In a media release on 17 July 2023, Annette Brownlie of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) welcomed the decision by India not to particpate in the 'Talisman Sabre military exercises which were scheduled to be held from 22 July in Queensland's Shoalwater Bay.
The Australia-India Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement reconfirms that Australian Prime Minister Albanese stands for an ‘Excessively Big Australia’, according to Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). Voters are coming off third best.
The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) Media Release - For Immediate Release date - 20 August
U.S. government strategists are using sanctions as a wrecking ball to demolish the globalized economy. It is a desperate struggle to preserve their global hegemony and a unipolar world. The policy of consciously demolishing supply chains of essential products amounts to a reckless war on defenseless civilian populations. Sanctions disrupt trade worldwide and send shockwaves far beyond the countries directly targeted. This is well understood by financial planners.
India is in a terrible state due to the pandemic, a situation largely the result of gross mismanagement by the government. The spread of the virus was difficult to control because of high-density cities that made lock-downs extremely difficult for residents, and safe separation impossible. A highly infectious new variant may also be a driver, but there are other factors, including an underfunded health service, and a severe shortage of doctors. India needs about 600,000 more doctors, just to meet the WHO recommendations for doctor to patient ratio. Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse. A study by the Indian Journal of public health found that, because of population growth, India will need another 2 million doctors by 2030.
Yet training more doctors is but part of the solution, as it is becoming increasingly clear that India is in a highly competitive battle with developed countries to retain the services of their newly minted doctors.
“Out of the total number of graduates, 10% are opting for pastures abroad. The basic fact is that India needs them, and India is not in a position to retain them,” says Dr. Vedprakash Mishra, vice chancellor of DMIMS University, a medical college in Nagpur.
In 2007, the WHO estimated that over 100,000 Indian-trained doctors were employed overseas. About half these expatriate Indian doctors were in the US, followed by the numbers in Canada and Australia. About a third of doctors practicing in Australia and Canada had done their initial training overseas, many being from developing nations. In 2017, there were 4771 Indian doctors working in Australia, as well as 2287 from Africa, and even 116 from Oceania. Not all overseas-qualified doctors in Australia are working as doctors because of professional qualifying hurdles, meaning that many skilled migrants may find it impossible to find employment in their chosen career.
From an economics point of view skilled migration is a bargain. It’s also immoral, but morality isn’t part of economics.
Maybe we could adapt our foreign aid to subsidize the employment of doctors in poor countries?
Some References:
Australian Government Report: "Medical practitioners workforce 2015, Who are medical Practitioners?"
Farz Edraki and Cathy Pryor, "Doctors and engineers end up driving taxis': The uphill battle facing migrants to Australia," ABC, 31 October 2019.
Navin J Antony, Health care: India needs more doctors," The Week, August 17, 2019.
I was honoured to have met the Syrian Foreign Minister Mr Walid Mouallem yesterday in New Delhi. Also present was the Syrian Ambassador Mr Riad Abbas and a host of other Indian and foreign dignitaries and veteran journalists. Mani Shanker Aiyar, the veteran Parliamentarian is also seated to the right, at the table in the photogram.
A high powered Syrian delegation has been present in Delhi, where the Govt of India has supported the Syrian-Russian position, that the Syrian crisis must be resolved by Syrians alone through a process of dialogue, constitutional reforms and elections. The Syrian delegation met the Indian PM Narendra Modi, the Foreign Minister Ms Sushma Swaraj and the National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.
The two governments share a common political position and have decided to exchange Intelligence on ISIS and other terrorist organizations. On the economic front many agreements have been reached and Syria sees India as a major contributor to the growth of the Syrian economy, even in the current crisis, but especially in the post-war reconstruction phase, in the sectors of Energy, Agriculture, Food Grains, Infrastructure, Pharmaceuticals and other sectors.
The Syrian delegation was earlier in Moscow and Beijing before they arrived in New Delhi, as part of the international diplomacy prior to the Geneva Talks scheduled for the 25th of January 2016.
The same forces are at work across the entire globe - whether it be Ukraine or Australia, Elites (the 1%) are seeking to make the vulnerable more vulnerable in an insatiable effort to consolidate their wealth, and perhaps more importantly for them (and us) - their power.
It is now clear that America's democracy is completely corrupted.
It seems that Australia is also going down this path, with Joe Hockey 'selling' access for $22,000, and many other rorts for a privileged few going behind the scenes, such as those involving Sinodinos.
According to #ixzz31T0FxNdO">researchers from Princeton and Northwestern universities the U.S has now
"taken a turn down elitist lane and become a country led by a small dominant class comprised of powerful members who exert total control over the general population — an oligarchy"
So it seems that Australia is not far behind and as civil society in Australia is not-so-slowly dismantled, we will increasingly suffer the ill-effects of its absence as we change from a society that aims to look after the interests of all to one that looks after the interests of the few.
And if the 99% try and stop it, they are criminalised - with nearly 8,000 arrests of former participants in the Occupy movement globally,- or subjected to brute force, as is being discovered by the residents of the Northern Rivers Region, who are now appealing to the United Nations for protection.
And it is clear where this path leads, the U.S is now walking down it, as other countries have before. The experience of these countries, such as India, is well documented, so there really should be no surprises for Australians as to where we will end up. Australia, as an 'ally' of the U.S participates in its massive data collections through bases such as Pine Gap. The experience for other nations is that:
"The gathering of information to control people they rule is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the government has embarked on a massive biometrics programme, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information-gathering projects in the world— the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor”, will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry? (A conservative estimate of the UID budget exceeds the Indian government’s annual public spending on education.) To “digitise” a country with such a large population of the largely illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum-dwellers, hawkers, adivasis without land records—will criminalise them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state.
Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, “numerical targets”, “scorecards of progress”. As though it is a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt and skewed profit-oriented, corporate policy."
?
