I liked this article because of couple of reasons:
1. As it states in its first paragraph that "we already grow enough food for 10 billion people." Now, I don't know where this author got this number of 10 billion, but the fact it is stating is definitely true. Many people commonly comment after hearing that billions are malnourished in the world & the world needs more resources to cope with increasing population that the world needs less people & hence, the public around the world needs to reduce their birth rate.
Problem is not high or low birth rate. Problem of how the world is going to sustain 9 billion people in the next 35 years is not going to be resolved by reproducing less. Problem lies with inefficiency & unequal distribution of existing resources. Our world is more than capable of producing more than enough resources to sustain billions more, but nothing is sustainable when those resources are tightly controlled by a few rich elites, at the individual level & the national level.
As per latest Oxfam report, the world has 62 billionaires who have as much wealth as half of the world's population (that's 3.5 billion). Do these billionaires need all that wealth to comfortably live in this world? Of course not. A human's wish to comfortably live in this world can be fulfilled with a very few needs. But hoarding cash, or resources, only makes the world more unequal, & hence, unsustainable for billions of poor around the world.
Then, we got inequality at the national level. As the article also suggests, the global north, or economically rich countries, not only overconsume, but also waste a lot of food, & in general, resources. Lots of African & Middle Eastern countries are thirsty for water & wasting water to make swimming pools & lush green lawns are a "necessity" in US & Canada. Obesity is a major health problem in the global north because people cannot stop stuffing their faces, while malnourishment, or even famine, is rampant in the global south.
2. Control of agricultural practices by a few giant industrial companies, e.g. Monsanto. People readily say that GMO seeds & chemicals (i.e. fertilizers, pesticides etc.) are required to grow more food in fewer areas, since, we need to grow more food to feed the increasing population.
As the article once again stresses the point that these giant agricultural companies don't help the environment & the agricultural practices by forcing small-scale farmers to buy special seeds from them only & grow specific crops. I am not against GMO seeds since I don't even know if they do cause cancer or not. But I do know that forcing farmers to grow specific crops, which are more of money makers (cash crops) than letting them diversify which crops are grown (which helps in keeping the soil nourished in the natural way, instead of through chemicals) destroy the soil longevity.
Now, the article also provides a few recommendations to improve agricultural practices to increase efficiency & reduce unnecessary losses in losing vital crops. I, on the other hand, am less optimistic that these recommendations will ever be implemented by international organizations & companies, because giant agricultural companies, like Monsanto, heavily lobby organizations, at national & international levels, to help extend their own agendas (increase profitability & share prices) at the expense of environment & people's lives & health.
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The World Bank’s view that we need to grow 50% more food by 2050 to feed 9 billion people, while finding ways to reduce carbon emissions from agriculture at the same time, ignores one very simple fact – we already grow enough food for 10 billion people.
But a combination of storage losses after harvest, overconsumption & waste mean that some 800 million people in developing countries are malnourished.
The storage losses mainly affect the global south ... Overconsumption & waste mainly affect the global north.
The challenge of feeding the world is not simply met through increases in production – this is precisely how the so-called green revolution created our current problems.
The answer lies in increasing the climate resilience of agriculture in ways that reverse the catastrophic environmental degradation of the last 50 years while also making production more efficient.
The green revolution that took place in the 1960s, increasing cereal production in developing countries, is credited with saving a billion lives. But today the environmental toll from this boom is all too evident.
The statistics tell the story – 38% of the planet’s cropland is degraded, 11% of the irrigated area is salt contaminated, 90% of the biodiversity of the 20 main staple crops has been lost, nitrogen fertiliser produces 6% of greenhouse gases & its runoff creates 400 marine “dead zones” (areas where oxygen concentration is so low that animal life suffocates), & more than 350,000 people die every year from pesticide toxicity.
Research on planetary boundaries estimates that nitrogen fertiliser use needs to decline by 75% to avoid large-scale environmental impact of this kind. The focus on productivity over efficiency has meant that the amount of energy needed to grow the same quantity of food has increased by between one-quarter & one-third over the last 25 years. Even without climate change, conventional chemical agriculture is driving humanity towards a food-security cliff.
A Christian Aid briefing paper argues that if we are to reverse this situation in the face of climate change, agriculture needs a transformative change in the way it addresses climate resilience.
