New Orleans        The spring board meeting for ACORN is held on Zoom.  We had good attendance from more than a dozen countries across the globe and multiple time zones.  Libera, Sicily, and Malta, among our newest affiliates reported.  Kenya filed a written report.  Scotland, England, Canada, India, and the USA all answered the roll call.  Each in turn reported on progress and plans, establishing last year as a good one and this one as exciting as the last.

India’s report was perhaps too timely.  After mentioning the growth among our hawkers’ union and the beachheads we have established among gig workers in food delivery, as well as legislative reforms that will extend social security and other benefits to these workers, Dharmendra Kumar, ACORN’s director in Delhi, said that they had been forced to begin a new campaign with their lower income members in general and their food delivery workers and food sellers among hawkers as well.  The issue was access to critical cooking gas.

One of the positive achievements of the autocratic, communalist administration of Prime Minister Modi over the last decade has been the effort to make gas connections available to lower income households.  The cleaner fuel aided the families and the environment by replacing burning wood, scrap or cow dung.  Liquefied petroleum gas has become ubiquitous growing to 330 million families from 145 million in 2016 with more than a billion people depending on it as well as many businesses and industries.  This transition in India relied on imported gas making the country second only to China in these purchases.

The crisis that had triggered the urgent need was the US and Israeli War against Iran.  Reports indicate that 60% of India’s gas comes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.  The desperate demand for cooking oil in India is part of the collateral damage from Trump’s war in a much more personal way than the 20% increase at America gas pumps in the two weeks so far.

In retrospect, the government may have waited a week too long before making families the first priority over restaurants and businesses, rather than acting immediately.  It’s hard to criticize them too much, because India, like the rest of the world, probably found Trump’s war unbelievable and unimaginable, and may have bought his first blurts that it would be over quickly.  Now fried items and slow-cooked sauces are off the menu many places and there are lines in many cities as families try to refill their gas cylinders.  The government is telling people it will be all right, but the shortages are spreading.

For ACORN’s members in our informal workers unions in India being able to cook or deliver food is their livelihood and accounts for their daily income.  The government says alternative shipments are coming from the US, Norway, Canada, Algeria, and, once again, Russia, where India had only recently agreed to decrease purchases because of the Ukrainian war.  Invariably, it will cost more, threatening poor families, and likely forcing fewer meals to tradeoff for the new prices.

In the global economy where oil remains essential, it’s classic hubris for countries, like the US and Israel, to act unilaterally for what remain unexplained reasons, without considering how many hundreds of millions of people are impacted by their arrogance and aggression, no matter the rationales.  War makers should know these things, advise, and protect their allies, not bring them to the brink of ruin and starvation.