A Whale of a Lie

Socialist Banner has previously reported on hw fishing crisis around the African coast and another story has come to our attention .A coalition of conservation groups and a leading fisheries scientist have accused Japan of damaging the fisheries interests of poorer countries.
They say Japan promotes the argument that whales are responsible for declining fish stocks in order to boost support for whale hunting.

Daniel Pauly, director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, said there was abundant evidence that whales are not behind the decline in fish stocks.
"Blaming whales is an issue that is not only false - whales are no more responsible than the Martians - but which prevents the very small resources of West African countries from being devoted to understanding the real reasons why their fisheries are declining," he said.

Some developing countries, notably along the west coast of Africa, have seen stocks fall abruptly as fleets from Europe and East Asia have moved either legally or illegally into grounds that had previously been the preserve of small scale local fishermen. But some of these countries evidently believe the fish are disappearing largely because whales are eating them , diverting from the real cause of he depleion of fish stocks .

The Pew Environment Group said Japan has been raising the issue "to scare and recruit countries into supporting its move to end the whaling moratorium."

Marketing Poverty

From the fraternal blog Reasons to be Impossible

So according to the FAO:
Per capita food production has declined in Africa for the past 30 years and farm productivity in Africa is just one-quarter the global average. Today, more than 200 million people are chronically hungry in the region, and 33 million children under age five are malnourished.and we hear from the BBC, Kofi Annan:
Attending the Rome conference in his new role as the chair of Agra, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, he said the African farmer was the only farmer in the world that still took all the risks, often operating without financial support, expertise or safety nets. AGRA makes an interesting point:
Markets can play an important role in improving the incomes of poor farmers. However, markets in Africa are generally poorly organised and volatile, and often inaccessible to small-scale farmers. Also lacking is the market information that farmers need to negotiate good prices for their produce. Even such basic information as current wholesale and retail prices is rarely available. Therefore, building efficient and well-integrated input markets (through which farmers can buy supplies), and output markets (enabling farmers to sell their harvest) is key to encouraging farmers’ adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies.

All of which is to highlight two things - firstly, that most of the world does not play by market rules when it comes to food - food security is national security, and security of food prices stabilises labour markets (food soars, we strike).

Secondly, the state of Africa's markets shows that people left to themselves do not just create functional markets.

Now, I seem to recall reading one African post-liberation leader, discussing how traditional African nmarkets were inherently socialist (I can't remember who) - but the fact of the matter is that the sharing of information is a necessary prelude to socialism - if, as I heard on the radio last night, after a bit of investment Malawi has trebled its food output, there is reason to hope that this programme will work, and the horror of starvation may be obliterated. but, mark you, it isn't sponanteous markets that will be doing the work, but conscious investment, and co-operation. The capital markets have failed in Africa.

Ethiopia

"There's not enough food and everyone's starving and that's all there is to it."

From a Zambian comrade

Two contributions from comrade Kephas Mulenga in Zambia:

SOCIALISM AND TRADE UNIONS

Becoming a member of the WSM entails the acceptance of the class struggle—political
consciousness envisages working class political solidarity. But must a member of the
WSM participate in trade unions?

It is empirically justified that a working class person must join a trade union in
order to improve his working conditions.

The moral principle of trade unionism is labour arbitration and not class antagonism
as such. Trade unionism intensifies economic and labour reforms and this restrains
working class political solidarity. It is the case that a member of the WSM needs
not to participate in a trade union or labour movement…because trade unions restrain
working class political solidarity. Because the working class has not yet achieved
its emancipation from the limiting conditions of wage employment, we must expect
that a member of the WSM may find it socially unjustified not to participate in a
trade union in the sense that the moral principle of trade unionism is labour
arbitration and not political revolution as such.

We are of the opinion that trade unions are not vehicles of working class political
solidarity otherwise than as movements of labour arbitration.

In Africa trade unions have become a vital source of class pressure. It is a fact
that trade unions in Africa are controlled by political charlatans—they tend to be
more politically vocal. It is my contention that a member of the WSM in Africa must
not underestimate the significance of racial and cultural prejudices (nationalism)
that remain to transcend all political and class barriers.