"Corporate-endowed foundations are the biggest funders of the social sciences and the arts, endowing courses and student scholarships in “development studies”, “community studies”, “cultural studies”, “behavioural sciences” and “human rights”. As US universities opened their doors to international students, hundreds of thousands of students, children of the Third World elite, poured in. Those who could not afford the fees were given scholarships. Today in countries like India and Pakistan there is scarcely a family among the upper middle classes that does not have a child that has studied in the US. From their ranks have come good scholars and academics, but also the prime ministers, finance ministers, economists, corporate lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who helped to open up the economies of their countries to global corporations."
and the final conclusion:
"Capitalism is in crisis. The international financial meltdown is closing in. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.
The proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. The proletariat has, over the years, been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India, it has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India, the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.
Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.
Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work."
Thus these excerpts from Arundhati Roy's article at Outlook India.com above indicate that India, like Greece and Ukraine, is another example of the excesses of corporate shock doctrine, which is in the process of being applied to Australia.
End Immigration - it sux resources away from Australia's homeless, unemployed and growing underclass. Migrants by plane rob locals of affordable housing, jobs, you name it. State infrastructure can't cope with 200,000 immigrants a year. The Green Foreign Labor Coalition is imposing upon Australians what British colonists did to Aborigines - taking over, marginalising, deculturing. National television programmes that antagonise Australians, pit immigrants against locals, that stir up racism like Joe Hildebrand's 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' do not help.
End Immigration - it sux resources away from Australia's homeless, unemployed and growing underclass.
Immigrants by plane, arrive in Australia by lifestyle choice, and so rob locals of affordable housing, jobs, you name it. State infrastructure can't cope with 200,000 immigrants a year.
The Green Foreign Labor Coalition is imposing upon Australians what British colonists did to Aborigines - taking over, marginalising, deculturing.
The only difference is that instead of proud Aboriginals standing up for their rights and getting physically shot down for doing so, proud traditional Australians standing up for their rights are getting socially shot down by 'politically corrupt' media by being branded 'racist'.
Crap! Any traditional people in any country who are concerned about excessive foreign immigration impinging upon their way of life have a right to express their concern. It's called local resistance when seeing what was valuable in one's own home is being usurped by foreigners. No foreigner has any right to invade another's homeland, but to only arrive with permission and with conditional rights of a host people.
Gillard's Green Foreign Labor and her One-Worldist mandate have undemocratically abused electoral power over Australians. Gillard's 200,000 immigrants a year and passive accomodation of illegal boat arrivals (beyond the croc-o-political tears) have denied Australians their rights to democratic social preservation and self determination. Gillard is beholden to the dangerous New Greens dictation of Sarah Hanson-Young.
Joe Hildebrand (pictured) is playing into the One-Worldists agenda.
Hildebrand's nationwide programme 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' not only denigrates Australia's tolerant society, but fuels xenophobia and local unrest by teasing out racism and by playing the race card about traditional Australians on ABC's current affairs programme 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist. Why did Hildebrand not run his programme insightfully in Cronulla? Hildebrand is idealistic in his puritan One Worldist vision. He fails to appreciate Australian natural insecurity and that resistance to the statistically recent overwhelming number of foreigners is but a mild and admirably tolerant resistance. Still naive Hildebrand eggs on anyone he can find in the street to say at least something racist while they are intoxicated and so prove his unjust prejudice against ordinary Australians.
Such prejudiced content is more akin to an SBS mission statement, rather than coming from the respected ABC.
If Hildebrand is to be impartial and wants to sample REAL racism then he needs to do a follow up programme in:
Compare Racism in India:
Read More"Most Indians think racism exists only in the West and see themselves as victims. It's time they examined their own attitudes towards people from the country's North-East."
Compare Racism in China:
Read More"The daughter of a Chinese mother and an absent African-American father, 20-year-old Lou caused a media storm when she was named one of Shanghai's five finalists for Let's Go! Oriental Angel, an American Idol-style show. But her fame has been for all of the wrong reasons, after her appearance provoked a vigorous and often vicious nationwide debate on whether she was even fit to be on Chinese television because of the colour of her skin."
Compare Racism in Israel:
Read More"Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism - New report indicates 26% rise in anti-Arab racist incidents; 74% of Jewish youths call Arabs 'unclean.'"
These are just to name a few. Australians are exceedingly tolerant by international standards. Our post World War II history proves it.
It is Hildebrand who is dumb for unnecessarily inciting racist sentiments that can exist below the surface in any society. Australia does not need this programme. He needs to be fair and cover the same subject overseas. He will be lucky to get back to lucky Australia, alive.
John Marlowe
Australia, still a colony, has more supermarkets per capita than the US and nearly three times as many as the UK. [1]India, no longer a British colony, has no supermarket chains. What other country can claim this? Late last year Indian shopkeepers rioted successfully to stop foreign investment liberalisation and multinational supermarkets. Here is a mostly French-sourced article about how emerging powers are looking after their own industries, while the free-marketeers of the west sell the rest of us down the river. See also article about President Francois Holland's program to meet protectionism elsewhere with protectionism at home: ,"New French industry policy to moderate globalisation, Ministerial interview" A word of warning to vegetarians, the sacred cows of India are being sacrificed now to the mighty dollar.
(Adapted from a report entitled, "La pousee du protectionisme a l'echelle mondiale" by Pierre Monègier et Nicolas Ducrot on France2 Journal Televise, Thursday 7 June, 2000hrs.)
Presenter David Pujadas relating the phenomenon to the global financial crisis, says that according to an annual report from the European commission, world-wide, import duties are strongly increasing in number and in size. "This is particularly so among emerging powers, which have no qualms about protecting their markets."
The France2 report centers round India.
We see film of a factory where millions of bright green gerkins are being processed. The message from Pierre Monègier is that
"This little gerkin has every chance of finishing up in [a french] plate. Indians produce more than
200,000 tonnes a year, but they don't like gerkins themselves.
