Imagine this scenario.
You’re a farmer in a country, let’s call
it, oh, just let’s say it’s called India.
You don’t have much of a farm. In your
grandfather’s time it might have been quite large, and fertile, and the rains
irrigated it plentifully every summer so that his crops never died of thirst. Even
if there was a year or two when the monsoon rains failed, there was a tube well
and more than enough groundwater to ensure that the harvest wasn’t a failure.
And whatever your grandfather produced, the government guaranteed that it would
buy it at a certain price, known as the minimum support price, so
he knew that even if he couldn’t sell it at a bigger profit in the open market,
he could still depend on a certain guaranteed level of income, just so long as
his crops continued to grow.
But that was then.
Things happened. First, with increasing
health care standards, no matter how imperfect, more of your grandfather’s
offspring lived to adulthood than in his father’s time. So your grandfather’s
farm was divided among your father and uncles. And, in time, your father married
and bred, and more of your siblings survived to adulthood than in your
father’s generation, which meant that his share of the farm was divided again
between you and your brothers. So, you ended up with only a tiny fraction of
your grandfather’s farm.
Meanwhile, other people have been breeding
too, and their children, too, have been surviving to adulthood in hitherto
unprecedented numbers. So, to house them and to supply food for them, and to
rip coal and oil and minerals out of the ground for them, forests have been
chopped down; and to supply the thirsty cities with water, rivers have been
dammed and their water piped to said cities. Chimneys have been spouting smoke
from factories, because the government has decided that unchecked
industrialisation is the only path to “growth” – and also because the
corporations owning those industries are important sources of funds for
elections and to buy up politicians afterwards. All this has done enough damage
to the climate that the rain has grown increasingly erratic and unreliable, so
that you’ve had to rely more and more on your tube well to irrigate your patch
of field. The groundwater level, in consequence, has been falling, and falling,
and you’ve had to borrow money to dig your tube well deeper and deeper – and still
the water continues to fall.
All this while, your own expenditures are
climbing. Things are more expensive. Your tiny patch of field doesn’t bring in
enough to pay the bills unless you begin to plant multiple crops a year. This
is turn exhausts your soil, leaching out the fertility, which earlier used to
be renewed because your grandfather could afford to leave it fallow between
planting seasons. So you have to buy huge amounts of fertiliser as well as farm
machinery, because the old ways are no longer productive enough. Pests invade
your field, and the pesticide you used to use no longer work because the pests
have developed resistance. So you have to buy more expensive pesticides.
Because the pesticide, fertiliser, and farm machinery are not free, you have to
borrow money to buy them, so you slip into debt.
Then the government decides on “economic
liberalisation”, which means that it starts systematically pandering to the
corporations that provide it with money. Suddenly, your minimum support price is
no longer paid on time, or is simply abolished altogether. You can’t pay your
loans back to the banks from where you took them. They threaten to foreclose on
your land. So, in order to pay them off, you borrow again, this time from the
village moneylender. And then an unseasonal storm, which happens more and more
frequently, comes along and kills off your entire harvest.
You think you have problems? Your problems
are just beginning.
Because there isn’t anything like enough
money coming in from your farm to pay your bills and even the interest on your
loans, in between plantings and harvests you need some other income. So you look
for work, as a labourer or whatever else you can manage. Work isn’t available
in the vicinity, so you have to travel long distances, often to the other side
of the country – and it’s a big country – to look for work. In a
desperate attempt to make ends meet, you hire yourself out as a labourer for
some months, rush back home, harvest and plant, try and sell on the market, try
to keep your head above water, and then rush off to work as a labourer again.
Meanwhile the cost of machinery and
fertiliser keeps increasing, the groundwater levels keep dropping, your debts
keep piling up, some foreign company called Monsanto cajoles and bribes the
government to compel you to buy seeds from it – seeds that cease to grow after
one season, so every year you need to buy seed stock from Monsanto again,
instead of using leftover seed from the previous year to plant again. And it
begins to rain when it shouldn’t, drowning your crops, and it’s bone dry when
it should be raining, so that what you have left withers to straw poking
through cracked brick-hard soil. And the government, which you voted for, doesn’t
care. It wants to grab your fields to hand over to its capitalist cronies for
factory farms or just factories, and the worse things get for you, the better said
capitalist cronies like it.
You see where we’re going with this?
Then, just when you think things couldn’t
get worse, they do.
