“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying.

This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so the real crisis, which is after all about something as mundane as food, has slipped off of the radar. The global meltdown of the banks, a grand Greek drama of the folly of the gods if ever there was one, has captured our attention. Have the problems with food thus disappeared? I think not. They are here to stay and getting stronger.

The problems we saw with the huge price rise in 2008 are still around, bio-fuels, huge agri-businesses exploiting market power, and so on. It is a myth that this was driven by increased demand from China and India, downwards pressure on wages in developing countries has actually reduced per capita food intake in the poor majority of these countries. Adding speculation in food markets yields a lovely recipe for population control (Thus Passim). Over the past two years, evidence has grown of the impact of Climate Change on agriculture. An FAO report by Cline in 2007 put agricultural yield losses by 2080 at between 5 and 20% globally. This hid a regional picture where India could lose 30-40% of its yield. As if this was not enough, he pointed out the glaringly obvious problem with equilibrium models, which mean even greater declines in food production.

These models assume systems tending to a steady state, and are used in both agro-economics and climate modeling. They mask extreme events and chaotic systems that refuse to settle down. Extreme weather is a fact of life in India, whose climate is driven by the dynamic monsoon weather system. No-one quite knows how this system will respond to changes in climate, but what we do know is that around 40% of India’s population depend directly on the rain. They live in terror of extreme weather, and this year, with a major drought from failure of the monsoon, India is importing food again. This just after India signed an accord to turn land over to fuel production to help keep American engines going.

Finally, there is sea-level rise to consider, something also not included in Cline’s report. For instance Egypt is facing the loss of much of its prime agricultural lands along the Nile Delta. So worry about the banks that hold in your money all you like, the food problem is not going away.

The historic Naz Foundation petition to the Delhi High Court actually began with a history lesson – of fetishism, perversion, fondling and fornication and the punishments thereof. Tellingly, the Christian and European side of the history is much more severe and restrictive than the Hindu Indian one. It only takes a visit to India’s most notorious temple to see that there is a history here of open discussion of sex. Section 377 of the 1860 Indian Penal Code, which criminalises “carnal relations against the natural order” is based on the English Sodomy Law. The embedded notion – sex is for procreation only and that other sex is “unnatural” -is very much a Judeo-Christian idea which still hold sway in Bible Belt America (cf Pro Life) and in the pronouncements of the current Pope and in several sects of Islam (itself Judeo-Christian) but is not a feature of mainstream Buddhism or Hinduism. This idea held sway in the early applications of the law, but quickly gave way to India’s need to control its population.

Some in India claim that gays are a decadent western import. India's ladyboys walk on the wild side - now they can do so legally. Will it make a fundamental difference to how society views its others?

The Delhi High Court Decision to exempt mutually consenting adults from section 377 is a major shift which has been compared to the Roe vs Wade case in America, where women won the right to choose an abortion. At the same time the ruling has opened the debate as to whether the civil rights process itself is an aspect of Westernisation. Extremists even argue that somehow homosexuality, and by definition, tolerance, is alien and that civil rights for minorities is an invasive, exotic way of thinking.

Those radicals who argue against the corrupting aspects of western notions such as democracy avail themselves of the internet, that most democratic of outside influences, to illustrate and promulgate their views. The paradox is vividly apparent in the case of Iraq and Iran. While the web gives activists in India an opportunity to pool intellectual resources and raise their game to the point where they often make a fool of the government – see the varying quality of the 377 case documents, this version of events does little to explain the particular history of the laws being fought. This applies not just for gay rights and sexuality, but equally to Forest Law. These were drafted around the same time, but in this case importing the commercial interests of the British Raj, with the conservation of forests predicated on the need for massive Timber extraction. In 2006, in a similar way, this legal regime was challenged, and ownership rights of India’s “original people” were re-asserted after more than130 years.

It is sad that 60 years after Independence, these relics of British rule still remain, but it is also joyous to see that India has the resources and will to remake itself, and to do so with dignity. Both the Gay and Forest Rights campaigns focused around the notion of human dignity, something central to the Gandhian ideal and the wave of decolonisation it triggered. To call this a western ideal is to ignore the History of Others - others who were also capable of understanding the value of human life. These values, asserted in the Indian Constitution, are now taking precedence over a painful legal legacy. Thus these legal changes are signs not of the dominance of western values, but of a growing sense of inner confidence and self-ownership.