The subtitle for this report, filmed in India, is, "You buy my products, I'll tax yours."
Reporter Pierre Monègier tells us,
"All these gerkins are therefore destined for export to France, the United States, Africa... 'Made in India' rolls out everywhere in the world, without obstacle. It's the same for livestock. In the Land of the Sacred Cow it would be sacreligious to put your fork in one, yet this year India will become first in the world in beef exports.These performances signify a giant in the making. And that makes foreign investors want to have a share in the Indian cake, but in cooking, India doesn't really play fair," he concludes.
The camera shows us a French restaurant in India with a number of business-class looking male diners in the dining room and then moves to the kitchen, where the French proprietor tells us that he estimates that the cost of French products is multiplied by Indian import duties by three and a half to four times, generally. He says that it is the same for all French products - for wine, for fine delicatessen goods.
The reporter says that the result is that it is almost impossible to find french farm products in India. Furthermore, he says, one cannot rely on big supermarket chains in India to reduce the costs and put French products on their shelves.
"In contrast to China and Brazil, India is still ferociously resisting foreign investment in the form of supermarket chains here. There are no supermarkets here. Carrefour [French supermarket chain] and Wal Mart have come to grief here. The government rejected them in order to protect thousands of grocery stores."
It began with an attempt to pass a law permitting 51% foreign investment-led multinational supermarket chains:
"NEW DELHI: Global chains like Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco may face problems in opening stores in over half of the 53 cities eligible for FDI in multi-brand retail.
The parties and alliances ruling in 11 major states with 28 cities, have strongly opposed the decision of the Central government to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail which is dominated by small traders" Source: #10;30440909-">"FDI in retail: Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco may face hurdles in 28 cities."
(25 November 2011):"Anger and indigation took over the Indian Parliament on Friday, after the Indian Minister for Industry and Commerce, Anand Sharma, announced the liberalisation of market policy towards foreign multinationals in India. The Opposition parties and the Trinamool Congress, key ally of the Congressional Party in the heart of the governing coalition (UPA), loudly protested against the green light given by New Delhi to big supermarket chains, permitting for the first time, foreign investment at 51% in the country in that sector.
...Direct foreign investment by groups like Wal-Mart and Carrefour to open a retail store would be subject to several conditions: minimum investment of 100 million dollars, of which 50 per cent must be devoted to housing infrastructure (chaine du froid etc), 30 per cent of produce would have to be sourced from small and medium sized businesses, and the stores would only be allowed to open in cities of more than one million inhabitants."
(Translation by Sheila Newman): Source: -la-polemique">25/11/2011 | Antoine Guinard ( Aujourd'hui l'Inde).
It ended with direct democracy:
Policy changes aiming at opening the market up to 51% foreign investment in the form of big multinational supermarket chains resulted on 2 December 2012 in one of those huge popular protests that India does so well and which constitute its chief form of real democracy.
"New Delhi backs down. ... Parliament was paralysed by the anger of the opposition. All the legal projects are in limbo today. Last Thursday the protests went to the streets, with one hundred thousand shopkeepers in a general strike. (Translation by Sheila Newman). Source:#10;6_24.php">"India suspends the introduction of foreign supermarkets." (Article by Vanessa Dougnac.)
All translations in this article by Sheila Newman
[1] Numbers of supermarkets in Australia per capita: http://www.stuartalexander.com.au/aust_grocery_market_woolworths_coles_wholesale.php
Sex is a voluntary act, therefore children are discretionary. The motivation to have many children to support a family is a backward primitive tradition that is an unsustainable, selfish burden and impost upon an already grossly overcrowded planet.
Yes, as one CanDoBetter.org contributor has highlighted: "the explosive population growth we've seen in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other predominately agrarian societies is due to most women having large families of 4+ children."
Big family culture is unsustainable and selfish
I refer to my previous article on this website of 11th August 2010 'Boycott charities until donations linked to conditional birth control and wealthy high-birth nations forced to fund their excess' and to my comment 'Time for third world charity to be conditional on birth control'.
A key solution to the global big family culture is for affected national governments to impose a consistent, long-term, mandatory financial combination of carrot and stick initiatives upon their populations, as well as from the United Nations/World Bank upon those national governments delinquent in population control.
The human global message is: Families must receive no public benefit beyond 2 children.
This is morally superior to China's one child policy. If the global community were to research the Catholic and Mormon culture of more wealthy western nations, they would realise that the burden and impost of big families upon the planet are far worse because the offspring consumerism demands are infinitely more extravagant. The United States is where the big family luxury problem lies.
While human family size is nothing to do with urgent humanitarian relief such as in neglected Haiti (Third World and overpopulated) following the Jan 2010 Earthquate, Haiti's extremely wealthy neighbour, the United States, has a neighbourly moral obligation to lead and finance the humanitarian relief and rebuild the social and economic infrastructure of Haiti.
While human family size is nothing to do with urgent humanitarian relief such as in Pakistan (Third World and overpopulated), following the July 2010 Massive Floods, Pakistan's extremely wealthy neighbours, India, China, Russia and India's nearby oil rich Arab nations NO DIFFERENTLY have a neighbourly moral obligation to lead and finance the humanitarian relief and rebuild the social and economic infrastructure of Pakistan.
Indeed, worse than Haiti, given the pre-existing civil unrest associated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda terror threats, the real risk is that Pakistan could else fall into civil collapse and another war zone like Afghanistan. Cheaper to care for Pakistan now than wait until it becomes a terrorist haven. This is not rocket science!
India's egotistically extravagant multi-billion Commonwealth Games should be cancelled! It is costing in excess of
The Indira Gandhi International Airport modernisation alone is costing nearly US$ 1.95 billion! [Read More] This is a comparable value to the crop losses from the Pakistan floods over India's border. [Read More]. And yet Indians and Pakistanis are the same ethnic people with mixed Hindu and Muslim religions, divided in 1947 by a tyrannical colonial Britain.
