As UN ‘Reviews’ Presence in Afghanistan, Afghans Face More Hunger and Poverty 

Editor’s Note: The following article contains terminology that may allude readers. However, Toward Freedom published this piece because it provides a different dimension to the struggle against U.S. imperialism. The Qiao Collective, of which the writer is a member, is comprised of members of the Chinese diaspora who seek to explain U.S. imperialism’s impact on China.

On May 26, 2021, President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to produce “analysis of the origins of COVID-19” within 90 days. This move followed weeks of speculation surrounding the claim that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory, usually identified as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Having rightly rejected this claim for more than a year as a Trumpian conspiracy theory, centrist and liberal commentators in the West have breathed new life into the “lab leak” hypothesis, taking cues from allegations and claims made by U.S. state leaders and corporate media. Meanwhile, Facebook and other social media giants reversed their censorship of lab-leak disinformation almost overnight, impelled by a tawdry mix of insinuations from unnamed U.S. intelligence sources and vague allegations of impropriety relating to the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic earlier this year.

Right on schedule, the nation’s finest intelligence analysts delivered their report to the White House on August 24 and released an unclassified summary three days later. The once hotly anticipated story landed like a damp squib and was buried by the regular news cycle in less than a day. In part, this was due to the inconclusive nature of the findings: four intelligence community (IC) elements and the National Intelligence Council assessed “with low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from “natural exposure,” another IC element leaned “with moderate confidence” toward lab leak, and three others did not commit either way, though they naturally all agreed that “Beijing… continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States.” But what really doomed the report to oblivion was a signal failure of U.S. intelligence—and the entire imperial apparatus—on a far grander scale: the utter rout of the United States’ puppet regime in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who in 10 days captured every provincial capital (save one), including Kabul.

One underexplored throughline linking both events is Biden’s fraught though largely earnest attempts to restore the traditionally multilateral basis of the U.S. empire, drawing a sharp distinction with his predecessor Donald Trump. While Trump dramatically withdrew the United States from the WHO at the height of a global pandemic in 2020, alleging an entirely illusory pro-China bias, one of Biden’s first acts in office was to rejoin the organization. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus duly celebrated the restoration of U.S. funding by contradicting the WHO mission’s own assessment, as part of a joint study with China, that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”

Biden’s penchant for pursuing the new cold war through multilateral channels has continued in his engagement with the G7 and NATO. Trump famously denigrated both forums and delighted in alienating the United States’ sub-imperial vassals. Biden has, meanwhile, used these summits to great effect as ostensibly internationalist window dressing for the military encirclement of China. In June, a NATO Brussels Summit Communiqué for the first time identified “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour” as “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security.” In the months since, Britain, France, and even Germany have launched performative naval incursions into the South China Sea—almost the antipodal opposite of the alliance’s ostensible remit in the North Atlantic.

Biden and the Democrats’ response to the domestic surge in anti-Asian racism, effectively delinking it rhetorically from their imperial aggression against China, has followed a similar logic. Gone are the days of presidential bombast over the “China virus” and the “Kung Flu.” Instead, after the Atlanta spa shootings of March 16, the Democrats worked overtime to identify Trump and his loyalists as the unique locus of violent anti-Asian animus. They extended the promise of full inclusion into American society and protection from isolated acts of vigilante terror—a promise somehow underwritten by a violently racist policing system and conditioned on mawkish displays of loyalty to the imperial project. The United States’ selective incorporation of the Asian and particularly Chinese diaspora, in exchange for Asian Americans’ active collusion in the relentless demonization by the United States of their countries of origin, has ample historical precedent. That Biden signed the (predictably hyper-carceral) COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act on May 20, 2021, mere days before ordering his intelligence apparatus to fan the flames of sinophobic hate by promoting the lab-leak myth, is testament to the inestimable hypocrisy of liberal “anti-racism.”

No figure in the Biden administration so thoroughly embodies the hollowness of such politics as Kamala Harris, an infamously vindictive ex-prosecutor now feted as the first Black and Asian vice president. Coincidentally or not, she too found herself playing an awkwardly timed bit part in the hybrid war on China as her government’s imperial designs in Afghanistan hurtled to their ignoble denouement. While the humbled U.S. military shambolically evacuated the one remaining piece of Afghan territory it controlled after a 20-year war—making sure to commit some parting war crimes for long-suffering civilians to remember it by—Harris was tasked with enlisting Singapore and Vietnam into the United States’ machinations in the South China Sea. Vietnam at least did not take the bait, instead reaffirming its historic ties to the People’s Republic of China as a fellow socialist state.

