Farewell to Hong Kong. Image from Stand News, used with permission.

The following story was originally published in Chinese on Stand News. It was translated into English by Global Voices and will be published here, with permission, in five different parts. Part One of the series follows.

Between August 29 and September 1, Stand News asked its readers in Hong Kong, through a series of online polls, how the national security law has impacted their lives.

More than 2,580 people responded — and about 37 percent revealed that even before the Steering Committee of the National People Congress announced its decision to implement the national security law on May 21, they had considered leaving Hong Kong. Since the law’s enactment, 76 percent of respondents said their desire to emigrate had intensified.

The most popular destination for relocation is Taiwan (32.3 percent), followed by the United Kingdom (23 percent).

Stand News’ reader survey on emigration attitude.

On July 22, the UK government introduced a policy that facilitates the emigration of residents from its former colony, by allowing eligible Hong Kong British National (Overseas) passport holders and their family members to settle in the UK for work and study. After five years of residency under this British National Overseas (BNO) arrangement, they can apply for full citizenship.

The new immigration scheme will begin accepting applications in January 2021. For now, though, eligible Hongkongers can apply to enter the UK based on “Leave Outside the Rules” (LOTR) — guidelines that allow UK Immigration to exercise discretion on the basis of compelling compassionate grounds.

YM [pseudonym] and her family decided to use this option. They left Hong Kong and, upon their arrival in the UK on August 6, applied for “Leave Outside the Rules” entry. Along with about ten other Hongkongers who were queuing up for the interview, they were asked about their occupation, financial conditions, and religion, as well as about their relatives and acquaintances in the UK.

Born in the 1980s, YM was working as a manager in a public relations firm in Hong Kong, but decided to leave the city with her family in August 2019 after the infamous attack at Prince Edward subway station, in which riot police indiscriminately assaulted passengers in an attempt to arrest protesters.

They sold their apartment for six million Hong Kong dollars (approximately 781,000 US dollars) and lived in a hotel for six months. At first, they planned to immigrate to Cyprus by investing 200,000 Euros in the country, but that plan was put on hold due to the outbreak of COVID-19. When the UK introduced the new BNO scheme, they decided to settle there.

Like tens of thousands other Hongkongers, YM was active during the year-long, anti-China extradition protests. She had joined a number of Telegram groups and made donations to fellow protesters who needed to equip themselves with protection gear. Three of the Telegram groups she belonged to were deleted after their administrators were arrested.

In a protest photo that was widely circulated online, YM’s face was recognisable; quite apart from her worry about getting caught in the cross hairs of the authorities, she told Stand News she was also concerned about her seven-year-old daughter’s education:

The patriotic education would turn her into ‘little pink’. What you learn in the textbooks would no longer be the truth. How could a government treat its young generation like this? In Hong Kong, it is a crime to be young. My daughter is now seven, after a few years, she will be in high school, what would become of her? I don’t want to see her getting arrested.

“Little pink” is a term used to describe young Chinese nationalists on the internet.

Now that YM and her family have successfully entered the UK under “Leave Outside the Rules”, they have started a Facebook page aimed at providing other Hongkongers with information on immigrating to the UK. Within one week, the page received more than 60 inquiries.

YM and her family have since decided to buy a property in the UK, and have no plans to visit Hong Kong in the near future.

Stand News’ reader survey on emigration.

Peter [pseudonym], a civil servant who plans to move to Taiwan with his wife, has signed up for a migration scheme under which he would invest a minimum of HK $530,000 in a Taiwan-based start-up. After five years, he will be able apply for permanent residency.

He chose Taiwan because he believes the fate of Taiwan and Hong Kong are intertwined: “Both Chinese regions are subjected to the tyranny of ‘One China’,” he said:

Taiwan is near to Hong Kong; I can travel back to Hong Kong as frequently as possible. I can also join solidarity rallies in Taiwan and give support to the exile protesters there. In Hong Kong, the space for voicing out has shrunk.

According to Taiwan’s immigration authorities, the island granted 3,161 residency permits to Hongkongers in the first half of 2020. The figure reflects a 116 percent increase when compared to 2019.

Many of those who don’t plan to emigrate — or want to but still haven’t left — have transferred their savings to offshore bank accounts, since the national security law gives police the power to freeze the assets of anyone being investigated. In the Stand News reader survey, 55.8 percent of respondents admitted that they’ve considered transferring their savings abroad, with around 27.8 percent having already moved their money into foreign accounts.

Mr. Lam [pseudonym], an environmental project engineer, made the decision to transfer his savings to an offshore account in May, soon after Beijing announced the implementation of the national security law. He feared that, like mainland China, Hong Kong would restrict foreign currency exchanges, or that the Hong Kong/US dollar peg would be undermined as a result of US sanctions. He therefore converted his HK $10 million nest egg into US currency and moved the money to bank accounts in Singapore.

Since Mr. Lam is already in his fifties, he is considering emigrating from Hong Kong upon his retirement. As a BNO passport holder, one of his options is to settle down in the UK, but he has also considered applying for a retirement visa to Thailand, as the country only requires a savings account worth HK $200,000 in order to apply for residency.