New Delhi Commonwealth Games Stadium.
Australia is heading down the same way as the countries which John Marlowe uses as an example here. We are being treated like just another colony. There is nothing about our prevailing 'race' or 'ethnicity' that protects us from a colonial-style government that wants to maximise population for commercial reasons that have nothing to do with democracy.
The Chinese Government is buying Australian farms to directly feed its population. Farm buy-ups were not referred to the FIRB unless they were worth more than $320 million! So, unless the farm property is under this amount, it just becomes "international" land! Unease about global food shortages in the next 20 years - and long term agricultural market opportunities - have made Australia and areas of South America prized targets for foreign government-aided enterprises and private investor groups.“Racism” is justified sometimes
Now is the time for some real and justified "racism"!
The Chinese Government is buying Australian farms to directly feed its population.
The purchases are not monitored by the Foreign Investment Review Board, according to Senator Bill Heffernan. Farm buy-ups were not referred to the FIRB unless they were worth more than $320 million! So, unless the farm property is under this amount, it just becomes "international" land!
The highest bidder should be scrutinised! Any agents for the Chinese government or nationals should be rejected.
Just how many farms are worth more than $320 million anyway? What about our food security in the face of climate change threats, which Kevin Rudd has dismissed?
In March, 2009, visitors on temporary visas, such as business owners and foreign students, were allowed to purchase any home to live in, land to build on or new dwellings for investment purposes.
The change saw Chinese money in particular being poured into blue-ribbon Melbourne real estate, as both a way of safeguarding wealth and advancing hopes of migration. Suburbs such as Elwood, Hawthorn and Caulfield North all returned to the $1 million median price club and experienced quarterly growth in excess of 20 per cent. Although the Government announced in April this year that it would adopt a more stringent approval process, experts claim the latest changes will have little effect on the market. Opposition finance spokesman Joe Hockey said it was clear that foreign investment was having an upward impact on housing prices. The same will happen with farming land prices, and food!
Unease about global food shortages in the next 20 years - and long term agricultural market opportunities - have made Australia and areas of South America prized targets for foreign government-aided enterprises and private investor groups.
Africa has also been the focus of a significant land grab, particularly by overseas government-owned investment corporations from China and the Middle East.
So far there were only anecdotal reports of Chinese agricultural investment but Senator Heffernan quoted research by Professor Zhangyue Zhou of the School of Business at Townsville's James Cook University. He believes the produce would be sent back to China from farms now being purchased.
There are reports of significant Chinese interest in Tasmanian dairy farms. The Chinese would never allow this in their own market!
The key focus of foreign investment has been China in the past two years, but direct investment from Japan to Australia hit $36 billion in 2008, up more than 50 per on 2006 levels, and is predicted to keep growing. A table of Australian acquisitions by Japanese companies compiled by law firm Blake Dawson lists 25 major plays since the start of 2007, totalling almost $18bn.
The two largest investments were Japanese brewing giant Kirin's takeovers of Lion Nathan ($3.3bn) and National Foods ($2.9bn). (The irony is not lost that our "National Foods" is not owned by our own nation!)
Others in this sector included Asahi's takeover of Schweppes and Suntory's takeover of Frucor.
Corporate heavyweight Mitsui paid $100 million for a 49 per cent stake in Australia's fourth uranium mine. Mitsui also owns the Bald Hills wind farm in Victoria. They are not likely to be concerned about losing Australian wildlife, like the Orange-bellied parrot!
In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilisers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food. The overuse of one type - urea - is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising.
In Western Australia we've got an Indian-government backed company planning to build a fertiliser plant which will be committed, as part of its financial arrangements, to sending 90pc of its production back to India.
In 2006 India invested $2.2 billion in Australia, up from $1.1 billion in 2005.
Hindalco Minerals, a subsidiary of giant Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla, bought Western Australian copper miner Western Minerals. Aditya Birla Minerals Limited is now listed on the Australian stock market.
Another Indian group, Bhushan Steel, holds a 10 per cent stake and a board seat on Queensland coal miner Bowen Energy.
The difference is that the Indian companies are privately owned while the Chinese investors have a much more opaque relationship with China's government.
This is a direct result of Australians not sticking up for Australians. It is high time we had a more nationalistic agenda. If farms are being sold 'cheap' it is all thanks to the ALP in various states, devaluing the farmers hard work and assets. Add to the fact the total lack of reliable services in rural areas, like water, electricity and health hardly attracts people to the bush. The Chinese take, take, take from the Australians thanks to our weak leaders like Kevin Rudd and now its just like that old adage....give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
The irony is that thousands of farmers are walking off the land, due to financial difficulty because they cannot compete with cheap imported food, so the Chinese buy up our land grow huge amounts of food, ship it off to China and most likely export it back to Australia and in turn more Australian farmers walk off their land and most likely sell it to the Chinese again.
For the first time in history we have a Chinese-Mandarin speaking Prime Minister more focused on helping China's growth and food security than actually helping Australia! Ironically, farmers are also being forced to sell their land due to sky-rocketing rates to make land available for property developers.
'Modern' Australia has the worst record in the world for species extinction. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, there are more endangered plants and animals in Australia than most of the rest of the world. Records of recently extinct species in Asia show 71 species that have disappeared in the wild. Examples include the Yunnan lake newt (Cynops wolterstorffi) from China, the Bonin thrush (Zoothera terrestris) from Japan, or the redtailed black shark (Epalzeorhynchos bicolor) from Thailand. They are hardly going to have any concern about our so-called "pest" Australian native species!
We need to increase food output by 70 per cent by 2050 to meet the global food crisis. There needs to be money for helping farmers to adapt and manage climate change, and for meaningful water initiatives.
