Africa: We Don’t Want Aid. Please Keep It For Your Local Poor!

By: Mawuna Remarque KOUTONIN

 

 

Africa: We don’t Want Aid. Thanks.
Europe: No, No you don’t understand you need Aid.

The most fierce defendants of Aid to Africa are now mostly non-africans, while most africans are asking to stop it.
Take the example of one small east african nation Eritrea. They declared self-reliance and shut all NGOs and relief organization offices.
They refused to accept aid. Since then they’ve started building their country and have good results.

“Keeping with its self-reliance policy, the government of Eritrea stopped requesting any financial assistance from the United States since 2005, and fully cut-off all third party NGOs that were financially sponsored by the United States after 2006. The Eritrean government believes that foreign assistance breeds a culture of dependency that shackles African countries into a cycle of poverty”.
One Eritrean official declared “Aid only postpones the basic solutions to crucial development problems by tentatively ameliorating their manifestations without tackling their root causes. The structural, political, economic, etc. damage that it inflicts upon recipient countries is also enormous.”  

But it doesn’t came without cost. The nation paid a big cost. The western countries started bulling and demonizing the government.
According to wikileaks, once in 2008, Hilary Clinton was found to say, “Eritrea is bad example of good governance”.
The BBC vested journalist Ed Harris warned “Self-reliance could cost Eritrea dear“.
The Economist ridiculed the country  “A myth of self-reliance: Eritrea’s people pay the price for their government’s pride“
What a bad example Eritrea is showing!
What if more African countries would follow their example!
Self-reliance ideology is a threat to the well proven exploitation scheme in place around the continent.

The country ended up in economic sanctions under the pretext that the country is helping alshebab in Somalia. But the truth is pretty clear Eritrea stands against all forms of neocolonialism, political, economical, etc.
In a previous post I’ve called on Africans to Kill The NGOs, Chase The Charlatan Experts, Be Wary Of IMF & World Bank, because the hard truth about aid is this:
The mission of the fisherman is not to feed the fish. If the Fish doesn’t Understand that, It’s the Fish problem. If it’s Free, you are the Product!
And, as Thomas Sankara put it “He who feeds you, controls you…”

Obviously, if foreign aid would develop any place, Africa will be the most developed continent in the world.
International AID is currently doing more harm to Africa than good. It became the main tool used by foreign governments and organizations to corrupt the African elite, and get them to behave so irrationally toward their own populations and the basic interest of their countries.
Aside corruption and the criminality, International Aid is the root of the 5 Stars colonization disease that cripple the African elite which dislikes the responsibility and the self sacrifice that comes with being in control of a nation destiny. As far as they enjoyed the status offered by their positions, they never liked the responsibilities demanded by the jobs, therefore they use international aid programs as substitute to their responsibilities.

If Africa needs any aid, the most urgent one is to get rid of the 40 billions corruption industry (called International Aid) that shackles its youth and elite, cultivates and maintains the beggar mentality.

Africans don’t want aid. Please keep it for your local poor! Help your neighbors in the West!

taken from here

 

Who Cares about CAR?

The UN has declared the entire 4.6 million population of the Central Africa Republic to be victims and the country among its most dangerous destinations. Its refugee agency has called it the "most neglected crisis in the world". Médecins Sans Frontières warns that the country had been effectively "abandoned to its fate".

The Central African Republic is all but lawless, with just 200 police to guard those 4.6m people from rebel gangs who attack women, kill men and recruit children at will. Despite repeated warnings, the international community has done little, even as arms continue to flood into the country. In Bangui, the capital, convoys of gangs can be seen speeding through its suburbs and are blamed for looting and indiscriminate shootings. The country's infrastructure has been effectively demolished. Human rights groups say the justice system has been dismantled, the prisons destroyed. The army has been disbanded.

Malnutrition rates have skyrocketed and malaria cases have risen by 30% since the Seleka rebels assumed control of the country. Latest assessments reveal 484,000 people at risk of food insecurity, with more than 206,000 people displaced. Armed groups running amok in a state the size of France, free to plunder as they wish.

