posted
Some people are under the false impression China's economic structure is communist when it truly isn't. Truth of the matter is China's economic system is AUTHORITARIAN CAPITALISM; runaway capitalism with no regulation, laissez-faire capitalism and no protections.
China's capitalist economic structure is absent of any social democracy. A system the conservative right-wing in America envies and would love to emulate in the states.
I hate reading stories like this but felt I had to share.
Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.
I think I am probably going to die any minute now. An inflamed, deceived mob of about 50 desperate men are crowding round the car, some trying to turn it over, others beating at it with large rocks, all yelling insults and curses.
They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let’s not think about that …
I am trying not to meet their eyes, but they are staring at me and my companions with rage and hatred such as I haven’t seen in a human face before. Those companions, Barbara Jones and Richard van Ryneveld, are - like me - quite helpless in the back seats.
If we get out, we will certainly be beaten to death. If we stay where we are, we will probably be beaten to death.
Our two African companions have - crazily in our view - got out of the car to try to reason with the crowd. It is clear to us that you might as well preach non-violence to a tornado.
At last, after what must have been about 40 seconds but that felt like half an hour, one of the pair saw sense, leapt back into the car and reversed wildly down the rocky, dusty path - leaving his friend behind.
By the grace of God we did not slither into the ditch, roll over or burst a tyre. Through the dust we churned up as we fled, we could see our would-be killers running with appalling speed to catch up. There was just time to make a crazy two-point turn which allowed us to go forwards and so out-distance them.
We had pretty much abandoned our other guide to whatever his fate might be (this was surprisingly easy to justify to myself at the time) when we saw that he had broken free and was running with Olympic swiftness, just ahead of pursuers half hidden by the dust.
We flung open a rear door so he could scramble in and, engine grinding, we veered off, bouncing painfully over the ruts and rocks.
We feared there would be another barricade to stop our escape, and it would all begin again. But there wasn’t, and we eventually realised we had got away, even the man whose idiocy nearly got us killed.
He told us it was us they wanted, not him, or he would never have escaped. We ought to be dead. We are not. It is an interesting feeling, not wholly unpleasant.
Why did they want to kill us? What was the reason for their fury? They thought that if I reported on their way of life they might lose their livings.
Livings? Dyings, more likely.
These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.
To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.
Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.
Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.
We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.
Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.
We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren’t in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.
By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.
The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.
I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.
Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.
It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation.
It is my view - and not just because I was so nearly killed - that China’s cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise.
China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation.
For the governments, there are gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railways, hospitals and schools - in return for giving Peking a free and tax-free run at Africa’s rich resources of oil, minerals and metals.
For the people, there are these wretched leavings, which, miserable as they are, must be better than the near-starvation they otherwise face.
Persuasive academics advised me before I set off on this journey that China’s scramble for Africa had much to be said for it. They pointed out China needs African markets for its goods, and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent.
For once, they argued, a foreign intervention in Africa might work precisely because it is so cynical and self-interested. They said Western aid, with all its conditions, did little to create real advances in Africa, laughing as they declared: ‘The only country that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican.’
Why get so het up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India?
Is it really our business to try to act as missionaries of purity? Isn’t what we call ‘corruption’ another name for what Africans view as looking after their families?
And what about China herself? Despite the country’s convulsive growth and new wealth, it still suffers gravely from poverty and backwardness, as I have seen for myself in its dingy sweatshops, the primitive electricity-free villages of Canton, the dark and squalid mining city of Datong and the cave-dwelling settlements that still rely on wells for their water.
After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long chaos that went before, China longs above all for stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty of Lubumbashi’s Belgian-built Park Hotel: ‘Africa is China’s last hope.’
I find this argument quite appealing, in theory. Britain’s own adventures in Africa were not specially benevolent, although many decent men did what they could to enforce fairness and justice amid the bigotry and exploitation.
It is noticeable that in much former British territory we have left behind plenty of good things and habits that are absent in the lands once ruled by rival empires.
Even so, with Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda on our conscience, who are we to lecture others?
I chose to look at China’s intervention in two countries, Zambia and the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’, because they lie side by side; because one was once British and the other Belgian.
Also, in Zambia’s imperfect but functioning democracy, there is actual opposition to the Chinese presence, while in the despotic Congo, opposition to President Joseph Kabila is unwise, to put it mildly.
Congo is barely a state at all, and still hosts plenty of fighting not all that far from here.
Statues and images of Joseph’s murdered father Laurent are everywhere in an obvious attempt to create a cult of personality on which stability may one day be based. Portraits of Joseph himself scowl from every wall.
I have decided not to name most of the people who spoke to me, even though some of them gave me permission to do so, because I am not sure they know just how much of a risk they may be running by criticising the Chinese in Africa.
I know from personal experience with Chinese authority that Peking regards anything short of deep respect as insulting, and it does not forget a slight.
I also know that this over-sensitive vigilance is present in Africa.
The Mail on Sunday team was reported to the authorities in Zambia’s Copper Belt by Chinese managers who had seen us taking photographs of a graveyard at Chambishi where 54 victims of a disaster in a Chinese-run explosives factory are buried. Within an hour, local ’security’ officials were buzzing round us trying to find out what we were up to.
This is why I have some time for the Zambian opposition politician Michael Sata, known as ‘King Cobra’ because of his fearless combative nature (but also, say his opponents, because he is so slippery).
Sata has challenged China’s plans to invest in Zambia, and is publicly suspicious of them. At elections two years ago, the Chinese were widely believed to have privately threatened to pull out of the country if he won, and to have helped the government parties win.
Peking regards Zambia as a great prize, alongside its other favoured nations of Sudan (oil), Angola (oil) and Congo (metals).
It has cancelled Zambia’s debts, eased Zambian exports to China, established a ’special economic zone’ in the Copper Belt, offered to build a sports stadium, schools, a hospital and an anti-malaria centre as well as providing scholarships and dispatching experts to help with agriculture. Zambia-China trade is growing rapidly, mainly in the form of copper.
All this has aroused the suspicions of Mr Sata, a populist politician famous for his blunt, combative manner and his harsh, biting attacks on opponents, and who was once a porter who swept the platforms at Victoria Station in London.
Now the leader of the Patriotic Front, with a respectable chance of winning a presidential election set for the end of October, Sata says: ‘The Chinese are not here as investors, they are here as invaders.
‘They bring Chinese to come and push wheelbarrows, they bring Chinese bricklayers, they bring Chinese carpenters, Chinese plumbers. We have plenty of those in Zambia.’
This is true. In Lusaka and in the Copper Belt, poor and lowly Chinese workers, in broad-brimmed straw hats from another era, are a common sight at mines and on building sites, as are better-dressed Chinese supervisors and technicians.
There are Chinese restaurants and Chinese clinics and Chinese housing compounds - and a growing number of Chinese flags flapping over factories and smelters.
‘We don’t need to import labourers from China,’ Sata says. ‘We need to import people with skills we don’t have in Zambia. The Chinese are not going to train our people in how to push wheelbarrows.’
He meets me in the garden of his not specially grand house in the old-established and verdant Rhodes Park section of Lusaka. It is guarded by uniformed security men, its walls protected by barbed wire and broken glass.
‘Wherever our Chinese “brothers” are they don’t care about the local workers,’ he complains, alleging that Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and treat their African workers like dirt.
In language which seems exaggerated, but which will later turn out to be at least partly true, he claims: ‘They employ people in slave conditions.’
He also accuses Chinese overseers of frequently beating up Zambians. His claim is given force by a story in that morning’s Lusaka newspapers about how a Zambian building worker in Ndola, in the Copper Belt, was allegedly beaten unconscious by four Chinese co-workers angry that he had gone to sleep on the job.
I later checked this account with the victim’s relatives in an Ndola shanty town and found it to be true.
Recently, a government minister, Alice Simago, was shown weeping on TV after she saw at first hand the working conditions at a Chinese-owned coal mine in the Southern Province.
When I contacted her, she declined to speak to me about this - possibly because criticism of the Chinese is not welcome among most of the Zambian elite.
Denis Lukwesa, deputy general secretary of the Zambian Mineworkers’ Union, also backed up Sata’s view, saying: ‘They just don’t understand about safety. They are more interested in profit.’
As for their general treatment of African workers, Lukwesa says he knows of cases where Chinese supervisors have kicked Zambians. He summed up their attitude like this: ‘They are harsh to Zambians, and they don’t get on well with them.’
Sata warns against the enormous loans and offers of help with transport, schools and health care with which Peking now sweetens its attempts to buy up Africa’s mineral reserves.
‘China’s deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo is, in my opinion, corruption,’ he says, comparing this with Western loans which require strong measures against corruption.
Everyone in Africa knows China’s Congo deal - worth almost £5billion in loans, roads, railways, hospitals and schools - was offered after Western experts demanded tougher anti-corruption measures in return for more aid.
Sata knows the Chinese are unpopular in his country. Zambians use a mocking word - ‘choncholi’ - to describe the way the Chinese speak. Zambian businessmen gossip about the way the Chinese live in separate compounds, where - they claim - dogs are kept for food.
There are persistent rumours, which cropped up in almost every conversation I had in Zambia, that many of the imported Chinese workforce are convicted criminals whom China wants to offload in Africa. I was unable to confirm this but, given China’s enormous gulag and the harshness of life for many migrant workers, it is certainly not impossible.
Posts: 148 | From: Sirius | Registered: Sep 2006
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Some people are salty about China I say. Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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However, I wouldn't be laughing if I were you, I'd be worried about the fact that an irreversible change happened yesterday that's perhaps not in YOUR best interest.