Watch Jeff Jarvis talking to a room full of Guardian Journalists. You will see a curious thing (in part 2). Here is a guy standing in supposedly the UK’s, if not the world’s, leading left-of-centre newspaper, talking about ‘flexibilising journalism in the new link economy.’  In plain English, he is advocating that journalists – including Guardian hacks – will have to work with absolutely no safety net, no pension, no social security, nothing in this newest world order. They all sit and nod sagely. This may be because it all seems so inevitable, a future which flows naturally from the nature of the technology. Does it have to be that way?

Four out of five countries with the most personal computers per-capita are small, with strong social safety nets. The fifth is the US, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, and the clear exception that proves the rule. Whilst America is built around what Isiah Berlin might call “negative liberty” that is freedom from constraint and interference (though not from health insurance companies it seems) most other civilised countries also put an emphasis on the sorts of positive freedoms that arise from the collective, or in other words the ways in which a supportive state makes it possible for its citizens to realise their potential. And this is not all about the bend-over-and-hold-your-cheeks politics of flexibility.

Turning to entrepreneurialism  - would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks)  will take care of you? This is precisely the kind of free-thinking and risk-taking that the internet is supposed to foster, but do we want innovation to derive from desperation, as in the India of Adiga’s White Tiger, or be nurtured by a confidence in the system? The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.

So should we expect technology, on its own, to make the world a better place - a web-2-opia? It is clear that the foundations of freedom are not manufactured by businesses, but created by well-run, uncorrupt states. Neither the UK nor the US, whose anglo-saxon definitions of freedom are singularly defined in economic terms, are notable examples. So the future of the web, like the future of religion, the future of finance and the future of the environment, is increasingly unlikely to conform to the American dream.

The electorate has returned  a centre-left government with an increased majority.  A government that is broadly seen as competent and relatively un-corrupt, at least for Indian politics. Manmohan Singh, the left-leaning economist returns to power again based on his economic track record. The comparison with the UK is telling. India’s left-wing politicians are actually allowed to say ‘no’ to some forms of deregulation.  However Delhi insiders say that India’s relatively unscathed passage through the latest economic storm was more due to inertia in the system than planning: they simply could not liberalise fast enough. This was then claimed as a victory when the winds changed. Whatever the case, India emerges from this election as a functioning democracy and economy.

Whilst the inertia of a huge Federal system sometimes prevents ideological excess becoming policy, it is also the greatest source of political frustration here. Poverty is still the bleeding sore of Indian politics, and economic development the great hope. Overcoming inertia has become a rallying cry to the developmentalist core of both the main political groupings, the Congress-led United People’s Alliance (UPA) and the Hindu Nationalist led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

On the NDA side, the disappointing performance by 81 year-old leader Lal Krishna Advani during this election has opened the way for the controversial governor of Gujurat, Narendra Modi, to move towards the top. He is alleged to have stood by as Muslims were massacered in Gujurat in 2002, and as an almost neo-fascistic figure. But under him Gujurat has grown at 10% a year, so he is also known as the guy who knows how to get things done in India.

This frustration at the inertia of Indian democracy is also seen in the ruling Congress camp. The serving home minister Chidambaram came out in the Indian press in 2006 to say that India was “willing to tolerate debate, and perhaps even dissent, as long as it does not come in the way of 8 per cent growth”. The rising star on the Congress side Rahul Gandhi, has taken issue with this approach. Chidambaram is known for having represented both Enron and Vedanta Resources in the Bombay High Court, both very controversial companies known for getting their way by legal means or otherwise. Chidambaram also served on Vedanta’s board of directors before landing a ministerial role. Rahul Gandhi came out publicly in opposition to Vedanta’s plans to mine the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa. He represents, with his qualification in Development Studies, a new pro-poor politics not exclusively centered in Industry, in contrast to the MBA-bearing Chidambaram.

This struggle will continue in Indian politics, with the need to include and protect the poor during liberalisation balanced against the basic need to get things done in a very complex and corrupt federal system. This will be a telling challenge, as Indian politicians will need to show that Democracy is a viable form of politics in the times ahead. If China uses its autocratic model to respond to calls to cut its carbon emmisions much more rapidly and effectively than India, how will that make democracy look? Given that China’s social statistics are so much better than India’s, the case for democracy would begin to wear thin – too much inertia may not be seen as a good thing, and the decisive authoritarians, like Modi, will perhaps more and more be seen as the way forward.

