Biofuels: Stealing Land to Steal Food and Water from Africa

Western countries wring their hands and rush for their mobile phones to pledge money to whatever catastrophe happens to be fashionable enough to attract the attentions of some brainless celebrity. But they are not so interested when it's a matter of stopping their country from causing the next catastrophe.

Eight million Kenyans (out of a total of about 40 million) are currently short of food. They are not short of food because there isn't enough of it. They just can't afford the food that is produced in their own country. Europeans can afford to buy agricultural products that are grown in Kenya, even though they produce so much in Europe they have to dump a lot of it, sometimes in Kenya.

A number of factors have driven up the cost of basic foods in recent years. Food has been treated as a commodity that can be played with by speculators. Costs of agricultural inputs have become more and more under the control of a few multinationals. And rich countries have been buying up land in developing countries for a song so that biofuel crops destined for these rich countries can be grown there.

Despite what the landgrabbers say, they are not paying fair compensation for the land, the land is not marginal (if it was it would be of no use to them), the land is not unoccupied, nor virtually so, and large numbers of people are not being employed in producing biofuels. Nor is there any environmental payoff. In fact, environmental destruction on a massive scale is often required before these vast tracts of land can be used to produce biofuels, causing even more environmental damage.

According to an article in the English Guardian, British firms have been grabbing more land than any other country. This contrasts with their recent boasts about how they have increased aid spending and even improved the quality of foreign aid. Aid spending is a piffling amount compared to what can be extracted through biofuel and other forms of exploitation.

In addition to competing for land and water, and thus increasing the price of food, the type of farming involved is totally disempowering to local communities. Where once many families subsisted, now none do. Where once whole communities were employed, now a mere handful are. Instead of relatively harmless practices that allowed a healthy ecosystem to remain, biofuel production will destroy everything in its path, irreversibly.

It would be useful to contrast these disadvantages with some advantages, but there are none for the poor farmer. Whatever advantages there are accrue to the landgrabber alone. They are coming up with fancy brochures to impress investors but this is just the usual rose tinted excrescence that goes with foreign exploitation of all African resources, gold, uranium and other minerals, sugar, coffee, cocoa, anything that can be produced cheaply without those profiting having to leave much behind in the form of tax, royalties, skills, assets or even investment.

The last thing African countries need is to lose their rights to their land and water, given that these are among the means of production for food, to feed themselves and to export. Coupled with the current threat of genetically modified organisms (GMO) being imposed on the continent, rates of poverty, dispossession, endemic disease and starvation are only going to increase.

Not content with making our fat asses fatter, we're proposing burning the potential for growing food in our cars, at the expense of people who are dying for lack of food and water. So we needn't see ourselves as being so generous whenever another disaster hits the news, considering we're happy to allow even greater disasters to occur just so we can fulfil our consumerist dreams. There is enough food, but not if we use it all up on power games and car fuel.

A New Orphan Project (and Another Grumble About Pills)

I recently blogged about the tendency to medicalise problems that have very simple and cheap solutions. For example, if people are suffering from nutritional deficiencies, they need a good balanced diet and therefore access to adequate food. So many companies, especially multinationals, are weighing in with their very expensive food supplements and 'biofortified' versions of various seeds. If people don't have the money for even their meager diet, they certainly can't afford these overpriced supplements and fortified seeds.

But as myself and my colleagues from Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group sat in a restaurant having a meeting yesterday, a woman came up to us to sell us some nutritional supplements which had all manner of stuff in them, according to the colourful label. But they were to be taken three a day for seven days to relieve just about any ailment that could possibly relate to nutritional deficiency. And the course cost as much as more than two weeks of staple food for four or five people.

If people had this sort of money, they could just buy good food. They would be ill advised to spend it on pills that some woman who approached them in a restaurant tried to sell them. But people do buy all sorts of rubbish that promises to sort out all their children's or their own problems. This is a terrible form of exploitation and the stuff being sold is often produced by very big, powerful, wealthy companies. We tried to persuade her that what she was saying couldn't be true. But you can't blame her for trying to make a living in a country where most people don't have jobs. After all, she's been conned too.

