profit system - it is insane

  GRAIN researcher, Devlin Kuyek, co-author of "The Great Food Robbery"

"...with climate change, we also have to change the way food is distributed. More drought, dry weather, and water crises are going to mean a substantial loss of food production. You have to question the global system of food distribution; it's set up around profit right now. Who gets to eat and who doesn't is decided in a few rooms by boards of directors composed mainly of rich men. Who gets to eat and who doesn't is decided in a few rooms by boards of directors composed mainly of rich men. A handful of people in Northern countries deciding whether Africa is going to eat or not is insane."

"Africa is increasingly being targeted as a centre of production for global markets. The talk now is that Africa is one of the last frontiers because much of Africa is not under the model of export production. Land and water are still in the hands of local communities. So there's a big push to industrialize agriculture for export. Unfortunately, African governments are colluding with corporations who want to pursue agribusiness in their countries, with the help of the World Bank and bilateral and multilateral donors."


"...programmes like AGRA [Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa], are openly talking about small scale farmers as obstacles to development that need to be replaced by a new generation of commercial, modern farmers. This is code language for big farms, often owned by foreign capital, that use the machines, seeds, pesticides and others inputs sold by multinational corporations like AGCO and Monsanto, and that supply the global trade networks of corporations like Cargill and Olam."

 "In Ethiopia, you have a government that has stated its policy is to go from 80 percent rural population to 20 percent rural population. Who can imagine what all those people are going to do? What's the plan there? What jobs are they going to have? You can't say that this is about people in Africa choosing to move to cities. People are being forced out of their lands through mining projects, land acquisitions, and overall bad policies."

Full interview at  http://allafrica.com/stories/201205250403.html

The Scramble for Bio-Fuel in Africa

Apart from the frenetic Scramble For Oil in Africa that is currently taking place ( see earlier blog entries here and also here and here ,here , too, as well as here and here ) , but there is now also the beginnings of a frantic , feverish Scramble For Bio-Fuel ( or agro-fuel as some quarters call it ) - ethanol production - in the African continent . The EU alone wants to see at least 10% of road fuel derived from plants by 2020 and to achieve that aim it has to acquire resources .

The GRAIN report says its research shows show that governments and biofuels firms in developing countries are collaborating to push hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and peasant communities off their land.
GRAIN said: “The numbers involved are mind-boggling… an agrofuel lobby is speaking of 379 million hectares being available in 15 African countries. We are talking about expropriation on an unprecedented scale."

Brazil, largely by way of the state-owned oil company Petrobrás, has cut deals for ethanol imports and technology transfer with a range of African countries, from Senegal to Nigeria, Mozambique to Angola
Viscount Energy (China) Memorandum of understanding with the Ebonyi state government in Nigeria to establish a US$80-million ethanol factory in Nigeria using both cassava and sugar cane.
21st Century Energy (USA) Plans to invest up to US$130 million over the next five years in the production of ethanol from sugar cane, maize and sweet sorghum, and later to manufacture biodiesel from cottonseed and cashew nut residues in Cote d’Ivoire.
Bioenergy International (Switzerland) Plans to set up a 93,000-hectare jatropha plantation with a biodiesel refinery and an electrification plant in Kenya.
Sun Biofuels (UK) In association with the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC), has acquired 18,000 hectares of top quality agricultural land for jatropha production.
AlcoGroup (Belgium) Bought South Africa’s NCP Alcohols, Africa’s largest producer of fermentation ethanol, in 2001.
MagIndustries (Canada) Acquired a 68,000-hectare eucalyptus forestry plantation and is constructing a 500,000-tonnes per-year wood-chipping plant near the port city of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. The wood chips will be shipped to Europe for use as biomass.
Aurantia (Spain) Investing in oil-palm plantations and possibly four biodiesel refineries in the Republic of Congo.
Dagris (France) Investing in the development of biodiesel production from cottonseed oil in Burkina Faso through its local oil processor SN Citec.
SOCAPALM and Socfinal (Belgium) Plans to expand its 30,000-hectare oil-palm plantation in Cameroon .

Rather than improving energy security, biofuels will create a new problem of food insecurity, for the price of the national staples, cassava and palm oil, will almost certainly rise substantially when agrofuel production is under way. This year South Africa is running a deficit in its maize production, instead of the expected surplus. In only the last six months the “ethanol effect” (that is, the extra demand from the ethanol producers), combined with a drought in Southern Africa, have caused maize prices to skyrocket, with a percentage increase four times the level predicted in the Biofuels Strategy. As maize is the country’s staple food, the poor are suffering most.

