Noam Chomsky: 'Coronavirus Pandemic Could Have Been Prevented'

By Al Jazeera

04 April 20

Chomsky slams US's handling of virus as he warns nuclear war, global warming threats will remain after pandemic is over.

he coronavirus crisis could have been prevented because there was enough information available to the world, according to Noam Chomsky, who has warned that once the pandemic is over, two critical challenges will remain - the threats of nuclear war and global warming.

Speaking from his office in self-isolation to Croatian philosopher and author Srecko Horvat, the celebrated 91-year-old US linguist offered a stark perspective on how the pandemic has been managed by different countries.

"This coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented, the information was there to prevent it. In fact, it was well-known. In October 2019, just before the outbreak, there was a large-scale simulation in the United States - possible pandemic of this kind," he said, referring to an exercise - titled Event 201 - hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Nothing was done. The crisis was then made worse by the treachery of the political systems that didn't pay attention to the information that they were aware of.

"On December 31, China informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown origins. A week later, some Chinese scientists identified a coronavirus. Furthermore, they sequenced it and provided information to the world. By then, virologists and others who were bothering to read WHO reports knew that there was a coronavirus and knew that had to deal with it. Did they do anything? Well yes, some did.

"China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore began to do something, and they have sort of pretty much seemed to have contained at least the first surge of the crisis."

He explained that the way the West prepared for the crisis differed between countries.

"In Europe, to some extent, it's happened. Germany ... did have spare diagnostic capacity and was able to act in a highly selfish fashion, not helping others but for itself at least, to evident reasonable containment.

"Other countries just ignored it. The worst was the United Kingdom and the worst of all was the United States.

"One day [US President Donald Trump] says, 'There is no crisis, it's just like flu.' The next day, 'It's a terrible crisis and I knew it all along.' The next day, 'We have to go back to the business, because I have to win the election'. The idea that the world is in these hands is shocking."

The US has the world's highest number of infections with more than 250,000 cases, while more than 6,500 have died with the virus.

Globally, there are more than a million cases across at least 180 countries, and more than 53,000 people have died of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, which has origins in China.

Describing the US president as a "sociopathic buffoon", Chomsky said while the coronavirus was serious, "it's worth recalling that there is a much greater horror approaching. We are racing to the edge of disaster, far worse than anything that's happened in human history.

"Donald Trump and his minions are in the lead in racing to the abyss. In fact there are two immense threats that we're facing - one is the growing threat of nuclear war ... and the other of course is the growing threat of global warming."

While the coronavirus can have "terrifying consequences, there will be recovery", said Chomsky, but regarding the other threats, "there won't be recovery, it's finished".

He also blasted Trump for continuing punishing sanctions on Iran, a country which is struggling to contain the virus with more than 3,000 deaths, as a way to make people suffer bitterly.

"When the US imposes devastating sanctions - it's the only country that can do that, everyone has to follow ... the master. Or else they are kicked out the financial system," said Chomsky.

The conversation with Horvat took place online on March 28 as part of a series by Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, a political party launched by Greece's former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, to discuss the world after the pandemic.

Other speakers have included Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and German-Croatian theatre director and author Angela Richter.

Looking ahead, Chomsky said there could be reason for hope as he made a case against neoliberalism.

"Possibly, a good side of the coronavirus, is it might bring people to think about what kind of a world do we want.

"We should think about the emergence of this crisis, why is there a coronavirus crisis? It's a colossal market failure. It goes right back to the essence of markets exacerbated by the savage neoliberal intensification of deep social-economic problems.

"It was known for a long time that pandemics are very likely and it was underestimated. It was very well understood there were likely to be coronavirus pandemics, modifications of the SARS epidemic 15 years ago.

"At the time, it was overcome. The viruses were identified, sequences to the vaccines were available.

"Labs around the world could be working right then on developing protection for potential coronavirus pandemics. Why didn't they do it? The market signals were wrong. The drug companies. We have handed over our fate to private tyrannies called corporations, which are unaccountable to the public, in this case, Big Pharma. And for them, making new body creams is more profitable than finding a vaccine that will protect people from total destruction."

Remembering the polio epidemic in the US, Chomsky noted that it was ended by the discovery of the Salk vaccine by a government institution. The vaccine was available by the early 1950s.

"No patents, available to everyone. That could have been done this time, but the neoliberal plague has blocked that."

Asked for his view on the current "war-time" language used during the crisis, which has seen medical workers described as being on the "front line" and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warning of the biggest challenge since World War II, Chomsky said the rhetoric was justified to mobilise people.

