Next Year's Famine Victims Currently Being Groomed by Western Powers

If you look at the top 30 donors to the East African Famine, number one is the US. It is one of the richest countries in the world, although donations as a percentage of per capita income are nowhere near the highest.

But the US is also pretty good when it comes to land grabbing. This time it's Tanzania, where a substantial deal is being questioned by opposition MPs. But recently, it came to light that big, wealthy US educational institutions were snapping up land in various African countries that are, or have had, shortages of affordable food.

An estimated 162,000 Tanzanian smallholders stand to lose their land if the deal goes through. This means that more than half a million people would be impoverished as a result. And all so that some US energy company can produce what they refer to as food crops, but are much more likely to be used for biofuels.

'Affordable' food is the key term. There isn't a shortage of food in Tanzania as a whole (nor in Kenya or several other countries where people are starving). Indeed, some of Ethiopia's most productive land is also being grabbed, as millions there face starvation. Famines typically involve lack of access to affordable food, not lack of food.

One of the culprits mentioned in relation to Ethiopia is Italy, which also appears in the top 30 donor list, albeit at number 19. (The EC, number 2 in the list, is busy trying to ensure that India will no longer produce affordable drugs for HIV positive people by pressing them to sign an 'Economic Partnership Agreement'.)

The most generous also stand to reap far more than they sow. The UK is number 5 on the list and their history of land grabbing, which is still a huge contributor to the country's wealth, is legendary. They are one of the biggest grabbers in Africa, though they are more likely to boast about how much they 'contribute' in aid. Another big and long running land grabbing incident in Tanzania involves a British company called Sudeco.

It's interesting how a lot of the land being grabbed is being used for sugar cane. This can conveniently be referred to as a food crop but is far more likely to be used these days for biofuels. Western powers spend decades driving African sugar producers out of business by subsidizing their own producers and dumping their surplus on African markets. But now they seem to want African sugar again.

Canada is number 6 on the list. Much of Tanzania's gold, much of Africa's gold, is extracted by a Canadian company, which pays little or nothing in taxes or royalties. The US, UK and even South Africa, number 28 on the list, also extract gold at massive cost to ordinary Africans. Gold extraction puts huge tracts of land out of use, though direct contamination, water contamination and through forcibly excluding indigenous people, often people who once made a living from the gold.

Make no mistake, famines like the one currently developing in East Africa, are generally not 'natural' disasters. They occur and last because they are a consequence of large scale theft, government sponsored, multinational sponsored, philanthropic institution sponsored, even international institution sponsored, theft.

I don't wish to suggest that contributing money to the current famine is wrong, I would encourage people to contribute. But, bearing in mind what we are 'contributing' to next year's famine, giving money is not the only thing we can do. We can also ask public representatives tough questions about things that are often presented as 'business' or 'aid' or 'partnership', especially when they involve land and water use.

The majority of people in all East African countries depend very directly on land for their food and income. If that land is taken from them, or even if its use is dictated by those whose sole aim is profit, their lives and livelihoods are threatened. A famine is not an 'act of God', it's a consequence of human activities.

Stealing People’s Land Can Only Impoverish Them Further

The World Bank, an institution devised to divert aid money on its way to developing countries back to the rich and powerful, seems to have woken up to the sort of negative impact that its policies have been having on developing countries. I wouldn’t get too excited, though, because the negative impacts they are concerned about follow from their policies, which they haven’t changed in any way. And no matter how they appear to equivocate, it’s always worth bearing in mind who ‘international’ financial (and other) institutions are intended to benefit.

Grabbing land goes back a long way, hundreds of years, as does using people and resources in developing countries for the enrichment of people in developed countries. The monumental disaster, the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, which started in the late 1940s and was abandoned in the early 1950s, is just one out of many examples.  Like all of today’s land grabs, the grabbers were quick to claim numerous advantages for those who were being dispossessed of their land; employment, food security, development, mechanization, efficiency, modernization, etc. Such terminologies have changed little since the 1950s!

The flaws of the Tanzanian scheme were many and obvious from very early on, but there were those who thought they would make a lot of money from it. So vast tracts of land were destroyed and lots of equipment and other resources were wasted. Someone did make a lot of money out of the scheme, though it’s not certain who. But the losers were Tanzanians, the Tanzanian economy and the Tanzanian environment.