Coronavirus image concept of medical face mask and money, representing the pandemic and economic damages by Jernej Furman on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

By Ian Inkster

On September 6, 2020, officially recorded cases of COVID-19 surpassed 27 million, with a mortality of over 884,000 people. Although we are still in the midst of this global pandemic, thoughts are increasingly turning to its ultimate economic impacts. Here we show that the economic impress of the virus in any nation will be closely related to the extent of virus cases and mortality and the condition of the economy prior to the endemic, as well as to virus management policies.

The political economy of any one nation, however, is interlinked with the global economy, and because of this the scale of activities in the largest economies really does matter—they may even be of greater importance to a nation’s ease of recovery than the effectiveness of its COVID-19 management regime.

Table 1 below lists the six major economies by GDP, noting overall COVID-19 incidence since the inception of the virus.

Row A shows cases per million, Row B shows deaths per million, and Row C shows deaths per number of cases in each nation. Together, these six nations represent 44 per cent of the world’s population (E), 42 per cent of COVID-19 cases (D), and 57 per cent of global GDP—so they are of tremendous importance in all respects.

It is immediately clear that the crude total of cases (Row D) says nothing much about real impacts. India, for instance, has a huge number of cases but a much smaller ratio of cases/population than the USA or the UK. Indeed, Britain—with far fewer total cases than India—has a disastrous statistical record: the largest number of deaths per million and by far the largest ratio of deaths to cases (Row C), often termed the “observed case mortality ratio”, at over 12 per cent compared to Japan’s 1.9 per cent. Germany, usually seen as exemplary in the West, in fact has a much greater case mortality ratio than Japan or India. Things are not quite what they seem when compared to the “spike talk” and abrasiveness of the Western press, in particular.

Poverty, Age, and COVID-19

Table 2 moves towards an interpretation of this data. First, the poorer the nation as measured by per capita purchasing power parity income (that is, World Bank data) the lower the incidence and morbidity of COVID-19. Moving along Row F, India has a per capita income of only 13 per cent of the USA, 15 per cent of Germany’s, or 18 per cent of Japan’s. Yet the presence of COVID-19 in India, despite headlines of alarm, is far lower.

Rows G and H explain this substantially. In an income-poor nation such as India, the population of youngsters 0-19 years old (G) is very high, at 35.7 per cent, compared to 17.2 per cent in Japan or 17.7 per cent in Germany. As the virus has little impact on the young, this substantially reduces the proportion of the population subject to infection in India. Again, the very low percentage of elderly people (Row H, 6.6 per cent) compared to each of the other five nations is startling. Germany’s 22.2 per cent means that death per capita there should be much higher than in India by a multiple of 3 or 4, as COVID-19  results in mortality among the elderly far more than among younger age groups. Even in China, where Maoist population control reduced births, focused on smaller families and achieved longer survival amongst the elderly, the age differentials based on low income do possibly explain the China’s good COVID-19 performance—we do not have to believe Trumpist rhetoric about lying and mischievous Chinese authorities.

The advantages of relative poverty

The other elements of Table 2 that act as advantages for India and China compared to the other four nations centre on much lower urbanism, lower air pollution, and more distant borders (Rows J-M). Row J shows emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbon, hydrofluorocarbon and sulphur hexafluoride per capita in metric tons. The combination of high air contamination with very high degrees of urban living in the richer of the six nations is a possibly potent factor in transmission and severity of the virus, although research on this is ongoing.  Again, in the poorer large nations, the table shows long borders, but these are distant from urban centres and sparsely populated in the main. In contrast, the USA has considerable borders in dense settlement regions adjacent to other high-COVID-19 nations—Canada with 3,479 cases per million, Mexico with its 4,372 cases per million.

The life expectancy results in Row P spell out the effects of low income and low health expenditures—Indian life expectancy being 15 years and more below that of Japan. So, while the lack of health funding in the low-income nations (with Row N showing USA spending 20 times as much and 4 times the proportion of its GDP, in comparison to India) is a depressing global fact, it is not sufficient to raise infection or morbidity levels of COVID-19 in comparison to those of the rich nations of this group.

Complexities, political economy of COVID-19

Table 3 below turns to the likely economic impacts of COVID-19 following our overall analysis.

The biggest factor in recovery will probably be the extent of COVID-19 spread. Thus, Japan and the UK have almost identical incomes per capita, (Table 3, Row Q) but Japan has a far lower incidence of COVID-19 (Table 1, Rows A-C), less than one-quarter of British cases, a tiny fraction of its observed case fatality ratio. We can expect an easier Japanese recovery. On the other hand, generalising across the board, several other factors are involved in any economic forecasts, as suggested in Table 3.

Row T shows different rates of GDP in the six nations in post-recession years, and, other things being equal, the fast-growing China and India have a better running start on recovery. Their lower levels of national debt (Row R) means that they might have more public-funding slack—that is, growth will reduce debts from “recovery spending. At the same time, these two nations have a greater opportunity to borrow public funds through increasing their national debts.

In contrast, Japan has a very high existing national debt (R) but low COVID-19 presence, so might be able to trade her way out of imminent funding problems—Row S, showing that, as with Germany, Japan has a surplus on her export-import trade balance (e+i%).

