This weekend you’ve got a unique chance to hear a heroic leader of the struggle for ecosocialism in Latin America speak in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Hugo Blanco has for decades been a key figure in fighting for the transformation of society in his native Peru, and for the rights of indigenous peoples. On Friday (Oct 15th) he’s speaking at an SSP rally for ecosocialism, which is starting at 7.30 in Partick Burgh Halls. Then on Saturday (16th), Edinburgh Uni Socialist Society is hosting a dayschool on ecosocialism and Latin America, featuring a whole raft of workshops on struggles from across the continent and Hugo, again. It’s on in the Dining Room of Teviot House, Bristo Square from 10.30 – 1.

As a warm up for these exciting events, we thought it might be a good idea to give you an idea just who Hugo is, so that you don’t miss the chance to come and hear him speak.

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Two scientists have now resigned from a group charged by the Food Standards Agency with having a “public dialogue” about genetically modified foods.

Last week Dr Helen Wallace, who is part of the think tank Gene Watch UK, resigned from the steering group for the project, and Professor Brian Wynne, who was the group’s Vice Chair, resigned yesterday.

Professor Wynne is an expert on public engagement with science, and said the dialogue programme, which was set up by the previous government, was in fact little more than propaganda for the companies responsible for developing GM food. He added that the Food Standards Agency, which is supposed to act as an independent watchdog that protects the public, had a “dogmatically entrenched” position in favour of GM.

Dr Wallace has similar concerns, arguing:

“It has now become clear to me that the process that the FSA has in mind is nothing more than a PR exercise on behalf of the GM industry. In my view, this would be a significant waste of £500,000 of taxpayers’ money. A process that was barely credible has become a farce.

“Taxpayers’ money should not be wasted on a PR exercise for the GM industry.”

Campaign groups have argued that the whole exercise, which is going to be outsourced to another organisation, will in fact just be used to gather information to allow better marketing and political propaganda efforts as part of an effort to make the public accept GM food.

The last government set up the project to explore the public’s views on the possible wider use of the technology. In the late 1990s GM foods were introduced throughout Britain, including in Scotland, with virtually no public consultation. This led to many massive campaigns, of which the SSP played a key part in several. Now, although GM crops are still grown in the UK, many supermarkets promise not to stock them because of the pressure.

GM protester pulls out crops

Socialists have argued for years that the drive to introduce the technology was coming from massive private companies with an interest in making more money from food, and agricultural products like pesticides and fertilisers. Chemical companies like Monsanto have worked hard to genetically alter organisms so that they will be able to cope with poisons intended for pests being sprayed on them. However, there are concerns that once new genes are introduced into the natural environment they have been shown to spread to other organisms and crops, with unforseen consequences for environmental and human health.

But perhaps most worryingly, these new technologies are not being developed by innocent scientists just interested in advancing knowledge. They are being designed and developed by for-profit corporations, whose sole interest is in making more money. So once a company has altered the genes of an organism, it can claim that this living thing is now their work, and patent it. This means that whenever someone uses that crop or animal in farming, they will have to pay the company for the privilege. In fact, many farmers have been forced to pay who weren’t growing genetically modified crops, after company scientists discovered that what was predicted had happened: their genetic modifications had cross pollinated, and you could find altered genes in non GM crops. Instead of seeing this as a concern, companies like Monsanto see it as a way to make more money, by making these unfortunate farmers pay.

The ultimate consequence of this would be the privatisation of our food supply, so that a few huge corporations would be able to control the seeds and technology necessary for the world to feed itself, and we would have to pay them ransom to survive. One of the most terrifying examples of the way these companies think was the attempt to develop “Terminator” seeds (their name!), which would produce crops that would not themselves go on to produce any seeds. If the companies were ever able to get this product widely used, then farmers would be unable to collect seeds from the previous years’ crops for replanting, meaning they would be completely dependent on seeds bought from the company that owned the patent on Terminator crops.

The resignation of these two scientists follows on from the complete discrediting of the previous government’s relationship with science, after it reclassified cannabis as a Class B drug despite the advice of its own scientists not to, and then rushed through a ban on mephedrone with no concern for real scientific evidence. It remains to be seen whether the ConDems will have a better relationship with the scientific community, but given their support for the mephedrone ban we won’t hold our breath. The Food Standards Agency says it will ask the new government before going ahead with the GM food consultation.