"There is nobody to help the population. There are no authorities, no militaries. When you resist, they kill you," Albert Vanbuel, Catholic bishop of Kaga-Bandoro, a town of 26,000.  Even the sprawling UN compound 3km from the town has been looted, its food stores pillaged.

A plan was constructed to pay off fighters who agreed to disarm. UN officials told the security council that a lack of funding to complete the disarmament process could push the country "to the brink of disaster".  Just two countries: Luxembourg offered £67,000 and Australia £134,000, despite £14.2m being required to complete the disarmament and reintegration process.

 A UN request for £129m of aid received £40m. A recent Unicef emergency appeal outlined a need for £21m, but received under £6m.

Britain, along with the CAR's colonial owner France, is among those accused of neglecting the country. A Foreign Office source said he could not recall if a UK minister had ever visited the country. The British ambassador is based in Cameroon, 500 miles away.  The UK cuts its annual aid to the republic from £2.7m to £1.29m two years ago.

Since 2005 the UK has been the fourth largest European exporter of arms to the CAR. Equally alarming is the role of Britain as the key supplier of arms to the increasingly unstable region of central Africa. Britain is Europe's largest arms exporter to Uganda and the third largest to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both CAR neighbours. Britain is the fourth largest supplier of arms to Chad and the second largest to Sudan, both officially classified as "countries of concern" by the Foreign Office. Almost £670,000 of mainly tanks and vehicles have been sent to Chad, while the UK government last year approved £7.6m of military export licences to Sudan including weapon sight mounts. The UK has emerged as the second largest exporter of arms to the volatile, embryonic state of South Sudan – and its sole supplier of explosive devices.

New Alliance - Old Colonialism

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa (NAFSNA), designed by the governments of the eight richest economies, for some of the poorest countries in the world. The New Alliance was born out of the G8 summit in May 2012 at Camp David and, according to, WoW, “has been modelled on the ‘new vision’ of private investment in agriculture developed by management consultants McKinsey in conjunction with the ABCD group of leading grain traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus) and other multinational agribusiness companies.”(Ibid) It has been written in honourable terms to sit comfortably within the Africa Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), bestowing an aura of international credibility.

At first glance, The New Alliance, with its altruistically-gilded aims, appears to be a worthy development.  Who could argue with the intention to “achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years”.

 Alliance contracts and deals-done favour wealthy investors, revealing the underlying, unjust G8 initiatives objective, to “open up African agriculture to multinational agribusiness companies by means of national ‘cooperation frameworks’ between African governments, donors and private sector investors” according to War on Want. With African governments anxious to eat at the head table, or at least be invited into the cocktail chamber they have little choice but to sign up to such unbalanced plans and policies.

African countries are required to change their trade and agriculture laws to include ending the free distribution of seeds, relax the tax system and national export controls and open the doors wide for profit repatriation (allowing the money as well as the crops to be exported). In Mozambique, as elsewhere across the continent, local farmers have been evicted from their land under land sales agreements.

Britain has pledged £395 million of foreign aid whilst, according to the UN “over 45 local and multinational companies have expressed their intent to invest over $3 billion across the agricultural value chain in Grow Africa countries [a Programme of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) established by the African Union in 2003.].” In order to get their hands on some of the corporations billions however, African nations are required to “change their seed laws, trade laws and land ownership in order to prioritise corporate profits over local food needs”, Mozambique e.g. is contracted to “systematically cease distribution of free and unimproved seeds”, and is drawing up new laws granting intellectual property rights (IPR) of seeds, that will “promote private sector investment”. In other words, laws are being written that allow foreign companies – ‘investors’ to grab the land of their African ‘partners’, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets.

 In Ghana, Tanzania and Ivory Coast, similar regulations sit on the table waiting to be rubber-stamped.

The New Alliance is “a pro-corporate assault on African nations”, the ‘investment and support‘  to further expand their corporate assets and with the support of participating governments, obliged to provide a selection box of state incentives.

African farmers, along with 25 British campaign groups including War on Want, Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation and the World Development Movement see clearly that “opening markets and creating space for multinationals to secure profits lie at the heart of the G8 intervention”. The New Alliance is a poisoned chalice.