Trade will be crucial. Row Y shows a high mutual dependency on trade in this group—the calculation here shows the number of the six nations listed as within the top four importing/exporting nations of the nation concerned; a figure of 0 would indicate minimum dependency, a figure of 4 the maximum. The figures of 2 and 3 throughout this row, therefore, show a high dependency of trade within the group—severe trade failure as a result of slow COVID-19 recovery in any members will demonstrably impact on the others. So, the large nations, in a pessimistic scenario, could well lead the rest of the world into further economic recession through a fall in their trading activity outside the group.

This is highlighted when we focus on the US and China as trading nations, bearing in mind that the total Chinese economy is growing much faster than that of the US (Row T). In 52 of 64 major economies globally, China is ranked in the top 4 as an exporter or importer to them. In 33 cases China is the major origin of their imports. China imports 10 per cent less than it exports, and has been growing very rapidly for some time. In contrast, the USA has a smaller world impact, trading disproportionately across her own borders with Canada and Mexico, or with China and Japan. The USA imports 20 per cent more than it exports, and its GDP has been growing at a rate of around 30 per cent of that of China. Crucially, the proportion of Chinese imports that go to poorer, non-industrial nations is around twice that of the USA. We may conclude that although severe trade decline would affect all nations, severe Chinese decline would be very serious for a much greater array of nations, and especially so for poorer or developing countries.

Constraints on policy choices

Finally, the political dimension can only be surmised. Rows W, X, and Z provide something approaching a measure of a comparative political economy for the six nations. The HDI, or human development index, of the United Nations incorporates life expectancy, education and incomes, and Row X adds the degree of income inequality between nations—the lower the figure the greater the equality. India suffers badly here from its low HDI position, which would hamper longer-term recovery from COVID-19. Surprisingly, given the range of political systems in this group, levels of equality/inequality are nothing to boast about but are relatively similar. So, these nations would have difficulty driving forward economic recovery programs that dampened the high levels of HDI, and at the same time—as shown in Row Z—they have very strong positions of political and economic freedom as measured by Freedom House earlier in 2020. As indicated by “*”, all nations other than China are defined as “electoral democracies,” with Germany and Japan leading in this regard. China is the odd nation out.

Six nations and global recovery

The conclusion is awkward. This immensely influential portion of our COVID-19 world has suffered more than average from the virus, has managed this in very varied ways, mostly problematic, and is economically highly interrelated.

The US recovery is likely to be slow and hard to predict, in that it suffers hugely from COVID-19, has a low rate of economic growth, and, as Rows X and Z of Table 3 suggest, Freedom House has reason to identify the USA as leading a decline in liberal democracy and the “functioning of government, freedom of expression and belief, and rule of law.” This judgement was made just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.

India might well be a contrast, with a faster recovery due to lower COVID-19 impacts and advantages stemming from all the elements listed in Table 2. A speedy recovery in China together with reasonable growth in India could be the leading optimistic combination—they both have fast rates of growth in the recent COVID-19 past, and they are complementary traders. China, in particular, impacts a wider range of less-developed nations than does the US or the other Big Six nations. In addition, China has political room to move—no electorate complaining of declining democracy, a very low degree of political freedom as defined by Freedom House, (Row Z), so an ability to push through determined programs for recovery and open trade.

Finally, in this very complex situation, we might find that the US-China trade war changes in tone, from a simple dualism to a general division between US pressure for global protectionism and a Chinese insistence on global free trading.

A forestry worker, wearing a face mask for protection against coronavirus, gathers fallen wood from a tropical area, in Guinée, Africa. Photo courtesy Aboubacarkhoraa Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

COVID-19 lockdowns have yielded dramatic scenes of natural recovery: smog disappearing from the skies of India, waterways of Italy becoming clear for the first time in memory, wild mountain goats roaming the streets of Wales, sea turtles returning to the beaches of Brazil. Many people, while confined to their homes, have had time to think about these revelations. Stories about everyday life brought to a standstill provide unique insight and allow for a reflective pause. Is this also a window of opportunity? Global Voices contributor Andrew Kowalczuk is a green technology engineer and former biomedical researcher. We interviewed him on implications for health, wildlife, and climate change in the post-COVID future.

Kevin Rennie (KR): We have seen the spectacular reappearance of animals in habitats and urban areas during lockdowns in the COVID-19 crisis. What are the new opportunities for or threats to wildlife?

Andrew Kowalczuk (AK): The resurgence of wildlife holds a powerful appeal, for several reasons. People, confined to these eerie quiets, find out they’re closer to nature than they had ever realized. And that is very hopeful, an atavism, or fascination with biodiversity, as contrast to urbanized living. The reverse side, however, is that humans are custodians of rare animals. Globally, eco-tourism is by far the number-one source of funding for national parks, wildlife reserves, and conservation initiatives. COVID travel restrictions directly caused the collapse of tourism, and therefore the economies, of those destinations. In Africa, Central America, and other locales, there has unfortunately been an increase in poaching. Desperation gives the motive, and absence of ranger patrols in wildlife preserves gives the opportunity. Hopefully, media attention will translate to better protection of vulnerable animals after COVID subsides.

KR: COVID-19 appeared in China in winter 2019, but there is still controversy about its exact origins, and whether that outbreak was preventable. How do these viruses get from the natural environment into humans?