Quit riding China's **** and worry about your own problems.
Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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I was just wondering why some of the most blatantly anti-black stuff in w.st media seems to consistently come from dailymail, thats all.
I thought there was a correlation between white/uk/anglo jealousy and china/africa relations.
Posts: 426 | From: Cali-for-nia | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
^ LOL , ok, I must have mis-interpreted your statement.
Apologies comerade!
I have been conversating with friends from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand etc frantically over the past couple days and they reckon the Brits are just salty. They also see the end of the 'American Empire'. They agree with me China is infinitely better to do business with from an African perspective. The Chinese actually have solid, time-tested moral foundations and don't have 'sadistic' intents for Blacks.
If we start off from a mutual respect standpoint, China and Africa could create many many win-win situations. And over time, they can 'help' us shake-off the last vestiges of unwanted European presence in Africa.
Of course we have to be careful because all humans carry the disease of Greed. But not all humans carry this cancer of 'white supremacy' that has brought the world to its knees - even the whites who supported and maintained the system are now getting ROYALLY FUCKED by their own devices.
Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
Two key points about how Chinese "investment" hurts Africa:
quote: Everyone in Africa knows China’s Congo deal - worth almost £5billion in loans, roads, railways, hospitals and schools - was offered after Western experts demanded tougher anti-corruption measures in return for more aid.
Sata knows the Chinese are unpopular in his country. Zambians use a mocking word - ‘choncholi’ - to describe the way the Chinese speak. Zambian businessmen gossip about the way the Chinese live in separate compounds, where - they claim - dogs are kept for food.
There are persistent rumours, which cropped up in almost every conversation I had in Zambia, that many of the imported Chinese workforce are convicted criminals whom China wants to offload in Africa. I was unable to confirm this but, given China’s enormous gulag and the harshness of life for many migrant workers, it is certainly not impossible.
Since when did schools and bridges become a substitutes for CASH? With CASH you can build all the schools and bridges you need. What textbook on economics promotes such NON SENSE as a way of building economies? NONE! Schools and bridges does nothing to help Africa create WEALTH. THAT is the same sort of scam that Westerners have been pulling on Africa all along, by swapping "aid" for Africa's natural resources, but NEVER cash, which is what the Africans REALLY need. And this talk about corruption is only used as a cover up, because these Africans are corrupt BECAUSE of these bogus deals to BEGIN with. Anything that keeps Africans from MAKING MOST of the money off their natural resources and labor is THIEVERY plain and simple. Building a couple huts and a medical closet is not a fair exchange for taking BILLIONS of dollars in natural resources OUT of Africa. If Africans had those BILLIONS of dollars, they could BUILD THEIR OWN infrastructure and schools. THAT is the whole point. Think of all the HEAVY EQUIPMENT that is used to create the dams, bridges, mines and other industrial infrastructure to support these HUGE foreign operations and you will see the problem. This equipment could rebuild Africa almost overnight. But who controls it and where does all the equipment go after these projects are built? Certainly not to Africa. It goes BACK to the countries that imported it in the first place, which means that the Africans are left WITH NOTHING to build their own. And none of these MASSIVE projects have African companies who share in the effort of design and construction who OWN such heavy equipment. ANY country that is SERIOUS about development would have a VESTED INTEREST in promoting and PROTECTING such companies as THOSE TYPES OF COMPANIES are what you need to BUILD and GROW your infrastructure, not AID. Yet the "aid" given to Africa is ALWAYS promised as a substitute, but in reality it does NOTHING.
On top of that, by importing Chinese labor, equipment and companies to do all the work, this means that Africans NEVER get the chance of gaining experience to build THEIR OWN infrastructure. The goal for Africa should be one of SELF SUFFICIENCY, where they have the skills, expertise and equipment to DO FOR SELF, just like the Chinese are doing. But the Chinese are working PURELY out of self interest, by keeping ALL the money they spend on these projects IN THE HANDS OF CHINESE. Little of the money spent on these projects GO TO AFRICANS. Again this highlights the importance of MONEY, SKILLS and EQUIPMENT in the development of a country. Yet this is PRECISELY what the Chinese AND the West have NEVER helped the Africans to get. Therefore, this means that Africans are NOT really being helped. Africa has ALL the raw materials it needs to BUILD. Africa has ALL the labor they need to build. ALL that Africa is lacking is CASH, EQUIPMENT and SKILLS to make it happen and NONE of these FOREIGNERS are really going to help Africa get where they need to be. They are ONLY operating out of self interest and giving Africans TOKEN trinkets of "aid" that are relatively MEANINGLESS in terms of real value.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
^ Without "defending" the Chinese, Yes, they are working for their own "self interest",
Wouldn't you?
And you pointed out rightly that the problems Africans have is "CASH, EQUIPMENT & SKILLS".
Europeans historically have pro-actively "PREVENTED" Africans from getting these things.
Since when did the Chinese go "out of their way" to "PREVENT" Africans from getting these things? or anything for that matter.
Must they hold our hands?
I don't think it is fair to blame African incompetence on the Chinese. You have to look at the situation in its larger context. Africans have suffered a lot from European ill-will for centuries now. That Africans cannot match the Chinese in the Chinese efforts in Africa is a testament to that.
So the problems here are:
*There clearly are no African leaders competent enough to negotiate fair terms with the Chinese coming in to do business and *The Chinese seem to be "indifferent" to Africa's problems (such as our "bad leaders").
I still don't think it is fair to look at the Chinese via the same lenses we use for Europeans. We must judge them on their own merit.
Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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It is all about SELF INTEREST. Whether Chinese, Western or MARTIAN, it doesn't matter. If the deal is based PRIMARILY around the SELF INTERESTS of foreigners it WILL NOT benefit Africa. China is NOT in Africa to help Africans. It is there FOR CHINAS benefit and CHINAS benefit only.
Africa will begin to benefit when it STOPS pretending that the WORLD will SAVE them and HELP them become economically better off and self sufficient. NO they wont. The ONLY way Africa will become economically better off and self sufficient is when AFRICA begins to operate out of SELF INTEREST, which would mean that NO FOREIGNER can come to Africa and make DEALS which GUARANTEE the MAJORITY of the benefit in terms of MONEY, RESOURCES, LAND and LABOR go to the foreigners and not the Africans. China is included.
So the point is to stop LOOKING for a savior to come from OUTSIDE Africa and SAVE Africa. The ONLY savior for Africa is AFRICANS.
Africa has ALL the raw materials, resources, land and human labor needed to transform itself OVERNIGHT. All they need is to STOP pretending that FOREIGNERS are coming to provide AFRICA with a better life. Over a thousand years of history is PROOF that foreigners have NO INTENT of going to Africa to HELP Africans.... That is PURE NONSENSE FAIRY TALES.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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^ You've just repeated what I said except you're whinging.
The problem still remains squarely in the domain of African "leaders". We need real leaders not chimps hiding in agbadas and dashikis.
Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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No what I said was that you need to stop pretending that China is somehow a SAVIOR for Africa and worthy of some praise as being such. That is bullsh*t.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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^ Dude, now you're accusing me of things I didn't say. I expect more honesty from you.
Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
I generally agree with Doug's often-stated basic theme about the sinister, self-interest-centered and exploitive intents of foreign/non-African transnational corporations and plutocratic-State enterprises that purportedly come in to "invest" [to take advantage of local cheap labor and natural resources, as well as to create markets for their value-added goods] and undertake some "social welfare" programs in the process; however, I think his presentations too often suffer from treating Africa as though it comprised of a single/homogenous social layer -- or else societies with single social layers, that altogether makes decisions in geopolitical affairs and in the existing global economy apparatus, rather than societies comprising of different social strata with distinct socio-economic interests, wherein the average workers look to the ruling layers -- and not "saviors" from the outside world -- to provide the necessary industrial-finance framework, as cornerstone of modern society, that will allow a decent living standard.
Posts: 7516 | From: Somewhere on Earth | Registered: Jan 2008
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^ Agreed. Which pretty much means we need better leaders of African nations who can bring about the right conditions. Better politics, better economics and better society.
Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
Why do you fools post these damn race fantasy propaganda articles from whites?
There are companies doing business in India, Japan, China, etc. and yet if someone does business in Africa its slavery. Are those Arabs in Egypt who are out digging and shoveling for those white archaeologists slaves?
You dumb fuckers actually believe the white mans hype that you're nothing but a bunch of losers. There is no other way to explain it.
Posts: 3085 | Registered: Jan 2008
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Do you imbeciles not understand that all you do with someone that they feel threatened by is come up with some bogus article or opinion about how this _______________ (fill in the blank) group doesn't like "Black" people.
Do you not understand that these people are sick, psychologically disturbed;
They have a pathological obsession with Africans, "Black" people or whatever you want to call them.
They have an equally sick racial hierarchy that Africans are the lowest of humanity obsession.
And despite knowing all of this you motherfuckers continuosly fall for their propaganda time and time again. You all are either dumb or you have such pathetic levels of self-esteem (which in my opinion is probably worse than being dumb) that you follow these articles like rats to a dumpster.
Posts: 3085 | Registered: Jan 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Egmond Codfried: Mutant in residence Djehuti alias Doug M having a discussion with Djehuti alias JMT. How sick can you get?
And you are???