There are signs of hope in India, the Congress government was voted back in partly because its pro-poor policies have started to have some impact. The subsidies on food and fuel held during the 2008 price spike, and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has started to make inroads into rural misery, which has been on the rise since 1990 in India. The same congress government saw through the Right to Information Act. This act made uncovering corruption much easier, making it harder for big companies to cut corners (and thus throats) in their rush to get things done. So let’s hope that India comes up with the goods, and those that wish to protect the poor through the use of democratic means can prove that it works.

By Daniel Taghioff.

This development has brought on a wave of angst across the civilised world, as middle-class lefties realise they will have to brush up on their modes of production and dust off their anecdotes on ideology (See Thus Passim). But the thing is, none of this is difficult. So with no further fanfare, here it is:

The THUS potted guide to political economy:

Profit: If you have an unhealthily high rate of profit the money moves away from the poor to the rich. If you have a low rate of profit the rich get pissed off. 

Capitalist Crises: Too much of the former, you crush the poor – who then, incidentally, can’t buy stuff. Too much of the latter, a counter-revolution like Neo-liberalism.

An even briefer history of Neo-Liberalism: TheThatcher revolution and ’Reaganomics‘ both inspired by Milton Friedman (and Ayn Rand et al) led to redistribution of wealth, largely from the middle to the top and ‘light touch’ regulation in the financial markets. The stated objective was smaller government and an end to Keynesian supply-side economic dogma, but this didn’t happen. It all went horribly wrong (Thus passim).

Inequality: The poor got richer (in absolute terms) despite the robbery from above because there were more resources coming in from the environment.

The environment: A lack of natural resources makes inequality more of a problem (free summary), as you loose cheapo consumer goods as a way of buying off the poor, and as prices spike, especially for food… (Thus passim).

Productivity: Productivity gains or ‘advanced technology’ allegedly defeated Marxism, or rather the lumbering economic giant of Communism. But in reality, it actually dramatically increased natural resource usage. All that growth from the ‘white heat of technology’ can be accounted for as increased available energy in the economy,(Full text here) which nowadays means Big Oil.

Consumption: Productivity should really be measured in terms of goods per unit of natural resource. This is not going up anywhere near fast enough (look at page 20). To quote Monbiot (if you must- JK) “if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs.” Hence we are running out of stuff, like Oil, though there will be peak other things too, like available fresh water.

Revolution: So there will be a crunch (or several). Printing money will not buy us out of trouble if there isn’t stuff to buy (Thus passim). Developing countries, especially those with a a big exposure to food price rises such as India will not be able to hold onto democracy if basic natural resources totally deplete. Revolutions, on a small or large scale are imminent. We are in for some interesting decades (Thus Passim)…

Conclusion: This recession is a phoney war. Our kids won’t need to worry about levels of debt – which, by the way, are notional – a future dictatorship of the proletariat could abolish these by simply refusing to honour them (or just by printing money). Our kids (and their parents) need to worry about natural resources, because we can’t print more of them.

Foolish people have argued that there is a choice between preventing the worst effects of climate change and adapting to unavoidable changes, despite compelling evidence, such as that produced at the latest meeting at Copenhagen that the majority cannot survive without drastic emissions reductions and even if we do, adapting to a lot of changes. While there is a very lively debate on mitigation, on reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the debates on adaptation have been sidelined, perhaps becuase they are seen as distracting from the serious task of saving the world – or perhaps saving the relatively rich English-speakers having the debate. Most measures supposedly designed to reduce carbon in the air also tend to have a horrible impact on the poor. Bio-fuels, which would allow a kind of business-as-usual in terms of running car on liquid fuels, are a prime example – large scale cultivation will disrupt food production. Indeed, the World Bank claims that 75% of last year’s food price spike was down to this very factor.

Another example is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) designed to get developing countries involved in  Carbon Trading. These are mitigation measures, this money might help adaptation as well, but, under the current system, it won’t.  India’s Center for Science and Environment has been very critical of CDM, which lets the rich buy all the cheap ways of reducing their carbon outputs, forcing the rest to pay more for this later. In addition, the complex process of obtaining carbon credits means it is only really suitable for big companies. So the money won’t go to helping the poor adapt, but will go to the big companies, who do most of the polluting in the first place.