Professor Cribb, Science writer and former head of CSIRO media, told a recent Senate enquiry in Canberra that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation last year revealed investments in the order of $80 billion a year in agriculture were needed to help meet the needs of a global food challenge. By 2050 there will be about 10 billion people on the planet to feed!
We seriously lack patriotism and vision in Australia and we are too willing to the highest bidder - something we will regret! It is time the taboo on "racism" be lifted to protect Australian interests.
Population growth is being used as an industry to keep our economy strong through building up the property markets. What happens when all our mining resources finally run out? With almost no manufacturing sector, all our farms foreign-owned, will we turn into a third-world economy overnight.
China will have a perfect pretext to attack and invade Australia in order to allegedly protect its legally purchased acquisitions and the Chinese people who now own them.
Why spend so much on Defence when the potential enemy is already invading by stealth? Australia will become an economic subset of China and Chinese citizens will be given unlimited access to move to Australia to look after their interests and eventually, if Chinese buy even more Australian assets, and they have the money to do so, what is to stop Australia will becoming a Chinese province?
The tragedy below is not unique to India or to elephants. In Australia exactly the same thing is happening to kangaroos, wombats, quolls, and all the other animals and their forests - as you can read most days on candobetter.org 
In Viewpoint, Amirtharaj Christy Williams, in “Where should the elephants go?” writes,
“The country, the people, the language or the retribution are different, but the cause for elephant-human conflict remains the same - humans displacing elephants from their natural habitat. …”
She says that, “In India, Nepal and Bangladesh, humans encroach on elephant habitats, which are further fragmented by roads, canals, dams, mines.”
She explains that elephants need about 200 sq km of ‘forest home range’, and that it is when, ‘… humans move into forested habitats, elephant-human conflicts are born.”
She describes how those invading elephant habitat use the cruelest of methods, such as “throwing burning tyres, shooting at the beasts with sharpened nails, even by laying out foods laced with killer pesticides.”
But those examples of human depravity are only symptoms of the cause, which is the destruction of the elephants’ homelands, often with the help of “short-sighted government officials who encourage large areas to be set aside for monoculture cash-crop plantations or infrastructural and development projects.”
Williams' comments indicate that governments are responsible for the failure to protect these animals’ habitats, due to their foolish and naïve decisions made in response to big-business propaganda.
“In India, we have seen this with the collusion of corrupt officials and academics writing fake Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) designed to serve the interest of a small group of politicians, industrialists or contractors who profit from the untruths.”
She adds that many apparently expert plans to manage development are drawn up by people who do not have knowledge of elephant behaviour and ecology. (We see the same in Australia with people 'managing' kangaroos.)
"The brunt of the resulting conflict is borne by local communities and the beleaguered giants who stand no chance against the destructive power of humans."
"Our power to transform things is so much greater than our power to understand them. In this way we are the same as the cattle that unknowingly destroy the banks of rivers with their hard hoofs."
(Jill Quirk, Victorian President of Sustainable Population Australia)
There is more to Williams' article but I have cut it out in order to report the news of the elephants without, for once, making people choose between people and elephants in their imaginations. This is no choice. The growth-economics system is what forces people off their land where they used to grow food for free and into a spiral of population growth simply to survive on tiny wages so that employers might profit from industries built on stolen land.
We have to stand up for the elephants and we have to stand up for the people so that their land may not be ceded by their governments to big business in India, Australia, the US, Canada, or anywhere else.
As I said in the beginning of this article about Williams's article, the tragedy below is not unique to India or to elephants. In Australia (a supposedly scientifically and ecologically sophisticated first world country), exactly the same thing is happening to kangaroos, wombats, quolls, and all the other animals and their forests. In Australia, if the engineered rapid population growth fuels demands for land used by kangaroos, the kangaroos will be shot or simply forced out with no provision made and if no critic notices then the perpetrators get away with this. The government and even the developers may talk about poor people who need houses, but it is the government and the developers who are driving up the cost of land for housing. And they know it. That is why it is a crime worthy of trial and punishment.
Forests are clear felled without even requisite studies of the areas to ascertain the numbers, rarity or range of resident wild life. No provision is made for the future of the wild life whose forest falls around them- if they're not killed outright by the operation, they die soon after retreating to another animal's territory
Yet Australians are not yet as densely populated as Indians - not in humans and not in other fauna. They never will be. Australia is biophysically much poorer than India. That is the reason that humans and other animal populations here are less dense in most parts of Australia, but very dense where there is comparative fertility.
The problem of cruelty and depravity against nature's many beautiful and contrasting faces is caused by overpopulation and development in both cases, and it is politically induced by big business lobbying. Both Indians and Australians have lost effective self-government to global corporations.
The problem is a product of colonialism and economic growthism, in India and Australia. Rural commodities industries, property developers and other corporate interests which have ownership of physical assets want to earn more than is reasonable or fair in a finite system. A malignant global media is their mouthpiece. They therefore convince governments to break-down local self-government, then to force up population growth. This drives up the cost of land and water, hence the cost of living. Only big business profits. "Jobs, jobs!" you will hear. Yet nomadic big business constantly finds excuses to downsize employment. In good times and in bad times. Growth, smart or foolish somehow amounts to the same thing; the earth is always poorer; the rich are always richer; and democracy is always more unreachable.
This modis operandi is common to all colonised countries which have inherited the British land-tenure system and growth economics. It happens in Australia, it happens in India.
I urge readers (people) not to be confused by the question of rights of disempowered poor people and wild life at the jungle's edge, but to rise up against the real monsters, the corporations and the shareholder system, and the governments and media which promote and portray this exploitative, sick system as inevitable. We must do battle against the merchants of growth instead of the other creatures who share our planet. The growth-merchants should be put on trial for crimes against nature and locked away in zoos.