Listen, I don't need a damn alias. Only punks and trolls use aliases. Either way I don't give a hoot who you think I may be. I don't profess to be any expert, scholar or scientist. I'm here to simply learn and share dialogue regarding historical and current African/African American issues. Now if you have something to say be a man and talk to me directly.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: It is all about SELF INTEREST. Whether Chinese, Western or MARTIAN, it doesn't matter. If the deal is based PRIMARILY around the SELF INTERESTS of foreigners it WILL NOT benefit Africa. China is NOT in Africa to help Africans. It is there FOR CHINAS benefit and CHINAS benefit only.
Africa will begin to benefit when it STOPS pretending that the WORLD will SAVE them and HELP them become economically better off and self sufficient. NO they wont. The ONLY way Africa will become economically better off and self sufficient is when AFRICA begins to operate out of SELF INTEREST, which would mean that NO FOREIGNER can come to Africa and make DEALS which GUARANTEE the MAJORITY of the benefit in terms of MONEY, RESOURCES, LAND and LABOR go to the foreigners and not the Africans. China is included.
So the point is to stop LOOKING for a savior to come from OUTSIDE Africa and SAVE Africa. The ONLY savior for Africa is AFRICANS.
Africa has ALL the raw materials, resources, land and human labor needed to transform itself OVERNIGHT. All they need is to STOP pretending that FOREIGNERS are coming to provide AFRICA with a better life. Over a thousand years of history is PROOF that foreigners have NO INTENT of going to Africa to HELP Africans.... That is PURE NONSENSE FAIRY TALES.
Good post, Doug. My sentiments exactly. Unfortunately a couple of knuckleheads around here always have to throw a monkey wrench in every post and F things up.
Posts: 148 | From: Sirius | Registered: Sep 2006
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The simple point is that people here do not know enough about what is REALLY happening on the ground in Africa to even be able to understand the ACTUAL problems. Yes, a lot of the Western media coverage about Africa is inherently propagandistic, even that which supposedly UPHOLDS African interests. But if that is the ONLY source of information you have about Africa, then you are LOST. Don't depend on the West or anyone else to get your facts about Africa as those so-called facts are almost always guaranteed to be wrong.
As for portraying foreigners as intent on doing evil in Africa, the point is that foreigners are under NO OBLIGATION to put food in the mouths of Africans when they are PERFECTLY ABLE to put food in their own mouths. Africans have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years and now ALL OF A SUDDEN in this SO CALLED MODERN AGE, they can't FEED themselves, cant clothe themselves or can't figure out how to NOT get raped by the international industrial cartels? What the f*ck kind of BULL SH*T is that? NO Africans are NOT deaf, dumb, cripple and blind, but it is EXACTLY THAT kind of portrayal of Africans that you see in the Western media AND it is EXACTLY that stereotypical portrayal of Africans that is used to JUSTIFY so-called AID for Africa, which IS NOT really AID at all, it is actually HURTING Africa:
There is more than enough food to feed Africans IN AFRICA, yet because of the POLITICS and SELF INTERESTS of Western Farmers, Africans are NOT ALLOWED to use THEIR OWN GRAIN to feed people in times of crisis. Food aid is used to FORCE Africans to import grain when LOCAL grain is available to meet the need. Again, most of this is A MANUFACTURED CRISIS to begin with and the AID agencies are nothing but POVERTY PIMPS taking advantage of the situation for various interest groups like the FARM LOBBIES in the U.S.
quote: Two decades after the “biblical” Ethiopian famine of 1984 darkened the plains outside Korem, the scourge of hunger is still rising in Africa, accelerated by climate change, conflict and disease. Today, in a world of plenty and despite repeated commitments to provide food for all (codified at the World Food Summit and in the first Millennium Development Goal), more than 40 million people in the continent are threatened. Across the world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds. “Hunger is neither inevitable nor acceptable. It is a daily massacre and a shame on humanity,” Jean Ziegler, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, reported to the Human Rights Commission in March 2004. This shame on humanity should be a spur to implement a long-term “Marshall Plan” to secure local food supplies that would ensure hunger is eradicated across the continent. This has not happened. Indeed, support for local sustainable agriculture and emergency grain stockpiles has fallen under global trade rules.
Those with power, particularly the United States, have used hunger as justification for trade supremacy and the promotion of proprietary genetically-modified (GM) crops owned by northern multinational corporations – much to the delight of pro-GM advocates. Countries and their peoples who legitimately resist the consumption of GM grain and seed are under intense diplomatic threat of denial of food aid in times of crisis. United Nations agencies and US private voluntary organisations are complicit in this process, as is attested in these minutes of a May 2002 meeting between US Private Voluntary Organisations and the US Department of Agriculture).
Angola is the latest country to have declared, in March 2004, that it will not import GM grains and seeds until Biosafety is proven. According to Elizabeth Matos, chairperson of the National Plant Genetic Resources centre in Luanda, the ban has also been implemented to protect Angola’s great diversity of plant life. “We (hold) in our gene bank almost 800 different types of maize and local ecotypes that we have picked up from all over the country and we don’t want this material crossed with GM,” she said. Despite huge diplomatic pressures Angola, has continued to resist GM food aid imports and it will now mill much-needed food aid before use or import it from non-GM sources. The 120,000-ton grain surplus produced by Zambia in 2003 could have provided GM-free food aid to Angola, and indeed its government is currently in discussion with the World Food Programme about providing food aid to Angolans, some of whom are refugees in Zambia.
In Sudan, whose western Darfur region is engulfed in a terrible conflict, more than one million displaced people need food aid. The government declared in May 2003 that it did not want to import GM grains but, under pressure, it granted a waiver until January 2004. That date arrived, no alternative food aid strategy had been developed and it has been further pressured, through a ‘demarche’ or ‘diplomatic protest’ by the US government, to accept GM food aid or nothing – so the waiver has been extended first to July 2004 and now to January 2005, in order to allow continued imports of GM food aid. The irony of this situation is that Sudan has enjoyed one of its best harvests in recent years 6.3 million tonnes, of which 82% is comprised of sorghum and this GM-free grain could be made available if purchased and transported West.
And then after CREATING the crisis, again it is these SAME WESTERN CAPITALISTS that pretend to be the SAVIOR, which again is nothing more than them PIMPING the crisis for their own gain:
Why the F*CK does Africa need Bill Gates to get involved with local farmers when the PROBLEM is the World Food Program? Get rid of the World Food Program and the BULL SH*T that keeps Africans from using THEIR OWN CROPS to feed themselves and the problem would be solved. But NO! We have a SAVIOR! This western CAPITALIST will save the day and make sure that the small farmers in Africa are UNDER THE CONTROL of the World Food Program and WESTERN CAPITALISTS, which IS THE PROBLEM TO BEGIN WITH..... And of course their money will be used to PRESSURE Africans to use GM crops. This is B.S. and is EXACTLY the sort of evil doing that the West perpetrates in Africa on A DAILY BASIS.
It is BECAUSE of the WFP and other forms of MEDDLING in African affairs that Africa does NOT have a proper agriculture system that IS DESIGNED to feed the people. That would put the poverty pimps out of business and keep money out of the pockets of subsidized Western farmers. So it is in their INTEREST to keep the agriculture system in Africa BROKEN and UNABLE to feed the people, so that they CAN CREATE FAKE CRISES and of course, PROPOSE a solution which is INHERENTLY DESIGNED to further destabilize and DOMINATE the agricultural system of Africa for WESTERN interests. There is NO NEED for Bill Gates and massive Western Bureaucratic institutions like the WFP in Africa. Simple, basic systems of FOOD DISTRIBUTION and ECONOMICS would be sufficient to handle 80-90% of the situations that arise in Africa. Only in the MOST EXTREME case should those agencies be involved. But these people NEED these crises as a FRONT and EXCUSE to continue meddling in African economic affairs and laying the groundwork for MORE suffering, not less.
People need to get out and see the world for what it really is and not what they want it to be.
quote: The global economy might be reeling from the shakeout on Wall Street, but two of the world's richest businessmen are vowing to spend tens of millions of dollars more — not on bolstering their own companies, but in helping the world's poorest. With Congress locked in talks over a mammoth bailout package, Bill Gates and Howard Buffett (Warren's oldest son) announced at the United Nations on Wednesday that their private foundations will plow more than $75 million into helping small farmers in Africa and Latin America to sell their crops as food aid — a move which could potentially overhaul the decades-old — and often criticized — global food aid system.
Under a five-year pilot project called Purchase for Progress, the foundations will help 350,000 or so small farmers in 21 countries, most of them in Africa, to grow food for the U.N.'s World Food Program, the biggest food aid distributor in Africa. Rather than simply buying the farmers' crops outright, much of the money will go to teaching better farming methods, and to helping them store their crops in warehouses, plant higher-yield seeds, and transport their produce to customers. Those are all serious obstacles for poor farmers, many of whom find it almost impossible to eke out more than a bare-bones existence from their plots.
With WFP as a guaranteed client, many poor farmers will be eligible for credit with which to buy seeds and fertilizer, and perhaps employ people to help harvest the crops. "Once a farmer's group wins a contract they can take it to a local bank," says Rajiv Shah, director of agricultural programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "They can show that not only do they have the means to produce but a market to sell it." Gates told reporters on Wednesday that he aimed to "transform the way small holders are able to get to market." And WFP executive director Josette Sheeran called it "a revolution in food aid."
