, so, the stress of making ends meet in these impossible circumstances falls primarily on the women’s shoulders.

Finally, as fishermen’s livelihoods are undermined, this can fuel what might be seen as a crisis of masculinity in a context where traditional patriarchal gender roles assume that men bring in the most money. As this is rendered impossible, interviews with local community organizers suggest that frustration and pressure are rising, as is domestic violence.

Lastly, the very often unseen and feminized labor of maintaining social cohesion, and community structures and norms is also impacted. There are several local NGOs in and around Makassar encouraging fisherfolk to take compensation from the government due to the negative impacts of the MNP. Unfortunately, the amount offered is quite low – around 1 million rupiah -, and ironically the women are often not consulted. Other fishers flat out reject compensation. This is causing further tensions within the community, which the women end up having to manage.

Women’s Solidarity organization, Solidaritas Perempuan (SP), argues that the process of marine spatial planning in Indonesia has been developed and implemented according to a patriarchal logic. “RZWP3K (the marine spatial plan) is allocating space to different sectors. Who is the most important in this? Some people will lose. In Indonesia there are patriarchal priorities – big projects. But for us creating jobs for women in fishing communities should be a priority, but they are not seen. Women are invisibilized and therefore will lose.”⁵

Indeed this lack of recognition of women is institutionalized by the state and within their own communities. Women are legally registered on their ID cards as the wives of fishers, rather than fishers themselves, even if they go to sea and contribute in many ways to local fishing economies. Insurance and public finance options don’t recognize women as fishers so they cannot get support from the government. Women have to have a marriage certificate to inherit property, and this is only possible if they become widowed, otherwise they cannot own property. And in the limited consultation processes that did take place in the development of the Makassar Marine Spatial Plan, women were not invited and could not give their contribution because they were not recognized as stakeholders. In the law it says that the head of the family is the man. Thus in the words of SP, “the law itself and policy specific to fisheries are patriarchal.”⁶ At the same time, their own husbands and other men in the community often claim that women aren’t needed in the process. Thus traditional fisherwomen’s perspectives are not being taken into consideration and their contributions are invisibilised. But in reality what they do is fundamental for subsistence. “The New Port is not about subsistence, it’s about big business.”⁷

This development logic has serious ecological implications as well. Therefore, as Buckingham-Hatfield (2000) describes, “women are disproportionately affected by negative environmental impacts because of their social and domestic roles and a greater likelihood of poverty.”⁸ As Kurniawaty from SP and Wulandari’s analyses show, environmental degradation is a form of discrimination, part of an oppressive system, institutionalized by policies that advance large-scale infrastructure development while invisibilising the rights and needs of women.

Mobilization and the way forward

These projects on the ground leading to displacement of fisher people not only have gendered impacts, but also gendered reactions and mobilizations. Solidaritas Perempuan Association (SP), formed in 1992, supports women’s mobilisation and provides feminist leadership training from its 11 offices across Indonesia. The vision of SP is to create a democratic social order, based on the principles of justice, ecological awareness, respect for pluralism, in an equal system regarding male and female relations, in which they can fairly share access to and control over natural, social, cultural, economic and political resources.

On the ground, SP has 76 members in Makassar, and is working particularly in fishing communities like Tallo, facing the impacts of the MNP development. They use popular education and action research, to analyze gendered impacts in Indonesian communities, and empower women so that they can fight the issues described here. The type of research methodologies they use prioritize women only spaces where they seek to raise awareness about what is happening in the communities and specifically to understand women’s perspectives, without men encroaching on the speaking space of women. “If we want to make working groups, which is important to work more easily, if women are in groups with men, then we won’t be heard. We need our own groups.”⁹ These groups are carefully collecting data and information about the MNP construction processes and its impacts in order to strengthen advocacy work. Community meetings organized in this way, thus, help to gather data about gendered impacts of big infrastructure development while also supporting women in organizing and building strategies to resist against big infrastructure development policies, deeply rooted in a patriarchal system.