SOCIALISM AND REVOLUTION

The political subject of scientific socialism is conceived as an intellectual and
theoretical detachment. Thus the definition of class struggle and revolution remains
so much exaggerated in situations where the political subject of scientific
socialism remains so far removed from the entrenched political and academic
conventions. It may come to pass that working class political consciousness is not
so much politicised in Africa today. What I am trying to emphasise is the fact that
working class self-consciousness has not yet attained its political and social
emancipation from the limiting cultural and tribal prejudices (nationalism).

Nationalism is a cultural and political limitation in as much as African economic
underdevelopment comes to presuppose racial and cultural antagonism between Africa
and Europe. Thus the dilemma of African economic underdevelopment comes to be
conceived through racial prejudice—black consciousness is the language of African
nationalism. The extent to which the working class in Africa can achieve its social
and political emancipation may come to depend upon the existing historical
conditions. Socialism can only be realised in conditions where the working class has
achieved its emancipation from the limiting political and cultural limitations.
Though we may take it for granted African economic underdevelopment is a direct
product of European neo-colonialism, yet we are ready to point out that nepotism,
tribalism and corruption are also contributing to African economic underdevelopment.
Political independence in African was a hybrid of bourgeois black nationalism and
not of peasant revolution as such.

The fact is that Africa will never attain its economic development from within the
existing mode of capitalistic economic and production relations based upon the
exploitation of man by man.

your child's health report

The report, "The State of Africa's Children 2008," was launched on May 28 at the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Japan.

The facts are shocking.

Although Africa accounts for only 22 percent of births globally, half of the 10 million child deaths annually occur on the continent. Africa is the only continent that has seen rising numbers of deaths among children under five since the 1970s.

Many of these children die of preventable and curable diseases.

UNICEF's report says malaria is the cause of 18 percent of under-five deaths in Africa. Diarrheal diseases and pneumonia -- both illnesses that thrive in poor communities where sanitation is severely compromised, and where residents are often undernourished and exposed to pollution -- account for a further 40 percent of child deaths. Another major killer is AIDS.

sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely to achieve any of the health-related Millenium Development Goals by 2015; the continent lags behind on progress towards eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, improving maternal health, and halting and reversing the spread of HIV. One in every six children in sub-Saharan Africa will still die before his or her fifth birthday. The region is described by UNICEF as the most difficult place in the world for a child to survive.

In South Africa, 250,000 children under 15 are HIV-positive -- a huge proportion of the estimated 400,000 children under 15 who have been infected with HIV in Africa. Despite the expanded provision of anti-retroviral drugs, 64,000 more children contract the virus in South Africa each year. Across the southern African region, under-five deaths have risen by 17 percent between 1990 and 2006; these deaths are mostly attributed to HIV/AIDS.
In West and Central Africa, there were more people without access to clean drinking water in 2004 than in 1990. Unsafe drinking water can cause diarrhea, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases.

It needn't be like that !

There can be expanded immunization programs, the increased use of insecticide-treated bed nets, and the provision of vitamin A supplements to children.
Other interventions in Africa include exclusive breast-feeding practices up to six months and the prescription of anti-retroviral medication to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV.
In Ghana, all pregnant women are now covered by an intervention program that includes iron and folic acid supplementation and preventative treatment for malaria. All children between six months and five years of age are vaccinated against childhood diseases like measles and polio.
In Malawi, the government has rolled out immunization programs as well as micronutrient supplementation -- small amounts of vital minerals like iron, cobalt, chromium, and copper. The government is also building wells to improve access to clean water for people living in remote towns and villages.
Rethinking the supply and management of water systems is also crucial. In Ghana, a water reform program introduced in the 1990s has met with huge success. Responsibility for water supplies was transferred to local governments and rural communities and by 2004 access to clean water sources had increased to 75 percent from a low 55 percent.

Just imagine if there were no financial budgets acting as restraints on peoples needs and that the labour hours spent on wars and State oppression were re-directed to constructive and not destructive purposes.