From here 

Aid - the negative industry

The financial figures are trotted out so often they are becoming almost boring: seven of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies, 13 countries with a higher per capita GDP than China, a fast-emerging middle-class with higher household spending than India.

Unfortunately, such truths have been obscured by the Live Aid legacy. For all their fine intentions, the mega-concerts proved a disaster for Africa. The tone was set by the absence of African artists from the line-ups of bands playing at concerts designed to save their continent. The message was clear: it was western voices that counted.

Two decades ago there were thought to be 70 charities operating in Ethiopia; today, the figure is close to 5,000. In Kenya, there is a slum with an estimated one charity for every 32 people living there. After any major disaster, where once 40 groups operated, there will now be in excess of 1,000, causing chaos and confusion rather than helping the afflicted, as seen following the Haitian earthquake two years ago. Western politicians of all hues, desperate to look sensitive and caring, cravenly pandered to this aid lobby led by Bob and Bono, while journalists put on kid gloves when engaging with it, ignoring practices that would provoke outrage elsewhere. As a result, global aid spending soared from £50bn a year to £83bn over the first decade of this century.

 Today 595,000 people work in a fiercely-competitive industry.

A study last year found even among these aid workers only about one-third thought their projects worked. In private, many will admit to grave doubts. You could fill this entire newspaper with examples of how the flood of money washes down the drain: a report by two health economists, for example, found nearly two-thirds of health aid in Africa is diverted. The waste, the ineptitude, the tolerance of corruption, the support for repression, the furthering of inequality, the boosting of arms spending is utterly scandalous.

First, all those new colonialists riding around in their big white jeeps telling the locals what is good for them. "They don't consult with us," complained a minister in Somalia, latest recipient of massive British aid. "It's like a doctor trying to prescribe medicine for a patient you haven't seen yet." This distorts priorities of recipient nations. It leads to the creation of pointless bureaucracy – one study found a typical African country must churn out 10,000 aid reports each year. Additionally, while Western government attacks welfare dependency at home, it encourages it abroad with unquestioning support for politicians who have no need to bother responding to the needs of their own citizens.

Imagine how you would feel if armies of Africans came and told you how to run your schools and hospitals (while living in some of the smartest homes)? Or funded politicians who steal and murder? But this is the West's approach abroad: we know best, our voices count. This is how Britain ended up funding a regime that sent a hit squad to this country to kill people. And how it spent £1bn supporting education in just three east African countries but failed to check whether the teachers turned up or the children were learning; sadly, they were not.

Second, there is strong competition from all those charities for your money. They produce adverts and leaflets to tug your conscience, making it seem like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – war, poverty, starvation, disease – gallop constantly across Africa. "If you are not negative enough, you won't get the funding," confessed one charity boss. A study suggested the dominant image remains "malnutrition and pot-bellied young children desperate for help with flies on their faces". The result of all this poverty porn – especially combined with a similar and lazy media narrative – is that Westerners see the continent as one benighted and dangerous country, not a vibrant, inventive and increasingly-successful collection of 54 diverse nations. This constant negative imagery puts them off travelling or trading there.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/ian-birrell-geldofs-obsession-with-aid-hurt-africa-but-now-trade-is-healing-the-scars-7792579.html

When America and Al-Shabaab Agreed

When war-torn Somalia was also ravaged by a drought-induced famine last year, which killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, international media was quick to blame the Islamist Al-Shabaab for blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching its zone of control in southern Somalia.Although the group undoubtedly prevented assistance from reaching starving famine victims based on its claim that food aid was a Western conspiracy to drive Somali farmers out of business, Menkhaus, a specialist on the Horn of Africa, believes that was not the end of the sordid story. According to Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College in North Carolina, the United States’ counter-terrorism laws played an equally central role in obstructing assistance from reaching famine victims in desperate need of aid. Menkhaus said humanitarian organisations suspended food aid delivery to drought- struck areas controlled by Al-Shabaab for fear of violating the USA Patriot Act. Humanitarian groups were fearful that an accusation of "aiding terrorists’ could damage their entire organisation. In reality, the U.S. could have issued a waiver, protecting relief agencies from counter-terrorism laws; similar waivers have been issued for relief agencies in southern Lebanon and the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories, where Hezbollah and Hamas operate respectively. But in the case of Somalia, Menkhaus believes the U.S. administration did not want to give its Republican opponents any political leverage on the eve of upcoming presidential elections by appearing too "soft on terrorism". Instead, the U.S. government prepared a document that purportedly gave relief agencies protection from the law but which, upon close examination by legal experts, was found to contain no such protections, leaving those humanitarian agencies vulnerable to attack under the Patriot Act.