All that said, the most spectacular failure of the United States’ return to traditional alliance structures is undoubtedly the Afghanistan withdrawal itself. The irony is inescapable: Joe Biden, who staked so much on multilateralism and a clean reputational break with his predecessor, has infuriated his “coalition partners” by honoring Trump’s unilateral commitment to end 20 years of brutal military occupation. Extraordinarily, the United States has arm-twisted its Western allies into accepting the unmitigated defeat of a common imperial project, which it initiated, gravely harming its relations with its allies in the process.

Already, of course, the U.S. and its allies are undermining the prospects for lasting peace by threatening the new Afghan government with debilitating sanctions and fearmongering about a new “Taliban-Pakistan-China” axis. This confluence of events has not gone unnoticed in China, where Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointedly urged the U.S. to “work with the international community to provide Afghanistan with urgently-needed economic, livelihood, and humanitarian assistance” while condemning “the so-called investigation report on COVID-19 origins produced by the U.S. intelligence community” on a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In the fevered imaginations of U.S. war planners and their media sycophants, the empire’s greatest ideological, civilizational, and racial enemies of the last century—communism, Islamist jihadism, and a rising China—seem to be fusing into one. Hopefully, recent events have taught the United States’ prospective partners to think twice before following them once more unto the breach.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Charles Xu is a member of the Qiao Collective and of the No Cold War collective.

Eighty-eight-year-old Sakharam Gaikwad never anticipated that farming sugarcane would become a bittersweet endeavor.

In 1972, a drought hit the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Considered one of the most devastating disasters of the last century, it affected 20 million people (57 percent of the state’s rural population) and 5.6 million—or 40 percent of—cattle.

The disaster prompted Gaikwad to move in the direction of his fellow villagers toward sugarcane cultivation. At the time, the young farmer had been growing indigenous rice varieties, and a wide collection of nutritious millets, including sorghum, finger millet, pearl millet, and little millet.

Starting in the late 1960s, he began using chemical fertilizers to cultivate hybrid sugarcane and sorghum varieties. Seeing bumper harvests in shorter periods of time, he said, “Farmers abandoned the traditional millets and moved rapidly toward sugarcane.” Year after year—during the 1970s—farmers began cultivating sugarcane in his village of Jambhali until an overwhelming majority were involved with the fast-growing plant.

Everything went well for Gaikwad until climate change disasters started destroying his crops. For instance, a 200 percent increase in rainfall in one week in October destroyed the majority of his sugarcane. In 1.5 acres, he managed to harvest 70 tons. He has noticed a drop over the last five years by almost 50 tons, costing him $1,830 per year.

However, stories like those of Gaikwad are increasing across India, with most farmers moving either toward commercial crops, like soybean and sugarcane, or hybrid varieties of indigenous crops. Last year, India reported producing 500 million metric tons of sugarcane worth 1.18 trillion Indian Rupees ($14.26 billion).

Meanwhile, in 2019, India cultivated 80 percent of traditional and hybrid millet in Asia and 20 percent of the world’s production. Grains like traditional millets that can withstand rapidly changing weather are on the decline in India. With India now having convinced the United Nations to declare 2023 the International Year of Millets, what does it mean for Indian farmers?

Farmers Say UN Designation Isn’t Enough

“Just announcing that this year is dedicated to millets doesn’t change things for the farmers,” said Amol Naik, a farmer, activist, lawyer and a member of the All India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He and farmer Narayan Gaikwad, the younger brother of Sakharam Gaikwad, suggested a series of reforms to ensure fair prices to farmers.

“In several villages, we can’t even find the seeds of traditional millet varieties,” said Narayan Gaikwad, a 77-year-old activist and a farmer from Jambhali. “The government should conduct awareness sessions in villages and help farmers by ensuring a better price for millet and making traditional seeds more accessible to farmers.”

Gaikwad added that traditional seeds have become so rare that many farmers need help understanding the difference between a traditional variety and a hybrid variety.

“Just declaring a year dedicated to millets is not going to help.”