In particular, SP members have analyzed how policy tools like marine spatial planning (MSP) are used by the national and provincial governments to justify and implement big infrastructure projects. MSP is described as a neutral tool to solve conflicts over ocean space, but as a recent report on the topic shows, gender bias is clearly evident in the way MSP is implemented on the ground, taking advantage of patriarchal cultural and institutional dynamics to keep women out of a decisions making process that is likely to impact them strongly.

This type of participatory action research has helped to create a vehicle for fisherwomen’s mobilization. On one hand, they have put pressure on government from outside the institutions, organizing multiple protests in front of the local government (DPRD for its initials in Indonesian), with hundreds of women to voice their concerns. And on the other hand, SP leaders have been invited to give public speeches inside the DPRD to insist on the gendered impacts caused by MSP.

In 2015, the “Aliansi Selamatkan Pesisir” (Save the Coast Alliance) was formed in order to push forward litigation against the CPI coastal development. This work was led by Walhi Sulsel (Friends of the Earth South Sulawesi) and Anging Mammiri joined on behalf of SP in order to strengthen the role of grassroots women in the alliance. The strong presence of SP on the ground also allows its members to put gender as a central issue in the coalition, raising awareness of other NGOs, which may be less aware of gender dynamics in the communities. This puts gender at the center of civil society organizing, helping to slowly address patriarchy within NGOs as well as bring a feminist analysis to the advocacy work.

Fishers, especially women are being stripped of their ability to fish, and maintain their autonomy from this work. By prioritizing large-scale infrastructure development to facilitate long distance trade and national economic growth, the autonomy and survival of local communities are at risk, and environmental destruction becomes another form of discrimination women have to face every day.

The food sovereignty agenda provides a critique of this global profit driven logic, which undermines the ecological and social health of the people who live and fish in those places of global commerce. Feminist perspectives articulated by SP dovetail nicely with this food sovereignty vision, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing the systems that ensure life and dignity. As the CPI and MNP construction barrels forward, the lives of entire coastal communities are put at risk. Taken together a feminist-food sovereignty agenda puts life and life ensuring activities like food production at the center of decision making. A gender sensitive food sovereignty analysis helps us pay closer attention specifically to the lives and needs of women and their diverse roles in the food system from food production to provision, among other things. This makes clear the need to challenge institutionalized patriarchy, which does not recognize these crucial contributions, as well as patriarchy within communities and civil society organizations. Therefore, the fact that SP is part of the CSO (civil society organizations) coalition and engaging inside and outside local institutions can be seen as a needed diversity of tactics to deconstruct patriarchal dynamics, within governmental institutions, within the civil society and within communities.

At the same time, these elements highlight the ways in which the small-scale food producers that keep local food economies going and marginalized communities fed, are being squeezed out and dispossessed in favor of global trade and investment.

This case also reveals the doubly important role of fisherwomen. On one hand, food producers are essential, given that the fruits of their labor, literally keep us all alive. But fisherwomen specifically do this as well as attend to the social reproduction of food producers themselves. Therefore, strong role in the struggle itself is highly needed, as they are often doubly impacted by big infrastructure development, as we describe above. The role of SP in the coalition, and the space they managed to create inside and outside the local parliament had a strong impact on women’s empowerment in the communities, who are now more actively engaging in and resisting infrastructure projects and the policies that justify them.

For food sovereignty advocates, the needs and perspectives of these life ensuring people are central to guiding the direction of change. Thus, the work of SP in providing spaces for cultivating feminist leadership and training among fisherwomen so that their voices and demands can be more powerful, is a crucial part of building food sovereignty. The example of Makassar is just one instance and similar cases can be observed all around Indonesia. SP has drawn on the experience in Makassar, for example to put gender as a central point of the “Save Jakarta Bay Coalition”. Indeed, as we have seen, the gendered impacts of the Jakarta NCICD project are really similar to those observed in Makassar, and the experience of SP is crucial for the feminist element of the struggle to move forward. Just as feminism and the leadership of women, especially those small-scale fisherwomen fighting to defend their livelihoods and communities, are crucial to the construction of food sovereignty.