Illustration:"The Mysterious Fast Breeder Reactor and her brood"
This 2,500 word article is an extract from a 5,687 word chapter, “Nuclear Fission power options,” in Sheila Newman, (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, (2nd Edition), Pluto Press, UK, 2008
Most reactors round the world use uranium. A breeder reactor must be started with enriched uranium or some fissile substitute.
During the operation of a conventional nuclear power station, some of the neutrons in the atomic pile are captured by its U238, converting it into fissionable material. This includes plutonium and other dangerously radioactive products. These products are increased in a breeder reactor. In conventional reactors, moderators slow the neutrons. By thus reducing each one's likelihood of becoming part of a converted U238 nucleus and increasing its chance of finding one of the already-fissionable U235 nuclei, moderators allow a natural uranium pile to support a slowly increasing chain reaction.[a]
Without the moderator, the neutrons slow down less and the reactor becomes a ‘fast neutron reactor', often abbreviated to just ‘fast reactor', with a bias towards the U238 being converted. In a fast breeder the nuclear waste products which present such a problem in conventional reactors become more fuel. The aim is to make this a closed and remote controlled process.[b]
The first Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) or Fast Neutron Reactor was built in the US in 1951 with a tiny output of 0.2MW (electricity) and operated until 1963, when it was succeeded by a 20MW (electricity) one, a 66 MW one, a 20MW one and “Fast Flux TF” which had a thermal output of 400 MW, from 1980-93. The UK had a 15MW(el) from 1959-1977 and then a 270MW one from 1974-94. France built her first in 1966 with an output of 40 MW (thermal), followed by Phenix in 1973 (250 MWe) (still in operation) and Superphenix 1in 1985-98 with an output of 1240MWe. Germany had one very small one with an output of 21MWe from 77- 91, India has one with an output of 40 MW (thermal), built in 1985; Japan’s Joyu with 140MW (thermal) was built in 1978. Monju (280 MWe) went from 1994-1996 and is currently closed. Kazakstan’s BN350 has been going since 1972 with an output of 135 MWe, half of which desalinates about 80,000 tons of water each year for the city of Aktau. Russia has had 3 FBRs: the first in 1959-1971 reopened in 1973; the second from 1979 produces 12 MWe, and the third, built in 1981, with an output of 600 MWe is the largest still running (with assistance from a US supervisory crew), but it has had a lot of problems with liquid sodium coolant and other leaks, involving long periods out of action. France’s Super Phoenix was the biggest in the world, but it was closed down due to safety problems associated with sodium leaks. Monju Fast Breeder in Japan was also closed due to safety concerns.
Significant commercial success seems to have been elusive so far but there are international ambitious plans for “Generation IV” FBRs of various designs, including thorium based ones. The low cost of uranium is often offered as an explanation for the failure of this technology to find the necessary finance to take it past the experimental stage. Design and research are materially and financially costly. [1]
Potentially thorium breeder-reactors would enable a process of converting all the 98.3 per cent of the natural uranium into radioactive substances which can maintain a sustained fission process in a chain reaction.
No-one is doing this yet.
One experimental thorium breeder reactor [2] exists in Kalpakkam in India, which is also the only place, where all three fissile types: U235, Pu 239 and Th 233 are burned.
You can read a lot about the bright future of plutonium seeded thorium breeder-reactors on the internet, for instance, Michael Anissimov’s “A Nuclear Reactor in Every Home” [3]. Conventional nuclear power stations now only use about 0.75 per cent of U235 and increase the radioactivity of what is left in the form of terrifyingly lethal contaminants known generally as the actinides. The problem of safe transport of fuels and waste that is presented in conventional nuclear power stations is likely to remain for as long as these power stations are productive. Breeder reactors would generate similar poisonous substances but they would also burn them up in a closed and remotely controlled cycle, in continuous production of lower grade materials which burn usefully for nuclear energy production. The waste problem would be considerably reduced even though some less long-lived wastes would still pose a storage problem.
The potential of thorium breeder reactors is still unproven beyond the small experimental facility in India. There is concern that proving and building them would be very expensive. There are still fears that they may never work properly as units.
There is however growing support for a new paradigm of quasi-continuous self-renewing fission energy which would ‘eliminate’ dangerous wastes. Against this ideal is the contention that breeder reactors could still be used to create weapons grade plutonium. The rebuttal of this is that weapons plutonium requires enormously more expensive Separation Work Hours and is not useful or necessary for generating power and that fast-breeder reactors designed for power production would not lend themselves easily to this use. If weapons plutonium were wanted then weapons plutonium specific reactors much more suited to the task would be built.
Another reason you will read is that there is a looming shortage of plutonium. [4] Although when Russia and the US agreed to eliminate a lot of their nuclear weapons this made a lot of enriched uranium and plutonium available, much of it was snapped up by conventional reactors and nuclear submarines. Warheads became fuel for US atomic power stations. The weapons-grade plutonium is diluted to become non-explosive. Recycling it saves time and energy normally used for the enrichment process.
Another school says that no-one influential is likely to want to disturb the uranium investment market because it is so profitable, particularly in the light of impending petroleum and other fossil-fuel depletion. This factor, coupled with the legal and other set-up costs of fast breeder-reactors, makes sticking to conventional reactors and mixing weapons plutonium with yellowcake more economically viable in the short to medium term – pending running out of uranium and recycled waste, and possibly pending a perfected thorium breeder reactor.
Importantly, the reliability of conventional reactors with their established safety and legal frameworks and the comparative low cost of building new ones according to ‘tried and true’ models discourages investment in new designs of which the setting up would entail complex and fraught negotiation of new safety and legal frameworks.
The chief beneficiaries have a vested interest in maintaining an industry that reprocesses and sells spent uranium to countries which have conventional reactors but which do not have global approval to reprocess their own waste.