The tragic irony Menkhaus explained  "suspension of food aid into southern Somalia was the only thing that the U.S. government and Al-Shabaab could agree on, to the detriment of (millions) of Somalis" 




The humanitarian agenda is becomes secondary to the political agenda.
By 2008 Somalia was the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers. "One-third of all humanitarian casualties occurred not in Afghanistan or in Iraq but in Somalia," Menkhaus said. The Kenyan refugee camp of Dadaab, with a population of 520,000, is now Kenya’s third largest city, and completely unsustainable. In addition, destitute nomads and farmers who can no longer find livelihoods in rural areas are drifting into urban centres. These people, who come with no technical skills into a barren employment landscape, are forming huge slums of several hundred thousand people in villages that previous housed only a few thousand residents.


http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107508

Haiti - “The Republic of NGOs,”

Africans can learn from the experience of Haiti when it comes to foreign aid promises. Haiti is a formerly French colonial island nation occupying a little less than half of the Caribbean island originally called Hispanola (the other half of the island, the Dominican Republic, is a former Spanish colony). The island soon became a critical stop in the slave trade in the Americas, with its capital, Port-au-Prince, being one of the most popular hubs. The colonial overseers grew rich, exporting sugar and coffee to the world. By 1804, due to several slave uprisings, the poor natives overthrew French rule and became the first free nation in Latin America. Like other new democratic successes of the Atlantic World, the Haitians discovered self-determination. They also discovered debt, saddled with a French demand for 150 million francs (more than $20 billion in today’s terms) to compensate the colonial power for its lost territory.

The world pledged some $12 billion after the 2010 earthquake to Haiti . Two years later, little has been used to actually rebuild the country. According to reports by Oxfam, the UN, the U.S. Government Accountability Office and international aid experts interviewed by GlobalPost, billions of dollars of aid were pledged to Haiti’s reconstruction, but promises of funding have not translated into money on the ground. Of the original $1.4 billion allocated by the US Congress, according to a most recent GAO report, $655 million in funds was reimbursed to the Department of Defense. Another $220 million went to repay the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. $350 million went to disaster assistance (an umbrella term that includes everything from medical care to sanitation); $150 million to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (for emergency food and forward-thinking agricultural programs in Haiti); and $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration fees and aircraft fares for the lucky few Haitian refugees brought to the United States.

“In the end,” says Robert Fatton Jr., professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia “...if you read the reports — the UN Report and so on — you’ll see that actual Haitians got less than 1 percent of all the American money pledged.” In other words, Fatton explained, “99 percent of [the U.S. money spent] went back to the U.S. military, the State Department, NGOs and contractors. The money was clearly intended for Haiti, but it ended up returning to the same place it came from.”

Expanding the picture doesn’t change it. The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the overall $2.4 billion pledged by the UN for humanitarian efforts in Haiti, 34 percent (or $864 million) of those funds were given back to donor civil and military organizations, 28 percent (or $672 million) was laid out to UN and non-governmental humanitarian projects such as housing and health-care, 26 percent (or $624 million) was given to contractors for things like road-building and infrastructure, and 5 percent ($120 million) was given to various international Red Cross/Red Crescent societies.

As recently as the early 1980s, Haiti was producing just about all of its own rice. Now more than 60 percent is imported from the U.S., making it the fourth largest recipient of American rice exports in the world. That was before the quake and now with donated rice coming in as well, Haiti is even more awash in rice while American agribusiness makes billions of dollars every year through generous government subsidies.