Don't Die for Oil

The Sudan government and rebels from the south signed the accords making up a peace deal to end 21 years of fighting. The agreement included a permanent ceasefire, and protocols on sharing power and wealth. The conflict - Africa's longest-running civil war - had pitted the Muslim north against Christians and animists in the south, leaving some 1.5 million people dead.

Yet was it all to do with religion and Sharia Law ? The latest news from south Sudan describes scavenger birds picking through the charred remains of houses and shops in the central Sudanese town of Abyei, four days after violent clashes between troops from the North and South of the country ended. tens of thousands of people fled from the town and surrounding area to escape days of sporadic fighting. Looters steal what they can , the northern soldiers who now control the town stand looking on.
"We have been to the centre of Abyei and it doesn't exist any more," said the head of the UN mission in Sudan, Ashraf Qazi.

Border demarcation and the status of Abyei were at the heart of the problems.

Both North and South are desperate to have Abyei inside their borders because of the oil fields that surround the town.

Once again , war comes down to the mundane competition for resources and religion used as camoflage to justify rivalry and delude people into dying for oil .

Capitalist Markets and Food Shortages

From the BBC we read that six million children in Ethiopia are at risk of acute malnutrition following the failure of rains, the UN children's agency, Unicef, has warned. The WFP estimates it needs to raise $147m (£75m) to tackle Ethiopia's needs. Aid workers say the money just is not arriving, with donors concentrating on the disasters in Burma and China.

Ethiopia for most of the past three decades has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash. It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time. Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined. Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive.

Why, with so much international support, have things gotten worse and not better?

Foremost is that any large-scale intervention by definition distorts local economics.
"We import huge amounts of grain from abroad. So this will inevitably affect the internal production and markets," said the Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse.
When foreign aid lands, local prices collapse, and farmers who have managed to produce a surplus find their crop is virtually worthless. They have no money to pay for seed or fertiliser for the following year.

One Class , One Struggle

Companion bloggers The World Socialist carries an article that has been often commented upon here on the Socialist Banner - the rise of xenophobia in South Africa - the search for scapegoats for the failure of the ending of the apartheid era and the ANC government to satisfy the material needs of those who put their faith in the promise of change .

"...it depends on your ability to pay…"

"We have a water problem"

You have to buy water or you have to draw water yourself… We get water from far away, because if you are getting it from up there at Chemichemi springs…everyone is at that place… It is just a ditch and that ditch used by all the people in this area. Everyone has to form a line and it takes many hours...If you do not have water, you have to pay 300 shillings and that represents school fees, so we have a water problem. There are those people who have dug wells and there are those who have taps, so it depends on your ability [to pay]… If you have money, about 10,000 shillings, you can connect pipes to your house.The tap water comes on in one area at a time. For example, it may be available in the part with the hospital, but there is none this side [of Kimana] - but we understand… I have neighbours whom God has helped and they have tap water and also pumped water. They sell it. One container is 2 shillings. You are forced to buy it - if you do not want the water from the ditch you have to buy it.

African health worker gap catastrophic

Socialist Banner has previously reported upon the African brain drain and especially in the health service sector ( here and here ) . Freedom Press have produced an article which is worthy of a re-post .

Rob Ray looks at claims that a brain drain to West is crippling healthcare across the African continent, for Freedom Press

It has been revealed that the global shortfall in healthcare professionals has reached four million people – with one million needed in Africa alone. The figures were voiced at the Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, which opened in the Ugandan capital of Kampala on March 3rd.
Poor working conditions in Africa, along with heavy incentives from the West, are drawing a heavy proportion of newly-trained health professionals out of the continent. Some 57 countries, especially in Africa and Asia, are particularly affected and unable to effectively provide health services for the population, which also hampers prevention and information campaigns, drug distribution and other life-saving interventions.

Africa has been particularly badly hit as measures from wealthy countries to encourage skilled workers to emigrate have stripped African countries, particularly in sub-saharan regions, of up to 75% of their physicians (Mozambique) and up to 82% of nurses.

"They seek better employment and quality of life. Income is an important motivation for migration [as well as] better working conditions, career opportunities and more job satisfaction," Sigrun Mogedal, one of the conference organisers, said.