AK: Historically, all of the largest pandemics were zoonotic. Meaning, a natural pathogen already present in animals, usually in mammals, jumped that gap between animals and humans. The Plague of Justinian, and the bubonic plagues in the Middle Ages, were a bacillus, originally from rodents. The 1918 influenza pandemic, that time was viral, by recombination of several mammalian viruses, from food livestock. Now with COVID-19, the difference today is that human overpopulation keeps encroaching further into natural environments, into more contact with previously exotic animals. That’s the lesson. Among coronaviridae, several closely related ones found in bats can cause human disease. SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID, is again genetically very similar. And there were previous, recent warnings, in the form of the outbreaks of SARS-1 and MERS, in 2003 and in 2012. So, in theory, yes, COVID-19 could have been prevented, by curtailing those human-versus-nature transgressions in the first place.

KR: There has been speculation about the new coronavirus having been created or altered in a lab. Is that at all possible?

AK: Good question, actually. That’s what many people still want to know. SARS-CoV-2 definitely was not created de novo in a laboratory, that is not possible. So instead, let’s look at the more realistic possibility of deliberate genetic modification. Evidence found by mapping the DNA sequences and phylogeny makes that also very unlikely. The novel nucleotide inserts, found in the spike protein domains of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, are not something genetic engineers would logically do, in gain-of-function experimentation. Now, that doesn’t rule out the scenario of a naturally occurring strain, with features of clinical interest, having been isolated in a lab, then escaping. If that were so, history will tell that tale soon enough. What matters is that, in any case, prevention of future epidemics will depend on environmental responsibility. New viruses will continually emerge in nature.

KR: Some natural habitats are disappearing, as they are consumed and degraded by humans. Does slowing down by the pandemic buy time to reconsider those activities?

AK: Not necessarily, for example, deforestation in the Amazon basin in Brazil. The expectation was that lockdown would slow destruction of rainforests. Actually the opposite is the case, a sharp increase in deforestation by clearance of land beginning around April of this year as seen by direct observation and in satellite imagery. There’s a double-edged effect. First, Brazilian government choosing not to enforce environmental law, and even giving an amnesty for illegal logging. Next, tycoons whose legal businesses became unprofitable in lockdown turning their attention to the Amazon. The people directly cutting rainforest trees are impoverished laborers in a shifting, informal economy who know it’s illegal, often feel remorse, but have few other options for subsistence. Besides losing carbon dioxide sequestration, more intense fire seasons will result. And the loss of biodiversity is analogous, or synonymous, with the wildlife conservation question.

KR: Improvements in air quality have been reported around the world during lockdowns. How can we build on these?

AK: That aspect has been most remarkable to the most people, since smog occurs over dense urban areas. If suddenly, skies are more blue, and citizens breathe more freely, they realize a more healthy and sustainable life is within reach. COVID lockdowns were the largest restriction of population movement in human history. And that curtailed industrial and other sources of pollutants, particulates, and greenhouse gases. Global carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 will have had the largest annual percentage decrease since the Second World War, the effect is gigantic. Some major cities, such as Milan and Brussels, do intend to reclaim urban spaces from automotive traffic. And there’s an unprecedented baseline from which to estimate what it would be like without combustion vehicles. Compliance would otherwise be low, so yes, jurisdictions will take this opportunity to push through measures for improved air quality.

KR: Finally, what climate change challenges will we face in the post-COVID world? How can we best meet these?

AK: Well, thank you, and to all our Global Voices authors, for having taken such a comprehensive overview of the issues. In the short term, diplomacy on climate change policy has been somewhat interrupted by COVID. As for the economics, many gigawatts of renewably sourced electricity, which would have gone online in 2020, have been delayed in deployment. That said, the United States is expected, for the first time, to produce more electricity from renewables than from coal. Renewable energy can stimulate economic growth in the recovery from recession, in any nation. Especially as its production is decentralized. In science, the intense work on deciphering coronavirus genomics, epidemiology, and vaccines, has given more urgency and openness to international cooperation than ever before. That same model will be needed for climate change mitigation. So, there you have it. Thanks for the forethought in these questions and coverage, and in your foresight for the future.

Youth pose for a photo capture at a conference in Namibia. Image credit: Yusuf Kalyango Jnr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

This article is part of UPROAR, a Small Media initiative that is urging governments to address digital rights challenges at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). 

On paper, there are little if any restrictions on access to the internet in Namibia, which is one of Africa’s most stable democracies and least inhabited nations. 

However, recent bold moves to acquire various forms of spyware have posed a dilemma to observers: Are Namibia intelligence agents deftly walking a fine line to acquire digital spy equipment from both China and the European Union?

Digital surveillance may be underway in Namibia, given the inventory of spy technologies acquired over the last few years — especially public closed-circuit TV gadgets and International Mobile Subscriber Identity-catchers (IMSI), says Admire Mare, a senior lecturer in the communication department at Namibia University of Science and Technology. Namibia is not alone as, “many countries in  Southern Africa have been expanding their surveillance capabilities as part of a growing wave of authoritarianism in the region,” Mare told Global Voices (GV).