But post-pandemic options, he warned, "range from the installation of highly authoritarian brutal states all the way over to radical reconstruction of society and more humane terms concerned with human need and no private profit.

"We should bear in mind that highly authoritarian vicious states are quite compatible with neoliberalism."

We Need a Green New Deal for Farmland

By Liz Carlisle, YES! Magazine

04 April 20

 

s the coronavirus crisis has laid bare, the U.S. urgently needs a strategic plan for farmland. The very lands we need to ensure community food security and resilience in the face of crises like this pandemic and climate change are currently being paved over, planted to chemically raised feed grains for factory farm animals, and acquired by institutional investors and speculators. For far too long, the fate of farmlands has flown under the radar of public dialogue—but a powerful new proposal from think tank Data for Progress lays out how a national strategic plan for farmland could help boost economic recovery while putting the U.S. on a path to carbon neutrality.

The new Data For Progress memo builds on the Green New Deal resolution—a sweeping proposal to build out a carbon neutral economy, inspired by the package of Roosevelt administration social policy that lifted the United States out of the 1930s Depression and created the largest middle class in history. The Green New Deal, advocates say, would mobilize similar infrastructure and jobs programs, but with a focus on climate mitigation and resilience, and a more broadly construed focus on equity. (While the original New Deal met many goals expressed by organized labor, it failed to address racial inequality).

Yet this latest Data for Progress memo, published today, hearkens back several decades before Roosevelt’s presidency. Reopening conversations that were front and center during Abraham Lincoln’s time in the White House, the memo proposes one of the most promising strategies yet offered for meeting climate targets while building broad-based economic prosperity: a systematic national policy to facilitate land access for small farmers.

Lincoln’s Unfinished Business

Farmland ownership has not followed the path that President Lincoln envisioned, explains the memo’s co-lead author Meleiza Figueroa, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at University of California, Berkeley and faculty-owner of the Birmingham-based Cooperative New School for Urban Studies and Environmental Justice. When Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, he promised small tracts of land to family farmers. Following emancipation, the Lincoln administration also promised “40 acres and a mule” to formerly enslaved Africans.

However, land speculators cheated from the beginning of the homestead era, gobbling up multiple claims under different names. And “40 acres and a mule” were never provided to emancipated slaves, as President Andrew Johnson rescinded the promise after Lincoln’s assassination. Homestead claims trickled to a close in the early 1900s, and the federal government backed out of land policy, letting the market take its course. “When you look at the history of injustice in this country,” Figueroa says, “it’s all about land.”

In the century-long absence of a coherent U.S. policy framework for farmland, Figueroa and her coauthors point out, several worrying trends have developed. For one, prime farmland has been paved over. According to the American Farmland Trust, 25.1 million acres of U.S. agricultural land—nearly the size of the state of Ohio—was converted to developed uses between 1982 and 2015.

Such land use change has significant climate implications. A 2012 University of California, Davis study that compared an acre of urban land to an acre of irrigated cropland found that the urban land generated 70 times as many greenhouse gas emissions. There’s also an opportunity cost: Land-based carbon sequestration strategies like agroforestry and cover cropping can’t be adopted if the land is under concrete.

Second, the memo points out, what farmland remains has become ever more concentrated in the hands of large farms and institutional investors. A mere 3.2% of U.S. farms account for 51% of the total value of the nation’s agricultural production. Forty percent of U.S. farmland is rented, discouraging sustainable agricultural practices that require long-term management and secure land tenure. And farmers make up just 1.3% of the U.S. workforce.

“There’s an assumption out there that this is just the forward march of progress,” Figueroa says. “ ‘Who wants to be a farmer anymore?’ Actually, a lot of people want to be farmers now—especially young people who are aware of the effects of climate change and also not satisfied by alienating office labor. Why not offer the opportunity for meaningful and gainful work that is beneficial to everybody, to people and planet?”

Racial Injustice Plays Out on the Land

The absence of a coherent U.S. land policy can be blamed for some of the current problems with farmland concentration, say the authors of the Data for Progress memo. But co-lead author Leah Penniman, founding co-director of Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York, argues that the U.S. government has had a very influential de facto land policy over the past century, even if it wasn’t articulated as such. “The very basis of U.S. land policy is rooted in the theft of land and the exclusion of people of color from land,” Penniman explains. “This, of course, started with the genocidal stealing of almost the entire continent from the stewardship of Indigenous people … [and] throughout much of our history, there have been various state-level property ownership requirements that excluded people of color from being able to own property.”