You’re in the city, working at a temporary
job as a construction worker, and you need to come back to your tiny farm
because the harvest is due. But just as you’re about to, suddenly the
government imposes a curfew because of some foreign disease that is supposedly
killing people left and right. Your employer dismisses you and doesn’t even
give you your back pay, on the grounds that he has no money. You can’t even
step out into the street without being beaten by the police, even to buy food;
and, if you do manage to sneak out of the city, you don’t have any way of
getting home. There are no buses, no matter what the politicians claim, no
trains, nothing. So, with no other option, you begin walking home along the
highways, under the grilling midsummer sun, while the government spends
taxpayer money to bring in rich Indians who abandoned the country for greener
pastures abroad and suddenly find themselves unwelcome in their new homelands.
Meanwhile, your brother, who’s stayed back
on the farm, has his own problems. The harvest can’t be sold because the
markets and distribution systems are all shut because of the government’s
lockdown. There are no preservation or storage facilities, so the produce can’t
even be kept relatively fresh, and, even if there were, he couldn’t afford the
fees. So what option does he have except to dump the stuff in the fields to rot
in the sun?
None.
It isn’t the worst yet, oh, no.
While all this was going on, the climate
worldwide has been going to hell, too. Forests have been disappearing, fossil
fuels have been filling the skies with smoke and carbon dioxide, ice caps have
been melting, the ocean currents have been changing as a consequence, and scientifically
illiterate imbeciles have been pretending all of this is a hoax. Evaporation from
oceans that are warmer than they used to be has warmed the air above and filled
it with moisture. The warm air, rising, has drawn in colder air from around it
to warm in turn, pick up moisture, rise, and bring in yet more colder air,
until you have a gigantic vortex of rotating cloud and wind, spiralling towards
land, bringing not just destruction but heavy rain wherever it goes. This thing
is known as a cyclone.
This cyclone hits, shall we say, another –
possibly fictional – country called Saudi Barbaria, which is mostly desert. It
dumps so much rain that actual, literal lakes develop in the desert. This
sudden moisture causes an equally sudden proliferation of vegetation. And,
before the sun has an opportunity to parch this vegetation to mummified hay,
yet another cyclone comes along and dumps another few thousand tons of water on
the desert, creating even more greenery.
Great, right? Green is good, right?
Wrong.
There are animals living in that desert,
notably insects, those most adaptable of all creatures. One of those insects is
a, usually inconspicuous, middle-sized short-horned grasshopper called Schistocerca
gregaria. This is a rather well-known insect; it’s been featured in no less
than the Bible and the Koran, and you may even have heard of it under its
common name.
Schistocerca gregaria is also known as the desert locust.
Locusts are grasshoppers. Grasshoppers eat
vegetable matter. When there is a lot of vegetable matter, the grasshoppers lay
a lot of eggs, which hatch to form many more grasshoppers, which live to grow
to adulthood because of all that easily available vegetable matter, and lay
more eggs, which give birth to more grasshoppers, which...
You get the idea.
And then there are so many grasshoppers
that they begin to eat all the vegetation. And the cyclones don’t keep coming,
so the lakes dry up, as the desert returns to its usual state, and the greenery,
without water, begins to die off. So the grasshoppers crowd together to get at
whatever little vegetation remains, because they don’t want to starve to death
any more than you do. And when they get packed in tightly enough together, they
bump against each other, just as you would in those crowded unreserved railway
compartments in which you’d travel back to your hometown from your construction
job in the city.
Now, unlike ordinary grasshoppers, locusts –
there are many species, all of which are short-horned (that is, with short
antennae) grasshoppers – do a special thing when there are a lot of them in such
close proximity that their hind legs bump each other. Their biochemistry changes, with increased production of the hormone seratonin. Their bodies
change colour, in the case of Schistocerca gregaria to yellowish pink
and black.
Their habits change – normally night-flyers, they now switch to
flying during the day, and instead of maintaining distance from each other,
they now actually seek out each other’s company. This is known as the
gregarious or migratory phase. Soon, the massive agglomeration of these insects
takes off in search of new food deposits to devour.
And, because of that global warming, there
have been unseasonal rains here and there, so the locust swarms have plenty of
food. They land, eat, have sex, lay eggs, and, with their ranks swollen by the
new generations, set off again on their mission of conquest, flying up to a
hundred and fifty kilometres a day. Oh, and they can cross oceans too, because
when they get tired, they rest on the floating corpses of their friends who
died of old age or exhaustion and float, bobbing on the waves.
Now these locusts have been migrating east
and west for two years, devastating countries with names like “Ethiopia” and “Somalia”,
“Yemen” and “Kenya”, which you’ve never heard of. But the government, with its overeducated
bureaucrats, has most certainly heard of them. It is aware that two
neighbouring countries, let’s call them, for fun, “Iran” and “Pakistan” have
been hit hard in recent times. Just the previous year, in fact, Pakistan had
some 40% of its crops eaten by locusts, which isn’t a small amount. In fact, a
one square kilometre swarm of locusts – which is an extremely small swarm
– can eat, in one day, as much food as would be needed to feed, wait for it,
35000 people. Locust swarms can extend over hundreds to thousands of square
kilometres.