Small-scale farmers & pastoralists, who manage 60% of agricultural land & produce 50% of the planet’s food, should be central to this agenda. Research to solve their problems should be guided by their priorities, & take place largely on their farms.
The kind of support farmers want often includes advice on soil management & testing, reliable climate forecasts, & development of their own seed & livestock breeding processes. The advice they get usually revolves around unaffordable chemical fertilisers & pesticides, while their ability to exchange & sell locally adapted crop seeds is threatened by corporate-inspired legislation promoting crop varieties developed in distant biotech labs.
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For farmers to invest in resilience, they need secure land tenure, especially when they participate in communal land-tenure systems. Land deals with largely foreign buyers have increased to 55 million hectares. This not only dispossesses farmers but also undermines the confidence that others need to invest in measures to control land erosion, in trees & in other adaptations that pay off over several years.
Activities that degrade soils, forests & other vital catchment protection resources inevitably result in greater vulnerability downstream – through flood damage, increased exposure to cyclones & more intense drought, all of which affect food production.
The good news is that by empowering farmers to develop climate resilient agriculture, it is possible to envisage the elimination of extreme hunger in 15 years. The conservation of resources & use of environment-enhancing approaches, such as conservation agriculture, agroforestry & integrated pest management, have been shown to yield more & deliver significantly better resilience to climate extremes than conventional, chemical agriculture. Such practices also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition, increasing access to markets can turn agriculture into an engine that drives diversified, sustainable rural economies.
The World Bank’s call for climate-smart agriculture includes focusing on sustainable water use, countering gender inequality, & increased research.
It should also acknowledge the need for a truly three-dimensional approach to reversing the environmental degradation & climate change that “20th-century technology” has caused. Such an approach would include plans to strengthen the review of World Bank Environmental & Social Safeguards to ensure lending enables, rather than undermines, climate resilience for small-scale farmers & pastoralists in developing countries.
Richard Ewbank is climate advisor for Christian Aid
A good article but it left a big reason why a majority of the poorer households in UK, & around the world, won't have access to healthy & nutritious food. One of the big reasons is social inequality, which in turn, is caused by, in major part, by huge disparity in income & wealth.
There are political & business elites -- the 1-percenters -- who live in their own little world. But the other 99% of the world populations are trying to survive on low income. They don't earn enough to buy healthy & nutritious food in the stores. That majority will always buy the cheap food, which is usually not grown organically & full of calories. Those people know that what they are buying is not healthy for their families but they don't have a choice.
At the same time, the government pays millions in grants & subsidies to companies in military-industrial complex to make new & advanced weaponry, but don't make effective agricultural policies to incentivize scientists & farmers to come up with new & efficient means to grow healthy & nutritious food, all the while limiting the use of fertilizers & harmful chemicals.
At the end of the day, majority of the families know which food is healthy & which one isn't. They would love to buy healthy & nutritious food but are constrained by their income level. If the government wants their public to become healthy, then one major change would be to increase minimum wages & taxes on wealthy individuals. Poor families would readily buy healthy & nutritious food with their increase in income.
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The world is entering an era of global food insecurity which is already leading to the “double burden” of both obesity & malnutrition occurring side by side within countries & even within the same families, a leading food expert has warned.
It will become increasingly common to see obese parents in some developing countries raising underweight & stunted children because high-calorie food is cheaper & more readily available than the nutritious food needed for healthy growth, said Alan Dangour of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
“We are certainly looking at a period of increased instability in the supply of food, and also the diversity and types of food that are available are going to change,” said Dr Dangour, who is to lead a major study into global food insecurity & its impact on health.
“A result of this is called the ‘double burden’ of malnutrition,” he added. “Under-nutrition causes starvation and stunting in children, whereas obesity and over-weight in adults is another form of malnutrition, caused by eating the wrong type of food.
“The double burden exists in countries, or indeed in households, where you get a stunted child and an overweight mother. And that happens in many countries around the world as a result of the wrong diets being eaten [by adults] and the wrong diets being given to children,” he said.
“It’s not the fault of the mother, it’s the fault of the food system where the mother cannot afford to buy nutritious food such as dairy, eggs and fruit and is predominantly feeding her child a diet that is rich in calories, such as oil and cereal-based carbohydrates,” Dr Dangour said. “That diet will not be sufficient for the child to grow. It will stop the child from being hungry but it will also stop the child from growing properly,” he said.