How much “development”, “employment” and “well-being” do free trade and international investment bring? Twenty-six years ago, Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the most aggressive trade agreement in the world, with Canada and the United States (US) ². Then, in the year 2000, it signed a similar agreement with the European Union (EU), which is in the process of being “modernised” ³. For years, Mexican and international social movements have been denouncing the impacts of free trade agreements on a wide range of sectors. Between 2011 and 2014, the Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunal held a session to put NAFTA on trial. After rigorously analysing 500 cases of human and collective rights violations, the tribunal ruled that the agreement has generated “a widespread humanitarian crisis that affects various sectors of the population and has caused a crisis of the state” ⁴. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. From 2 to 11 December 2019, a caravan of international observers (#ToxiTourMexico) travelled from West to East along the neovolcanic belt in Mexico, crossing dense industrial corridors that have attracted capital from the US, Europe and other countries along the way. Members of the Caravan witnessed the alarming environmental and health emergency situations that the affected communities are experiencing and their impressive organising and mobilising capacity and dignity. In May 2020, it was reported that 78% of the deaths due to COVID-19 in Mexico were in the regions that the caravan had visited.

Photo: Martín Álvarez-Mullaly, OPSUR (#ToxiTourMexico, December 2019)

The initial promoters of the “Caravan on the social and environmental impacts of transnational corporations and free trade in Mexico” were the Asamblea Nacional de Afectado/as Ambientales de México (ANAA, or National Assembly of Environmentally Affected Peoples) and the Corporate Power Team of Transnational Institute (TNI). ANAA, a network of 130 indigenous and peasant organisations, trade unions and NGO working on social and environmental justice conflicts in Mexico, launched the call for the session of the Mexico Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunal ⁵. TNI facilitates the Global Campaign to Reclaim People’s Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity ⁶, which has close ties with the UN process on a binding treaty that will force transnational corporations to respect human rights⁷.

Representatives of the European Parliament, the Parliament of the Basque Country, the Senate of the State of Minnesota (US), scientists and activists from organisations from Argentina, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Mexico, The Netherlands and the US participated in the Caravan⁸. Other participants include representatives of the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT or the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources) and scholars from the Unión de Científicos Comprometidos con la Sociedad (UCCS or Union of Scientists Committed to Society)⁹.

The Caravan’s main goal was to give greater visibility to the impacts of free trade and the presence of transnational corporations in Mexico. As Mexican economist Andrés Barreda points out, it is important to note that neoliberalism has generated not only tax havens, but also industrial paradises in recent decades¹⁰. An industrial paradise is an area that attracts investments due to the lack of enforcement of the most basic social, labour and environmental standards. Mexico is playing an increasingly important role in neoliberal globalisation since the mid-1990s thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union-Mexico Free Trade Agreement; the latter may soon be replaced by a new, recently finalised agreement¹¹. Both trade blocs use the country to outsource the social and environmental impacts of their own economies. Transnational corporations are free to act with total impunity in Mexico, as they are protected by the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS) that is usually included in free trade agreements.

From a human rights perspective, the consequences have been disastrous. Daniel Feierstein¹², member of the jury of the Permanent People’s Tribunal – Mexico Chapter, explains that to implement NAFTA, a socially destructive process was initiated with the goal of dismembering and destroying the Mexican social fabric in order to impose a new model of extraction, production and consumption. This process involved the selective assassination of social and environmental leaders, peasants, indigenous peoples, journalists and human rights defenders, feminicide and a social war disguised as the ‘fight against drug trafficking’. It is estimated that between 1997 and 2018, at least 400,000 people died as a result of violence involving organised crime, with the government as its accomplice¹³.

During the tour, international observers conducted field visits and attended meetings with local organisations in the following six regions: Santiago River Basin (state of Jalisco); Independencia River Basin (state of Guanajuato); Mezquital Valley (Atitalaquia, Atotonilco, Tula, Apaxco in the states of Hidalgo and Mexico; Atoyac-Zahuapan River Basin (state of Tlaxcala and Puebla); and the northern part of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (state of Veracruz). In each region, representatives of the affected communities, with the support of scientists who have been documenting the cases for years, presented the impacts of the industrial corridors promoted by free trade on the communities’ health and the environment.