If uranium-fueled nuclear were to expand from the 16 per cent of world electricity [5] it currently supplies, then diverse projections see uranium failing to meet demand by around 2040. With no nuclear expansion, at current use it might last into the beginning of the 22nd century. [6]
Still others have argued that there is too much uranium around to worry about thorium or other stuff.
Some more technical problems with thorium and fast breeder reactors:
The costs of developing nuclear power using thorium as fuel are increased by the engineering problems associated with the production, recycling, and containment of extremely radioactive isotopes. Far more shielding would be required than for plants currently operating, including ‘MOX’ plants, which use recycled uranium mixed with plutonium.
The thorium cycle includes the need to come to terms with exotic old and new artificial substances of extreme radioactivity. The substances include U-233, which is chemically separated from the irradiated thorium fuel, and always contains traces of U-232. U-232 itself has a 69 year half life but strong gamma emitting daughter products, including thallium-208 which has a very short half life. Recycled thorium itself contains alpha emitter Th-228, with a 2 year half life.
The weapons proliferation risk associated with thorium FBRs is partly based on fears that U-233 might be separated on its own. The reprocessing of thorium itself is still highly experimental. [7]
The technical problems associated with the commercial development of thorium breeder-reactors are so formidable, even on the scale of research possible in a country as large as India, that India could just drop its pursuit of thorium FBRs if it could obtain ready access to traded uranium.
There are currently delicate international negotiations proceeding with India, which offers a huge commercial market for uranium but has an interest in developing nuclear self-sufficiency based on its huge thorium reserves. India’s nuclear technology has developed independently due to being isolated through India’s having developed nuclear weapons too late (1974) for inclusion as an official Nuclear Weapons State under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The NPT of 1970 accorded five countries: France, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States the exclusive official status of Nuclear Weapons States based on their having reached that status prior to 1970. Of those five countries, all but the USA reprocess spent nuclear fuel. As well as having been excluded from this club, India has enduring differences with the NPT’s strategies for lowering risk. Historically it has preferred to support a global policy of universal disarmament initiatives. It claims to be very uneasy about China’s capabilities and not to be reassured by Pakistan’s expressions of potential support for the NPT.
India has thus proceeded in comparative isolation with a civil nuclear power program, planned from the 1950s, receiving little or no fuel or technological assistance from other countries.
Up through the late 1990s India’s nuclear power plants performed poorly with only 60 per cent capacity.
Dot-com revolution and Indian diaspora
The dot-com revolution of the 1990s saw a huge flow of Indian students and scientists into US universities, institutions and firms. With the dot-com crash many of them returned to India, bringing substantial technical knowledge with them. The scientific and technical community in India became very attractive for the global outsourcing of new scientific and technical developments. It is perhaps partly because of these social changes that capacity of its nuclear power plants improved markedly by 2001-02 to 85 per cent. [8]
As early as the 1950s India planned for a three-stage nuclear development program. Stage One was for U238 to be used in pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs). In Stage Two the plutonium generated by these PHWRs was to be deployed to run FBRs. This has so far only been done in a 13 Megawatt experimental small FBR at Kalpakkam. The planned FBRs were to use the plutonium mixed in a 70 per cent oxide (MOX-fuel) in its core within a fertile ‘blanket’ [9] of U233 and thorium232 which would be there to make the fuel in the core sustain fission. In Stage Three it was intended that the FBRs use thorium232 to produce U233 as fuel for the third stage reactors. [10] India currently has 12 nuclear power plants. The Department of Atomic Energy has government clearance to set up a 500 MW prototype of the ‘next-generation’ FBW at Kalpakkam, with the intention of commercially exploiting thorium for its major fuel supply.
After Australia, India possesses the world’s largest reserves of thorium. Use of Indian thorium would make India independent of imported uranium including reprocessed spent uranium.
Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation negotiations
On 9 December 2006 US Congress passed the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, allowing shipments of nuclear fuel and technology to India for use in its civilian nuclear power program. [11] India had not yet ratified this agreement. A major point of difference was US insistence that used fuel from any US-supplied reactor must not be reprocessed.” [12] This would inhibit practices in India’s energy and weapons system, for both kinds of facility were, at the time of writing this article (May 2007), still producing plutonium for reuse. The agreement would require complete separation of power facilities from weapons facilities, which were still exchanging reprocessed materials.
“The opposition to accepting safeguards on the grounds that it is difficult to separate civilian and military facilities, and that it compromises on national security, is, however, ill-founded. Demarcation of facilities as military should not be difficult but a detailed exercise of identifying these has to be carried out. The manner in which the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) declared the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and a few other facilities out of bounds for AERB inspections with a single bureaucratic order in 2000, would suggest that the process should not pose any administrative problems either. In any case, the agreement is for a phased declaration. But there will be a substantial cost involved and that is the price one has to pay for failing to plan for long-term fuel needs properly.
Since the research reactors Dhruva and Cirus are the chief sources of weapons-grade plutonium, and it makes no sense to use reactor-grade plutonium for weapons, one can easily demarcate all the power plants as civilian. It would seem that the main costs would pertain to replicating reprocessing plants specifically for weapon purposes because one cannot declare the existing plants - which currently reprocess spent fuel from power reactors as well as research reactors to yield plutonium for the breeder programme and weapons respectively - as military.
It is obvious that one-way traffic of nuclear material from military to civilian reactors does not pose any problem; it is only when there is a two-way traffic, as in a reprocessing plant, a dedicated facility for each objective becomes necessary because of safeguards on the material that comes in and goes out. There could be other costs involved in duplicating personnel and equipment required in this as well as other operations where people and equipment double up for the twin objectives at present.” [13]
Since the UK and France, both countries which reprocess fuel, have also shown interest in the huge commercial market which India could represent, it seems likely that the pressure on the USA to relent on its anti-reprocessing stance will grow. Given the profit issues and that the corporate forces have an interest in this stance changing, resistance will be difficult.