Why Millet Cultivation Declined

Traditional millet once was a staple food in India, helping people remain healthy. India, the sixth-highest sorghum-producing country globally, produced 4.2 million metric tons of sorghum last year, almost a 40 percent decline since 2010. Some reasons for the decline include fluctuating local climatic patterns, changing eating habits, rising heat waves, and a shift to non-native remunerative commercial and food crops.

Starting at age 17, the first crop 76-year-old Vasant Kore learned to cultivate was kar jondhala (indigenous sorghum). However, retaining the heirloom seeds wasn’t lucrative enough for many farmers. “The hybrid sorghum varieties yield double the produce as compared to traditional ones in almost half the time, whereas kar jondhala takes five months to grow,” explained Kore, who recalled hybrid sorghum varieties were introduced in his region in the 1970s.

Farmer Sambhaji Shingade, 61, from Sangli’s Garjewadi village, recounted the start of the commercialization of farming. “Many multinational corporations bought seeds from poor farmers at a meager price, developed hybrid varieties, and started selling them to the same farmers at much costlier prices. We were robbed of our traditional wealthier seeds.”

The rapid commercialization didn’t happen in a day. “Every government has systematically destroyed farming,” Gaikwad said. “Farming now relies on multinational companies who make these hybrid seeds and fertilizers.”

Despite the benefits of growing traditional varieties, farmers have been forced to move toward commercial crops.

“Farmers are encouraged to grow sugarcane and are rewarded by assuring them that the sugar mills will buy it,” Gaikwad said. “On the other hand, farmers are rarely given subsidies for cultivating traditional varieties that keep everyone fit, and there’s no market for such crops, forcing farmers to move toward sugarcane.”

“Also, most millets cultivated today are genetically modified hybrid varieties that promise a higher yield, but aren’t climate resistant. So, preserving the traditional varieties becomes even more critical, as they will completely vanish in a few years,” warned Vijay Jawandhiya, an activist and farmers’ leader from Maharashtra.

Gaikwad added chemical fertilizers and pesticides are now a must.

“Over the years, more and more hybrid varieties were developed and as farmers got used to them and fertilizers, the prices [of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers] eventually skyrocketed, making farming unaffordable.”

Plentiful Water and Fertilizers

When irrigation facilities started reaching Gaikwad’s village in 1964, he said everyone thought their problems had ended. “Little did they know it was the beginning of the troubling times.”

With water becoming readily available, everyone shifted to sugarcane. “Back then, there was not a single sugar mill in the region,” he said. By 2020-21, India had 506 operating sugar mills. Moreover, sugarcane requires tremendous use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The amount used varies based on soil conditions and climatic changes, among other factors. Also, it takes 1,500 to 2,000 liters of water to produce a kilogram of sugar. An Indian government report warns, “Most of the country’s irrigation facilities are utilized by paddy and sugarcane, depleting water availability for other crops. Pressure on water due to sugarcane cultivation in states like Maharashtra has become a serious concern, calling for more efficient and sustainable water use through alternative cropping pattern.”

Despite its problems, farmers say they aren’t left with an option. “Cultivating the traditional variety is unaffordable. It takes a lot of time to grow, and even the production is less,” Gaikwad explained.

Traditional sorghum varieties don’t require chemical fertilizers and are resistant to extreme climate events like heat waves. In addition, they can grow in drought conditions and water-logged soils, withstand salinity and alkalinity, and they are resistant to pests. Saline soil has excessive amounts of soluble salts, which hamper plants’ ability to absorb water. Meanwhile, alkaline soil contains high levels of sodium, calcium and magnesium.

Most farmers face this dilemma of losing their hybrid crops to climate change disasters or reporting lesser produce with traditional crops.

Dongarsoni farmers found a workaround by growing a lot of grapes, which unfortunately require tremendous use of insecticides, herbicides, and other toxic pesticides. “The farmers here earn a lot of money from grapes by exporting them. So they can retain the traditional crops in their vacant land,” explained farmer Gulab Mullani, 41, who follows the same approach.

However, a significant challenge for farmers like Gaikwad, who long ago abandoned the crops, comes from birds and animals eating produce. “One farmer cannot report sustainable profits if other farmers predominantly cultivate cash crops. This is because the majority of the millet produce remains a feed for birds and wild boars,” Jawandiya explained. “When there are large patches of farmland with the same traditional crop, the loss caused by birds and animals isn’t felt much.”