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“We know that at the end of this century it’s going to be very difficult to grow crops in certain parts of the world because of increasing temperatures,” Dr Dangour said. “In other parts of the world there is going to be increasing productivity because warmer temperatures will mean longer growing seasons.”
He said no single prediction on food insecurity could tell the whole story because climate change will affect different crops differently in different parts of the world: “For the UK, we could imagine a scenario in which changing food availability globally leads to changes in the availability of and the access to that food in the UK.
“For example, cereals may not be affected but fruit and vegetables, critical to a healthy diet, may become much more expensive. As people are responsive to food prices, it may lead to a reduction in consumption of those foods in the poorer population, which may lead to increased health inequality in the UK.”
In the past, policy-makers & planners have concentrated on producing enough food based on calorie content, often to the detriment of more nutritious food, such as pulses & fruit, that are required for healthy growth. This has helped to fuel an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, Dr Dangour explained.
“It’s happened over the past 10 years or so & it’s hugely important. It means policy-making is an enormous challenge, because you think: ‘It’s about just increasing the amount of food we produce.’ Well, no: you need to think about the types of food you are producing and about the access to those foods.
“As food availability globally changes, we could see both of those things happening. We could see under-nutrition and we are already seeing enormous increases in chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes,” he added.
There have been stories of "slave-labour" being used in American agriculture sector. There have been stories of migrant workers being used as slaves in the European agriculture sector (fruits & vegetables grown on Spanish & Portuguese farms were being sold in British supermarkets). Then, we also have stories of slaves working in Thai's fishing industry, which ultimately supplies seafood products all over North America & Europe. Now, we have "slave labour" on Australian farms.
Who says slavery is no more in this "modern" world?
Is it surprising that slavery still exists? (not to me, at least). Heck, that's why, immigration exists.
On one end, we have big supermarkets like WalMart, Costco, Aldi, Lidl etc which demand low-cost supplies of produce from their suppliers, because after all, they need to sell those at a low cost, too, to their customers (who are themselves are earning meagre wages, thanks to automation of their jobs).
Anyway, so, if the suppliers need to reduce their costs, then, after automating whatever processes they can automate, they will start hiring migrants & using them as "slave labour", which only means long hours of work at meagre wages with no benefits, whatsoever.
So, you can decide for yourself, where's the problem lies in this whole supply chain?
- Customers are always looking for the cheapest produce they can get their hands on.
- Retailers are looking for cheapest produce they can get their hands on.
- Distributors are looking for cheapest produce they can get their hands on.
- Producer is pressured to produce at as low a cost as possible.
Problem actually lies at the top; the business persons & owners of companies who are always looking to cut costs, & the biggest component of their costs, is always going to be their labour costs. It also includes all those shareholders / stockholders, esp. the large institutional ones, who pressure companies to lower their costs (to maximize their profits & ultimately, dividends to shareholders).
Companies have only one way to reduce labour costs, by automating whatever they can automate & reduce the workforce to as few a people as they can, to the point that the labour public has a choice to either accept working at meagre wages with no benefits or no job at all. So, that public will obviously go for the cheapest produce it can find in the supermarket, because, after all, that labour public needs to eat.
So, can we really blame the agriculture producer / farmer to hire migrant workers & use them like a "slave labour" when owners, like, Sam Walton's family (WalMart owners) are becoming billionaires?
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Allegations of unethical treatment & underpayment will be investigated by the state government of Victoria.
Victoria will also push for a national inquiry into what it has described as "a national shame".
Claims Australia has an underclass of foreign workers treated like "slave labour" were made by ABC TV ... .
The report by ABC's Four Corners programme detailed widespread abuses of Australia's 417 visa.
The visa is for people aged 18 to 30 years of age who want a working holiday of up to 12 months in Australia.
The investigation uncovered abuses of the popular visa, including what were described as "slave-like conditions" at farms & factories across Australia.
"No employee should ever be exploited, harassed or deprived of their basic liberties", said Victoria's Minister for Industrial Relations Natalie Hutchins.
"This is not just about the underpayment of wages; this is about creating an underclass of foreign workers," said Ms Hutchins in a statement.
Foreign underclass
"It's clear that Victoria needs a better system in place when it comes to regulating labour hire practices," she said.
The food being picked & processed by exploited workers was reportedly sold to consumers across the country by major supermarket chains & fast food outlets.