El Salto, the riverbanks of the Santiago River (Photo: Martín Álvarez-Mullaly, OPSUR – #ToxiTourMexico, December 2019)

The Caravan visited industrial corridors that have been consolidated over the past 20 years under the protection of Mexico’s free trade agreements. They observed in situ how the law allows transnational corporations to self-regulate the environmental aspects of their operations in order to attract investment. High-risk industries, extensive agro-industrial activities and extractive operations coexist with urbanised spaces and the lack of monitoring of the impacts on the local population’s health.

Overall, the alarming state of environmental and health emergency that the observers found in the six regions caused them a great deal of concern. The visits brought many problems to light, such as the systematic pollution of the air, water and soil; the destruction of rivers, lakes, forests and farmland; uncontrolled urbanisation; the proliferation of garbage dumps and extremely hazardous waste dumping sites; and the destruction of the health and the fabric of the communities in regions where transnational corporations protected by the trade and investment regime have set up shop. According to information gathered from toxicological reports shared during the tour, the residents of these regions suffer from various diseases, such as liver, kidney, skin and stomach cancer, leukaemia, genetic mutations, miscarriages, kidney failure and dental and skeletal fluorosis. All these illnesses are linked to the activities of transnational corporations operating in different sectors.

It became clear that even though the successive Mexican governments were aware of all of this, they had done nothing about it. What is worse, they made the environmental, labour and social impacts invisible by ignoring the affected communities’ claims and demands; attempted to stifle social unrest through criminalisation, repression and the use of various criminal groups to terrorize social organisations; and facilitated the implementation of new industrial and mega infrastructure projects that increase the risks for the local population even further.

As for the governments of the countries of origin of foreign corporations operating in the industrial corridors, which are mainly from the US and Europe, they have not taken measures to ensure that these transnational corporations are respecting human, labour and environmental rights, nor do they assume any responsibility for the socioenvironmental conflicts that they cause. Furthermore, they promote free trade and investment protection agreements, such as the new agreement between the EU and Mexico concluded in April 2020. One of the key elements in the agreement is the investment protection chapter¹⁵. Mexico will be the first Latin American country to sign an agreement with Europe that contains this kind of mechanism. The benefits for European corporations are clear: 35% of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mexico is from Europe¹⁶. But for the Latin American country, which is among the five countries in the world (third in Latin America) with the most complaints filed against it by foreign investors in international tribunals, the investment chapter involves considerable risk. Of the 31 requests for arbitration that the country faced in 2019, seven were submitted by European corporations (five from the Spanish State and two from France)¹⁷.

One of the elements that impressed the international observers the most was the affected communities’ capacities to organise and articulate resistance struggles in the six regions. For decades, despite the socioenvironmental devastation of their territories and the constant attacks on their lives and health, they have been monitoring impacts and have developed an advanced capacity for collective analysis that integrates all the dynamics that they face. They have also built ties with scientists who are highly committed to social struggles and who have helped consolidate the communities’ analyses. The advances that these organisations have made will have impacts not only in other regions of Mexico, but also on an international level.

In early 2020, the global health crisis triggered even greater concern among the Caravan’s observers in relation to the potential impacts of the pandemic on the affected communities that they visited. The SEMARNAT and the Ministry of Health’s recent observation that 78% of the deaths caused by COVID-19 appear to be concentrated in some of the regions that the Caravan visited or other very similar regions only added to this concern¹⁸. In fact, as the organisations reported in their meeting with SEMARNAT, the Ministry of Health and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT, or the National Council of Science and Technology) on 6 May 2020, the situation in all six regions is one of structural vulnerability and neglect marked by the deterioration of the inhabitants’ immune systems due to the prevalence of comorbidities that strongly interact with SARS Cov-2. This is the case of degenerative diseases such as cancer, kidney failure, respiratory diseases, diabetes, obesity and autoimmune diseases, among others¹⁹.