There is evidence elsewhere that leads many to believe that agrofuels may, in part, be a smokescreen for the investors’ real agenda, which is to obtain land. The agrofuels sector, which is only a few years old, is almost entirely unregulated. In the confusion investors are obtaining large chunks of land for nominal fees. One ministry of energy official confided in an off-the-record briefing: “It is possible that the whole thing is being abused by night-flyers, since the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.” By the time the government wakes up to what is happening, many more of the country’s precious natural resources will have been destroyed .

In South Africa, the Eastern Cape government is to make 3 million hectares of “under-utilised” and fertile communal land available for agro fuel investments. One such project involves the planting of 70,000 hectares of canola for export by German investors. Rural communities use this land in several ways, including grazing, and it makes a considerable contribution to their livelihood. South Africa has a long history of expropriating rural communities or restructuring land use in a way that impoverishes them. This new scheme for taking land away and using it to plant crops for export is, unfortunately,
just more of the same.

“Southern Africa has the potential to be the Middle East of biofuels”, said Andrew Owens, CEO of the UK’s Greenergy at an agrofuels meeting in Cape Town.

But as in any other sector of agribusiness, corporate profit with agrofuel crops is best assured when these plantations are on the most fertile lands, close to major transportation routes. Millions of small farmers still occupy these lands. In Tanzania, the prime minister is fast-tracking agrofuels to accommodate a Swedish investor looking for 400,000 hectares in the Wami Basin, one of the country’s major wetlands, to plant sugar cane for ethanol. The project will inevitably displace local small-scale rice farmers. In Liberia, a UK company, Equatorial Biofuels, acquired Liberian Forest Products (LFP), which holds management agreements and permits covering over 700,000 hectares of land for the cultivation of oil palm. In Ethiopia, where land pressure is high, over 1 million hectares are being granted to agrofuel corporations to grow mainly jatropha, a potentially invasive species that is being introduced on a large scale without proper environmental impact assessments .

The truth is that the agrofuels boom in Africa is not about rural development and improving the living standards of poor farmers. On the contrary, it is about foreign companies taking over the land: by striking deals with government officials and lobbying for legal protection, subsidies and tax breaks; by acquiring scarce fertile land and water rights; by coercing farmers into becoming cheap labour on their own land; by introducing new crops in large-scale plantations; by introducing GM crops through this backdoor; by displacing people and biodiversity-based systems; and by enslaving Africa even more to the global market. Land grabbing on an unprecedented scale is on the march in Africa.

The agrofuels boom is being driven by the government’s desire to increase export earnings, mainly through the export of cassava and sugar cane for agrofuels. The reality is that, just as in the case of oil and all other global commodities, the market will fix the price of agrofuels. The country of origin will have little control, especially if ownership of the whole value chain is in the hands of international companies. The production of agrofuels will not guarantee cheap fuel to the local population.

Bio-fuels will not improve the lot of the vast majority of African people for various reasons:-
First, the poor simply cannot afford them because they do not have money to buy energy, but rely on wood, charcoal and dung.
Secondly, it makes no sense for rural families to replace their sustainable and food-secure agricultural systems and forests with foreign-owned industrial plantations and in the process become cheap and dispensable labour.
Thirdly, the privatisation of the land that is the source of Africa’s wealth will undermine any chance that Africans have of determining their own future.

The aim of capitalism is not to satisfy people's needs but to accumulate profits. This is not a policy choice but an economic necessity imposed by the operation of impersonal and uncontrollable economic laws which governments have to abide by, unless they want to risk making things worse by provoking an economic crisis and stagnation in the area they rule over.

Governments put profits before poor people because they are obliged to by the impersonal workings of world market forces, not out of choice. The same goes for the capitalist corporations. Their whole purpose is to make a profit on the capital invested in their businesses so that their shareholders can benefit. That's the nature of the beast . As long as the international capitalist system continues to exist, its economic laws will operate.

What is required is the end of the economic principle "can't pay - can't have" , not a reform of this system but its abolition and its replacement by one in which the Earth's resources become the common heritage of all humanity. Only on this basis can these resources be mobilised to eradicate world poverty and ensure a decent life for every man, woman and child on the planet. Yes, the world and Africa does possess the wealth and means to end world poverty .