“You might say it is a perfect metaphor for what is wrong with aid to Haiti,” says Marc Cohen, a senior researcher for Oxfam. “Instead of bringing subsidized rice in on ships from Miami, we could be helping Haiti grow rice in its own fields,” explains Cohen, who worked for many years in Haiti with the International Food Policy Research Institute and studied the broad economic impact of U.S. rice subsidies, or “Miami rice,” as it is known here.

If you really want to see the face of humanitarian spending post-earthquake in Haiti — the financial clout of the NGOs — there’s only one place to go: the Toyota dealership in Port-au-Prince. The white Toyota Land Cruiser is perhaps the ultimate symbol of international interventional power. And in and around Port-au-Prince, the vehicles are omnipresent.

How much does one cost?“Each one, with taxes, is $61,100,” she says. “If you have tax-free status, you can get them for less, but then you have to take them with you or give them away here. If you pay the taxes, you can just sell the car.”

And how many do you sell a year?

“This year, we sold 250 of this model. But, you know, right after the earthquake, for several months, we were probably selling that many Land Cruisers every month. Maybe twice that many.”

250 Land Cruisers at $61,000 each is upward of $15 million dollars. So even if they sold only a few more Land Cruisers in 2010 after the first few months (and you have to assume they did) plus the 2011 sales numbers so far , conservatively speaking that’s a gross cash influx in the neighborhood of $100 million in the last two years (though of course, some will have to go to taxes). Add to that the repair and maintenance fees, and you’re looking at maybe $110 million. Maybe $150 million. And that’s a conservative estimate.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/haiti_where_did_the_aid_go/

to aid or not to aid

An interesting interview on Der Spiegel with Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, author of "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa," and "How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly -- and the Stark Choices Ahead."

Dambisa Moyo: ... Africa is the only continent on which there continues to be famines again and again. Between 400 and 500 million people don't have enough to eat even though the continent has more fertile arable land than any other. Something's wrong about that.

SPIEGEL: Catastrophes like the one in Somalia are one thing. But don't you think Africa needs long-term aid programs to get its problems under control?

Moyo: I'm opposed to continuing to automatically pump billions into Africa each year in the form of cheap loans and budgetary assistance. This money has bred dependence and inflation; it doesn't allow people to ever really become productive. The West has been reliably supplying aid for 40 years. But, even so, Africa continues to have poor infrastructure, bad education and a lousy health-care system. Poverty has actually increased since development aid started being supplied. In 1970, 10 percent of Africans lived in poverty. Since then, that figure has grown to roughly 50 percent.

SPIEGEL: Why haven't African governments been able to put to good use the roughly $2 trillion (€1.45 trillion) that has flowed into their coffers over the last 50 years?

Moyo: Because this aid has hardly ever been tied to conditions. Donor countries allow African leaders to put this money in Switzerland, only to go shopping with it later on the Champs-Élysée.

SPIEGEL: Why doesn't anybody rebel against the corrupt rulers in Africa?

Moyo: Why should we normal Africans call our elites to account when people keep coming from the West and saying: "Don't worry. We'll keep paying no matter what you do with the money." An African president once said to me: "You can do what you want. You can swindle. You can kill your own countrymen. As long as there is hunger and disease where you are, the West will take care of you." That's why African governments steal and swindle.

Socialist Banner however finds it disappointing that Moyo can only call for more capitalist investment, particularly from China, as a solution. Africans, as she argues, indeed "need to finally take responsibility for themselves."

Dependence Syndrome

In the past, it was said and often repeated that Africa was inflicted by three crippling scourges, namely poverty, hunger and disease. Unfortunately, the three severely handicapping scourges are still prevalent.

Most African leaders have steered their governments into the unpredictable and costly dependence syndrome. Many of these leaders and their bureaucrats continue to be seen in the capitals of the developed and developing worlds with begging cups in hand. On their return home, they jubilate and exhibit their triumphs in having convinced their counterparts in the former worlds to part with crumbs under their rich tables, in exchange for the surrender of local raw materials which consist of wealth.

Today, the dependence syndrome in Africa has come to mean the surrender of valuable national assets in return for cheap trinkets and poorly designed and manufactured transient goods and equipment. The African continent continue to rely heavily on expatriate experts and money with their programmes of participation, personnel and paraphernalia, sometimes alien models of development have been thrust upon Africa while implementing international or bilateral agreements. These are agreements that invariably favour the donor rather than the receiving host country.