Across the continent, Africa has 11% of the world population and 24% of the global burden of disease, but only 3% of the world’s health workers. Nine countries, including Britain, the US, France, South Africa, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Australia and Portugal, received the vast majority of all migration from Africa – 92.4%, amounting to over 65,000 people in the year 2000 (the most recent figures available).

Britain has been particularly active in Kenya, recruiting the vast majority of the 51% of healthcare workers which have left the country, leaving many of those injured in recent fighting around the elections unable to find medical help.

At the conference, Ugandan health minister Stephen Malinga said that wealthier African countries, particularly South Africa, had been poaching healthcare workers as their own emigrate – around 5% of South African health professionals leave the country. The effect created is of a feeder chain, with the wealthiest countries buying in doctors and nurses from African countries, wealthier African countries copying the tactic to draw people away from weaker neighbours, and the poorest and most vulnerable populations left with the least protection.

Uganda is facing an acute shortage as there is only one doctor for every 15,000 patients, far below the recommended 1.5 per 10 patients. Last October, the Ugandan Ministry of Health reported a staggering shortfall of 2,290 nurses out of the required 5,568 in government funded hospitals alone.

While money is often sent back to the country by healthcare workers abroad, the absence of proper healthcare is contributing to a catastrophic fatality rate. The Global Health Workforce Alliance said one in four doctors trained in Africa was working in western industrialised countries.

MAYDAY 2008

Mayday belongs to the workers. Although that means admitting that the rest of the year belongs to the capitalists , it also means that we know who we are – the first step to changing our condition.

Mayday belongs to the workers – we have a world to win, and we can win it.

UnFreedom Day

A belated post on South Africa Freedom Day

"...On Sunday it will be Freedom Day again. Once again we will be asked to go into stadiums to be told that we are free. Once again we will not be going to the stadiums. We will, for the third time, be mourning UnFreedom Day. Since the last UnFreedom Day we have been beaten, shot at and arrested on false charges by the police; evicted by the land invasions unit; disconnected from electricity by Municipal Security; forcibly removed to rural human dumping grounds by the Municipalities; banned from marching by the eThekwini City Manager; slandered by all those who want followers not comrades; intimidated by all kinds of people who demand the silence of the poor; threatened by new anti-poor laws; burnt in the fires; sick in the dirt and raped in the dark nights looking for a safe place to go the toilet...

...In our movement we have often said that we are not free because we are forced to live without toilets, electricity, lighting, refuse removal, enough water or proper policing and, therefore, with fires, sickness, violence and rape. We have often said that we are not free because our children are chased out of good schools and because we are being chased out of good areas and therefore away from education, work, clinics, sports fields and libraries. We have often said that we are not free because the politics of the poor is treated like a criminal offence by the Municipalities while real criminals are treated like business partners. We have often said that we are not free because the councillors are treated like the people's masters instead of their servants. We have often said that we are not free because even many of the people who say that they are for the struggles of the poor refuse to accept that we can think for ourselves...

...But freedom is more than all of this. Freedom is a way of living not a list of demands to be met. Delivering houses will do away with the lack of houses but it won't make us free on its own. Freedom is a way of living where everyone is important and where everyone's experience and intelligence counts..."

From PAMBAZUKA NEWS - Full article at link

free access

“Cameroon could not only become self-sufficient but a major food exporter”

How to do this ?

Create free seed banks. “All the framers will have to do is come and get the seeds.”

Start handing out four to five hectares of fertile land to any farmer who can show that he or she is capable of using the land productively.

Poverty knows no colour

"The problem of white poverty is a silent problem..." Flip Buys, general secretary of Solidarity said "...but it's not politically correct to talk about white poverty. We must break the silence, because poverty knows no color."

About 9 percent of South Africa's 48 million people are white. Solidarity, a union whose base is among white workers, estimates about 13 percent of working-class whites — some 247,000 people — earn less than 1,600 rand (about $200) a month.

Bethlehem , a collection of wooden shacks on the outskirts of the capital , has no electricity, running water or sewer service, and the people there eke out a meager living by selling vegetables they grow near their shacks.Such squalor was common for blacks under apartheid, and the vast majority of South African blacks still struggle to get by. But, while it is rarely discussed, white poverty is not new — Zuma told the Bethlehem residents he knew poor whites growing up in a working-class family in Durban.