 When people of color did amass property, Penniman says, they were targeted with violence.

“The Ku Klux Klan, the White Caps, and the White Citizens Council were responsible for lynching almost 4,500 people, many of whom were landowners, who they saw as having the audacity to get off the plantation and to want to stop sharecropping.” The federal government also discriminated against black farmers through USDA programs, Penniman explains, resulting in a rapid decline of black farmers from 14% of the nation’s farmers in 1910 to approximately 1% today.

Given that the average age of the American farmer is 57, and a significant share of the nation’s farmland will soon change hands, Penniman and her co-authors argue, Americans have a short window of opportunity to rectify this unjust history while ensuring that farmland is conserved and that farmers have opportunities to combat climate change.

A Diverse Coalition for Reform

The diverse coalition mobilizing around these shifts to farm policy is notable: Contributors to the Data for Progress memo range from staffers at predominantly white farm state groups like National Family Farm Coalition and Family Farm Defenders to racial justice leaders like Penniman and Figueroa to academics focused on economic policy.

What these diverse constituencies share, the memo’s authors explain, is that they’ve all gotten the short end of the stick of land consolidation and are struggling to survive. Ironically, many family farmers have accumulated significant land over the past generation or two but are less economically secure, as they’ve taken on debt to keep up with the treadmill of overproduction stimulated by current agriculture policy.

“We need to give current family farmers, who are mostly white, a lot of credit,” Penniman says. “Nobody wants to be complicit in racism and in that kind of harm and exclusion. I think it’s in our best interest as a nation not to pretend that we’re all the same or that we all need the same policies, but to really look truthfully at what needs to change. And we’ve found that having these honest conversations in our communities often leads to common ground.”

As for how to turn this common ground into policy change, the memo’s authors outline a couple different pathways. The ‘low hanging fruit’ option, explains contributor Adam Calo, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, would be to expand three separate kinds of existing policies. For one, Calo believes, the U.S. should ramp up efforts to conserve farmland and protect it from development while limiting land investment by large corporations. Second, programs that incentivize farmers to use regenerative agricultural practices that combat climate change should be dramatically scaled up. The third and critical piece of this policy triad, Calo emphasizes, is equity: the U.S. must strengthen and enforce policies that ensure “Socially Disadvantaged Farmers” (the USDA’s term for farmers subjected to racial discrimination) have equal access to all farm programs and particular set-asides to redress historic injustices.

More ambitious and transformative, the memo’s authors suggest, would be to combine these objectives with a fully integrated land policy. Such a policy would include public land banks that could acquire land from retiring farmers and provide affordable access for farmers of color, new farmers, and farm cooperatives who pledged to use sustainable practices. It would also include a land commission, anchored by community-based institutions led by people of color, that would periodically assess that state of farmland access and make policy recommendations.

Good Stewardship at Scale

Figueroa is excited about these more far-reaching approaches, which she sees as opportunities to mobilize the underutilized climate response potential in Black and brown communities. “How many Oaxacan farmers are in apartment buildings right now?,” Figueroa asks. “If you gave them land, they know what to do with it. It’s not like they forgot what to do with it once they crossed the border.”

But getting farmers on land isn’t enough, Figueroa and her coauthors emphasize. A successful Green New Deal for farmland must help ecological farmers stay on the land—and thrive. Penniman points to the success of payment for ecosystem services policies like those in Costa Rica, where farmers are compensated for providing environmental benefits on behalf of society—benefits like maintaining pollinator habitat, preventing soil erosion, and sequestering carbon. We already have such programs in the U.S., including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, but they are funded at much lower levels than other farm programs that predominantly support industrial agriculture.

Overhauling farm programs by shifting current subsidies to instead compensate farmers for climate-beneficial practices—and establishing public procurement and supply management—would allow current family farmers to earn more money on fewer acres. At the same time, it would enable farmers to produce more human food (rather than biofuels and feed grain for factory farms) and provide more public benefits (such as drawing down emissions and improving watershed health). Remaining and degraded acres no longer needed by these now much more viable farms could be transitioned into land banks like those envisioned by the Data for Progress team, offering a just transition for both existing family farmers and landless farmers looking to contribute to climate mitigation and community food security by stewarding land.

“It’s a win-win,” Figueroa says. “People who want to put their labor into agriculture and struggling farmers who want support can actually join together as a community.”