The revolution is long overdue, say advocacy groups. Organizations such as Oxfam and the London-based think tank Overseas Development Institute are critical of traditional food aid programs because they depend so heavily on western agricultural producers, such as the U.S. and Europe, and fail to help farmers in poor countries. When a crisis hits, as it did in Ethiopia this summer, the WFP typically asks governments to donate millions in emergency funds to feed people. That help comes either in food supplies or in cash, which the organization then uses to buy huge quantities of rice, maize and other staples from large-scale distributors. Aside from disasters like famines or earthquakes, the WFP also regularly feeds many poor people, including millions of children in school feeding programs; it estimates it will feed about 90 million people in some 80 countries this year. Yet despite its giant mandate and global scope, it buys "only a small percentage from small farmers," says WFP spokeswoman Laura Melo. "We have not targeted small farmers."
quote: As the U.S. Congress considers a five-year farm bill, the Bush administration is pushing for change to allow delivery of some food aid by procuring commodities from local markets rather than providing only U.S.-produced commodities. Resistance to change is strong, and the outcome is uncertain.
Bruce Odessey is managing editor of eJournal USA.
Government decisions about food aid spending involve a political calculation, of course. The biggest U.S. food aid program is called Public Law 480, Title II. For a long time this program has required that all U.S. foreign donations of food aid consist of U.S.-produced commodities.
Right now Congress is considering U.S. agricultural policy for the next five years as the 2002 farm bill expires at the end of September 2007. Whether Congress will change the food aid policy part of the bill remains uncertain.
Over and above simple issues of distribution of available crops, there is the issue of REAL technical assistance and know how. NONE of these programs are doing ANYTHING to help African farmers increase output and long term sustainability through technology. Yet if a WHITE farmer goes to Africa he/she gets ALL KINDS of technological know how and assistance from the West or South Africa. Yet African BLACKS have to maintain their farms using SIMPLE TOOLS and back breaking labor with NO technological assistance in terms of tractors, irrigation systems, pumps and so forth. ALL of this is part of the plan to KEEP Africans from being able to be SELF SUFFICIENT and DEPENDENT on the West for their AID instead of being able to FEED themselves.
quote: African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.
Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."
The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.
Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.
According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."
In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."
By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.
Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.
quote: It's early May and Malawi seems to be awash with corn. On the roads, trucks heavy with pale yellow maize heads rumble from the fields; in the villages nearly every woman and child is at work stripping the little kernels from their cobs, singing the harvest songs that give a rhythm to their work. Other women are pounding the maize with a giant pestle and mortar into flour to make the national staple dish - nzima - corn mash. (The men mostly seem to be occupied drinking the new season's maize beer.) It has been the best harvest in a dozen years or more. So why - and this is what we've come here to ask - in this time of historic plenty, is the rich world still sending its unwanted food to Malawi?
This little southern-African country has had a rough decade. Staggering under the effects of an Aids epidemic that affects one in five of the population in some districts, there were famines here in 2002, 2003 and one in 2005, when a third of Malawi's 13 million people ran out of food. Until this April, over 300,000 were still being fed emergency rations by the United Nations World Food Programme. Malawi deserved a good year.
But record harvests don't necessarily guarantee good times. 'We have so much maize this year - thanks be to God,' says Felicita Bailoni. 'But we have a problem over where to sell it. It's not just that the price is so low because there is so much maize, there isn't anyone to sell it to. The traders normally visit the village but they haven't come.' Felicita, 59, talks as she rubs the kernels from a cob into a basin before her. Even in the time of plentiful food she's worried. She and her husband Stephen look after her two grandchildren, whose mother died three years ago, and two other orphans.
Most households in their village, Kunthembwe, have taken in the children of those who have died from Aids - which is particularly severe here around Blantyre in southern Malawi. Felicita and her enlarged family have more than enough food for today and for the year ahead - but they need cash to pay the children's school fees, for clothes and other necessities. And maize corn is so plentiful at the moment it fetches only eight Malawian kwacha, or about 3p a kilo - if you can sell it. In 2005, the price went up to 50 kwacha a kilo. The Bailonis are hoping to sell 100 50kg bags of corn ears - the cobs are lying round the back of their two-room house in a vast wooden cradle designed to keep the rats away. 'But if we wait till the price goes up, the weevils will spoil our maize,' says Felicita. 'We can only sit and worry.'
'The price is so low,' says Charles Rethman, a Malawi-based analyst of what the NGOs call 'food security', 'that we have a concern now about next year. Farmers will be put off growing maize, and they won't have the cash to buy the seeds for the next planting. So in 2008 we're looking at the possibility of another food crisis. So it's really important that we do everything we can to get the price up to a level that rewards the farmers.'
With so much cheap corn available Rethman is bemused by a US government deal, announced in April, to ship $19.5 million of American corn and soya to Malawi as food aid. 'It's a nonsense,' he says.
Everywhere I go in the little villages in the shadow of Michiru mountain I hear the same story. Plenty of maize but no market. This affects the very poorest. In one village I meet Lena Butao, a 24-year-old whose mother died last year, her father in 2003. (Aids has brought a collapse in life expectancy in Malawi to just 37 years). She looks after her three brothers and sisters, the youngest only 10. They managed to harvest 18 bags of maize from their parents' field, but it won't see them through this year. Lena needs to raise money to pay for school fees, soap, clothes and for medicine. She's in the middle of a bout of malaria; she shivers in the sunshine as she speaks to us. 'Normally I can earn about 500 kwacha (about £1.80 ) a week working in the fields for my neighbours. But at the moment the farmers don't have any money. Life is very difficult.' Lena had to leave school when her parents first became ill and she thinks now that she'll never achieve her dream of becoming a housemaid. The children ate nzima and stewed pumpkin leaves last night: they haven't eaten meat this year.
posted
Doug aka she-male Jenkins wrote: --------------------------------------- The simple point is that people here do not know enough about what is REALLY happening on the ground in Africa ---------------------------------------
And you do? How?
You ain't nothing but a crossdressing AA gal man that goes around stealing other folks images and posting them onto this forum. LOL : )
Posts: 3085 | Registered: Jan 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Egmond Codfried: Mutant in residence Djehuti alias Doug M having a discussion with Djehuti alias JMT. How sick can you get?
And you are???
Listen, I don't need a damn alias. Only punks and trolls use aliases. Either way I don't give a hoot who you think I may be. I don't profess to be any expert, scholar or scientist. I'm here to simply learn and share dialogue regarding historical and current African/African American issues. Now if you have something to say be a man and talk to me directly.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: The simple point is that people here do not know enough about what is REALLY happening on the ground in Africa to even be able to understand the ACTUAL problems. Yes, a lot of the Western media coverage about Africa is inherently propagandistic, even that which supposedly UPHOLDS African interests. But if that is the ONLY source of information you have about Africa, then you are LOST. Don't depend on the West or anyone else to get your facts about Africa as those so-called facts are almost always guaranteed to be wrong.
As for portraying foreigners as intent on doing evil in Africa, the point is that foreigners are under NO OBLIGATION to put food in the mouths of Africans when they are PERFECTLY ABLE to put food in their own mouths. Africans have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years and now ALL OF A SUDDEN in this SO CALLED MODERN AGE, they can't FEED themselves, cant clothe themselves or can't figure out how to NOT get raped by the international industrial cartels? What the f*ck kind of BULL SH*T is that? NO Africans are NOT deaf, dumb, cripple and blind, but it is EXACTLY THAT kind of portrayal of Africans that you see in the Western media AND it is EXACTLY that stereotypical portrayal of Africans that is used to JUSTIFY so-called AID for Africa, which IS NOT really AID at all, it is actually HURTING Africa:
There is more than enough food to feed Africans IN AFRICA, yet because of the POLITICS and SELF INTERESTS of Western Farmers, Africans are NOT ALLOWED to use THEIR OWN GRAIN to feed people in times of crisis. Food aid is used to FORCE Africans to import grain when LOCAL grain is available to meet the need. Again, most of this is A MANUFACTURED CRISIS to begin with and the AID agencies are nothing but POVERTY PIMPS taking advantage of the situation for various interest groups like the FARM LOBBIES in the U.S.
quote: Two decades after the “biblical” Ethiopian famine of 1984 darkened the plains outside Korem, the scourge of hunger is still rising in Africa, accelerated by climate change, conflict and disease. Today, in a world of plenty and despite repeated commitments to provide food for all (codified at the World Food Summit and in the first Millennium Development Goal), more than 40 million people in the continent are threatened. Across the world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds. “Hunger is neither inevitable nor acceptable. It is a daily massacre and a shame on humanity,” Jean Ziegler, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, reported to the Human Rights Commission in March 2004. This shame on humanity should be a spur to implement a long-term “Marshall Plan” to secure local food supplies that would ensure hunger is eradicated across the continent. This has not happened. Indeed, support for local sustainable agriculture and emergency grain stockpiles has fallen under global trade rules.
Those with power, particularly the United States, have used hunger as justification for trade supremacy and the promotion of proprietary genetically-modified (GM) crops owned by northern multinational corporations – much to the delight of pro-GM advocates. Countries and their peoples who legitimately resist the consumption of GM grain and seed are under intense diplomatic threat of denial of food aid in times of crisis. United Nations agencies and US private voluntary organisations are complicit in this process, as is attested in these minutes of a May 2002 meeting between US Private Voluntary Organisations and the US Department of Agriculture).
Angola is the latest country to have declared, in March 2004, that it will not import GM grains and seeds until Biosafety is proven. According to Elizabeth Matos, chairperson of the National Plant Genetic Resources centre in Luanda, the ban has also been implemented to protect Angola’s great diversity of plant life. “We (hold) in our gene bank almost 800 different types of maize and local ecotypes that we have picked up from all over the country and we don’t want this material crossed with GM,” she said. Despite huge diplomatic pressures Angola, has continued to resist GM food aid imports and it will now mill much-needed food aid before use or import it from non-GM sources. The 120,000-ton grain surplus produced by Zambia in 2003 could have provided GM-free food aid to Angola, and indeed its government is currently in discussion with the World Food Programme about providing food aid to Angolans, some of whom are refugees in Zambia.