Another reason for abandoning millet is its lower price and lack of a regulated market, often pushing farmers into losses. “With the rise of cash crops, the labor cost increased, but the prices of traditional grains haven’t increased much. Hence, agricultural laborers aren’t paid enough for harvesting millets, forcing farmers to shift to other crops,” Jawandhiya added.

Building Sustainable Food Systems with Millet

Millets, especially sorghum, were once a staple food in India and Africa. About 500 million people in more than 30 countries depend on sorghum as a staple food, according to the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. The study found that over two-thirds of Indians consume foods deficient in protein and essential micronutrients, such as zinc, iron and vitamin A.

Cultivating indigenous millets has been lifesaving for drought-affected farmers like Kore. They help control blood sugar levels, are rich in iron, fiber, and proteins, and improve heart health, among other benefits, over the hybrid varieties. In addition, their pest-resistant ability, tolerance to higher temperatures, and need for minimal rainfall make them an environment-friendly crop.

Moreover, traditional millet varieties don’t require chemical fertilizers. “Even if you apply chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the crop will still grow in their natural timing only,” Kore said with a laugh, “so there’s no point wasting money.”

Gaikwad uses a simple observation to predict the rising cases of several lifestyle diseases. “Just look at what people eat.”

Earlier, eating flatbreads made of traditional sorghum, finger, and pearl millet was the norm. Finger millet, compared with other millets, remains a rich source of minerals and protein, as well as calcium. In addition, it has been used to raise iron levels in anemia patients.

Now, they are replaced with hybrid wheat or rice varieties. Today, 3.5 billion people globally are at risk of calcium deficiency, with more than 90 percent of them from Asia and Africa.

Plus, millet stalks remain an excellent cattle feed. “Many farmers have retained the traditional millets only for their cattle,” Gaikwad said. Cattle dung, a much cheaper source of organic fertilizer, keeps the soil nutrient-rich and helps build sustainable farming cycles.

“With millets gone, this entire cycle has collapsed,” Kore said.

Spike In Chemical Fertilizers

While the hybrid varieties promise a higher yield in lesser time, they require maintenance through the application of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Kore added he has found it difficult to cultivate crops without using chemical fertilizers on the field where he grows hybrid varieties, commercial crops or grapes. “The soil is now used to chemicals and hybrid varieties. I think it will take several years to reverse this.”

His observation is a stark reality as globally, the consumption of nitrogen fertilizers reached 190.81 million metric tons in 2019, a 312 percent rise since 1965. Also, chemical pesticide usage has surged over 57 percent since 1990, as its consumption has now reached 2.7 million metric tons.

While this helps a crop survive to a certain extent, it has been found to provoke oxidative stress that causes Parkinson’s Disease, respiratory and reproductive tract disorders, Alzheimer’s Disease, different types of cancer, and much more, according to a 2018 study in the journal, Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology.

Looking at the younger generation’s experience with chemical farming, Kore’s brother, Shivaji, 67, of Dongarsoni village, never cultivated the hybrid sorghum. “Of the three acres of land I own, I have reserved an acre only for kar jondhala,” he says.

Preserving a Heritage

While kar jondhala fetches almost double the price of hybrid varieties, it has much less demand. “The younger generation doesn’t know its importance,” Kore said. He recalled the 1970s when traditional sorghum was treated as a currency. “People would exchange it for buying daily items.”

Farmers, like Kore, have now taken it upon themselves to help preserve this crop. In villages like Dongarsoni, farmers still use the traditional barter system to exchange heirloom seeds.

Gaikwad, however, said not all hope is lost. “It’s not that all the traditional varieties have completely disappeared. They are still there, but one will have to travel a lot to find them because very few farmers have preserved them.”

Farmers like Kore and Mullani have now taken it upon themselves to preserve the traditional millets. “I will keep cultivating traditional sorghum until the time I die,” Kore said, smiling as he gestured to his field.

Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s opinion.

“More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in the battle.” -statement of U.S. armed forces veterans on U.S. war on Vietnam

In the analysis of all exploitative systems, it is obvious to see how the exploited are harmed. This is where most attention has been focused, and understandably so.

Nevertheless, it is also important to examine and understand what happens to the exploiters at the other end of the process of exploitation.