Consequently, the dependence syndrome exacerbates instead of reducing the three scourges of poverty, ignorance and disease.

EXTRACTED AND re-EDITED FROM HERE

Aid to Poverty

The German magazine Der Spiegel has a report upon development aid in Africa and its problems which is well worth quoting extracts from .

"...The main reason that there is starvation in Africa is that there are no profits to be made in cultivating or trading foodstuffs. Either developmental aid ruins the profits or corrupt leaders rob their people blind..."

"..UN's employees are paid to fight hunger, and that's why they usually write reports in which they dramatically portray the situation in Africa and which they usually end with appeals demanding more donated food... And what happens when the help comes? First the merchants complain because the cost of food drops through the floor. Nor is it worth it, under the status quo, to build up any surplus stocks. Then, the farmers complain because their crops become worthless..."

"...Where there is hunger, it results from unethical leaders who steal from their people and let them either starve or rush them into wars...Kenya currently has 94 ministers and assistant ministers, each of whom earns more than $20,000 (€12,940) a month on top of having their own state-funded compound...."

In a previous Der Spiegel interview Kenyan economics expert and capitalist apologist James Shikwati said that aid to Africa does more harm than good.

Shikwati: ...Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere...

Shikwati: ... and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It's a simple but fatal cycle...

SPIEGEL: In the West, there are many compassionate citizens wanting to help Africa. Each year, they donate money and pack their old clothes into collection bags ...
Shikwati: ... and they flood our markets with that stuff...Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide..."

As Socialist Banner has always claimed , the craziness of the capitalist market economy creates the contradictions that provides for the existence of poverty alongside plenty .Patching the system up with humanitarian aid fails to deliver the real solution . Only socialism can end African's poverty .

Salving ones conscience

Paleontologists hunting fossils of early man in the Rift Valley of southern Ethiopia call the area the cradle of mankind. This year it's bursting with life, especially in the fields where local farmers grow barley, potatoes and teff, a cereal used to make the flat, spongy bread injera. As a warm July rain falls on a patchwork of smallholdings half a day's walk from the nearest road, the women harvest yams, the men plow behind sturdy oxen and fat chickens, goats and cows roam outside mud huts. And yet for all the apparent abundance, this area is so short of food that many are dying from starvation.
It is reported that in the six weeks to mid-July, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated 11,800 Ethiopian children for severe acute malnutrition. At a tented hospital in the town of Kuyera, 50 out of 1,000 died, double the rate MSF expects for a full-fledged famine.
"It's very bizarre," says Jean de Cambry, a Belgian MSF veteran of crises from Sudan to Afghanistan. "It's so green. But you have all these people dying of hunger."

Over time, sustained food aid creates dependence on handouts and shifts focus away from improving agricultural practices to increase local food supplies. Ethiopia exemplifies the consequences of giving a starving man a fish instead of teaching him to catch his own. This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid?
Ethiopian farmers can't compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there's a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn't have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can't.

Aid or Bribe

I read that Liberia's pop queen is practicing her newest single — a song called "Thank you" to be released for President Bush's visit here next week.
Her head tilted back, Juli Endee pulls the microphone close and belts out, "Thank you, George Bush."
"Thank you for democracy," she croons over the electric guitar, shaking her hips wrapped in yellow cloth.
"Thank you for the rule of law," she sings.
"Thank you for debt relief."

"If you were to take a survey, you would find that there is not one Liberian that doesn't love George Bush," effuses pop star Endee.

The Bush administration has made Africa the centerpiece of its aid strategy. Twelve of the 15 countries receiving funding from the five-year, $15 billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief are in Africa. Nine African countries are among the 16 drawing grants from Bush's Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provides support to nations that have reached benchmarks from stemming corruption to investing in immunizations. Since Bush took office, U.S. development aid to Africa has tripled, funding for HIV programs have vaulted from under $1 billion to over $6 billion per year and garment exports from Africa to America, fueled by special trade deals, increased sevenfold, according to U.S. statistics.