We briefly present below the preliminary results based on the data gathered by members of the ANAA²⁰ and on-site observations²¹.
The Lerma-Chapala-Santiago River Basin is the location of large industrial, manufacturing, urban and agricultural zones. Some of the more than 70 transnational corporations present in the region are: Nestlé, Huntsman, Forbo Siegling and Omya (Switzerland); Pernord Ricard, Danone and Virbac (France); Mexikor and Valresa (Spanish State); Nefab, Zassa Abloy and Concretos Apasco (Sweden); Operadora CICSA and Cytec (Belgium); DSM Nutritional Products (The Netherlands), QTEK México Pentair Vales and Controls (Ireland); Petosa, Siemens, Continental, WVoit, BDT, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Salzgitter Mannesmann, Borgwarner and Hella Automotive (Germany). In the year 2000, the affected peoples began organising to demand an investigation into the impacts of the industrial corridors on the health of the population²². In 2011, a study on the quality of the water of the Santiago River by the Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua (IMTA or the Mexican Institute of Water Technology) confirmed the presence of 1,090 pollutants in the water, daily discharges of 507.5 tonnes of toxic waste into the river and the failure of 94% of the factories to comply with the lax effluent standards²³. Despite these findings, no measures have been taken to remedy the situation or provide assistance to the population. What is more, it took the state of Jalisco 10 years to release the results of a study commissioned to Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP or the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí) – which it only did in December 2019 as the result of popular pressure. Data collected on 300 children between 6 and 12 years of age from El Salto, Puente Grande, Juanacatlán, Colonia Jalisco and Jardines de la Barranca found traces of: arsenic in 45% of the children from Juanacatlán; cadmium in 97.8% of the children from El Salto; mercury in 59% of the children in Puente Grande; lead in 93.8% of the children from Juanacatlán; and benzene in 73.7% of the children from Juanacatlán²⁴. According to the affected peoples’ organisations, this sample accurately reflects the reality affecting the whole population. They denounce that their region is being sacrificed for the sake of economic growth and to generate wealth for Mexican and foreign corporations and they demand that the area be declared an Environmental and Health Emergency Zone.

As for the Independencia River Basin, the communities in the north of the state of Guanajuato denounced the impacts of export-oriented agriculture (broccoli, spinach, strawberries, other berries and genetically-modified corn, among other crops) run by transnational corporations and powerful Mexican businessmen who have occupied the three branches of government for years. Not only has agribusiness drilled 3,000 deep wells, from which it extracts millions of cubic metres of water every year, but also the intensive use of agricultural chemicals has led to serious soil and water pollution. People living in the region suffer from symptoms caused by exposure to fluoride and arsenic in particular, such as: dental and skeletal fluorosis, neurological symptoms, kidney problems, kidney failure and several types of cancer. Furthermore, in San Miguel Allende, cases of lung cancer were found and attributed to prolonged exposure to potassium erionite.

The region is also under the threat of the “Cerro del Gallo” open-pit mining project in Dolores Hidalgo. SEMARNAT has rejected the permit application for now, but the interested parties could appeal the decision. The transnational corporation involved was denounced for extreme labour exploitation, as it hires individuals from indigenous communities from the south of the country as temporary workers and offers them precarious working conditions. In this region, the communities affirmed that the depletion of natural resources by the agricultural industry has forced a large number of people to migrate to the US. In the southern part of the state, where one of the country’s main industrial centres is located, the communities spoke about the impacts of the Tekchem plant where explosions of malathion in 2000 caused a toxic cloud to form, which affected people living within a several kilometre-radius. Also, they denounced the case of the Química Central de México plant. The Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente (PROFEPA or the Federal Bureau of Environmental Protection) closed the plant in 2014 and ordered the transnational corporation to remove thousands of tonnes of pollutants. In spite of this, the transnational corporation has still not complied with the order. The local people affirm that there have been increases in respiratory and immune diseases, teratogenic effects, malformations and problems caused by severe poisoning, such as headaches, sore throat, burning sensation in the eyes and vomiting.