Queensland MP Keith Pitt last month called for an investigation of exploitation of foreign workers in the horticultural sector.
He said many farmers were at risk of prosecution because they were using labour hire companies that underpaid backpacker workers.
Migrant workers are essential to Australia's agriculture sector, according to the National Farmers' Federation (NFF).
"Without them, there would be a chronic labour shortage at peak harvest times of the year," said NFF President Brent Finlay.
But he said all farmers had a responsibility to adopt employment practices & use labour contractors that did not exploit workers.
"And it's not just farmers, this is a whole of supply chain issue," he said.
Ghulam Hassan is in the mood to celebrate Eid ... 3 months early. His 1.5-acre farm in a small village in Helmand province has been blooming with white & crimson flowers. Now the petals are just beginning to drop, giving way to round, sticky, pungent green pods. In a few more days the pods will swell to the size of a bulb. This is when Mr Hassan’s family of 14 will move in. They will carefully slice open the bulbs & collect the oozing white latex or resin – the main ingredient in heroin.
“This is a bumper crop. The yield will be enough to feed my family for more than a year,” Mr Hassan said, gazing gleefully at his poppy field just outside the village of Hajj Alam in the Nehri Saraj district.
He is one of thousands of Afghan farmers who, despite the best efforts first of the US-led coalition & now of the country’s own anti-narcotics department, are growing more poppies than ever before.
Not only is the income from opium up to $1,800 (£1,200) per acre, some 12 times higher than that from conventional crops, but there is another, more insidious factor at work. Last year, like the year before that, Hassan had sown wheat.
“I borrowed from relatives & friends to buy seeds & fertilisers. The harvest was good,” he said. “But that’s where the good news ended. Because of the Taliban threat, truck drivers were not willing to carry the produce to bigger markets. As a result, most of my wheat rotted in the field. The crop was lost & I was left with a $4,000 debt.”
Dozens of Mr Hassan’s neighbours too have discarded wheat, maize & vegetable crops for opium poppies, which not only gives them easy access to credit & protection from the Taliban, but also fetches more money.
There is no sign that the Afghan government, now supposed to be policing the whole country itself since the formal conclusion of the US-led combat operation last year, is bringing the Taliban under control. More than 7 months after President Ashraf Ghani took office, Afghanistan still does not have a Defence Minister, & the security situation is deteriorating nationwide.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a higher income at a time of growing insecurity is driving more & more farmers to take up poppy cultivation. Last year, according to official Afghan & UN figures, the total area under opium poppy cultivation in the country rose by 7%, to more than 550,000 acres. Helmand, with almost 300,000 acres, had the dubious distinction of being Afghanistan’s biggest poppy-growing province.
Officials in the ministry of counter-narcotics say that Helmand is on course to set a record for poppy-growing this year, with the area under the crop rising a further 16%.
It is bad news for Colonel Mohamed Abdali, head of the interior ministry’s counter-narcotics police team in Helmand, whose already difficult job is becoming ever more challenging. Colonel Abdali is responsible for eradicating the province’s poppy fields. For the past 4 months, he & his 80-man team have been gathering information, mapping & photographing the fields. “We have prepared our own database – location of the fields, area under the crop, owners, etc,” Colonel Abdali said. “We send this data to the counter-narcotics ministry & on its clearance, destroy the fields.
“We have only a small, one-and-a-half month window to destroy the crop. It’s best to clear the field when the poppy has blossomed. Eradicating the crop before that allows a farmer to replant & regrow.” As he spoke, he signalled his men to mount 4 US-made Massey Ferguson tractors. Escorted by 15 armed soldiers in 3 police vans, they began to roll towards Trikh Nawar, ... some 20 miles from where Mr Hassan was preparing to harvest his crop.
The convoy makes its first stop at Haji Mamoon Khan’s field, & soldiers jump out to take up defensive positions. On Colonel Abdali’s signal, 5 men set off carefully to search for mines or any hidden improvised-explosive devices. “We always follow this drill. We are the enemies of both the Taliban & the drug dealers, said Colonel Abdali. “The villagers are also hostile to us. We have to keep our eyes & ears open for lurking Taliban fighters, roadside bombs & IEDs. We can’t take any chances.”
When a whistle from the field gave an “all-clear” signal, 2 tractors set about ploughing up Mr Khan’s poppies.