In addition, however, to purchase uranium from the 45 member Nuclear Suppliers Group would require India to sign the NPT, which India does not want to sign. It may be that the very factors which proponents of FBRs cite as discouraging their research and production in countries like the US are positives for FBR research and production in India. In this case, India is probably the place where FBR technology and production may break through first if it is going to.
[b] Thanks again to G.R.L. Cowan for his changes to this paragraph as well, correcting the error, contained in the original text:
"The Fast Breeder reactor (FBR)
Without the moderator the reactor becomes a ‘fast breeder’ with a bias towards the U238 being converted and producing more fuel than it actually burns. In a fast breeder the nuclear waste products which present such a problem in conventional reactors become more fuel. The aim is to make this a closed and remote controlled process."
It is very hard to find people who will go to the trouble of carefully reviewing the technical detail in such articles, but the authors, who cannot be specialists in every facet they write on, need this kind of feedback. G.R.L. Cowan's feedback makes this article and this site worth visiting for people trying to understand an area where very little is written for the non-specialist in a field where obscurantism compounds rapid change and complex concepts and engineering. Sheila Newman.
[1] http://www.uic.com.au/nip98.htm
[2] Also known as a Thermal Breeder Reactor and an Advanced Heavy Water Reactor
[3] Anissimov,M., “A Nuclear Reactor in Every Home”, Oct 16 2006, www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=212
[4] The Megatons to Megawatts Program is the name given to the program that implemented the 1993 United States-Russia non-proliferation agreement to convert high-enriched uranium (HEU) taken from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons into low-enriched-uranium (LEU) for nuclear fuel. From 1995 through mid-2005, 250 metric tons of high-enriched uranium (enough for 10,000 warheads) were recycled into low-enriched-uranium. The goal is to recycle 500 metric tons by 2013. Much of this fuel has already been used in many nuclear power plants in the U.S., as it is indistinguishable from normal fuel. http://www.usec.com/v2001_02/HTML/megatons.asp
[5]‘Electricity’ has been substituted for ‘energy’ here as a correction of a mistake in the full chapter version in The Final Energy Crisis.
[6] Figure 6, “History and forecast of uranium production,” in “Uranium depletion and nuclear power: Are we at peak uranium?” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379 Accessed 3-12-07 and “According to the authoritative “Red Book” produced jointly by the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s present known economic resources of uranium, exploitable at below $80 per kilogram of uranium, are some 3.5 million tonnes. This amount is therefore enough to last for 50 years at today’s rate of usage – a figure higher than for many widely used metals.” Source: “Can Uranium supplies sustain the global nuclear renaissance?”, World Nuclear Association Position Statement, http://www.uic.com.au/WNA-UraniumSustainability.pdf and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith Source: http://www.greatchange.org/bb-thermochemical-rebuttal_WNA.html
[7] Correspondence with Ian Hore-Lacy, Director – Information, Australian Uranium Association, Melbourne, http://www.uic.com.au Mon 4/30/2007 11:58 PM and Tue 5/1/2007 12:34 AM
[8] REF: http://www.uic.com.au/nip45.htm
[9] The core is the central part of a nuclear reactor containing the fuel elements and any moderator. A fast neutron reactor is configured to produce more fissile material than it consumes, using fertile material such as depleted uranium in a blanket around the core. Source of definition material: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf51.htm
[10] Frontline, Volume 22 - Issue 16, Jul 30- Aug 12, 2005, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2216/stories/20050812005700700.htm
[11] Nuclear Technology Milestones 1942 to Present, Nuclear Energy Institute, Washington, http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=3&catid=265
[11] “Sticking points in US-India talks”, Reuters, 30/03/07, Nucleonics Week 12/4/07, FT 19/4/07.
[12] R. Ramachandran, “Behind the bargain”, Frontline, Volume 22 - Issue 16, Jul 30- Aug 12, 2005, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2216/stories/20050812005700700.htm
India: Oil prices to increase by 11%
Diezel goes up by 9%
Cooking gas goes up by 17%
The Indian Government is reported to fear that the price of oil may cost it the next election#main-fn1">1.
Such are the politics of petroleum. There is nothing it does not touch.
The 'rich countries' appear to have much more of a buffer than most of India, but their road transport and agriculture industries are already in trouble. It is well-known that starvation is never far away for many people in the tropical Asian countries, but less well-known is the large class of people living in precarity elsewhere, especially in the Anglophone countries.
In London around 10,000 finance workers have lost their jobs this year and it is anticipated that perhaps up to 40,000 will lose their jobs in the current months. (France2 8pm News, 21 May).
In "Job loss a sure road to skid row"#main-fn2">2 in the Herald Sun of Tuesday May 27, 2008, it was reported that a Citibank survey showed that, in Australia, "one in two workers would face financial ruin within four weeks of losing their jobs;… almost 20 per cent of workers would not last a week. Only one in four workers would be able to survive more than three months."
Some 'rich countries' don't know when to stop and part of their population is sliding ever so quickly into third world status. For instance, the Australian government has become a 'banana republic' massively endebted and engaged in energy-intensive infrastructure expansion programs everywhere. Under the behest of the Australian academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, the Property Council of Australia, The Australian Population Institute, and its own state governments, all heavily peopled by big development lobbyists, Australia is trying to double its population as soon as possible, planning new megacities. For these 'programs' of infrastructure building and population increase, worker, business and family reunion immigration have been stepped up, and families receive baby bonuses for having children, just as though the days of cheap oil were just beginning, instead of in their twilight. Yet, as in the USA, evictions and personal debt are sky rocketing.
And really, what is three months security in a century of oil depletion? Who is safe? We all need more solidarity. France, so far, shows the best example.
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Rhys Blakely, "India concedes in battle to keep oil price down", The Times, 6 Jun 08
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ Craig Binnie, "Job loss a sure road to skid row" in the Victorian Herald Sun(Australia) of 27 May 08
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