Bush's focus on the continent, analysts said, stems from the realization that it's no longer just a case of Africa needing America, but of America needing Africa.

Today, a fifth of U.S. oil imports come from a single African nation — Nigeria. By the end of the decade, one in five new barrels of oil entering the global market are projected to come from Africa, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Benin, where Bush's trip will begin Saturday, received a $307 million grant from the Millennium Challenge Corporation two years ago for its commitment to democracy.
Ghana, one of the most stable democracies in West Africa, was the recipient of $547 million 2006 — "the largest grant ever to Ghana," according to Kwabena Anaman, director of research at Ghana's Institute of Economic Affairs.
Rwanda, which is recovering from a 1994 genocide, has just qualified to receive funding under the Millennium Challenge program.

Although the scale of funding under the Millennium Challenge is unprecedented, the program has been slow to take off, with only a fraction of the intended funds reaching the target countries six years after its launch.

Aid - the road to no-where

"Foreign assistance is far from charity," J. Brian Atwood, the USAID director under former President Clinton, told Congress in 1995. "It is an investment in American jobs, American business."

Just in case it was not already quite apparent we read here .

Under the Buy American Act, the U.S. Agency for International Development must spend aid money to buy products and services from U.S. suppliers whenever possible, and then deliver them aboard expensive U.S.-flagged ships or planes.

The World Bank estimates that throughout the 1980s, more than half of all aid was tied to what donor countries wanted to export, often at higher prices than could be found on the market. This practice reduced the value of aid by anywhere from 11 to 30 percent.

Often donors did not understand Africa or talk to Africans. The Norwegian government built a fish processing plant on Lake Turkana in the 1970s to provide jobs for nomadic cattle herders — soon doomed in part because the local community had no fishing culture.
In a self-assessment in 1987, the World Bank found 106 out of 189 African development projects audited — almost 60 percent — had serious shortcomings or were complete failures. African agriculture projects failed 75 percent of the time. A recent report on aid from the World Bank's private arm, the International Finance Corporation, found only half of its Africa projects succeed.

In the 50 years since the first African countries won independence, the world has spent $568 billion on Africa. Yet Africans are poorer now than a quarter century ago

"Africans do not want to be viewed as a charity case," adds Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank managing director. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of Africans are people who are getting on with their own lives. All they are asking for is....a set of tools."

We in Socialist Banner will add that what also is required is a new social system , something that the World Bank cannot deliver , only the workers themselves .

The Road to Hell is Paved by Good Intentions

Food aid sent to Somalia to combat one of the world's largest malnutrition crises has been criticised by Somali elders for being delivered at the start of the harvest season.


It is not the first time that Marere's elders have criticised the UN's World Food Programme . After a chaotic food distribution last year, which also took place during the harvest season, the elders wrote to WFP asking the UN organisation not to deliver food again. It is driving farmers into poverty by effecting the local market prices , lowering the price of maize by 60 per cent.


Musa Yusuf Ahmed, 44, was a policeman before the Somali government collapsed in 1991. Now, he tries to make a living from farming, growing maize, beans and watermelons. He normally sells a 50kg bag of maize for 100,000 Somali shillings (about £3.10), but Mr Ahmed said it had dropped to 40,000 (£1.25). "For we farmers it is a big problem," he said. "The food will benefit the people with no money but it will hurt the farmers."


The US Department of Agriculture gives commodities to charitable organizations to sell in low-income countries where they are working. From these sales the NGOs obtain local currency, which they use to finance their projects in those countries. Because the commodities are sold , the local buyers obviously had the purchasing power to buy those commodities. These sales then must have displaced potential commercial sales – by either local farmers or other suppliers. When “monetization” of food aid displaces sales of local farmers, it drives down the local market price. This may actually increase poverty .


In the short-term food aid benefits targeted vulnerable beneficiary households but creates a dependency syndrome and a distortion of local food prices and markets. The low market price creates a disincentive to food producers. Investment decisions change in the production plans of the subsequent season in favour of cash crop production .


The simple task of stopping people from starving or going hungry is never a simple task under capitalism .

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.