In Sudan, whose western Darfur region is engulfed in a terrible conflict, more than one million displaced people need food aid. The government declared in May 2003 that it did not want to import GM grains but, under pressure, it granted a waiver until January 2004. That date arrived, no alternative food aid strategy had been developed and it has been further pressured, through a ‘demarche’ or ‘diplomatic protest’ by the US government, to accept GM food aid or nothing – so the waiver has been extended first to July 2004 and now to January 2005, in order to allow continued imports of GM food aid. The irony of this situation is that Sudan has enjoyed one of its best harvests in recent years 6.3 million tonnes, of which 82% is comprised of sorghum and this GM-free grain could be made available if purchased and transported West.
And then after CREATING the crisis, again it is these SAME WESTERN CAPITALISTS that pretend to be the SAVIOR, which again is nothing more than them PIMPING the crisis for their own gain:
Why the F*CK does Africa need Bill Gates to get involved with local farmers when the PROBLEM is the World Food Program? Get rid of the World Food Program and the BULL SH*T that keeps Africans from using THEIR OWN CROPS to feed themselves and the problem would be solved. But NO! We have a SAVIOR! This western CAPITALIST will save the day and make sure that the small farmers in Africa are UNDER THE CONTROL of the World Food Program and WESTERN CAPITALISTS, which IS THE PROBLEM TO BEGIN WITH..... And of course their money will be used to PRESSURE Africans to use GM crops. This is B.S. and is EXACTLY the sort of evil doing that the West perpetrates in Africa on A DAILY BASIS.
It is BECAUSE of the WFP and other forms of MEDDLING in African affairs that Africa does NOT have a proper agriculture system that IS DESIGNED to feed the people. That would put the poverty pimps out of business and keep money out of the pockets of subsidized Western farmers. So it is in their INTEREST to keep the agriculture system in Africa BROKEN and UNABLE to feed the people, so that they CAN CREATE FAKE CRISES and of course, PROPOSE a solution which is INHERENTLY DESIGNED to further destabilize and DOMINATE the agricultural system of Africa for WESTERN interests. There is NO NEED for Bill Gates and massive Western Bureaucratic institutions like the WFP in Africa. Simple, basic systems of FOOD DISTRIBUTION and ECONOMICS would be sufficient to handle 80-90% of the situations that arise in Africa. Only in the MOST EXTREME case should those agencies be involved. But these people NEED these crises as a FRONT and EXCUSE to continue meddling in African economic affairs and laying the groundwork for MORE suffering, not less.
People need to get out and see the world for what it really is and not what they want it to be.
quote: The global economy might be reeling from the shakeout on Wall Street, but two of the world's richest businessmen are vowing to spend tens of millions of dollars more — not on bolstering their own companies, but in helping the world's poorest. With Congress locked in talks over a mammoth bailout package, Bill Gates and Howard Buffett (Warren's oldest son) announced at the United Nations on Wednesday that their private foundations will plow more than $75 million into helping small farmers in Africa and Latin America to sell their crops as food aid — a move which could potentially overhaul the decades-old — and often criticized — global food aid system.
Under a five-year pilot project called Purchase for Progress, the foundations will help 350,000 or so small farmers in 21 countries, most of them in Africa, to grow food for the U.N.'s World Food Program, the biggest food aid distributor in Africa. Rather than simply buying the farmers' crops outright, much of the money will go to teaching better farming methods, and to helping them store their crops in warehouses, plant higher-yield seeds, and transport their produce to customers. Those are all serious obstacles for poor farmers, many of whom find it almost impossible to eke out more than a bare-bones existence from their plots.
With WFP as a guaranteed client, many poor farmers will be eligible for credit with which to buy seeds and fertilizer, and perhaps employ people to help harvest the crops. "Once a farmer's group wins a contract they can take it to a local bank," says Rajiv Shah, director of agricultural programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "They can show that not only do they have the means to produce but a market to sell it." Gates told reporters on Wednesday that he aimed to "transform the way small holders are able to get to market." And WFP executive director Josette Sheeran called it "a revolution in food aid."
The revolution is long overdue, say advocacy groups. Organizations such as Oxfam and the London-based think tank Overseas Development Institute are critical of traditional food aid programs because they depend so heavily on western agricultural producers, such as the U.S. and Europe, and fail to help farmers in poor countries. When a crisis hits, as it did in Ethiopia this summer, the WFP typically asks governments to donate millions in emergency funds to feed people. That help comes either in food supplies or in cash, which the organization then uses to buy huge quantities of rice, maize and other staples from large-scale distributors. Aside from disasters like famines or earthquakes, the WFP also regularly feeds many poor people, including millions of children in school feeding programs; it estimates it will feed about 90 million people in some 80 countries this year. Yet despite its giant mandate and global scope, it buys "only a small percentage from small farmers," says WFP spokeswoman Laura Melo. "We have not targeted small farmers."
quote: As the U.S. Congress considers a five-year farm bill, the Bush administration is pushing for change to allow delivery of some food aid by procuring commodities from local markets rather than providing only U.S.-produced commodities. Resistance to change is strong, and the outcome is uncertain.
Bruce Odessey is managing editor of eJournal USA.
Government decisions about food aid spending involve a political calculation, of course. The biggest U.S. food aid program is called Public Law 480, Title II. For a long time this program has required that all U.S. foreign donations of food aid consist of U.S.-produced commodities.
Right now Congress is considering U.S. agricultural policy for the next five years as the 2002 farm bill expires at the end of September 2007. Whether Congress will change the food aid policy part of the bill remains uncertain.
Over and above simple issues of distribution of available crops, there is the issue of REAL technical assistance and know how. NONE of these programs are doing ANYTHING to help African farmers increase output and long term sustainability through technology. Yet if a WHITE farmer goes to Africa he/she gets ALL KINDS of technological know how and assistance from the West or South Africa. Yet African BLACKS have to maintain their farms using SIMPLE TOOLS and back breaking labor with NO technological assistance in terms of tractors, irrigation systems, pumps and so forth. ALL of this is part of the plan to KEEP Africans from being able to be SELF SUFFICIENT and DEPENDENT on the West for their AID instead of being able to FEED themselves.
quote: African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.
Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."
The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.
Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.
According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."
In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."
By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.
Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.
quote: It's early May and Malawi seems to be awash with corn. On the roads, trucks heavy with pale yellow maize heads rumble from the fields; in the villages nearly every woman and child is at work stripping the little kernels from their cobs, singing the harvest songs that give a rhythm to their work. Other women are pounding the maize with a giant pestle and mortar into flour to make the national staple dish - nzima - corn mash. (The men mostly seem to be occupied drinking the new season's maize beer.) It has been the best harvest in a dozen years or more. So why - and this is what we've come here to ask - in this time of historic plenty, is the rich world still sending its unwanted food to Malawi?
This little southern-African country has had a rough decade. Staggering under the effects of an Aids epidemic that affects one in five of the population in some districts, there were famines here in 2002, 2003 and one in 2005, when a third of Malawi's 13 million people ran out of food. Until this April, over 300,000 were still being fed emergency rations by the United Nations World Food Programme. Malawi deserved a good year.
But record harvests don't necessarily guarantee good times. 'We have so much maize this year - thanks be to God,' says Felicita Bailoni. 'But we have a problem over where to sell it. It's not just that the price is so low because there is so much maize, there isn't anyone to sell it to. The traders normally visit the village but they haven't come.' Felicita, 59, talks as she rubs the kernels from a cob into a basin before her. Even in the time of plentiful food she's worried. She and her husband Stephen look after her two grandchildren, whose mother died three years ago, and two other orphans.
Most households in their village, Kunthembwe, have taken in the children of those who have died from Aids - which is particularly severe here around Blantyre in southern Malawi. Felicita and her enlarged family have more than enough food for today and for the year ahead - but they need cash to pay the children's school fees, for clothes and other necessities. And maize corn is so plentiful at the moment it fetches only eight Malawian kwacha, or about 3p a kilo - if you can sell it. In 2005, the price went up to 50 kwacha a kilo. The Bailonis are hoping to sell 100 50kg bags of corn ears - the cobs are lying round the back of their two-room house in a vast wooden cradle designed to keep the rats away. 'But if we wait till the price goes up, the weevils will spoil our maize,' says Felicita. 'We can only sit and worry.'
'The price is so low,' says Charles Rethman, a Malawi-based analyst of what the NGOs call 'food security', 'that we have a concern now about next year. Farmers will be put off growing maize, and they won't have the cash to buy the seeds for the next planting. So in 2008 we're looking at the possibility of another food crisis. So it's really important that we do everything we can to get the price up to a level that rewards the farmers.'
With so much cheap corn available Rethman is bemused by a US government deal, announced in April, to ship $19.5 million of American corn and soya to Malawi as food aid. 'It's a nonsense,' he says.