The Mezquital Valley was another industrial paradise that the caravan visited. The eight largest cement factories in the country are located in this region (representing a quarter of all cement factories in Mexico), including one owned by the France-based transnational corporation Lafarge-Holcim. This type of industry poses a threat to the population, as it requires two highly polluting processes to function: open-pit mining and the use of heat in the industrial processing of the minerals, which generates pollution emissions. Furthermore, the factories burn garbage and various kinds of industrial waste in cement kilns, including tires, chemical products and outdated oils, among other things. Every day, dust from the kilns containing dioxins and furans cover farmers’ fields and nearby cities. The communities also mentioned the impacts generated by urban and industrial wastewater coming from Mexico City and non-metallic strip mining. To this, one must add the air emissions from a Pemex refinery, a thermoelectric plant belonging to CFE and two industrial complexes and the food processing plants of food corporations, such as Sigma Alimentos, Cargill, Barcel, Griffith, Bimbo and Compañía Cerillera la Central. The affected communities also reported that in April 2013, ATC’s agro-chemicals factory exploded five times and approximately 40,000 people showed signs of poisoning²⁵.

During a presentation organised for the Caravan on one of the other regions that it visited, the Atoyac-Zahuapan River Basin, researcher Samuel Rosado²⁶ showed a map on which he has documented the increase in the presence of US and German capital since the signing of NAFTA. Between 2011 and 2016, the automotive sector in the region grew around 60%. According to Rosado, despite the promises that the industrial corridors would create jobs for local people, the manufacturing industry in Puebla and Tlaxcala only accounts for 16% of employment.

The affected communities also affirmed that reports by CONAGUA and the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH or the National Human Rights Commission) confirm the presence of the following pollutants in the river: mercury, nickel, lead, cyanide, arsenic, copper, chromium, cadmium, zinc, toluene, dibromochloromethane, chloroform, vinyl chloride, methyl chloride, phenols, benzene compounds, nitrites and nitrates, phosphate and xylenes. Furthermore, according to the reports submitted by the Centro Fray Julián Garcés de Derechos Humanos y Desarrollo Local A.C. (Fray Julián Garcés Centre for Human Rights and Local Development A.C.) to the Red contra el Genocidio y la Impunidad en México (Network against Genocide and Impunity in Mexico), between 2002 and 2016, over 25,000 people died of cancer and 4,000 from kidney failure. They also identified more than 900 miscarriages. This network estimates that on average, in the region, one person dies every four hours from one of these causes²⁷.

In Puebla, where another of the industrial and agroindustrial paradises visited by the Caravan is located, the affected communities denounced the overexploitation of aquifers and the high levels of pollution caused by the manufacturing, automotive (for example, Volkswagen), pork (Granjas Carroll-Smithfield), berries (Driscoll’s) and mining industries. It should be noted that this region was the epicentre of the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. It was also denounced that the plundering of local peoples’ land continues to make way for various types of megaprojects such as industrial pig farms, other export-oriented agroindustrial operations, open-pit mines and the wind farms of the Spanish corporation Iberdrola.

In the northern part of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Caravan travelled to one of the oldest and most important hubs of oil and petrochemical production in Latin America, made up mainly of the Lázaro Cárdenas Refinery and the Cosoleacaque Petrochemical Complex (PC) located in Minatitlán, Veracruz. Also, in Coatzacoalcos, one finds the Cangrejera PC (where, for example, the Spanish group COBRA owned by ACS operates), the Morelos PC and the Pajaritos PC. In 2016, 32 workers died in an explosion at the Clorados III chlorine plant in the Pajaritos PC. According to the affected communities, more than 300,000 local residents were exposed to ashes from the explosion, which contained high levels of polychlorinated dioxins and furans. In addition, the region is home to the main core of industrial fossil fuel pipelines (transporting oil, gas, gasoline and petrochemicals), which are the source of the explosions and spills that occur frequently in the area of Nanchital, causing dangerous levels of contamination in the region.

In addition to the ongoing pollution of the Coatzacoalcos River caused by oil spillages in the wetlands near the large industrial centres, the affected communities informed the Caravan that the above-ground storage of coke in Jáltiplan de Morelos by the Spanish corporation García Munte (currently ADN Energía de México) generates fine dust and toxic clouds in the area, which are linked to a large number of illnesses affecting the population. What is more, they highlighted that since the plant was built in 2013, local fisherfolk have observed that the fish, turtles and other local species are dying and peasant communities have experienced losses in their fruit and vegetable crops. It was pointed out that the coking plant generates only around 20 jobs and the workers have serious health problems.

