PROTESTS ONE: INDIA

The Indian farmers’ strikes have been going on long enough now (three weeks) that Western media is starting to notice it. The very online left has been complaining that corporate media has been ignoring the strikes because they’re an enormous labour action; realistically, though, they’ve been ignoring the strikes because Western media mostly ignores what’s happening outside the white first world ninety percent of the time unless it’s something super-dramatic like a hurricane.

Honestly, it’s getting traction now mostly because our media does pay attention to domestic agricultural issues to a certain extent, and the Indian strikes have been going on long enough that they’re starting to threaten to impact worldwide agricultural yields, because India grows a lot of stuff. I’ve discussed this before, but: a supermajority of the world’s spice production, forty percent of its cotton, biggest producer of milk, second-biggest of rice, wheat, fruits and vegetables. More than half of the people in India work as farmers, so if you’ve gotten the farmers mad in India you have probably done something they really, really don’t like.

What the Modi government has done is something a lot of other countries have done, either wholly or partly: they’ve eliminated the requirement for farmers to sell to their state agricultural market committees. Up until earlier this year, if you farmed in India, many different types of crops could only be sold to these committees, who would then sell to industrial buyers (supermarkets, exporters, wholesalers, et cetera) at auction. The committee guaranteed price minimums for purchasing these crops and price caps for the auctions, which ensured stability - particularly for the farmers, who knew that if they farmed an acre of ginger (for example), they would get at least a livable minimum amount of rupees for that ginger from the committee.

This sort of government agency is not entirely uncommon around the world. Canada’s dairy and poultry farms still use a similar framework (which we call “supply management” but the general principles remain the same), and used to do the same for wheat and barley. Ghana does it for cocoa; New Zealand does it for beef (and used to do it for dairy); the UK does it for wool. There are quite a few other examples remaining, but the general trend - particularly over the last thirty years - has been the gradual removal of these boards or their privatization, because they do tend to be anathema to the free market philosophies of most conservatives and quite a few liberals.

Being able to end-run around the committees, the Indian farmers fear, will drive down food prices (as big companies can drive down prices by becoming mass buyers) and make it harder to earn a living from farming. (The average Indian farmer earns about the equivalent of $180 CAD from farming, so it wasn’t a fantastic living to begin with.) This tends to be accurate from experience: eliminating nation-state middlemen purchasing agencies absolutely drives down food prices, and certainly can harm whole farming industries if proper care isn’t taken. (Australia ended their supply management schemes for dairy and eggs in the 1980s; since then, the dairy industry has shrunk in terms of numbers of farms, numbers of profitable farms and overall milk production.)

Hence, the farmers are protesting and striking. Quite a bit. And the rest of the world is starting to notice, in particular because a lot of those spices India produces aren’t produced in similarly large mass quantities anywhere else, and we do get picky when our supply chains are disrupted. I mean, Canadians get pissy when people block a road. How pissy will they get if turmeric doubles in price because the turmeric farmers in India are all on strike and Indonesia’s crop suddenly has to make do for the entire world? (Or ginger. Or cumin. Or coriander. Half of the stuff that makes everything delicious is mostly here because of India.)

PROTESTS TWO: FRANCE

Speaking of protests, France is protesting once again, because the French are nothing if not willing to march on a moment’s notice if they think the government is doing something wrong. This is one of the more admirable French traits, along with “making really good bread” and “not giving a shit about tourists if the tourists aren’t polite and make an effort to at least try to speak French.”

Right now it’s the protests against the draft “radical Islamization” laws currently making their way through the French Parliament, which are themselves a reaction to the various terror attacks in France of September and October, and particularly the multiple stabbings in Nice on October 29. This is not to say that those attacks weren’t heinous - they were. But the laws are a massive overreach - installing tighter surveillance and financial controls on mosques and imams, limiting homeschooling, strengthening online hate speech laws to allow imprisonment for “intimidating public servants on religious grounds,” banning several Islamic protest groups, et cetera.

A lot of this law is obviously reaction to the numerous terror attacks France has suffered over the past five years (more than anywhere else in the developed world). A lot of it is because Emmanuel Macron’s government has definitely floundered over the past few years on numerous fronts, and he’s tacking right to try to take some of the sails out of the eventual challenge from Marine Le Pen and her racist right-wing National Rally party. And a lot of it is just stupid. (Surveilling mosques and imams, for example, is kind of a waste of time - Islamist terrorists these days all get radicalized online in forums and chatrooms, the same way neo-Nazis and QAnon cultists do.)

The protests have already forced the government to make some concessions - for example, a part of the proposed laws was to ban the filming of police officers doing their duties (because what if scary Muslims doxx police officers?), and the populace absolutely revolted against that because filming cops is one of the few ways for everybody else to keep them accountable to the public, so that bit got scrapped a couple of weeks ago. But the French are still protesting in large numbers, even though polling shows that they’re really, really sick of Islamic terrorists (hence the reason for the laws in the first place). Because: France.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

You may be aware that Netflix has debuted Mank, the new David Fincher film about Herman J. Mankewicz, the writer of Citizen Kane. I am here to tell you: it is not good and you should probably not watch it.

See you soon.