Everywhere I go in the little villages in the shadow of Michiru mountain I hear the same story. Plenty of maize but no market. This affects the very poorest. In one village I meet Lena Butao, a 24-year-old whose mother died last year, her father in 2003. (Aids has brought a collapse in life expectancy in Malawi to just 37 years). She looks after her three brothers and sisters, the youngest only 10. They managed to harvest 18 bags of maize from their parents' field, but it won't see them through this year. Lena needs to raise money to pay for school fees, soap, clothes and for medicine. She's in the middle of a bout of malaria; she shivers in the sunshine as she speaks to us. 'Normally I can earn about 500 kwacha (about £1.80 ) a week working in the fields for my neighbours. But at the moment the farmers don't have any money. Life is very difficult.' Lena had to leave school when her parents first became ill and she thinks now that she'll never achieve her dream of becoming a housemaid. The children ate nzima and stewed pumpkin leaves last night: they haven't eaten meat this year.
As anyone can see, clowns only do one thing well and that is provide entertainment.
The serious part they cannot understand:
quote: There's one good piece of news for Lena: her 10-year-old brother Joshua's primary school has become part of the school-feeding programme run by the Malawian government and various aid agencies. This is a huge undertaking that now reaches over half a million children in the country, 20 per cent of all of those in primary school. It is playing a major part in addressing the awful fact that almost half of Malawian children have had their physical or mental growth damaged by malnutrition. And the half a million mugs of porridge served them each day are a guaranteed outlet for the produce of Malawian maize and soya farmers.
The next day, I travel to the village of Kampala and the sprawling red-brick compound of the Catholic Institute primary school. Built in the 1930s by missionaries, when Malawi was the British colony of Nyasaland, the school looks as though it hasn't been touched since. Most windows are broken and the grounds strewn with rubbish - it's pretty average for a Malawian school, I'm told. In her office, deputy head Annie Nakhouhouma is totting up the attendance figures - today the school is teaching an amazing 6,334 children aged between six and 17. Its 21 classrooms can't hold them all so, despite the cold drizzle that's falling, there are crowds of children under each of the big fig trees that dot the school grounds, in front of each group a blackboard and a teacher. I peer into one shabby classroom, and count 190 small children sitting inside. There's no room for furniture, so they are packed on the floor as close as sardines. The 10-year-olds are learning English: 'Hello, mister, how are you?' they chant at me. It's deafening.
There's a stranger sight - straight out of Oliver Twist - on the rough ground behind the classroom block. Hundreds of excited children, each clutching a large mug, are circulating around a camp of vast cooking stoves - 23 of them. Women in brightly-coloured wraps stir vats of grainy yellow porridge. This is CSB - corn-soya blend - a mix of maize, meal and soya flour, vitamins and sugar widely used in emergency feeding around the world. Locally it's called likuni phala. I taste it - it's sweet and nutty, a sort of gritty Ready Brek. Clouds of steam rise in the damp air as the children gulp the porridge greedily from their mugs - for many of them it's the first meal of the day and for some it will be the only one.
CSB is a wonderful product and the teachers are delighted. 'Look at the children - they are now so energetic. They don't fall asleep in class. They don't fight over each other's food, like they used to. They're fatter!' says Gertrude Sonani, who teaches 13-year-olds. But the effect goes further than just feeding the kids up. Children come to the school because of the meal - class numbers are up by about 7 per cent in every age group since the feeding programme began in January.
In a country where only 70 per cent of the children attend primary school, that's an achievement. At another nearby primary, where an Oxfam partner supplies milk to mix into the free porridge, the head teacher, Annie Jana, told me that she now had 800 eight-year-olds, compared to 500 when the programme started a year ago. 'Absenteeism has fallen, and even children who dropped out are coming back, especially girls.' And in Malawi, getting girls into school has always been difficult - which is why half of all women are illiterate.
The logistics behind feeding 6,300 children a mug of porridge are quite something. This programme is funded by the charity Scottish International Relief (SIR), through its local organisation, Mary's Meals. They show me a school storeroom where the bags of likuni phala tower high above the piles of textbooks and papers. Each day the contents of 46 of these sacks, nearly half a tonne, are mixed with water on the stoves and heated and served by volunteers from among the school's parents. The cost of the CSB comes out at about four kwacha, about 1.5p, per child - SIR feeds 175,000 children daily in Malawi at a cost of about £5.30 per child per year. One of the volunteers, Edina Moussa, told me that now her three children actually want to go to school. 'I'm a widow,' she said, 'and often it is hard to find enough to feed them.' She works as hired labour in her neighbour's fields, earning about 75p a day. 'Before January,' she says, 'they were often too tired to come to school. But now they come every day.'
School feeding is such an obviously good idea that the aid agencies and the Malawian government have been bringing more and more schools into the programme since it began in 1999. Most of the CSB comes free from the World Food Programme (WFP), which uses donated corn and soya - some of it from the Malawian government - and more that it buys locally. At the moment 442,000 children are being fed with CSB by WFP at school, 20 per cent of all Malawi's primary-school children. Malawians are proud of the programme: two weeks ago, some 60,000 of them went on sponsored walks to help raise money for school feeding.
Impressed by all this, in April the US Government announced that it wanted to join in. It would give WFP nearly $20 million over three years to help fund an expansion of the programme so, from 2008, 650,000 Malawian children get a daily mug of porridge at school. At the same time it announced similar schemes for Kenya, Cambodia, Guinea and Pakistan - a total spend of $85.9 million. WFP applauds the deal. 'It's a massive donation and a huge boost to the government of Malawi's school-feeding programme,' the organisation's country director, Dom Scalpelli, told me.
But not everyone in the country was overjoyed. 'It's very short-sighted - it doesn't make any sense. It's going to short-circuit the effort to improve nutrition here, it undermines farmers, households. It's not sustainable and it won't bring about any long-term change to malnutrition rates,' said Charles Rethman, echoing many critics of the plan.
The problem is - though WFP left this detail out of their press release - that the US grant came with a condition: it had to be spent on American CSB to be bought from American farmers and put in American ships to be transported to Malawi. According to WFP, the cost of buying, transporting and packing the annual 8,000 tonnes of US CSB will be $812 a tonne. SIR, which will buy about 3,600 tonnes of Malawian CSB - likuni phala - this year, expects to pay around $320 a tonne (distribution costs add another 5 per cent). Simply, if the American money was spent in Malawi, it could feed nearly two-and-a-half times as many schoolchildren.
Malawians are peaceable and polite people - but there was anger in the voice of one aid worker involved in school feeding when we talked about this. 'This is giving aid with one hand and taking it away with another. It's the Big Man saying: kneel down before I give you the help. These people, they get the food, they are vulnerable, they clap their hands and say, "Thank you Mr Bush". They don't understand what's really going on.'
quote:Originally posted by Egmond Codfried: Mutant in residence Djehuti alias Doug M having a discussion with Djehuti alias JMT. How sick can you get?
And you are???
Listen, I don't need a damn alias. Only punks and trolls use aliases. Either way I don't give a hoot who you think I may be. I don't profess to be any expert, scholar or scientist. I'm here to simply learn and share dialogue regarding historical and current African/African American issues. Now if you have something to say be a man and talk to me directly.
Out.
Check your PM. Now if you want to talk to me over the phone or have the balls to meet me in person it's up to you. Can't stand little agitator punks like you who talk crap in the comfort zone of cyberspace but don't have the balls to back up their rhetoric in a public setting.
Posts: 148 | From: Sirius | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote: Mousseau adds that the negative correlation between food aid flows and international cereal prices shows that the main driver of food aid remains the “domestic support to farmers and agribusiness interests rather than needs of the developing countries. Typically, food aid flow increases in periods of low prices and high level of food stocks in developed countries.”
In-kind food aid has been criticized in particular for being expensive. In addition, while it appears to release resources for the recipient government, those resources may not necessarily be used for development; they can be used for military purchases, for example (and countries like those in the US, EU, etc are often the major arms sellers).
In addition, such aid can also be tied to harmful conditions, such as Structural Adjustment Policies. (The problems of tied aid are discussed further in this site’s Foreign Aid section.)
One of the ideas behind policies such as Structural Adjustment for poor countries is to turn their agriculture sector into cash crops for export to earn foreign exchange to import food and help pay off debts. Program Food Aid has helped with this although phrases such as “development” and helping the hungry are what makes media headlines. While these could have been objectives, such policies had another effect: creating new markets for rich countries to export their own products.
Mousseau illustrates this, amongst other ways, through this revealing quote: "Supporting industrialization would certainly be very good for US agricultural exports, because as you help develop them [underdeveloped countries] industrially, you will shift their economy to an industrial economy, so that in the end you would create more markets for your agricultural products."
— Former US Assistant Secretary of State W.L. Clayton
The process used to achieve this is detailed further on this site’s food dumping and structural adjustment sections, but in summary went something like this:
1. Cheap (highly subsidized) American grain and other foods would be dumped onto the local economy 2. Small domestic producers would be unable to compete fairly (as governments of recipient countries are are often encouraged to remove such protections in their own farming sectors) 3. Small producers lose/sell their land and become jobless or laborers or move to the big cities 4. As such economies are encouraged to be exporters of cash crops, and food from food “aid” is so cheap, other work is on the cheap and people struggle to make a living 5. Poverty, food insecurity, and hunger increases
quote:Originally posted by Egmond No-balls: I DO NOT READ A DENIAL, HONEY!
Just like I thought... you little coward.
He's trollin. A couple other aliases were exposed, and planned to back out, so he started posting nonesense while they drag their feat in retreat, so it won't look like: they disappear - new troll appears.
Ignore him.
I don't think anyone really pays any attention to his posts.
Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Obama Boy: ^ LOL , ok, I must have mis-interpreted your statement.
Apologies comerade!
I have been conversating with friends from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand etc frantically over the past couple days and they reckon the Brits are just salty. They also see the end of the 'American Empire'. They agree with me China is infinitely better to do business with from an African perspective. The Chinese actually have solid, time-tested moral foundations and don't have 'sadistic' intents for Blacks.