Jackie Nel, a 53-year-old former government clerk who has been living in the settlement for a year, said there isn't any difference between black and white poverty.
"The whole of South Africa is struggling. The prices of food, petrol, kerosene are too high. Can't they (government officials) bring them down a little?" Nel , said.
Susie van Niekerk, a 73-year-old retired nurse who uses a wheelchair and has been living in Bethlehem since September, said she sometimes feels the plight of whites is ignored. But, she said, the government needs to do more "not only for white people, but for black people, too."

Idi Amin

Our companion blog Socialism Or Your Money Back carries a post from the archives of the Socialist Standard which is well worth re-posting .

The way to stop understanding of events is to show them as resulting from personal misconduct or mismanagement by those in charge. Had Hitler not been mad and bad, the Second World War would never have happened. Stalin's treacherousness made Russia what it is. But for a succession of weak and untrustworthy leaders, the Labour Party would have brought us all to the Promised Land. This view of history means we are perpetually invited to look at figures idiotic and corrupt, and put all the blame on them. Without doubt they are all as objectionable as stated, but that is not the answer. The high chairs in which these characters sit are provided by capitalism, and at some time of need each appeared to be the ideal occupant.

The special place of buffoon-turned-villain is held at present by President Amin of Uganda. Since his regime began it has been characterized by killings, culminating in the "Makerere massacre" of over 100 students in August this year. It has included the deportation of Asians in 1972, and a series of international incidents; in July there was a confrontation with Kenya, and on the 28th July Britain broke of diplomatic relations with Uganda. There have been attempts at uprisings and to assassinate Amin. On 1st August The Observer had an editorial headed "Getting rid of Amin".

The fact is that Amin's takeover in January 1971 was supported by Israel and favoured by Britain. A lengthy article in The Observer on 15th August recalled that the previous Prime Minister of Uganda, Dr. Milton Obote, had at the end of 1969 introduced a "Move to the Left" policy that was "Britain's reason for welcoming the coup d'etat 13 months later". On Amin's accession, the article went on: "The British Government was delighted...One of Amin's first acts was to de-nationalize the British businesses taken over by Obote." Israel viewed Uganda under Amin as as an ally against the Arab states. While these relationships lasted, Amin was presented as a not-umsympathetic clown; since they were reversed, the Ugandan regime has been shown as a reign of terror...

Amin's support in finance, arms and technical personnel comes from the Arab states, particularly Libya, which is in turn supplied by Russia. In the flare-up between Uganda and Kenya it was said that neither America nor Russia wanted to see a shooting war develop in this part of Africa and had advised caution to both sides and their neighbours. Nevertheless, the balance between Africa and Middle East states and the major powers which "handle" them is like that of the Balkan states and Europe before 1914. It is absurd to imagine that this position would be different if Uganda, Libya and other states had more amiable rulers. In some cases they had different ones, who were made unacceptable by the situation instead of the opposite happening....

The cause of war remains the same: conflicts among the capitalists of various nations over markets, trade routes and resources of production. Of course it is masked by diplomacy and and political motives. The last major war fought more or less openly for markets was World War I. The immediate factors in the modern world are control of strategic points and influence over particular sections, presented as a conflict between "ideologies". Ultimately, however, all wars are economic. The balance of power in Africa is between the growing and aspiring ruling classes of the states there, their deals for aid with bigger nations, and the bigger nations' own need for oil and minerals for commodity production.

In this balance, the grotesque Amin is entirely dependent on his sponsors. The continuation of the Kenyan oil blockade in July could have caused his downfall, and from the viewpoint of his Arab allies he is unreliable and disposable; no doubt their attitude is like Samuel Pepys's - "whether it will be better for me to have him die, because he is a bad man, or live, for fear a worse should come". Meanwhile, workers in Uganda and countless other countries not only under tyrannical regimes but have the prospect of being fodder for wars, in which the enemies are a matter of permutation. This is the result of production for profit. It does not have to go on."