Frederico Links, a research associate for the Institute for Public Policy Research, agrees. “Evidence indicates that Namibia has acquired sophisticated communications interception and surveillance capabilities, and that those capabilities have been deployed,” said Links, who is also the chair of ACTION Coalition, which advocates for greater access to information in Namibia.

IMSI catchers, commonly called “grabbers” in the spy industry, are devices that can be placed conveniently to trigger GSM mobile cell phone base stations to halt encryption of users’ voice, video or text calls. All digital correspondence that goes through an IMSI-catcher can be harvested, viewed, copied or heard. With the help of centrally-registered SIM cards, firmly courted by Namibian authorities, an IMSI-catcher is a perfect eye inside a national cellphone network, says Yasin Kakande, a TED fellow and Africa online privacy watcher, in a Zoom interview with GV. 

In 2017, datasets from the UK Department For International Trade, revealed that Namibia’s secret police agency, The Namibia Central Intelligence Service (NCIS), ordered and bought IMSI-catcher eavesdropping gear from the British company CellXion Ltd, which markets “cellular intelligence solutions.” 

Over the last decade, Namibia’s state intelligence police have been robustly active in the European spy gear retail market. 

The Coalition against Unlawful Surveillance Exports (CAUSE) revealed in June 2015 that Namibia made bids to purchase internet eavesdropping armoury in Switzerland as far back as 2013. However, this attempt was rebuffed when the Swiss government began to clamp down on such exports, fearing that rogue states could use such machinery to harm domestic pro-democracy opponents. Swiss authorities promptly froze shipments of internet surveillance gadgets and software to Namibia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Yemen, Qatar, Malaysia, Taiwan, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates. 

In October 2014, Namibia was outed in an audacious bid to acquire internet scooping gadgets from the notorious Italian software vendor The Hacking Team (rebranded as Memento Labs after it was acquired by another cybersecurity company in 2019). An embarrassing data breach from WikiLeaks exposed Namibia as one of Hacking Team’s proposed customers and the mushrooming deal fell through. The Italian government also seized the moment to cancel Hacking Team’s permission to export intrusion malware. 

The Campaign Against Arms Trade lobby alleges that in 2011, and between 2015 through 2017, Namibia carried out transactions with the Danish corporation Sys-tematic, which sells expertise, web control equipment and advisory for states that seek “solutions, services and know-how for surveillance, prevention, analysis, threat assessment and crisis handling.”

Then there is the big elephant in the room – Huawei, of China. The company’s relationship with Namibia is over a decade-old, as the company is credited with installing 3G, 4G and now possibly 5G infrastructure.

Huawei, arguably one of the world’s most enthusiastic sellers of web control technology, has an enormous presence in Namibia. The company is both the supplier and fixer of gadgetry and infrastructure of Telecom Namibia, the national telecommunications operator. 

Along with MTC, a Namibia government-owned cellphone operator, Huawei has been locked arm-in-arm in a technological transfer relationship, especially via its showpiece SingleRAN radio access technology that allows Namibia’s mobile telecom operators multiple wireless services on a single network. Up to 2 million Namibians lean on Huawei-supplied technology to access voice communication, internet and digital TV, thanks to hundreds of radio base stations and thousands of miles of fiber-optic lines stationed in Namibia by Huawei. 

In all of this, “no one is sure whether this close partnership has allowed Huawei to have backdoor sneak into Namibia’s internet vault as it reportedly did at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, where the Chinese giant built up a computer network and craftily began to harvest data from the shadows,” worries Yasin Kakande. 

It is exactly the ultra-secretive digital-control maneuvers of Namibia’s intelligence agency which baffles activists. “It’s hard to measure the internet surveillance capabilities of Namibia, given the opaque nature of the budget of the security services sector and the way government-owned telecommunication operators deal with foreign service providers. Transparency is the missing link in all this,” adds Mare, the professor. “It’s a secretive space, hence informants won’t come to the front to confirm or disconfirm the practice.”

Observers notice something bizarre but interesting: When the top publication The Namibian ran the story “(Namibia) Spy agency gets N$217m…over 3 years” ($12,97 million USD) in 2019, observers suspected that some of the cash is to be slated for buying internet surveillance gadgetry. However, in the national budget these items are often hidden under clever headings like construction, renovations and improvements.

Namibia denies accusations that it is building an internet war chest to effortlessly check up on its domestic critics. Charles Siyauya from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, wrote in response to a question from Global Voices that “to spy on citizen/s is the least on the priority list of execution of any progressive government. Only a predatory or failed government can spy on its citizens. Intelligence is about protecting the country and citizens from external and internal threats.” 

Namibia, like any state actor, has legitimate needs for using digital tools to guard its peace. It’s the secretive nature of the authorities’ digital manoeuvres that is unsettling. When purchased in secret—and used without the proper independent oversight— surveillance tools are a threat to fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy and freedom of expression. 

“Germany, choke on your asparagus” reads this graffiti in Wedding, Berlin. Photo (c): Maxim Edwards, May 2020.

In late June, more than 1,500 workers at a meat processing plant in western Germany contracted COVID-19. Once the limit of 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants had been surpassed, the lockdown of the facility and its neighbouring village was later extended to the entire district of Gütersloh, in the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia. It was the first lockdown on this scale since Germany relaxed federal restrictions on May 10.