If we start off from a mutual respect standpoint, China and Africa could create many many win-win situations. And over time, they can 'help' us shake-off the last vestiges of unwanted European presence in Africa.
Of course we have to be careful because all humans carry the disease of Greed. But not all humans carry this cancer of 'white supremacy' that has brought the world to its knees - even the whites who supported and maintained the system are now getting ROYALLY FUCKED by their own devices.
^ No prob its cool. Just a mis-take. Posts: 426 | From: Cali-for-nia | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Alive-(What Box): Happy day !
quote:Originally posted by JMT:
quote:Originally posted by Egmond No-balls: I DO NOT READ A DENIAL, HONEY!
Just like I thought... you little coward.
He's trollin. A couple other aliases were exposed, and planned to back out, so he started posting nonesense while they drag their feat in retreat, so it won't look like: they disappear - new troll appears.
Ignore him.
I don't think anyone really pays any attention to his posts.
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Profile for Alive-(What Box) Member Status: Member Member Number: 10819 Registered: 22 April, 2006 Posts: 2654 Location: The Yet Unknown Occupation: Validatology Homepage: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2230/2092183582_fc12696141.jpg?v=0 Interests: Quantum Kemics; the inner - the outer
Posts: 5454 | From: Holland | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Obama Boy: ^ LOL , ok, I must have mis-interpreted your statement.
Apologies comerade!
I have been conversating with friends from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand etc frantically over the past couple days and they reckon the Brits are just salty. They also see the end of the 'American Empire'. They agree with me China is infinitely better to do business with from an African perspective. The Chinese actually have solid, time-tested moral foundations and don't have 'sadistic' intents for Blacks.
If we start off from a mutual respect standpoint, China and Africa could create many many win-win situations. And over time, they can 'help' us shake-off the last vestiges of unwanted European presence in Africa.
Of course we have to be careful because all humans carry the disease of Greed. But not all humans carry this cancer of 'white supremacy' that has brought the world to its knees - even the whites who supported and maintained the system are now getting ROYALLY FUCKED by their own devices.
^ No prob its cool. Just a mis-take.
You're an arse! Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
And not only does the same economic strangulation of Africa take place in the agricultural sector, which is being DESTROYED by Western "aid" backed by the interests of Western capitalists, but the same goes for EVERY OTHER sector of African economics. Just as Africans are not allowed to grow food to FEED themselves and distribute that food in a way that would BENEFIT Africans across Africa, so to are they NOT ALLOWED to MINE their own iron, tin, copper and aluminum, not ALLOWED to process it for their OWN pipes, girders, bridges and factories and not ALLOWED to harness their OWN raw materials to BUILD their OWN infrastructure as well as NOT ALLOWED to PROFIT from their own resources and labor. How is this so? Because of THE SAME policies of the IMF, World Bank, NGOS and other so called "relief" agencies, which use their programs as a way of CONTROLLING Africans wealth for the interests of their constituent countries. This means that AID comes with STRINGS attached, which means that Africans MUST ACCEPT foreign banks and industries which continue EXPLOITING Africa's resources, leaving NOTHING for the Africans. With all the natural resources in Africa there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why it shouldn't take more than 20-50 years to build PROPER highways, bridges, electrical plants, schools, ports, cities, towns and everything else needed to have a prosperous country. But the point is that these so called AID groups, which are really AIDS groups (ie: a syndrome and virus that KILLS Africans) will NOT actually finance any such efforts with FOREIGN money. Any FOREIGN AID money is mainly tied to projects that only PROMOTE the interests of Western financiers and capitalists and NOT Africans.
Therefore, you get situations like that of Guinea, which after 50 years of independence, has some of the highest rates of poverty in the world, while it has some of the BEST minieral resources in Africa, including diamonds, oil, bauxite (aluminum) and so forth. So why are they so poor? Because the government is corrupt and allows foreigners to come in and take these minerals and most of the money that goes with them. NONE of these deals guarantee that African owned factories get built to process the raw materials for local development, no MONEY goes into African banks from the sale and export of these materials and NONE of the materials ARE USED to benefit the country itself. So you have all sorts of steel, aluminum, tin, copper and other resources, which are VITAL to development, but they aren't being USED for local development, they are being USED for export only and much of this is because of bully programs like the World Bank and IMF saying that THIS is the only way Africa can move forward economically....
quote: ECONOMY Richly endowed with minerals, Guinea possesses over 25 billion metric tons (MT) of bauxite--and perhaps up to one half of the world's reserves. In addition, Guinea's mineral wealth includes more than 4 billion tons of high-grade iron ore, significant diamond and gold deposits, and undetermined quantities of uranium. Guinea has considerable potential for growth in the agricultural and fishing sectors. Soil, water, and climatic conditions provide opportunities for large-scale irrigated farming and agro industry. Possibilities for investment and commercial activities exist in all these areas, but Guinea's poorly developed infrastructure and rampant corruption continue to present obstacles to large-scale investment projects.
Joint venture bauxite mining and alumina operations in northwest Guinea historically provide about 80% of Guinea's foreign exchange. The Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinea (CBG) is the main player in the bauxite industry. CBG is a joint venture, in which 49% of the shares are owned by the Guinean Government and 51% by an international consortium led by Alcoa and Alcan. CBG exports about 14 million metric tons of high-grade bauxite every year. The Compagnie des Bauxites de Kindia (CBK), a joint venture between the Government of Guinea and Russki Alumina, produces some 2.5 million MT annually, nearly all of which is exported to Russia and Eastern Europe. Dian Dian, a Guinean/Ukrainian joint bauxite venture, has a projected production rate of 1 million MT per year, but is not expected to begin operations for several years. The Alumina Compagnie de Guinée (ACG), which took over the former Friguia Consortium, produced about 2.4 million tons of bauxite in 2004, which is used as raw material for its alumina refinery. The refinery supplies about 750,000 MT of alumina for export to world markets. Both Global Alumina and Alcoa-Alcan have signed conventions with the Government of Guinea to build large alumina refineries with a combined capacity of about 4 million MT per year.
Diamonds and gold also are mined and exported on a large scale. AREDOR, a joint diamond-mining venture between the Guinean Government (50%) and an Australian, British, and Swiss consortium, began production in 1984 and mined diamonds that are 90% gem quality. Production stopped from 1993 until 1996, when First City Mining of Canada purchased the international portion of the consortium. By far, most diamonds are mined artisanally. The largest gold mining operation in Guinea is a joint venture between the government and Ashanti Gold Fields of Ghana. SMD also has a large gold mining facility in Lero near the Malian border. Other concession agreements have been signed for iron ore, but these projects are still awaiting preliminary exploration and financing results.
The Guinean Government adopted policies in the 1990s to return commercial activity to the private sector, promote investment, reduce the role of the state in the economy, and improve the administrative and judicial framework. Guinea has the potential to develop, if the government carries out its announced policy reforms, and if the private sector responds appropriately. So far, corruption and favoritism, lack of long-term political stability, and lack of a transparent budgeting process continue to dampen foreign investor interest in major projects in Guinea.
Reforms since 1985 include eliminating restrictions on agriculture and foreign trade, liquidation of some parastatals, the creation of a realistic exchange rate, increased spending on education, and cutting the government bureaucracy. In July 1996, President Lansana Conté appointed a new government, which promised major economic reforms, including financial and judicial reform, rationalization of public expenditures, and improved government revenue collection. Under 1996 and 1998 International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank agreements, Guinea continued fiscal reforms and privatizations, and shifted governmental expenditures and internal reforms to the education, health, infrastructure, banking, and justice sectors. Cabinet changes in 1999 as well increasing corruption, economic mismanagement, and excessive government spending combined to slow the momentum for economic reform. The informal sector continues to be a major contributor to the economy.
The government revised the private investment code in 1998 to stimulate economic activity in the spirit of free enterprise. The code does not discriminate between foreigners and nationals and provides for repatriation of profits. While the code restricts development of Guinea's hydraulic resources to projects in which Guineans have majority shareholdings and management control, it does contain a clause permitting negotiations of more favorable conditions for investors in specific agreements. Foreign investments outside Conakry are entitled to more favorable benefits. A national investment commission has been formed to review all investment proposals. The United States and Guinea have signed an investment guarantee agreement that offers political risk insurance to American investors through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In addition, Guinea has inaugurated an arbitration court system, which allows for the quick resolution of commercial disputes.
Until June 2001, private operators managed the production, distribution, and fee-collection operations of water and electricity under performance-based contracts with the Government of Guinea. However, both utilities are plagued by inefficiency and corruption. Foreign private investors in these operations departed the country in frustration.
In 2002, the IMF suspended Guinea's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) because the government failed to meet key performance criteria. In reviews of the PRGF, the World Bank noted that Guinea had met its spending goals in targeted social priority sectors. However, spending in other areas, primarily defense, contributed to a significant fiscal deficit. The loss of IMF funds forced the government to finance its debts through Central Bank advances. The pursuit of unsound economic policies has resulted in imbalances that are proving hard to correct.
Under then-Prime Minister Diallo, the government began a rigorous reform agenda in December 2004 designed to return Guinea to a PRGF with the IMF. Exchange rates have been allowed to float, price controls on gasoline have been loosened, and government spending has been reduced while tax collection has been improved. These reforms have not slowed down inflation, which hit 27% in 2004 and 30% in 2005. Depreciation is also a concern. The Guinea franc was trading at 2,550 to the dollar in January 2005. It hit 5,554 to the dollar by October 2006.