“They have ruined me & my family,” said the farmer, contemplating the crop that he had nurtured for months. “The produce would have helped me pay for my wife’s surgery & for my son’s wedding. But it’s all gone now. I can’t bring home happiness.”
His quiet sobs seem to unsettle the young colonel. “I know I am destroying someone’s livelihood. An entire family was depending on this crop,” Colonel Abdali said. “But it would have destroyed so many other families.”
The next day, as the team prepared to enter another poppy farm, Colonel Abdali received a phone call back at his Lashkar Gah HQ. “There’s been a landmine explosion,” the caller said. “One officer is dead, one is wounded.”
“Do not touch anything. Come out of the farm. Tread only on the tractor tyre marks,” Colonel Abdali warned.
The explosion, in Trikh Nawar, came as Sayed Shah, a counter-narcotics officer, was trying to defuse a mine. His body, covered by a tarpaulin, was lying in an ambulance, & 2 soldiers were bleeding from head wounds. As the ambulance was about to pull away, a phone rang in the dead soldier’s pocket. Colonel Abdali pulled out the phone to answer it. The caller was the soldier’s brother. “Sayed Shah is a martyr now. We are bringing him home,” Colonel Abdali told him.
So, apparently, the Holocaust allows Israelis to employ Palestinian children as low-wage workers, & the world stays silent on it, because Palestinians need to suffer now for the suffering of the Israelis in the Holocaust.
Now, some may say, why am I bringing up the Holocaust in an article about child labour in Israel. The reason is that you say anything, which seems to be against Israel, & the answer is always, from Israelis & Zionist supporters, is that Jews have suffered a lot from the Exodus to Holocaust. Although, that is nothing to do with the topic at hand, the answer is always the same.
So, apparently, everyone else, regardless of whether they ever did anything to any Jew or Israeli, need to suffer now.
It's funny how Israelis always find a nice loophole. Child labour is illegal in Israel BUT if child labourers are employed through a middleman contractor, then it's all legal.
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Human Rights Watch has heavily criticized the abuse of Palestinian children working on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that children are working in hazardous conditions & in violation of Israeli & international law.
The report, called “Ripe for Abuse,” said that children as young as 10 are working on the settlement farms in the Jordan Valley, sometimes in conditions that are harmful to their health.
HRW also said that much of the produce cultivated & harvested by child labor is exported to Europe & the US.
"Israel’s settlements are profiting from rights abuses against Palestinian children. Children from communities impoverished by Israel’s discrimination & settlement policies are dropping out of school & taking on dangerous work because they feel they have no alternatives, while Israel turns a blind eye," HRW's Middle East director, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement.
The head of the settlement community in the Jordan Valley dismissed the HRW report as “lies.”
"They've made up lies. The entire goal of this organization is to sully Israel's image. If they'd show me a farmer employing a child, I'd report it to police immediately," David Elhayani, a former farmer, told AFP.
He insisted he would lose his exporting license if he were caught employing child labor, although he did acknowledge that the Palestinian contractors he works with use middlemen who could employ children without a farmer knowing about it.
HRW interviewed 38 children & 12 adults to research their report in the Palestinian communities of the Jordan Valley who were employed by settlement farms in the area. HRW acknowledges that children are the minority of workers employed on settlement farms, but says that they do so because of a lack of any real alternatives.
Israel’s policies throughout the occupied West Bank restrict Palestinian access to land, water & fertilizer as well as their ability to transport & sell their goods.
“Ask [the children] if they have any bread in the house,” a Palestinian middleman who supplied Palestinian workers to settlement farms told an Israeli human rights worker.
The researchers found that most of the children working on settlements had dropped out of school & the rest were working part time while still attending school.
“It’s very obvious which kids go to work in the settlements, because they are exhausted in class,” a school administrator told HRW.
On average, children said they began working at the settlements when they were 13 or 14, but HRW found one boy who said he started working when he was 10. Work starts at 5:30 a.m. or 6 a.m. & lasts for 7 to 8 hours, which increases to 12 hours during harvest time, often for 6 or 7 days a week.
“The work that children perform can be both grueling & hazardous,” the report says. Some children complained of skin rashes, dizziness & vomiting after spraying crops with pesticides without adequate protection while others were injured by sharp blades & machinery used to cut crops.
Temperatures can exceed 50 degrees Celsius in summer & so many of the children as well as the adults are susceptible to heat stroke.
