Look out! The ‘BRIIICS’ are coming!

The Fifth BRICS Summit, March 26 - 27, 2013 Durban, South Africa

- By Prof. Rodney Shakespeare - March 28, 2013

The importance of the BRICS summit cannot be overestimated partly because it represents new countries beginning to take power and partly because it heralds a new world coming into being.”

Yes, BRIIICS, with three “I”s. That’s because to the countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (which have just held a summit in Durban, South Africa) will soon be added Iran and Indonesia.

Iran is a stalwart moral and political leader. It stands up against Zionism. It has huge natural resources. It is making extraordinary technological progress. It will soon be a BRIIICS member.

And so will Indonesia, which has the world’s fourth largest population, a fast developing economy (around 7% per year) and, again, huge natural resources.

Already, the present BRICS have 40% of the world’s population, 30% of its land mass, and 25% of its GDP with the latter being a sharply rising figure. Other countries, like Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia, are certain to join in.

Much more important, however, is the BRICS decision to set up a new development bank for long-term infrastructure. This is intended to rival, indeed, outclass, the Western-backed institutions. The underlying rationale is simple: the BRICS are determined to challenge Western political and economic dominance and, in particular, to break the dominance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which have not served the development needs of poor countries and have generally served only to put them into ever-increasing, un-repayable debt.

All of which is excellent news. The West has exploited emerging and poor countries and everywhere has been financially and militarily aggressive. Put simply, other countries are fed-up with the West: they have had enough.

The new bank, however, has more purposes than just being a development bank. American aggression, for example, is ultimately dependent upon the US dollar being the world’s reserve and main trading currency. The BRICS are going to end that by establishing a new reserve and trading currency.

Indeed, the situation can be put even more clearly. The West has long exploited and oppressed everybody that it could but now the boot, in the traditional metaphor, is on the other foot. Political power is shifting away from the West; economic power is shifting away from the West and its moral authority has almost completely disappeared (torture, assassinations, the creeping genocide of the Palestinians and the deliberate furtherance of a vicious sectarianism have seen to that).

Significantly, the BRICS are objecting to sanctions and war threats against Iran and are strongly opposed to Zionist Israel. It will not be long they declare that Israel is a pariah state.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the BRICS summit is the proposed creation of an fiber-optic cable linking all five states (with relatively easy extensions to Iran and Indonesia). Indeed, it could be that the BRICS are constructing an independent global fiber-optic internet system or at least an extensive one over which they will have complete control. The BRICS are intensely aware that the USA, denying the evidence of its own sixteen intelligence agencies, is pursuing a Zionist agenda against Iran which includes excluding Iran from the SWIFT international banking system and other banking transactions. The new cable should put an end to that.

The BRICS are raising the flag of independence and are telling the West that its abuse of others has gone so far that the others are going to make their own way in life. And that will really matter because more and more Non-Aligned Movement nations will be joining the BRICS in various ways which will particularly include regional, economic, financial, military and technological agreements. An example is that China and Brazil have signed a currency swap deal under which they will be using their own currencies for half of their mutual trade i.e., the US dollar will not be involved. For a while the US dollar can be expected to remain the main trading currency – until suddenly it isn’t.

Furthermore, Africa, for example, long exploited solely for its minerals and resources with no concern for the lives of the inhabitants, is simply going to turn to those who can provide the one big thing that Africa needs – industrialisation.

The importance of the BRICS summit cannot be overestimated partly because it represents new countries beginning to take power and partly because it heralds a new world coming into being.

However, a new world is not necessarily a better world and the BRICS, becoming the BRIIICS and much more, must be careful not to incorporate, without realising, assumptions and practices stemming from corrupt old Western institutions, thinking and practices. Chief of these is thinking that it does not matter if there is huge rich-poor division. This is at the heart of corrupt Western ‘trickle-down’ economics and is a complete breach of fundamental market principle, which says that producers and consumers must be the same people i.e., real productive (and therefore consuming) power must be spread to everyone in society.

Another corrupt assumption is that interest is necessary for the spreading of real productive capacity. Interest is not necessary: it is an unnecessary tax imposed by the global financial elite merely for its own benefit. The BRIIICS must ensure that the commercial banks are controlled so that they can only lend their own money (which they can then waste, if they want to, or charge interest on it). But the main money supply, for the spreading of the real economy, must stem, interest-free, from the national bank (although it may be administered by the commercial banks making only a fair administration charge).

Jalal (making a comment on the Press TV website) writes: “This is the best thing that could happen to the world. A new power that will not let the ex-colonials have the big cake to themselves as usual. This could also be the right path to finally new world order that will contribute to free human being and lead mankind towards a more balanced and harmonious world.”

Quite right, Jalal.

Prof. Rodney Shakespeare is a visiting Professor of Binary Economics at Trisakti University, Jakarta, Indonesia. He is a Cambridge MA, a qualified UK Barrister, a co-founder of the Global Justice Movement http://www.globaljusticemovement.net, a member of the Christian Council for Monetary Justice. His main website is http://www.binaryeconomics.net. Shakespeare is also Chair of the Committee Against Torture in Bahrain.

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Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms

- BY MICHAEL WINES - The New York Times - March 28, 2013

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.

In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.

The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be “much higher than it’s ever been.”

Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow.

Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.

“We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here this week.

“They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold.”

Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.

Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.

Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.

Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.

This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened.

“But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.

Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food.

Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses.

But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.

While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths.

The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths.

Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.

Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.

“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”

Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.

He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.

A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their impact on bees and other wildlife.

The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France.

Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.

Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.

“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”

Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.

Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”