The reason is, invariably, in any process of exploitation, exploiters are also harmed in ways that are serious and significant, even though they may be less visible and obvious immediately. This is partly the reason why this aspect of exploitation is less recognized. If there is a better understanding and a wider recognition of how exploiters suffer in the process of exploitation, new openings can emerge to convince the more powerful regarding the futility of prolonging exploitative relations and systems.

For the sake of brevity, here we speak mostly in terms of only two ends of exploitation systems—the exploiters and the exploited. But we also can speak of two ends of systems of dominance—the dominators and the dominated. Or the two ends of systems of conquest—the conqueror and the conquered.

One indication of what happens to the exploiter or the conqueror is available in some statements of the veterans of U.S. armed forces. One of these statements, which described the immense cruelties and killings, said, “We know what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder looks like, feels like and tastes like because the ghosts of over 2 million men, women and children still haunt our dreams. More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in battle.”

A detailed account followed the life of a pilot whose napalm bombing had led to the burning of a Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc. After returning home, this pilot kept looking at the picture of Kim in flames. This girl was roughly the same age as his son. “He could almost smell the child’s burning flesh.” The veteran had nightmares of screaming children pointing accusing fingers toward him. There was a breakdown in his family. He turned to alcohol. “He drank to put the bombing out of his mind, and the drinking made him more obsessed.”(Reader’s Digest, November 1997).

This is by no means an isolated case. Breakdowns in close relationships, substance abuse, domestic violence, self-violence and suicide attempts have been found to be very high among soldiers who return home after fighting highly unjust wars. More commonly, anyone who performs unjust and exploitative actions over a period of time is likely to be able to continue this only by giving up on the sensitivity needed for care, compassion and love. Hence, this person’s ability to fulfill close relationships based on this declines steadily, as also his ability to experience those forms of happiness associated with real love, caring relationships and compassion.

At a wider level, a group or society which seeks to enrich itself by plundering and exploiting others has to spread value systems that make their members insensitive to the sufferings of others. But in the process of making them insensitive, the foundation also is prepared for breakdown of internal social relations (including with the closest people), internal violence, self-violence and falsehoods. This can be seen in exploiter and conqueror societies as well as at individual levels, in the hollow lives of those who lead aggressions.

To give one example of such impacts, the example of Christopher Columbus may be cited. The extreme cruelties driven by the endless greed of this explorer are well-known. What kind of personality this turned him into is best revealed by a reputed doctor, Sigmundo Feliz, who attended to him in his final years:

“To be without roots, without a sense of home and place is one of the most serious, though one of the least emphasized, psychological disorders. This patient suffered from this to an unusual degree… This patient appears from all evidence to be someone who found it difficult, even in non-threatening circumstances, to tell the truth, a habit of delusion that at times turned into self-delusion.”

At the level of entire societies, those which lead by aggression toward others, culminating in wars, are often engaged in spreading falsehoods and self-delusions, media and education systems being two commonly used channels. The big lies cooked up to justify aggression for plunder or domination get transferred also to almost equally big lies cooked up to justify internal exploitation by big business interests. Hence, people are exposed to serious health hazards by big business interests; in some cases the toll in the longer term may be higher than that of even destructive wars. Therefore, not just at the level of individuals but also at the level of entire societies, exploiters also suffer in serious ways.

The aggression and weaponization abroad is also reflected in internal violence. The United States, for example, experienced:

• 1.2 million recorded violent incidents in 2019 (366 per 100,000 people), according to FBI data;
• Over 10 million arrests this year (not counting traffic violations), which comes out to 3,011 arrests for every 100,000 people;
• The highest number of prisoners per capita in the world;
• Seven people dying a violent death every hour; and
• 19,100 homicides and 47,500 suicides in 2019.

According to official U.S. data, this year 12 million people seriously thought about suicide, while 3.5 million planned a suicide attempt and 1.4 million attempted suicide. 

Among U.S. youth, suicide is the second highest cause of death. Plus, an unprecedented increasing trend of suicide attempts have been reported among U.S. youth during the last decade, and more pronounced among girls.

Some of this data points to a deep internal social crisis that can arise within an exploiter-and-conqueror society known for its invasion and aggression. Careful research is likely to reveal more links of aggression and internal distress. Such research should be used to convince more people about the futility of paths based on exploitation, dominance and conquest.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril and Earth Beyond Boundaries.