Eating this can not be a good idea

The fact of the matter is, the idea that we need GM crops to end world hunger is a myth peddled by people looking to make money for themselves. The world is more than capable of producing enough food to feed the human race through sustainable, ecological and organic agriculture. The problem isn’t the food we produce so much as the way its distributed. When so much of the land on Earth is dedicated to producing crops and meat for the rich countries, it’s hardly surprising those who live elsewhere go hungry.

Bonus: Check out this article, ‘Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?‘ (If you can’t be arsed reading the whole thing, the answer’s yes.)

If you’ve been watching the news in the last month or so, you could be forgiven for thinking the Earth has gone a bit crazy. Devastating earthquakes have hit Haiti, Chile, Turkey and then Chile again.

But in fact, the recent spate of earthquakes is not in any way unusual. In any given year, we can expect on average one richer-scale 8 earthquake, 17 quakes between 7 and 7.9, and roughly 132 with a magnitude between 6 and 6.9.

So why does it seem like 2010 has already been such a terrible year for earthquakes? In this case, it’s not the Earth which is changing, but human society.

Human society on Earth has recently entered an unprecedented new phase: for the first time ever, more people live in cities than in the countryside, on the land. The vast majority of these people live in recently built slums. These slums go by many names – favela, township, ghetto; they all add up to the same thing. Migrants from around the world, torn from the land by capitalist economic policies, pour into cities in search of a living. Faced with the failure of municipal governments to accommodate them with decent housing, they build their own homes with whatever they can find.

This process has been going on since the beginning of the capitalist era. The Highland Clearances were one of the first examples of poor people being chucked off the land, as wealthy landowners prepare to use intensive methods to extract the maximum profit they can from their land. Today’s clearances are taking place in rural China, India and Africa. They’re driven by the policies of the international financial institutions like the World Bank or the IMF, who force governments to make their agricultural sector only produce profitable commodities for export.

But at the time of the Highland Clearances, there was at least an industrial revolution that provided work for the mass of landless people flooding into cities like Glasgow, Manchester or Birmingham. Today, factories work differently, with more automation and advanced machinery than was possible in the 19th century. So although countries like China are rapidly industrialising, there will never be enough work to provide for all the people migrating to the coastal cities. The result is that those workers who do find a job labour in near-slavery conditions for absolute pittance wages.

A favela in Brazil

Meanwhile, the majority are forced to try and survive in what’s been called the “informal sector”, or the black economy. They peddle goods on the street, they scavenge rubbish dumps for anything valuable, or they become involved in crime and the one profitable industry within reach – the drug trade.

Left wing sociologist Mike Davis has chronicled what he calls ‘The Planet of Slums,’ in a book of the same name. It started out life as an article which is well worth a read, and is available for download here.

Many of these third world cities are built close to geological fault lines, making them prone to earthquakes. But the really devastating thing is that so many people now live in poorly built housing, which is extremely vulnerable to collapse. This means that the numbers dying from earthquakes on average is increasing. Therefore, more media coverage.

There’s pretty much nothing we can do to predict or prevent the occurrence of earthquakes. But what we could do is start a major global programme to make sure everyone on Earth has a properly built home that could better withstand one, which would drastically reduce the numbers that die.

More than that, we could start looking at how to change our global agricultural system. In global capitalist agriculture, production isn’t geared to providing people with an opportunity for meaningful work, or feeding the vast majority. What most agricultural production in the third world is geared towards is to producing the products wanted on the supermarket shelves of the rich countries. A different kind of agriculture worldwide could give most of the world meaningful work and feed the world’s population without harming the environment.

People scavenging a rubbish dump for survival in Cambodia

Ordinary working people on the land have fed humanity for centuries. What we need isn’t a return to some kind of medieval idyll that never existed. It’s the right of people to live and work where they choose, without being forced to move to survive, leading to a more equal distribution of the population across the land. This would also be safer, because it wouldn’t cram so many millions of people into megacities vulnerable to natural disasters. It’s what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they called for “the abolition of the distinction between town and country” in The Communist Manifesto.