Most of those infected at the Tönnies company’s slaughterhouse were migrant workers from Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. They are just a handful of the thousands of people from the EU’s eastern member states who head to Germany every year to work in the country’s food industry.

Germany’s epidemiologists have warned that these massive facilities, with their poor ventilation, running fluids, packed assembly lines, and oft-touched metal surfaces, constitute Petri dishes for infection. They have already noted a significant number of COVID-19 infections among slaughterhouse workers, who are now being tested en masse in at least five federal states. But some figures, including North-Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Armin Laschet, seemingly shifted the blame onto the workers themselves (Laschet has since “clarified” his statements, made in June, after criticism from federal politicians.)

Tönnies now adorns the frontpages of Germany’s leading newspapers; in some publications and on social media, it has become a popular quip to state that the pigs have a bigger lobby in Germany than the precarious workers who slaughter them. That may change. On May 20, Germany’s Minister of Labour Hubertus Heil presented a new law to ban the outsourcing of labour and hiring processes to subcontractors, obliging Germany’s meat companies to commit to minimum labour standards for migrant workers.

With this outbreak, another chapter has unfolded in Germany’s public discussion about the status of seasonal labour migrants. Labour activists from Europe, East and West, are warning that the COVID-19 pandemic has not only illuminated these existing inequalities — it has deepened them.

Choke on your asparagus

In Germany, the coming of spring is traditionally symbolised by the asparagus and strawberries. More recent tradition holds that they are picked by precarious Bulgarian and Romanian migrant workers — Germany’s agricultural sector hired 300,000 migrant workers in 2019 alone. So when the federal government closed the country’s borders in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the German agricultural lobby feared that tonnes of produce could be left to rot in the fields. Therefore, on April 2, Berlin agreed to open Germany’s borders to 80,000 seasonal labour migrants over the following two months. The EU instituted a union-wide exception to travel bans for seasonal labourers.

Almost immediately, thousands of Romanians heeded the call. On April 9, images hit social media of 1,800 people crammed into the small international airport in Cluj-Napoca, due to board four flights to Germany. According to some German media reports, several workers had arrived from the Suceava region, which was technically supposed to be under lockdown. What explained the crowds of people at Cluj airport that day?

Both at home and in Germany, these seasonal labourers were accused of recklessness and stupidity for choosing to work abroad during a pandemic. Rights activists and analysts alike criticised this framing as inaccurate, asking not why workers chose to take such risks, but what the German companies benefitting from their labour could do to keep them safe. After all they were, in the words of the EU directive which exempted them from travel bans, “critical workers.”

For many people in rural Bulgaria, Romania, and other eastern European states with poor employment prospects, seasonal labour migration is a matter of survival.

Polina Manolova, a migration researcher at the University of Tübingen, says that the Bulgarian government that the Bulgarian government’s lack of proactive measures to offer social support for workers intensified poverty, or the fear of impoverishment, during the pandemic:

These are people who have been laid off recently, people who aren’t entitled to any unemployment benefit because there are so many conditions they have to fulfil. A lot of people fall out of the social security net, or work in the grey sector, or are self-employed. I follow recruitment agencies on Facebook, and I have never before seen such massive interest in leaving to work on these jobs.

As this anonymous woman explained to Bulgarian National Radio in April:

Финансова е причината да искам да замина. С 20 паудна си пазарувам храна за цялата седмица и от нищо не се лишавам, а тук не мога да си позволя да си купя сьомга всяка седмица. На 30-и април летя, имам организиран чартърен полет от фермата. Пътувам за Англия. Тази година ми е девети сезон, ходя в една и съща ферма. Фермата е за ягоди, малини, къпини, боровинки. Не се притеснявам, там сме затворено общество. От познати, които са там, знам, че има карантинен период. Спим в каравани, по шест човека сме, имаме отделно баня, тоалетна

The reason is financial for me. With 20 pounds I can do my weekly shopping and I don’t deprive myself of anything. Here I can’t even afford to buy fish each week. I am going on a charter flight organised by the company on April 30. This is my ninth season in this farm. It’s a strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry farm. I am not worried because we are like a closed society there. My friends there told me that there is a quarantine period. We are six people in a caravan, we have a shared bathroom and a toilet.

Her words also suggest, as several analysts explained to Global Voices, that wage differentials are a necessary but not sufficient way to explain seasonal labour migration. It offers young families a chance to save for their children’s higher education or houses of their own. It offers social capital; for young men in rural areas, it may as well be considered a rite of passage.

This mainstay of rural life in Romania and Bulgaria was not going to be cut short by the pandemic. Facebook groups recruiting farm workers in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands teemed with eager workers soliciting advice on how to head overseas. A handful of comments on the Bulgarian-language Brigada UK express concern about the coronavirus and social distancing measures, but most seem undeterred, even comments in April when the pandemic was far worse in many countries.

“With the amount of chemicals they spray over there, there’s no way you’ll get COVID-19!” joked one man on the same page.

Life on the fields

When seasonal workers arrived in Germany, caveats applied. EU regulations, as well as instructions drafted by the German Ministry of Agriculture, obliged them to take a generalised health test before entering the country, whereupon they would have to self-isolate for two weeks. Only chartered flights were permitted, rather than the long bus journeys taken by most labour migrants.