Anyhow, today we went to a small village called Majani Mingi to assess some orphans so their families can be supported to send the orphans to school and look after them, along with the rest of their family. Majani Mingi is near Mogotio, about 50 kilometres North of Nakuru. In fact, you can't get to Majani Mingi most of the time and the best way to get there is by motor bike. It's about 10 kilometres from the main road but, despite this, you never leave the massive sisal estate that is 'owned' by a Greek man who can't even be bothered to pay his employees and suppliers most of the time.

With this in mind, we visited four households, taking in 5 orphans in all. All of them had lost both of their parents and all were being cared for by families that were already stretched for the means to keep providing themselves with the basics. Most people in the village have some connection, direct or indirect, with the sisal factory, either as employees or people who are dependent on employees. I think it is safe to say that pretty much all the people living in these sisal dominated villages are very needy, so it's hard to assess children and families when your finances will only stretch to four children.

We can put together the information we have received, along with similar information for four other villages and then make a decision. I suspect that families themselves will have to decide how to use any support they get because when money is in short supply, so is everything else. You can't very well ask a family of thirteen to give food, clothes and schooling to the one orphan and leave the others without. I really don't know how these decisions are made at the family level. I hope to gain some insight into this over the next few months.

There can be a tendency to associate orphans and other vulnerable children with orphanages. But thankfully, Ribbon of Hope is not interested in such institutions, they are beyond our scope. They cost so much money to run and the children do not get the sort of care they could get in a family. And so many orphanages have been hotbeds of corruption and deceit, where often children get very little and those running the orphanages make a very comfortable living. Of course, they are not all like that, but finding out which are genuine and which are not is just too time and resource consuming. As the orphan and vulnerable children project gets up and running, I'll report progress here.

Pills For Poverty

An article in SciDev.net entitled Don't Medicalize Micronutrient Deficiency argues that biofortifying foods or handing out food supplements is not a sustainable solution to malnutrition problems. Countries that have high levels of malnutrition have food and agriculture problems that pills or fortified foods will not solve.

This is a timely reminder, when so many 'solutions' come in the form of technical fixes that are often expensive, short term, inappropriate, unsustainable and often don't even work. I recently mentioned Bill Gates efforts to eradicate water borne diseases like polio, malaria and cholera by developing vaccines when the best strategy would be to improve water and sanitation. Water borne diseases can not be eradicated in areas where people don't have access to clean water and adequate sanitation.

Another problem with certain biofortified foods is that they have intellectual property rights associated with them, which adds a lot to their cost. Why should poor people suffering from nutritional deficiencies, instead of being enabled to produce enough high quality food, be offered something that is expensive and is just impoverishing their country further?

Some of the manufacturers of genetically modified organisms (GMO) have even got in on the micronutrient method of screwing yet more money out of developing countries. The vitamin A fortified rice, which was claimed to reduce blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency, springs to mind. Unfortunately, it contained vitamin A in a form that could not be absorbed and so it was a useless technology.

Poverty is the real problem when people can't afford a balanced diet for their family. If they are poor, they are certainly not going to be able to afford with the sort of premium price that intellectual property brings. And we have seen enough instances of poverty, disease and malnutrition being used as vehicles to sell expensive Western technologies, especially dangerous technologies that impoverish people further and that could even damage their health.

The attitude of multinationals, and that of certain people, seems to be to let people become sick and then come running with the pills or the GMOs or the technical solution. People need adequate economic means, food, food security, education, health services, water, sanitation, housing and the rest. In the absence of these human rights, they will suffer and die prematurely.

It may be the prerogative of multinationals and others to allow people to live in inhuman conditions as long as they can sell plenty of their goods. But it is not the prerogative of those who work in development or those who work to keep in check the excesses of multinationals. As the article in question points out, many of the people in the world suffering from malnutrition are farmers. They should be allowed to produce food that can provide themselves, their families and their countrypeople with a balanced diet. This would also improve economic circumstances and therefore health, education and other things, too.

If someone prescribes pills as a substitute for clean water or good food, they are probably a multinational.