Aided and abetted by consultants from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, business lobbies have managed to get environmental impact assessment laws diluted in India. Bribery and political influence from big companies is so widespread that several activists have been forced to send industrial water pollution samples to the US to get them processed, because no Indian laboratory dares to return results that would upset big business. Are we seriously going to direct more resources at this lobby in the hope that this will reduce emissions? And how exactly will this help the poor to adapt?

Alternatives will need to be fought for. The recent Forest Rights Act has made its way through Indian Parliament and is now being put into practice. It sets an interesting precedent by putting into law a framework of rights to underpin local democratic control of natural resources. This highlights one of the few advantages the poor have in terms of winning real adaptation concessions. Despite the tiny character of their landholdings,  due to their sheer numbers, they command control of a sizeable proportion of the land.

If you combine the recent findings about climate change with likely emissions reductions paths, you see that we little chance of making it through this crisis without taking some of the carbon back out of the air. The global carbon cycle suggests two main ways of doing this: put it into the sea, by seeding the oceans for instance, but the technology is not developed yet. Alternativey, you can put it into the land, either through minerals like Olivine, or through biomass, and turning it into charcoal (Biochar). It has been correctly observed that using charcoal as a global commercialised solution to climate change has the same effect as bio-fuels on displacing food production. However, dismissing biochar out of hand misses an important strategic point.

Oxfam and others argue that Human Rights should be put at the heart of the climate debates, particularly adaptation. However, they are somewhat more coy in public about the fact that rights are generally never given freely by the powerful, but forced as concessions from them by the struggles of others. But what on earth do the rich need the poor for? One area is to get access to land. Tata’s troubles in building a plant to manufacture the new Nano car illustrates that the poor will not give up control of what little land they have so easily. If the rich need to use land for getting carbon out of the air, and if the poor can prevent the rich  from doing so by thwarting their plans, perhaps this gives them leverage to demand more rights over their natural resources.

Despite biochar being criticised as an unreliable way to improve soil quality, there have been studies that show that used correctly it can be a useful input into organic agriculture, as well as offering a credible method for sinking carbon into the soil, especially when considered as a part of strategies to increase tree-cover overall. Can we afford to dismiss Biochar as an option because we fear the implications of its commercialisation? As a potential low cost-technology that the poor could implement to improve their land, and a possible source of some leverage on the rich in adaptation negotiations, it may be rash to dismiss it out of hand. With only $1Bn of the already pitiful $18Bn of adaptation funding having been paid out, current approaches to mobilising those resources are clearly not working. Can we afford to overlook the potential advantage the poor may have in the one resource they may control?

If the Indian Forest Rights model can be extended to support dryland organic agricultural practices within a democratised natural resource management framework, this actually creates a model where subsidy for mitigation, in the form of support of increased tree coverage and use of biochar might be used to build productive assets for the poor that may help them adapt. The experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India shows that productive use of subsidy is crucial to prevent the subsidy from undercutting the existing local economy, especially agriculture. Thus the issue of having a rights regime to protect access to the environment and thus local economic activity is crucial to any adaptation approach. There is almost no chance of realising such regimes unless the poor have some real leverage to exercise in order to get them.

 Anyone see any other leverage out there?

When the Food and Agricultural Organisation says that another 40 million were pushed into hunger in 2008, what images spring into your mind? Is it possible to imagine that many people starving? Well imagine it or not, we had better get used to it. Because the other thing that the FAO announced was that to bring the truly mind-boggling 973 million people who are starving now into the land of plenty, we need to double food production by 2050. Quite a challenge, bearing in mind we also have to totally rejig our energy systems in the meantime.

Global food markets are effectively trade in water. Tony Allen coined the phrase “Virtual Water” to point out that water mainly travels around inside other things. And these other things are mostly food: a tonne of which takes 1000 tonnes of water to make. Another thing the food trade uses a lot of is oil. We are talking (in 1974) a calorie of oil to grow a calorie of food, and then you have to ship it. And even though a thousand times lighter than the water it embodies, food is still bulky. Think about the heaviest things that regularly come in and out of your house. It is lugging food shopping in and waste out that breaks up our sedentary lifestyles.