Yet much remained the same. Seasonal labourers were still hired by subcontractors and middlemen rather than the farms or slaughterhouses where they worked. Formally paid the German hourly minimum wage of 9.35 euros, they complain that much of that sum is in fact deducted — not always transparently — to cover flights, food, and accommodation which they consider substandard. Dominique John, project coordinator of Faire Mobilität, an NGO which enforces fair working conditions for migrant labourers in Germany, told Global Voices that his colleagues had noted a rise in complaints of this nature in recent months.

Fundamentally, this precarious employment relationship did not change during the pandemic. As one German farmer told the national tabloid Bild in April:

Deutsche kann ich nicht gebrauchen. Stundenlang gebückt auf dem Feld zu arbeiten, sind die meisten Deutschen nicht gewohnt. Sie klagen schnell über Rückenschmerzen… Der Spargel muss alle ein bis anderthalb Tage gestochen werden. Deutsche fordern die Woche ein, zwei Tage frei. Das geht in der Hochsaison nicht. Rumänen ackern auch sonn- und feiertags

I can’t use Germans. Most Germans aren’t used to toiling away in the fields for hours on end. They quickly complain about backaches. But asparagus has to be picked every one to one and a half days. Germans demand one or two days off per week. That doesn’t cut it in the harvest season. Romanians work away on Sunday and public holidays too.

According to an April 2 concept paper drafted by Germany’s Ministry of Agriculture seen by Global Voices, seasonal labour migrants had to be provided with personal protective equipment (PPE) and be able to work and live at a safe distance distanced from one another. However, in light of the usual standards of accommodation for such workers, researchers and activists such as Manolova doubt that even stricter sanitary measures could be enforced across the board.

The following examples, according to labour rights activists, are not unrepresentative of the living conditions of seasonal labour migrants on farms in Germany and neighbouring Austria:

In April, other labour activists voice concern at the potential health consequences of the rigorous work regime on the fields:

horror stories from Romanian seasonal workers in Germany continue:
1. Days of quarantine: one. Then, on the fields.
2. Pressured to work 14 hours a day, 100 hours a week!
3. If refusing to work in cold rain, fired on spot. https://t.co/CCdI9e3AWg

— Daniela Gabor (@DanielaGabor) April 20, 2020

On April 11, a Romanian man working as an asparagus picker in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg was found dead, and had tested positive for coronavirus. He is believed to have entered the country earlier, on March 20. The same month, Romanian workers from Suceava working at the same farm wrote the following letter to Monitorul de Suceava, a local newspaper, complaining about working conditions during the pandemic. The subcontractor who had dispatched them there, they continued, was no longer responding to their phone calls.

Vă scriu pentru că suntem într-o mare dilemă, suntem în locul în care a murit acel bărbat din Suceava, aici nu sunt condiții de protecție, sunt oameni în izolare care muncesc singuri pe câmp. Astăzi a izolat o echipă întreagă de oameni, aici este o femeie care se simte rău și așteaptă medicul de azi dimineață și nu vine nimeni să o vadă. Se lucrează și în hală la sortat sparanghel, aici oamenii stau unul lângă altul, avem măști pe care le purtăm de 5 zile. Au închis porțile firmei și au pus bodyguard, au mers apoi la oameni în câmp și le-au spus că dacă vine poliția să le spună că e totul bine. Vrem să mergem acasă, nu vrem să murim aici pe capete.

I write to you because we are in a great dilemma. We are in the place where that man from Suceava died. There are no means of protection; there are self-isolating people who work alone in the fields. Today a whole team of people were isolated; there’s a woman who feels ill, she’s been waiting for the doctor to come since the morning and nobody comes to see her. People sort asparagus in the hall and stand next to each other. We have masks that we’ve been wearing for five days. They closed the gates of the compound and put guards there, then went to people in the fields and told them that if the police come, they have to tell them that everything is fine. We want to go home. We do not want to die here.

There are grounds to believe that the distribution of working hours has improved in subsequent months. But in light of the employment relationship, a key question remains: what should happen if an agricultural worker in Germany falls ill from COVID-19?

Last year, the Federal Employment Agency stated that nearly 70 percent of agricultural seasonal labourers in Germany were marginally employed on short term “mini jobs,” and therefore did not qualify for health insurance and German social security guarantees. Furthermore, the maximum period in which foreign workers were allowed to work in Germany without them or their employers contributing to the social security system was raised from 70 to 115 days during the pandemic, potentially prolonging their precarious situation.

Throughout May and June, public interest in the fate of seasonal labour migrants rose, as did fears that the incoming labourers would bring COVID-19 with them.

But what went less widely remarked was that eastern Europe had been comparatively successful in its fight against the pandemic. Despite widespread tropes about migrants “bringing disease” to Europe, it was the Romanian and Bulgarian asparagus pickers, not the consumers, were at greater risk from working in Germany — where the number of COVID-19 infections was far higher than in their homelands.