The children working in settlements are paid very low wages, far less than the Israeli minimum wage, which is $6.20 an hour. Most of the children interviewed by HRW earned $16 to $19 a day.
Israeli & Palestinian law makes it illegal to work if you’re under 15. Under military orders issued by Israel in the West Bank, Israel’s domestic minimum wage law is applicable to Palestinian workers in settlements.
But the practice of using middlemen to hire workers means there’s mostly no contract linking an employee child or otherwise to their employer.
Workers are paid “in cash, [get] no pay slips, & there are no [work] permits, so there is no paper trail to demand severance pay or anything else,” a Palestinian middleman told HRW.
Children working in Israeli settlements not only violate Israeli & Palestinian law but also international law. Both Israel & Palestine are party to the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which protects children from being economically exploited & from performing work which is hazardous or interferes with their schooling.
HRW also called on the US & Europe to stop importing produce from the settlements, much of which is given preferential tariffs.
"The EU has moved to exclude Israeli settlement products from the preferential tariff treatment it provides to Israeli goods... but [member states] have not instructed businesses to end trade with settlement-based entities. The US in practice continues to grant preferential treatment to Israeli settlement products under the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement," HRW said.
So who benefitted from Afghanistan war? American & Afghani politicians & American contractors.
Who lost from Afghanistan war? American troops, Afghani military & civilians, & American public (billions taken from them & given to contractors & in the end, causing a recession).
End result: Taliban are back in full force. World drug market is flooded with drugs derived from opium.
Is this a successful end of a decade-long conflict?
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In a war full of failures, the US counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan stands out: opiate production has climbed steadily over recent years to reach record-high levels last year.
Yet one clear winner in the anti-drug effort is not the Afghan people, but the infamous mercenary company formerly known as Blackwater.
Statistics ... reveal that the rebranded private security firm, known since 2011 as Academi, reaped over a quarter billion dollars from the futile Defense Department push to eradicate Afghan narcotics, some 21% of the $1.5 billion in contracting money the Pentagon has devoted to the job since 2002.
The company is the second biggest beneficiary of counternarcotics largesse in Afghanistan. Only the defense giant Northrop Grumman edged it out, with $325m.
According to the US inspector general for Afghanistan “reconstruction”, the $309m Academi got from US taxpayers paid for “training, equipment, & logistical support” to Afghan forces conducting counternarcotics, such as “the Afghan National Interdiction Unit, the Ministry of Interior, & the Afghan Border Police”.
Far from eradicating the deep-rooted opiate trade, US counternarcotics efforts have proven useless, according to a series of recent official inquiries. Other aspects of the billions that the US has poured into Afghanistan over the last 13 years of war have even contributed to the opium boom.
In December, the UN reported a 60% growth in Afghan land used for opium poppy cultivation since 2011, up to 209,000 hectares. The estimated $3 billion value of Afghan heroin & morphine represents some 15% of Afghan GDP.
“Given the growth in opium poppy cultivation, it must be assumed that the Taliban’s income from the illegal trade in narcotics has remained an important factor in generating assets for the group,” the UN reported.
That same month, the US inspector general for Afghanistan warned that the opium trade would surely rise as international aid money flees the country with the winding down of the war. Yet the inspector general also noted that US reconstruction projects, particularly those devoted to “improved irrigation, roads, & agricultural assistance” were probably leading to the explosion in opium cultivation.
“[A]ffordable deep-well technology turned 200,000 hectares of desert in southwestern Afghanistan into arable land over the past decade,” the inspector general found, concluding that “much of this newly arable land is dedicated to opium cultivation”.
Academi & its former Blackwater incarnation have an infamous history in Afghanistan. It once set up shell companies to disguise its business practices, according to a Senate report, so that its contracts would be unimpeded by company employees’ killings of Iraqi & Afghan civilians.
Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, sold the company – then renamed “Xe” – in 2010. Under new ownership, the firm occasionally gestures toward emphasizing its original business training military & police personnel, but it has never quite divested itself of its security contracting business.
In 2010, Blackwater was one of a group of firms selected by the State Department for its $10 billion contract to protect its diplomats worldwide, precisely the mission Blackwater performed when its agents opened fire on Iraqi civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007 & turned the company into the ugly face of private security. The following year, the firm’s newly installed CEO pledged, “We’re not backing away from security services.”