All that bulk gets moved around, a sample shopping basket of 26 imported organic items having travelled a total of 150,000 miles, or six times around the Earth. The US food system alone uses  as much energy as France and 80% of this is used outside the farm in transport and processing. This huge oil-driven industry is a way of redistributing water across the globe, albeit guided by purchasing power. The dry parts of the world rely on the food trade to a very great extent, and as it gets harder to grow food in the tropics under climate change, this dependency is likely to increase.

The IEA now forecasts that the production of conventional oils is likely to peak around 2020. That’s only 12 years away, and is likely to drive the price of energy up sharply across the board, as people try and substitute on type of fuel for another. This is bound to affect the food trade, partly because of the oil that goes into food,  but also because it makes it ever more tempting to use land for growing fuel.  The food price rises in 2008 were 75% caused by the increased demand from bio-fuels. It all adds up. The extra 40 million hungry in 2008 was with an oil price peaking around $100 a barrel. But the coming oil peak, dubbed “The last oil shock”, could raise the price to $300 a barrel. So this international trade in food (AKA water) is likely to get a lot more expensive. We could be seeing a lot of inflation (Thus Passim).

Countries will find it increasingly expensive to buy in the food they need. This will mean an increasing need, in the tropics especially, for countries to rely on the water they have in order to grow food. If you combine this with population growth in places like India, you get a worrying picture of massively declining amounts of water available per person even as you need more of it.

As if this were not enough to put you off your muesli, take a look at industrialisation. The US uses as much water for industry as it does for agriculture, and the EU uses twice as much. These are both areas with tight environmental regulations, particularly in relation to water pollution: This was the original cause celebre of the environmental movement, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” And let’s not forget Erin Brokovich.

In many tropical countries there is not much water to spare. In India 80-90% of the water demand is already from agriculture. Whilst there are a lot of good environmental laws on the books, the enforcement is weak, what with all the corruption. In 2006, pushed on by the World Trade Organisation, the Indian government rushed through 2 new laws. The first allowed major sections of Industry to self-certify their environmental impacts, which is a bit like asking them nicely for a confession, pretty please . The other was a directive that all natural resources should be exploited to the maximum benefit of “the people”. How the people will get a slice of the profits is not made clear.

This all seems a bit schizophrenic, because the same government is so concerned about water shortage that it is proposing the largest development project in the history of humanity. This is a 1 billion US$ proposal to link all of India’s rivers together.  The joke being that without enforced environmental regulations, this is likely to turn into a national pollution network. So what to do? Buy food from abroad? Fat chance.

Well one thing is to get the existing environmental regulations enforced. This is a global problem, as the food-oil-water link indicates, so a global treaty about the enforcement of environmental regulations in international trade looks ever more urgent. Otherwise international organisations will keep on lobbying to weaken the laws that protect the increasingly scarce water in the tropics.

The other way is from the ground up. There are plenty of traditional crops in Asia and Africa that have been displaced by markets for “modern” “luxury” food. Millets and Ragi in India have suffered this fate, replaced by water-guzzling rice paddy. Promoting these crops, which can get by on 5 times less water than wheat, is one way towards food security. Another is to reduce oil dependence in food production, especially in poor countries like India, where farmers already face huge problems with debt.

However, until international policy-makers wake up to these issues, and moderate the market fundamentalism that got us into our current mess, these types of solution are likely to remain drops in the ocean. Doing things mainly by markets and purchasing power means it is cheaper to let the poor starve. So don’t you know, we’re talking about a revolution.

The only way out is to win a quiz show

Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Golden-Globe-harvesting film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A) illustrate a “Shining India” that has long shown up in the statistics of those critical of the Globo-glorifiers. It bears repeating (Thus Passim) that 70-80% of India’s population cannot afford to feed themselves to international minimums, that is 2400 calories of cheap stodge per day, assuming they spend on nothing else.

Yet in the UK we continue to talk about “the poor” as if they live on council estates, and as if all they need is the chance to show how bright they are in order to climb up into our middle class paradise. Meritocracy may imply that the less intelligent ones should stay where they are, but what if they were dulled by malnutrition? The world is not made up of a series of Westminster villages, but being good nationalists, the policy makers and pundits seem reluctant to acknowledge this.