Land grabbing schemes of the last few years have already appropriated tens of millions of hectares, at very low cost. It is difficult to estimate how many people have been displaced and dispossessed but the number affected by the process will be enormous. ‘Investors’ will not be counting those costs, that’s for sure. They are anxious that we think of ‘feeding the starving’, even though 80% of the land hasn’t yet been used for anything. Ultimately, much of it is destined for non-food crops and for export to rich countries, though. What else would it be used for?

The World Bank has been talking about how to protect people in developing countries and their land. But they have been talking about a lot of things throughout their history. International agreements about accountability and transparency are a great idea, even better if there is some guarantee that they are upheld. But we know that all sorts of agreements are discussed, fewer are made and hardly any are ever upheld.

Land grabbing on a scale that is taking place presently is not happening despite the existence of institutions like the World Bank. On the contrary, such institutions were set up by rich and powerful countries so that they could stay rich and powerful. So we need different institutions, not the same ones saying the right thing while continuing the policies that have brought developing countries to their knees. The institutions are doing what they were intended to do, that’s why the World Bank needs to be abolished and replaced by something that genuinely represents the interests of the world.

The kind of land grabbing that is occurring at the moment will further devastate the most vulnerable communities, economies and environments in the world. People in rich countries may not be able to witness these phenomena as they occur, and the corporations currently enriching themselves are certainly not going to record them or make them publicly available. But by the time a handful of sound bites and photo opportunities are considered to be newsworthy by the world’s media, it will already be too late to reverse the damage.

Unnatural Disasters: GM and Biofuels

In an article about the highly suspect arrival of 40,000 tonnes of genetically modified (GM) maize in Kenya's Mombasa port, the BBC concludes "Many African countries are under increasing pressure to grow GM crops to tackle hunger and malnutrition, and drought in recent years has caused food shortages in Kenya."

This is very misleading, in several ways. Multinationals like Monsanto, which are having a lot of trouble persuading most countries to trust their attempts to take over world food production, want people to think that GM crops provide a solution to hunger and malnutrition. They want people to believe that their crops are resistant to drought, flooding, pests and whatever else. But none of these things are true. They have not developed crops that have any of these qualities.

Further, it has taken more than just drought to cause Kenya's food shortages. Much of Kenya's productive land is taken up with non-food or non-staple crops, such as sisal, flowers, tea, coffee, sugar and luxury fruit and vegetables. Most of these crops are for the export market. People cannot afford to buy food because they are poor. Because they lack empowerment, they do not have much choice as to what crops the country grows. And most people don't own large amounts of land, producing just enough to get by, if they are lucky. On the other hand, most of the industrial scale farms are owned by very few, well connected people, many of them foreigners.

The BBC article seems to take it as given that GM crops could play any part in reducing hunger and malnutrition. This couldn't be further from the truth. Most Kenyan farmers are subsistence farmers. GM crops were developed for rich farmers, mainly in the US. Some South Africans have fallen into the trap of accepting 'free' GM seeds and other inputs from the likes of Monsanto. Now they are stuck with contaminated land, crops they can't sell, rising input costs, shrinking profits and increased poverty and dependency levels. That's great if you're Monsanto but not so good if you're a small farmer.

This is probably the reason that the unwanted GM maize has ended up in Mombasa in the first place, but many Kenyans are wondering what it is doing there. Well, unless South Africans and some of the other poor fools who have been duped can now dupe others to take GM crops off their hands, they will have trouble shifting it. They have a surplus of maize in South Africa, which is bad enough, but a surplus of contaminated maize could prove to be a very hard sell.

High food prices, which are the real cause of hunger and malnutrition in Kenya and other countries, have a lot more to do with international speculation in staple food commodities. This speculation has recently been spurred by attempts by biofuel producers to buy up land cheaply in developing countries to produce yet more non-food crops or food crops that are destined for the petrol tanks of rich people. [Reuters have an interesting article about potential dangers of biofuels that the EU commissioned but subsequently 'forgot' to publish.]

Drought, flooding, pests and other phenomena can destroy crops and cause widespread poverty and starvation. But rich countries treating developing countries as mere inputs for the production of cheap raw materials, using cheap labour, is the real culprit in many of the famines and food shortages that are labeled 'natural' disasters. The real disasters are far from natural. They are artificially created for the benefit of the world's multinationals, the rich, the powerful and even those who just happen to live in the more fortunate countries.