Despite the opening in 2005 of a new road connecting Guinea and Mali, most major roadways connecting the country's trade centers remain in poor repair, slowing the delivery of goods to local markets. Electricity and water shortages are frequent and sustained, and many businesses are forced to use expensive power generators and fuel to stay open.
Even though there are many problems plaguing Guinea's economy, not all foreign investors are reluctant to come to Guinea. Global Alumina's proposed alumina refinery has a price tag above $2 billion. Alcoa and Alcan are proposing a slightly smaller refinery worth about $1.5 billion. Taken together, they represent the largest private investment in sub-Saharan Africa since the Chad-Cameroun oil pipeline.
Guinea is one of the countries possessing considerable mineral resources. Its depths hide sizeable deposits of iron and bauxite ores, gold and diamonds, as well as smaller layers of limestone, construction sand, shingle, gravel and fire clays. Also noticed were occurrences of chromites, rare earths, uranium, copper, silver, talc, manganese, beryllium, platinum, feldspar, nickel, graphite and kaolin. Oil is possible in the shelf region.
Below you will find brief information on mineral resources that are making up Guinea's real raw material base, as of January 1st, 2001.
So no, it isn't that China is making Africa a slave state, it is that the INTERNATIONAL Economy has declared that Africans are expendable and the RESOURCES of Africa more important than the survival and independence of Africans. It is THIS that keeps the SAME SORT of policies in place, under new names and disguises, that have ALWAYS been used to KEEP Africans suffering and starving even though they sit on top of the RICHEST deposits of mineral resources anywhere on the planet.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
All of the above can be seen in deals like this:
quote: RIO'S SIMANDOU ON TRACK China now targets Guinea resources in mines-for-infrastructure deal
In yet another move to tie up African natural resources, Guinea says it is in talks with China over infrastructure investment in return for access to minerals resources rights. Posted: Friday , 01 Aug 2008
CONAKRY (Reuters) -
Guinea and China are discussing a deal which could see billions of dollars of Chinese investment in return for mining rights in the West African country, which has a third of the world's bauxite, a Guinean minister said.
A delegation including officials from the Chinese Development Bank recently spent a week in Guinea and is due to discuss a range of investment projects with state and private sector investors back in China, he said.
"The first phase has just happened in Guinea. A mission is expected to go to Beijing in the next few months to meet with the Chinese companies about the operational details of this agreement," Guinean Economy and Finance Minister Ousmane Dore told state television late on Wednesday.
"On their return to Beijing, the Chinese side and Chinese authorities and companies will examine the mineral resources offered by Guinea, which could be the basis for an overall deal worth billions of dollars in investments," he said.
China already agreed in January to fund a $1 billion hydropower dam in Guinea in return for rights to mine bauxite, the aluminium ore of which Guinea is already the world's top exporter.
"The strategic committee has been formed ... it is a win-win partnership. The Guinean side has put forward really important projects, projects which would allow Guinea to emerge in the near future," he said.
"By making bauxite and iron ore available to the Chinese, Guinea could unlock an overall sum of investment that could support these projects," he said.
As well as bauxite, Guinea has significant reserves of iron ore, diamonds, gold and other minerals.
Existing bauxite operations are set to expand in the coming years and an official from a national anti-poverty programme said last year that big mining projects in Guinea would bring in nearly $27 billion in investments by 2015.
Guinean Mines Minister Ahmed Kante said on Tuesday that Rio Tinto's planned $6 billion Simandou iron ore mine was on track and would benefit both Guinea and the company, in an apparent effort to ease concerns over the legal status of the project.
A letter sent to Rio by the secretary-general of Guinean President Lansana Conte's office in June queried the validity of a decree giving Rio access to the ore, but the mining company insisted its legal status was secure. (Reporting by Saliou Samb; writing by Alistair Thomson; editing by Michael Roddy)
Which means that CHINESE companies will take AFRICAN resources and build infrastructure to support THEIR OWN MINES with a token town or some other "gesture" thrown in to make it look like they are HELPING Africans. Why don't these deals guarantee LOCAL AFRICAN processing facilities and LOCAL AFRICAN construction and development companies? WHY? The answer is obvious. And why do such deals always involve everything BUT direct CASH and direct AFRICAN control over the mines and facilities? THAT is the issue. If Africans don't control the mines and facilities, not only can they NOT use them to create their OWN infrastructure, but they also DO NOT make the money off of their operation. Which is B.S. economics no matter how you look at it, because NO OTHER country operates in such a way.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
Why do Africans keep allowing whites and now Chinese to do this to them. WHY? WHY? WHY? That's the issue.
Posts: 4165 | From: jamaica | Registered: May 2008
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posted
Some people think this is a joke but what is going on in Africa today is the same sorts of colonial exploitation that was seen 100 years ago, with the same stereotypes and the same NONSENSE about European "explorers" being there to "help" Africans.... with a hand full of "aid".
Notice the gang of foreign groups that are mentioned to "manage" this process: World Conservation Fund, IMF, World Bank, etc. And all these organizations are ONLY making sure that the LAND (wildlife conservation) around the mines is OFF LIMITS to the natives (the natives sure AIN'T the ones destroying the land with their big equipment) and the IMF and WORLD BANK telling Africans how they will get ahead by VODOO economics (give away all your minerals and money and you will get MORE AIDS!!)
It is so sad it is almost funny how DUMB this B.S. is.
NOT ONCE do any of these representatives talk about USING the minerals and raw materials to BUILD AFRICA. It is such a farce as to be ridiculous. And half these chumps are Afrikaaners to begin with.....
Sure we will HELP the locals we work with.... HOW?
Where are the bridges? Where are the roads? Where are the highways? Where are the docks? Where are the hospitals? Where is the infrastructure? What the F*CK is the point of mining if you aren't using those materials to build infrastructure? And how the F*CK are you helping Africans if you aren't USING the resources of African mines to BUILD the infrastructure that Africa needs? Sounds dumb don't it? But it aint DUMB to see how they use those minerals to BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE EVERYWHERE ELSE BUT IN AFRICA.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
^ Of course, this is NOTHING new. China has been eploiting Africa ever since the end of colonialisim when the continent was no longer an exclusive European owned affair. What makes the situation worse today is the fact that China lies and tries to pass off its affairs as "beneficial" and "charitable" to Africans!
Oh and to the two crazed queers who posted above Doug, perhaps you can vent your sexual frustrations here.
Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Of course, this is NOTHING new. China has been eploiting Africa ever since the end of colonialisim when the continent was no longer an exclusive European owned affair. What makes the situation worse today is the fact that China lies and tries to pass off its affairs as "beneficial" and "charitable" to Africans!
Oh and to the two crazed queers who posted above Doug, perhaps you can vent your sexual frustrations here.
But that "charitable" and "beneficial" crap was PATENTED by European colonialists. The Chinese are really HAND IN GLOVE with the European industrialists to begin with. The one video shows this clearly. Not to mention the fact that the Chinese have enslaved large parts of their OWN population for the purposes of making goods for the Western capitalists. Don't believe that nonsense about China and the West "competing" for Africa's resources. That is B.S. they are on the SAME team and of course Africa is on the opposing side.
Posts: 8890 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Doug M: It is all about SELF INTEREST. Whether Chinese, Western or MARTIAN, it doesn't matter. If the deal is based PRIMARILY around the SELF INTERESTS of foreigners it WILL NOT benefit Africa. China is NOT in Africa to help Africans. It is there FOR CHINAS benefit and CHINAS benefit only.
Africa will begin to benefit when it STOPS pretending that the WORLD will SAVE them and HELP them become economically better off and self sufficient. NO they wont. The ONLY way Africa will become economically better off and self sufficient is when AFRICA begins to operate out of SELF INTEREST, which would mean that NO FOREIGNER can come to Africa and make DEALS which GUARANTEE the MAJORITY of the benefit in terms of MONEY, RESOURCES, LAND and LABOR go to the foreigners and not the Africans. China is included.
So the point is to stop LOOKING for a savior to come from OUTSIDE Africa and SAVE Africa. The ONLY savior for Africa is AFRICANS.
Africa has ALL the raw materials, resources, land and human labor needed to transform itself OVERNIGHT. All they need is to STOP pretending that FOREIGNERS are coming to provide AFRICA with a better life. Over a thousand years of history is PROOF that foreigners have NO INTENT of going to Africa to HELP Africans.... That is PURE NONSENSE FAIRY TALES.
Good post, Doug. My sentiments exactly. Unfortunately a couple of knuckleheads around here always have to throw a monkey wrench in every post and F things up.
EVIL MUTANT DJEHUTI/DOUG M/JMT PATTING HIMSELF ON THE BACK. HOW SICK CAN YOU BE? HOW LONG WILL YOU KEEP THIS CHARADE UP, YOU DAMN SICKO?Posts: 5454 | From: Holland | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Egmond Codfried: Mutant in residence Djehuti alias Doug M having a discussion with Djehuti alias JMT. How sick can you get?
And you are???
Listen, I don't need a damn alias. Only punks and trolls use aliases. Either way I don't give a hoot who you think I may be. I don't profess to be any expert, scholar or scientist. I'm here to simply learn and share dialogue regarding historical and current African/African American issues. Now if you have something to say be a man and talk to me directly.
Out.
Check your PM. Now if you want to talk to me over the phone or have the balls to meet me in person it's up to you. Can't stand little agitator punks like you who talk crap in the comfort zone of cyberspace but don't have the balls to back up their rhetoric in a public setting.
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