The implication of this is that national governments tend to live in a room full of mirrors, where all that they see is themselves, especially in rich OECD countries. Almost everyone uses the poor to justify their policies and positions in these compassionate days of media-conveyed suffering, yet our policy and political debates do not at all reflect their circumstances. This is a flaw of the Left as well as the Right. The legacy of Marx and the Union movement is that we see emancipation of the poor in terms of workplace rights, yet only around 8% of people in India have formal employment contracts, so this is mostly irrelevant and this is probably the case in most poor countries.

If people cannot feed themselves in the cash economy, as the numbers show, then they have to be feeding themselves in the non-cash economy. How can this be so? Where does food come from if not from shops? That’s because the poor are in the environment. Either an urban one, scavenging the remains and polishing the shoes of those visible to us, or a rural one, growing or gathering food under unpredictable conditions. But since policymaking is largely about economics, and economics largely about the cash economy, and the cash economy about people with purchasing power, and not the environment or the poor, these humans (of whom there are rather a lot) remain largely invisible. But what is the problem with them, and their environment, remaining invisible to policy makers, particularly in the rich world?

It gives us a totally misleading sense of the future. Economists, particularly historically oriented ones, write as if it is the swing of a pendulum that determines economic history.  Presumably this means that after this latest desperate burst of neo-Keynesianism we will turn back to more liberal and less risk-averse approaches once times are good again. But that invisible thing, the environment, is changing, and it will impact on all of us, but mainly on those other invisible things, the poor, so that our whole perception of risk, and thus how to organise ourselves, will have to change. We are not going back to a nice cosey stable world with seemingly unlimited natural resources, and we are not replaying the Industrial Revolution in countries like India, even if our policy makers have been Oxbridge-raised on a diet of social thinkers from the steam-engine age. We can talk about public spending as a way of stabilising things until we are blue in the face, but how do we propose to get money to those really at risk under our undoubtedly changing circumstances?

Via NGOs? Well they are not coping well with spending the fraction of the 0.7% of GDP put to aid budgets efficiently. Via business? Well their track record of behaving well in the absence of strong regulation is not so good. Via governments in poor countries? To quote Aravind Adiga’s lead character in White Tiger, “what a fucking joke.” Survival of the fittest in a world where pro-poor leaders in the poor world, particularly those that interfere with rich world access to natural resources tended to “dissappear” has left a legacy of governance that does not exactly channel funds to the needy as a first priority.

We can perhaps hope that our rich world “Social Mobility” thesis works in poor countries, and the poor can suddenly help themselves. Sadly the post-industrial boom in India seems not to be creating lots of jobs, so the whole 1950′s rich world idea of mechanising agriculture and shunting people into the cities is creating shanti towns rather than a lovely unionised industrial base. Also, it takes rather a lot of planets, at current levels of inequality, to lift the poor out this way.

So we have a big problem that our current policy debates are simply not up to addressing. We don’t know how to think about the dependency of the poor on the environment, or how to support them in the face of environmental change or indeed how, in short, to stabilise the world through the coming times of trouble (Thus Passim). There is the  Keynsian idea of a “Green New Deal”, but this is not a cyclical issue we are facing, actually the problems are likely to grow gradually but inexorably over time, so a short-term spending strategy won’t do it (though long-term rural employment guarantees may help a bit, even if dogged by corruption).  Maybe we in the rich world should look to the artists for answers, because right now, it looks like our wonks are all out of ideas.

Leicester is now officially one of the most diverse towns in the UK, forecast to be the first to have a majority non-white population by 2011. Good news for everyone, argues John Keyes.

My memories of being brought up in Leicester are in most ways fairly typical of anybody of my age and class. Regiments of small terraced, red brick, houses and back street schools, the market in the centre, the Clock Tower and flat midlands accents – not Brummie, not Southern, on the cusp of becoming the North. A place that hosted a welter of the industries Britain had when we made stuff that other people wanted, and bought; shoes, hosiery, light engineering that kind of article. Leicester was not immune from market shifts but diverse enough, in the round, to ride out a lot downturns. The world might decide it didn’t want to buy many ships this year but the demand for socks remained fairly constant. It’s not the stuff of songs and I suppose Leicester is, at heart, a prosaic sort of spot (who sings songs about factories making underpants?) – but it was functional. A place where you could rely on work for you and yours, where houses were relatively cheap and you could build a life. Just the kind of place that would attract immigrants.

