With its track record of leveraging cultural power for US gain and barely concealed promotion of coup attempts, the US Agency for International Development will not be mourned among the US’s southern neighbours, write JOHN PERRY and ROGER D HARRIS
Food crises and the spectre of collapse
We need alternative modes of food production, but these won’t come out of an adherence to today’s corporately rigged markets or from a politics desperate to become more anodyne by the day, warns ALAN SIMPSON
![](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/FARMERPROTEST2.jpg.webp?itok=gDoYENI-)
“Tractors to the left of us, Tractors to the right.
Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.”
This isn’t how Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade poem opens up, but residents of across Europe’s capital cities could be forgiven for thinking it should have done.
In Brussels, people had to run the gauntlet of tractors lining both sides of streets around the European Parliament; all part of farmer protests against cuts in fuel subsidies, land set-aside obligations and low-cost food imports.
The protests kicked off everywhere. Germany, France, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Britain and the Netherlands, all witnessed demonstrations about farming in crisis.
More from this author
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Some hard political choices must be made in Trump’s post-truth era – starting by abandoning any illusions about the ‘special relationship’ and waking up to the need for bold policy-making on the climate, argues ALAN SIMPSON
![](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/10keirstarmer.jpg.webp?itok=vUjmldCx)
Centrist governments around the world face rejection by their electorates as neoliberalism fails to deliver the public prosperity it never promised – and the same fate awaits Labour unless it starts to deliver for those struggling to survive, says ALAN SIMPSON
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Undaunted by Big Oil success, ALAN SIMPSON looks at alternatives to lack of courage and imagination stifling the Labour government and it policies
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As deadly weather events spread death and destruction, ALAN SIMPSON argues that Labour’s first Budget has failed to address the converging crises of climate breakdown and democratic alienation that require transformative change
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