In reality, locusts are such a menace, and
have been such a menace through history, that the United Nations’ Food And
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) monitors them closely and warns governments when
their countries are about to be attacked. Your own government – the same one
that has stopped paying your minimum support price and is having you beaten up
for coming out in the streets – knows that the locusts invaded the country
last year, but did nothing, claiming that the insect swarm had receded without
doing any crop damage.
Well, right now, those swarms are back.
They’re back earlier than ever, in greater numbers than ever, and they’re
eating their way across the west of the country. In fact they’ve been doing it
for some time, but that same government and its tame media, which ignored your
existence as long as possible, ignored the swarms too, until they blanketed the
city of Jaipur, known for its pink sandstone construction, in a pink blanket of
hungry insects. Then, suddenly, the media deigned to notice it. Because it had
no choice.
So, to recapitulate.
The agriculture sector had already been devastated
by shrinking farms, dropping groundwater levels, irregular and unpredictable
rainfall, and cyclones, The government has taken a policy decision to let small
farmers die, literally and metaphorically, by neglect so that the farming
sector can be taken over by corporate cronies to set up factory farms and car
manufacturing plants. Farmers are drowning in unpayable debt that keeps piling
up as their land becomes agriculturally unsustainable. And then you’re walking
the highways starving after being thrown out of your job without pay, the
economy has packed it in, what of the harvest was collected is unsaleable and
had to be thrown out to rot, and now a plague of ravening pinkish grasshoppers
is eating every bit of vegetation in sight.
Right. Not only was much of this – in fact every
bit of it except the COVID-19 outbreak – totally predictable, none of it
just turned up overnight. All of this has been developing over years to
decades, and the successive, post-1990, governments of India not just ignored
it, they actively connived and encouraged most of the worst of it. They, and
their paid media prostitutes, actively promoted the idea that the manufacturing
industry was the only way to economic “progress”, and, to do this, the farm
sector would have to be sacrificed. I remember asking multiple times on
internet fora over the years whether people would be expected to eat cars and
television sets, and being downvoted en masse every time.
But people cannot eat
cars and television sets, and with the economy sliding downhill into the nether
doldrums, there is no longer any market for cars and televisions; the vehicle
industry has been moribund for well over a year. And the farm sector isn’t
doing exactly well for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, so that, for the
first time in thirty years, the level of average nutrition is actually dropping
in India. And the Modi regime has systematically ignored all of this, including
the gigantic locust plague which has been moving towards India for over two
years now.
And by gigantic, I mean that this is the
largest plague in 78 years. It’s also much more dangerous than any plague of
comparable size 78 years ago. Why? For the simple reason that the population of
the planet is much, much higher than 78 years ago, and vulnerable areas – east Africa
and west and south Asia – are infinitely more stressed than they were 78 years
ago. Not to speak of the fact that global warming causes more and more of the flood-drought cycle that promotes swarming, and that two of the worst affected countries, North
and South Yemen (I do not consider them to be one country any longer, as a
supporter of the now fait accompli South Yemeni independence), have been under
invasion and a starvation blockade by Saudi Barbaria and the Imperialist States
of Amerikastan since 2015.
Therefore, the chances of famine are extremely
high, and, since the Modi regime has shown absolutely no signs of changing its
policies, have been growing higher and higher. And now the locust swarm, which
is spreading steadily eastward and northward towards the agricultural heart of
India, is in the act of delivering the coup de grace.
I have noticed that the Modi regime’s pet
media, after a couple of days of finally admitting the existence of the
locusts, have suddenly made a point of repeatedly mentioning that the locusts “entered
from Pakistan”. I assume that this is not accidental; nothing the Modi regime’s
media does is innocent, accidental, or without the acquiescence of the regime.
I can only speculate that if the regime fails to halt the locusts through the
measures it is now allegedly taking – spraying pesticides from drones – it will
move on to accusing Pakistan of deliberately sending the hordes of Schistocerca
gregaria over the border to harm India. This would be on a par with the
Trump regime in the Imperialist States of Amerikastan accusing China of
creating COVID-19, a claim parroted by paid CIA agents on Indian social media.
Speaking of which, the Modi regime – in a
desperate and transparent attempt to divert attention from its endless failures
– is trying to provoke a border confrontation with China. Except for the
fantasy world of Modi’s pet television channels, Republic and Times Now, this
is going over like a lead balloon.
Starving people have more immediate
concerns than that.
Anyway, if and when the Modi regime decides
to blame Pakistan for the locusts, I’ll make it easy on them and give them
proof. Here’s your Jihadi Locust, Jihadocerca pakistaneria.
You’re welcome.