Headline Grabbers and Land Grabbers

It's been a couple of years now since Bob Geldof made his injudicious pronouncements about biofuels. He should have known better and given the matter some thought. A little research wouldn't have done any harm either. Scepticism about biofuels didn't just appear recently. The environmentalist George Monbiot argued very cogently against biofuels nearly five years ago and has written many more articles on the subject since then.

But now the issue of land grabbing is being discussed more frequently and the part that biofuel production plays in land grabbing is clearly significant. Many of the claims about biofuel crops, such as jatropha, being productive even in marginal lands, turns out to be lies. Biofuel crops can be either non-food crops or food crops that are just not being used for human consumption but they all need good land and good growing conditions. So in the Tana River basin in the East of Kenya, sugar is being grown on an industrial scale in an area of great ecological importance while millions in the country starve. There is even a shortage of sugar in some areas!

Food prices have been rising for some time but producers of biofuels refuse to accept any responsibility for this trend. Good land is also in short supply here and in other developing countries. And many areas are facing drought, so growing crops that are subsequently used for biofuel production means the country is effectively exporting much of its scarce water supplies as well. It's not even as if poor Kenyans are benefiting from this, either. Many small farmers are displaced by the biofuel growers, who are all large-scale operators or connected with large-scale operators. They use factory scale production methods that require very few employees. People who formerly owned or farmed the grabbed land have either been bought off for a pittance or squeezed out some other way.

Governments of developing countries usually connive with the various multinationals and rich countries who are looking for cheap land. They are of little help when it comes to protecting ecologically important areas from being destroyed. And they seem happy to allow overuse of destructive artificial fertilizers as long as that gives big landowners and users increased crops, at least temporarily.

This land is also being destroyed because biodiversity is wiped out by large scale production. In the near future this land will simply be useless. If biofuels don't take off, the areas will probably be abandoned, as some operations already have been. And even when these multinationals and other parties use the huge tracts of land they 'purchase' for food production, it is produced for export, with bugger all in taxes or wages or anything else going to the developing countries. It's hard to estimate the numbers of people who have been displaced, dispossessed and otherwise abused by land grabbing, biofuel production and food production that is exclusively produced for export to rich countries.

Most farmers in developing countries are small farmers. They have never made a decent living from contributing small amounts of cash crops to big operators, and they never will. They need to concentrate on producing food for themselves, their families and the local market. People such as Geldof, with little or no knowledge of the conditions under which people in developing countries live, should do some research. The man has tens of millions of dollars, he could even afford to pay someone to do the research for him. I hope in the future he will admit his mistake and campaign against land grabbing in all its forms and especially against biofuel production.

Geldof and other 'philanthropists' may well boast about all the money they have raised for the developing world but they seem to have little idea of how much is being extracted from these countries. The money they claim to raise is puny compared to the amounts of money being extracted by food companies, biofuel producers, mining operations, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare companies, textile companies, sweat shops (or whatever they are now called) and just about any multinational you can name.

Instead of ranting on about things they don't understand, these people could try concentrating on some of the areas where vast amounts of wealth are stolen from developing countries by multinationals, rich governments and even some of the very people who think of themselves as philanthropists. It's time for some development by omission: development through reducing the exploitation of developing countries by the rich.

Donor Funding: Pseudo Worries About Pseudo Aid?

The parabolic solar cooker, made from an umbrella lined with tinfoil, works well when it comes to heating up water. I'll try cooking with it when I have found a suitable pot with handles and painted it black. Meantime, I wish to demonstrate the 'Cookits' that I bought from Solar Cookers International to an audience that could turn out to be as many as 20 people, far from ideal. I'd prefer very small groups of people but I've agreed to it.

As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.

Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.

When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.

Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.

Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind.

Biofuels: Greed that Knows no Bounds

High fossil fuel prices and the need to reduce carbon emissions has made investment in biofuels seem a lot more tempting than it seemed in the past. But there are a number of problems. Firstly, total carbon emissions from the production and use of biofuels is not necessarily lower than from fossil fuels, and can even be higher. Secondly, few countries in the world have productive land to spare to grow biofuel crops in economically viable quantities.

So what do biofuel investors do? Well, they buy or lease land in developing countries, which solves the land shortage problem. And most of the carbon emissions from biofuel production, as a result, become the problem of the developing country. Developing country governments are desperate for any kind of investment and they encourage such industries with tax breaks and lax regulation. These measures are encouraged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, of course, because they always support the exploitation of developing countries for the benefit of rich countries.