The author, in ethnic Irish First Communion garb, outside Sacred Heart Madrassa, 1962

Attract immigrants it did – including my Irish Mum and Dad. Rural Ireland in the fifties had little to offer the working classes – another in the succession of Irish generations “reared for the boat”. The message was simple – “There’s nothing here for you -  go and do someone else’s heavy, dirty, work and maybe you’ll have a better life. You’ll at least have money to send home” (Ireland was always home). We ended up in Leicester rather than Liverpool, where my parents first lived, because of coal seams. My Dad was a miner, not out of choice but the lack of it – (there was an all round shortage of choice in the late 1940s). He ended up down the pit, firstly in Lancashire, and then North West Leicester. The latter he chose because the coal seams were bigger and if you had to be down a hole in the ground you might as well be able to stand up. He also told me that he was astounded in Leicester to find workingmen with bank accounts and some who even owned cars – an impossible dream.

When we got a house my mother took in lodgers (always Irish) and cleaning jobs. She told me she was glad when West Indians and Asians started arriving in numbers because it took the heat off the Irish.

Though I was born and reared in Leicester, we were immigrants, and we behaved accordingly. Clustered in the worst available housing, the Irish congregated at, and around, the church, the school, the pub and the club, where work and relationships were built and maintained. Some Irish pubs (and these were a long way from the “Shifty O’Shaughnessy’s” type of 1990s branded outlet) acted for decades as recruitment centres for the building trade.  New immigrants came to a brother, sister, friend or cousin’s for a roof over their heads and a “start”…. a job to go to…. and the numbers grew. We went to Catholic schools; overseen by an (Irish) parish priest.

Even more embarrassingly fundamentalist picture of J.Kelly (centre) in altar boy dress, 1962

Immigrants carry a direct memory of, and a longing for, home and they pass this on to their children – but the Irish are a sentimental people and sentiment does not sit easily  with reality. The emigrants left Ireland to escape poverty, small time repression, religiosity and even minor criminal convictions – but the Ireland they left became transformed in the leaving. A place of romantic tales, foolhardy bravery, tyrant landlords, casual cruelty born by the innocent, of laments of lost love – all catalogued in song. Leicester might have been a place of quiet prosaic industry but in the middle of it the Irish congregated and drank, and sang, and courted and married with their own. 

The Kellys, Costelloes, Murphys and Maddens are gone from my old school – Irish names and faces replaced by African, Goan and East Europeans – but the church continues as ever,  baptising, confirming and marrying the new arrivals – and now burying the Irish dead of the immigrant generations. I felt a strange and (thankfully) fleeting proprietorial twinge at the cast changes in the parish play. But it passed. We had our turn and it’s their go now.    

The traditional city centre Saturday market offered heaps of domestic and exotic fruit and vegetables at a price and quality that would have silenced an epicure. A poor man could comfortably survive on guacamole – eight avocados for a quid – or bags of tomatoes, peppers okra, aubergine or sweet potato, not to mention potatoes and cabbage for the Irish – at supermarket-beating prices. The adjacent meat and fish market catered for all tastes, and faiths – again on a pauper’s budget. The costermongers and traders (of all ethnicities) sang their wares in a style unchanged from Dickens, and the more entertaining for that.Leicester market has a use beyond commerce – it forces people to mingle. The direct person-to-person interchange, I suspect, does more for harmony and tolerance than any Council-sponsored “meet your new neighbours” shindig, and certainly beats the sullen, solitary wheelie-trudge of the superstore.

Conclusive proof that Indians have taken over Leicester

In a multicultural vignette, a crowd of East Asian, Africans and West Indians and native Caucasians, some in the traditional dress of Pound Shop Santa hats, stood around watching a group of chanting and dancing Native American (buskers) in full costume. We waited for the dance-off between the Cherokees and the Bhangra lads but it didn’t happen. As dusk fell, we visited one of the most dangerous Irish pubs of our youth – now a Jazz venue with a wooden (laminated?) floor. A couple of pints of Guinness later we made the traditional visit to an Indian (Pakistani) restaurant and the ”all you can eat’ buffet. No alcohol was available – possibly why we were the only non-Asians – but we took tea and faced up to the ‘all you can eat’ challenge of the buffet in an traditional Irish fashion, all for a tenner a head. The staff of this family-run cafe – big lads with beards – were amiable, helpful and non-intrusive. There was one other notice: “Please do no waste food.” Good advice, good business and a religious requirement all in one. 