Africa - Bill Gates Charity - No Solution

“Now it’s Africa’s turn. This is only the beginning of the continent’s Green Revolution. The end goal is that within 20 years, farmers will double or even triple their yields and sell the surplus at market. This is a vision of a new Africa, where farmers aren’t doomed to a life of hunger and poverty, where people can look toward future with promise.”
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 12 September 2006

Africa is often looked upon as backward and primitive , yet the birth-place of homo sapiens ( "wise man" or "knowing man" ) has developed its own and appropriate means of sustenance that successfully maintained its populations for tens of thousands of years and provided the knowledge for the rest of the world . African farming represents a wealth of innovation: for example, the US and Canada's main export wheat is derived from a Kenyan variety called "Kenyan farmer"; and the Zera Zera sorghum grown in Texas originated in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

With much fanfare and trumpeting the Bill Gates charity along with the Rockefeller Foundation launched the "Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa" investing over $150 million towards shifting African agriculture to a system dependent on expensive, harmful chemicals, monocultures of hybrid seeds, and ultimately genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Another initiative funded by the G8 is pushing biotechnology in agriculture through four new major Biosciences research centres in Africa. The charity headed by Bill Clinton’s foundation had pledged fertilizers and irrigation systems support to Rwandan farmers. Another US ex-president, Jimmy Carter, teamed up with a Japanese tycoon to launch the “Sasakawa 2000” project to bring seeds and fertilizers to Africa. GM companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta are entering into public-private-partnership agreements with national agricultural research centres in Africa, in order to direct agricultural research and policy towards GMOs. The core of these initiatives is the breeding of new seeds and getting Africa’s small farmers to use them. The Green Revolution is often described as an agricultural development project based on the breeding of new crop varieties that respond better to fertilizer, agrochemicals and irrigation.


This so-called "green revolution" or "gene revolution" is being done once again under the guise of solving hunger in Africa yet GRAIN claim it fails to address the real causes of hunger in Africa. Farmers in Africa cannot afford these expensive agricultural inputs and in fact these agricultural reforms are being driven by the industry's demand for new markets--not to meet the needs of farmers . The new foreign systems will encourage Africa's land and water to be privatised for growing inappropriate export crops, biofuels and carbon sinks, instead of food for people.

While the head of the Microsoft empire puts up most of the money, the real mover behind this initiative is the Rockefeller Foundation. who tried to explain away previous failed endeavours on the complexity of Africa’s agriculture and its lack of infrastructure as reasons why the new Green Revolution largely ‘bypassed’ this continent but according to GRAIN Green Revolution technology didn’t simply just ‘bypass’ Africa: it failed. It was unpopular and ineffective. Fertiliser use, for example, increased substantially from the 1970s onwards in sub-Saharan Africa, while per capita agricultural production fell. In Malawi, despite the widespread release of hybrid maize, the average maize yield remains roughly what it was in 1961.

With this evidence instead of offering another better and improved approach from Gates-Rockefeller experts , it has been more of the same - more fertilizer use, more irrigation, better infrastructure and more trained scientists. Together with these same corporations, which are constantly merging together, are now spending billions of dollars promoting yet another technological fix: genetic engineering. This new technology, which, like pesticides before it, is fraught with risks to human health and the environment, is particularly troubling because it has the potential to give corporations complete control over the global seed supply and, therefore over the production of food in the world. In this agriculture, farmers are merely recipients of technology, forced to sign contracts that dictate what can and cannot be done in their fields and with their crops.

Progress is being guided by the interests of transnational corporations, not by the collective wisdom of its rural communities. Totally ignored is the central role of local communities, their traditional seed systems and rich indigenous knowledge, despite increased international recognition of their crucial importance .

Under pressure from international and bilateral trade instruments African governments are increasingly opening up their markets to let their farmers “compete” with the heavily subsidised food and other agricultural produce dumped into their economies by the US and the EU. The same African governments are then forced by the same agencies to devote their most fertile land to the growing of export commodities for markets in the North, thus pushing small farmers off their land and food production out of rural economies.

For more about the dark shadows cast by Bill Gates Foundation and his philanthropy read here and also his cohort Warren Buffett here

The above article is collated from GRAIN , a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge.