events in Egypt: background

As tens of thousands are on the streets of the cities of Egypt, it appears that members of the security forces are starting to refuse to follow their orders. If the uprising is to be successful, this must happen. Jack Shenker, who is on the ground in Cairo sending continual reports for The Guardian, has today written this short but accurate account of the background to the current unrest in Egypt, which puts it in its appropriate context. The media is portraying the uprising as being driven by young, tech-savvy educated and underemployed men and women. Shenker sets the record straight. I reproduce part of the account in full:

"It was a 2008 strike by textile workers in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla al-Kubra that fired the imagination of many of those on the streets today. The three people shot dead by security forces during the Mahalla unrest on 16 April inspired an online movement which took its name from the date.

The traditional working class from all corners of the country has continued to provoke and inspire dissident activity ever since, occupying pavements outside parliament for weeks on end to highlight the devastating impact of the neoliberal reforms pursued by the ruling NDP party. Some trade unions – most notably the real estate tax collectors – have gone on to break free from state control.

Away from the economic concerns, anger at police corruption and brutality has been at the heart of the new wave of protest."

To which, of course, one must add the authoritarian corruption and brutality of the Mubarak regime.

the fall of the West's little dictator

An excellent analysis of the circumstances surrounding the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia by Esam Al-Amin:

Esam Al-Amin: The Fall of the West's Little Dictator

walking with the comrades

I have just read an excellent article by Arundhati Roy, the famed Indian novelist, entitled 'Walking with the comrades', in which she tells of her visit to armed Maoist insurgents in eastern India this year. The full article can be read here:

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/22-walking-with-the-comrades-aj-07

The article has provoked an interesting debate on an excellent website called Run from big media. You can review the debate here:

http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/#comments

These resources give an interesting insight into what Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls 'the gravest security threat' facing India today.

activist burnout

People who study or work in international development studies often tend to start from an action-oriented, activist and advocacy perspective. Yet later, they can appear to either become more bureaucratized, or disappear from the scene altogether. There are, in my view, 3 simple rules to trying to sustain an activist life:

1. keep your goals small and feasible, not large and impossible;
2. make sure that you have a life outside of your activism;
3. understand that while your choices matter, being an activist is not the same as denying yourself some of the elementary pleasures that this short life has to offer.

Keep activism grounded in the real world, and one's own real world needs, is how to avoid burnout.

slow food

I went to a very interesting event yesterday, organized by Slow Food Toronto, which sought to bring together slow food practitioners in the food services industry, slow food distributors, and slow food producers. It was principally a networking event, in a city where, according to the moderator, the debate over food and locality is more strongly developed than in any other city in North America.

Several things were striking about the event. First, there was a clear recognition that economics matters. Simply put, the premium on a piece of craft-raised meat is 30 per cent, which means the ability to 'buy in'--literally--to this movement is a function of income. This was not what the participants wanted, but they recognized it as a reality--as they also realized that the bulk of the audience did not reflect the diversity of a city like Toronto. Second, the participants realized--although some did not voice it--that in promoting slow food and local food production systems, a principle opponent was corporate agriculture, whether it is the 'standardized differentiation' of modern post Fordist industrial agriculture, or 'big organic', a label that the participants were particularly eager to use. There is a clear tension in the food system, between those that promote local systems of production and provisioning, and those that seek to deepen processes of global integration and the corporate food regime. How that tension plays out, in the everyday, is far from clear, as corporate food producers are more than happy to co-opt--as the experience of big organic, many of which were, at one time, small organic, make clear. Thirdly, as Phil McMichael has noted, so well, the members of this food movement do not realize that they are part of a global movement that is trying to reclaim control over the system governing food production and provisioning, a movement that is led, currently, by Via Campesina, and which takes, as its point of entry into the global politics of resistance to corporate agriculture, 'food sovereignty'.

These are interesting times. It is striking how many of the contradictions of globalization revolve around food: poverty and inequality being expressed in not having enough to eat, in a world that produces more than enough for all; the industrialization of food demonstrating how commodification extends, even when it is at the expense of human health in the North, in the form, particularly, of the northern obesity crisis; the way in which biotechnologies are developed so as to cement further corporate control over the global food system; climate change being witnessed in food production crises in the South, with the possibility that this will deepen, massively, in the next half century; and emerging from this, the possibility of conflict and, indeed, an end to progress, if--and yes, this is a big if--if agriculture, globally, were to collapse. It has happened before, and it could happen again. In other words, how we, as individuals, position ourselves within our own systems of food provisioning expresses our relationship to many of these contradictions, our own way of trying to navigate the choppy waters of globalization.

Of course, people at the meeting yesterday did not all see this, in all its fullness. But many did. They are well aware that redefining our relationship with the dominant system of food provisioning is an act against the corporate control of the food system, and indeed, current forms of globalization. What they are not aware of, I thought, was the extent to which this is truly a global movement.