Leicester is now officially one of the most diverse towns in the UK, forecast to be the first to have a majority non-white population by 2011. “Already 50 per cent of school children of five years age are non-white, and by 2011 we are talking of a non-white majority,”according to Paul Winstone, Race Relations policy officer of the Leicester City Council. Nowhere has this happened peacefully, and we are proud of what we have achieved in Leicester over the last 30 years. We dont want anybody to see this as a threat to the English way of life, since the majority will consist of several minorities,” he said. “Leicester is now a permanently multi-cultural society. Today the Asians have political power, economic power and cultural discipline. The sky is the limit for them.” 

From what i saw I’d agree, but the race issue polarises like no other, ranging from A: “they’re savages who eat their own children and will one day murder us in our beds” to Z “delightful, civilized, people – much better than drunken, violent, lazy chavs.” Leicester has hosted large scale immigration for a long time. I don’t live there, and plenty who do are vocal on the subject, but what I observed, and was reassured by, was that the foundations of the place appear sturdy and unshifted by the influx. I’d say good luck to them, in the spirit of my immigrant forebears, and ‘get a life’ to those who don’t like diversity.

By John Keyes.

A surefire sign that something's wrong

India and China sit on an awful lot of coal, and there is a heated debate going on amongst agonized environmentalists that Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors might be necessary to avoid it all going up in smoke. Carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon as it leaves the chimney and then storing it underground-  sounds like a good idea, but it is a long way from being commercially viable, and there is not a lot of time left. The Greenpeace energy plan for India avoids coal and nuclear, but leans on “biomass.” This means plants mainly, and it raises the same problems as bio-fuels, namely that it becomes more economic to power machines than feed poor people.

One thing that has become clear with the recent nuclear deal is that the chances of the US stopping India from further developing its military nuclear capability are next to zero. So in this version of events, the risk of nuclear proliferation is a sad side-effect of what has to be done to stop us from cooking ourselves more slowly.  However, in another version of the story, proliferation is the main event. It involves a dark place, deep underground, where a small yellow bird sits in a cage.

Before the invention of the Davy lamp, canaries were used by miners because they are sensitive to gas. When they died, the miners knew they had to get out. Today’s canaries are the poor, such as subsistence farmers. When they start to perish in accelerating numbers, we know that there is a calamity upon its way. This makes the recent slew of farmer suicides in India a bit worrying. Actually a country with 80 odd percent of its people at or below starvation incomes – the 27% poverty figure you see for India is based on snide statistics –  can only really be described as a Canary state. India uses 90% of its freshwater for irrigation, and looks set to get drier. Tweet, tweet.

Canaries are useless if you don’t pay attention when they start expiring. Indeed, if recent trade rounds are anything to go by, the rich world seems unconcerned about the fate of Indian farmers under climate change. But here’s the twist. The US has just given India what looks like a license to power up their nukes.  So India is now unlikely to go out with just a chirrup. It also has nuclear-enabled neighbours, China and Pakistan, who are not going to sit on their hands as India tools up. So we have probably got the best part of Asia cooking up a nuclear storm.

Forget Africa, with its huge land area and tiny population (ten times the area and 200 million less population than India alone.) The subsistence farmers in Africa are not hugely dependent on chemical inputs, and thus on Oil prices as in Asia, and they have a lot more space to move around in, with a huge North-South gradient to traverse in search of the weather they need. No, it is Asia with its incredible population densities supported by mechanised agriculture that will feel the pinch between Climate Change and Peak Oil. And that is where America has been is tending its nuclear flower bed.

So things are bound to change a bit: Rather than valuing the Canaries based on their “willingness to pay” for their lives (THUS passim), we have to start thinking about what happens to their nuclear-armed governments if they show a strong willingness to riot. Ironically, this means that George “W” is an accidental hero. Having upped the ante, the world now needs to work hard to ensure that India is not forced into a situation where food riots lead to catastrophic nuclear proliferation, enabled by the US. In the words of another great American, Forrest Gump, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”