The Caravan’s first meeting with Mexico’s Environment Minister, Víctor M. Toledo. (Photo: Martín Álvarez-Mullaly, OPSUR – #ToxiTourMexico, 11 December 2019)
The Caravan received extraordinary coverage by the Mexico’s main media outlets and other international media²⁸.

In regard to the political impact that the Caravan generated, SEMARNAT received the results of the Caravan positively at the first meeting on 11 December 2019. The next day, on 12 December, the Environment Minister himself publicly informed the Mexican president of the results²⁹. After the meeting, SEMARNAT issued a press release³⁰. Then, on 21 January 2020, SEMARNAT held a second meeting with the affected communities who presented 12 proposals and committed to developing ecologic restoration programmes³¹. At the third meeting, on 3 March, other sectors of the government began to participate in the dialogue, such as the Ministry of Health, CONACYT, PROFEPA and Comisión Federal para la Protección contra Riesgos Sanitarios (COFEPRIS or the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks). Participants agreed that an inter-institutional coordination group should be created to ensure that the pollution and health problems in the environmental emergency regions (EER) are resolved. The affected communities took the opportunity to express their concern about the expansion of new megaprojects in the region, which risk aggravating the contamination, loss of biodiversity, water stress, harm to health and dispossession of land³². Finally, the fourth meeting was held on 6 May with representatives of the affected communities, the head of SEMARNAT, the Health Minister and the director of CONACYT. Held in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, participants of the meeting highlighted the interconnection between the health of the environment and human health and the greater risk for the population in the six regions³³. The next meeting will take place on 6 July 2020.

Photo: Martín Álvarez-Mullaly, OPSUR (#ToxiTourMexico, December 2019)

Both the affected communities and the international organisations that participated in the Caravan are preparing reports, which will serve as the basis for denouncing the alarming situation in Mexico at the international level. Participants have already begun to disseminate the results outside of Mexico: members of the Caravan managed to present them to the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas (CONAIE or the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities) in activities of resistance to free trade prior to the coronavirus outbreak³⁴. A similar initiative in Argentina has been postponed to the second half of 2020, as has the affected communities’ tour of Europe and the US. To expose the public and private responsibility of the EU and intervene in the process of signing and ratifying the new EU-Mexico agreement, there are plans to hold interventions in the European Parliament, the German Parliament and the Parliament of the Basque Country, as well as public actions in France, Germany, the Spanish State and Belgium. The results will also be presented in October during the 6^th Session of the Human Rights Council’s Open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group (OEIGWG), whose mandate is to elaborate a binding instrument on transnational corporations and human rights.

Finally, the organisations from the Caravan are working to consolidate the networks of solidarity with the affected communities. A new phase may be beginning in Mexico today – one in which it will be possible to fight effectively against corporate impunity – and therefore, now more than ever, it is important to pay attention to this process.

Main European transnational corporations present in the areas visited

El Salto (Jalisco):Nestlé (Switzerland), ZF (Germany), Virbac (France), Continental (Germany), BDT (Germany), Mexikor (Spanish State), Nefab (Sweden), Pentair Vales and Controls de México (Ireland), Cytec (Belgium), DSM Nutritional Products (The Netherlands), Danone Group (France), QTEK México (Ireland), Pernod Ricard (France), Forbo Siegling (Switzerland), Omya (Switzerland), Petosa (Germany), Siemens (Germany), Voit (Germany), Assa Abloy (Sweden), Operadora CICSA (Belgium), Hella Automotive (Germany), Concretos Apasco (Switzerland), Valresa (Spanish State)

Independencia River Basin: Syngenta (China-Switzerland), Bayer (Germany), BASF (Germany)

Mezquital Valley: Lafarge-Holcim (France-Switzerland)

Ayotac-Zahuapan River Basin: Volkswagen (Germany), Audi (Germany), ThyssenKrupp (Germany), Bayer (Germany), BASF (Germany)

Puebla: Iberdrola (Spanish State), Lagermex (Germany)

North of the Isthmus (Veracruz): García Munte (Spanish State), Grupo Cobra – ACS (Spanish State).