But do developing countries have ‘spare’ land? Well, countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and many other African countries have a lot of land. But much of it is marginal or unproductive, more still is protected for various reasons and what’s left is nowhere near enough to produce enough food for domestic consumption. Governments of these countries talk about providing enough food, usually by asking the IMF and the World Bank for assistance, but they all still look to external ‘investors’ as if they are going to magically make hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity disappear. But on the contrary, big external investment has usually had the effect of worsening already serious social and economic problems.

In fact, much of the money going into biofuels investment is aid money. People are fond of complaining about aid money being wasted, stolen, misused or whatever but they don’t seem interested in hearing that the largest amounts of aid money go into the pockets of wealthy multinationals. Billions of dollars of aid money go into paying for condoms, drugs, infrastructure projects, defence contracts, consultancy and other goods and services provided by Western companies. That’s the main reason why so much of the aid money that is said to pour into Africa and other developing regions never seems to have much benefit.

These Western countries’ worries about fuel costs and shortages are being dressed up as a concern for the environment and even an ‘opportunity’ for developing countries. But that’s the last thing that we in the West are really worried about. If we were worried about carbon emissions we could reduce consumption, which is the only way to significantly reduce emissions anyway. And if we genuinely wanted to give ‘opportunities’ to developing countries, we would object to the way aid money is used to prop up Western companies. For example, most food aid is spent on expensive food, bought and processed in the West, transported by Western transporters, handled and distributed by Western companies. Aid money like this is being used as de facto subsidy. That’s when it’s not misused in some other way, and more often misused by Western governments than by developing country governments. Developing country governments are no angels but they are often not the major recipients of Western aid money.

It’s odd that one of the places sought for biofuels production is Saadani National Park in Eastern Tanzania. National Parks are protected, supposedly for the benefit of humankind as a whole. However, most Tanzanians will never get much benefit from Saadani. These national parks are more often frequented by tourists and the big businesses, hotels, tour operators, etc, are more often foreign owned than Tanzanian owned. Small numbers of badly paid Tanzanian employees get some benefit from the tourists and that’s better than nothing. But national parks are mainly of direct benefit to wealthier people.

But now the claim is that the production of biofuels is also for the benefit of humankind. But who is going to benefit? The Tanzanians will lose a huge and unique area of scientific interest, the few benefiting from the tourism industry will lose their livelihood and those farming or otherwise living in the area will also be denied their living. The environment will be destroyed, water will be diverted and contaminated, land will be degraded, the coastline will suffer and for what? So that Westerners can continue to overuse fuel and other resources at the expense of people in developing countries. This is not for the benefit of humankind, it is for the benefit of the rich and the relatively rich.

Far from reducing environmental degradation, the production of biofuels will cause environmental catastrophes and mostly in developing countries, the very countries that are already feeling the worst effects of climate change. Are we going to be fooled into thinking that because the carbon emissions are being moved to other countries that we have thereby reached our targets? These rich investors are treating Tanzanians and other people in developing countries as fools, at best; at worst they are treating them as just another commodity. But we in the West seem to be allowing ourselves to be fooled into thinking that we are not doing any harm, even that we are doing some good!

It might be asked if any kind of impact assessment has been carried out and yes, some assessment has been done. It has been done, as usual, by Western consultants who have an interest in being employed again and again. They, to be fair, reported some of the disadvantages as well the advantages of massive biofuels projects. But companies and officials involved will only use the bits of the report that suits them. They will knowingly continue with this work as long as it holds substantial promise for them. For instance, the land that is planned for destruction has timber that may be of greater value than the biofuel crop itself. This sounds like another case of asset stripping, like the various privatisation charades, which were (and still are) also presided over by the folk at the IMF and the World Bank.

Ultimately, millions of people will be directly affected by these biofuel projects and billions will be less directly affected. Impact assessments even accept that many people will lose their jobs and their livelihoods, many animal and plant species will be wiped out, the health of the affected populations will suffer and that the projects will be costly (though costly for whom?), etc. But if some parties can make money out of them they are very likely to go ahead.

A recent article on this subject is followed by a postscript stating that one particular project has been pulled as a result of campaigning. Indeed, several months ago many similar projects were pulled following the global financial crisis. But this doesn’t mean that developing countries will no longer be seen as a potential source of biofuels, food, metals, minerals and other resources. As soon as it becomes economically viable, at least for some parties, you can be sure that these investors will be back.