When the crops have been saved and their saviours return to their home countries, it could be worth revisiting this social media user’s words:

Auch muss ich gerade an diese abstrusen Bilder von voriger Woche denken, wo tausende Erntehelfer eng gedrängt an rumänischen Flughäfen standen.
Und ich frage mich: Wie wahrscheinlich ist es, dass ein rumänischer Erntehelfer hier zum Arzt geht wenn er Husten hat? Wer hilft denen?

— Dr. Wu (@Dok_Wu) April 15, 2020

I have to reflect on these abstruse images from the past weeks, where thousands of migrant workers stand back to back in Romanian airports. And I ask myself: how likely is it that a Romanian migrant labourer will go to the doctor here if he has a cough? Who will help him then?

It is a good question. If, indeed, one of those workers is able to visit a doctor in Germany, nothing will be lost in translation — for Germany’s healthcare system, much like many others in Europe, runs with the help of thousands of Romanian doctors who have come in search of a dignified salary. Meanwhile, Romania fights COVID-19 with a shortage of medical personnel.

The management of fresh food supply chains in Europe’s transnational agribusiness relies on cheap, non-unionised, and privately managed labour from low-wage Eastern European countries. The costs and benefits of this material structure are under-appreciated. West European farming benefits from massive EU and national subsidies, crowding out agricultural exports from the Global South. Yet pay and work conditions in the parts of European food supply chains that are not yet automated (such as fresh produce or meatpacking) remain precarious. International supermarkets pit producers against each other, who in turn rely on wage suppression to defend the sectors’ relatively small margins. While in theory, the East European workers enjoy the legal protections awarded to formal labour by EU law, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, and in some cases sharpened, their often exploitative work conditions. This occurred not just in countries with large informal sectors, weak labour unions a dual labor markets such as Greece, Spain or Italy, but also in countries like Germany, where economic informality is low and, for all the recent erosion, labour relations.

There’s a chronic demand for labour across Europe, and this shows it. You can have Brexit or no Brexit, you’re still going to need those workers, and there are few remaining places in Europe other than Romania where you can get them. Over the past 30 years, we’ve been through a process of liberalisation of economies, there have been much more short-term labour contracts and flexibility to recruit migrant labourers, and that’s in total opposition to the publicly stated desire to have less immigration; you can’t have both. You cannot on the one hand liberalise the economy and give more leeway to labour movement and then say that you want less immigration. Politicians play this game about closing borders because there’s political benefits, but at the same time it’s clear.

Trade unions also have to accept that local workers aren’t available for those jobs. It’s also not true that if the wages and conditions were improved, local workers would do that work — look at its social status. Perhaps students will do it, but once they graduate they’re not going to do this. Politicians can say that they want unemployed people to do that work, but the problem is that picking strawberries, asparagus isn’t an easy job! It requires getting up very early and being very motivated, and actually requires some skills. You won’t often find that among other workers. It has proven a complete illusion that you can do without this. We’re talking about very specific sectors — agriculture is one, care work is another, restaurants and dishwashing, hotel industry is another. These sectors can only exist because of that labour coming in.

Însă resursa umană cu care România a mai rămas nu mai este una super calificată, adică bine plătită, ci o resursă umană necalificată numită „forţă de muncă ieftină”. Aş spune chiar foarte ieftină şi prost plătită. Atât de ieftină, încît se vinde „sezonier”, „en-gros”, aproape ca buştenii. Dar dacă buştenii se reîntorc în ţară sub forma unor mărfuri prelucrate în fabrici şi cu un preţ mai mare, cetăţenii, „forţa de muncă ieftină”, revin în ţară mai obosiţi, mai bolnavi, mai bătrâni, chiar dacă cu ceva bani adunaţi. Citeşte întreaga ştire: Noul proiect de ţară este neoiobăgia. Statul nu face diferența între bușteni și oameni… […] Avem stare de urgenţă, sau dispare la un telefon din Germania? […] Ce garanţii au aceşti oameni, ce asigurări, ce condiţii sanitare etc.? Ei pleacă pentru câteva luni, căci sunt “sezonieri”: cine le plăteşte carantina când se întorc? Statul german, angajatorii sau statul român? […] Care este proiectul nostru de ţară?

The human resource Romania is left with is no longer highly qualified, or rather, well-paid, but an unqualified resource known as “cheap labour.” Cheap, or poorly paid. So cheap that it is sold “seasonally,” and “wholesale” — almost like logs. But if the logs return to their country of origin in the form of goods processed in factories, to be sold at a higher price, the “cheap labour” citizens return to their country more tired, sick, and older, even if they have raised a little money. Our country’s new project is neo-feudalism. The state does not differentiate between logs and human beings. […] So, do we have a state of emergency, or does it disappear with a phone call from Germany? […] What guarantees do these people have? What insurance, what healthcare? They leave after a few months, because they are “seasonal.” Who pays for their quarantine when they return: the German state, the Romanian state, or their employers? […] What is our national project?

As borders were closed across Europe, some of the continent’s most vulnerable workers saw themselves labelled “critical” and “essential” by Brussels and Berlin. It was a flattering acknowledgement, but one which implicitly invited comparison with their less than flattering employment rights and precarious existence.

If the post-pandemic world returns to “normal,” it behoves Europeans to ask once more about the how our normality came to be and at a cost to whom — the cost to those who toil unseen, the better to nourish our illusions that it may continue forever.