R. Barltrop 1976

One People ,One World

Socialist Banner has previously directed attention to the anti-migrant tendencies in South Africa and once again we receive yet more reports of the same.

Socialist Banner can only agree with these statements made by a libertarian group in South Africa .

"No, Zimbabweans are not the reason why we have high crime rates and live in poverty! It is the capitalist system that needs starvation and unemployment to keep prices low, and it is the inequality generated by the capitalist system that drives people to crime! It is the ruling class and the government which protect capitalism. We should not attack people suffering from the same system we suffer from but the people who are behind it!...It is time to get rid of some of the myths that are around in South Africa: most criminals in this country actually are South Africans and not Zimbabweans or Congolese or whatever scapegoat you want to find! It is a myth in order to build a South African national identity but it is built on a lie...Other Africans for the first time in their life experience racism in South Africa, and this comes from both white and black South Africans...Xenophobia, meaning the fear of the foreign, is a sign of a society that has forgotten what its real enemy is: capitalism and everyone who supports this system (i.e. the state). It is as disgusting as racism to which it is closely related...The poor and working class people of this whole planet have more in common with each other than any working class does with its ruling class in any one country. To attack immigrants is to fight our own people instead of working together to build a better world.

We should be fighting for a world without artificial national borders between brothers and sisters in which no one is illegal!"

A Report on Mau Mau

Our companion blog Socialism Or Your Money Back carried this article

Jomo Kenyatta who was jailed on this day in 1953 following the first Mau Mau uprising the previous year, campaigned for the capitalist class in waiting, who finally achieved their 'independence' to start exploiting the vast majority of people in Kenya a decade later. Kenyatta was rewarded with the presidency in 1964.

In the July 1960 Socialist Standard FD Corfield's Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of the Mau Mau received a scathing review as it pointed "..a sanctimonious finger of blame at almost everyone except the British Government and the narrow interests they represent..." Indeed, "..as an objective historical account of a particularly ugly piece of human history the report is useless and in every way unworthy of its title.."

The main contention of the report is that leading Africans, and in particular Jomo Kenyatta, encouraged by sympathy from many outside sources, and unwittingly aided by the facilities provided by a "liberal" government, perpetuated rebellion as a manifestation of their personal malevolence.
The report says, "Without the freedom afforded them by a liberal government Jomo Kenyatta and his associates, would have been unable to preach their calculated hymn of hate." Mr. Corfield is completely convinced that the government of Kenya was pre-occupied with "...the material progress of the peoples of Kenya." He says, "One has only to read the annual reports of the provincial commissioners to realise the immense efforts made by officials and unofficials to raise the material and moral welfare of the Africans."

These are the terms in which the report ignores the naked and cruel self interest of the white landowners' mission in East Africa. For a rational society of controlled purpose to be confronted by a primitive social grouping over which it held immense technical superiority would involve problems of a most delicate sociological nature. Its approach would be scientific procedures, its motives would be humanistic. But when the envoys of European propertied society landed in East Africa to preach the Gospel of Self Interest and predatory exploitation they were interested only in smashing the social organisation of the African inhabitants and making them servants and labourers. Here surely was the bed rock basis of the Mau Mau violence. Mau Mau, though loathsome in form, arose inevitably from the indignities, the injustice and the sheer primary poverty of the African's plight. This is well known and the evidence for it is even contained in the government's own Colonial Publications.

In contrast with the hypocritical Corfield report the African Labour Efficiency Survey, 1949 is a realistic appraisal of the problems of making the African a more efficient and effective wage worker.
In viewing the East African situation (in 1947) it says, "The East African comes from a tribal economy in which his human needs of sustenance can still very largely be met...He has not, to any significant degree, been bent under the discipline of organised work. In his primitive economy, the steady, continuous labour is carried out by women. In respect of the few working activities which in the past occupied him he was free and independent. Though the tasks he performed were prescribed by tribal law and custom, he could do them in his own way and at his own speed, for him time had no economic value. The work he did for others was not for wages, but was one of the duties arising out of his relationship with his fellows. He gave satisfaction by his work and derived a measure of contentment from it. In these circumstances he was willing to do what was required of him. To work steadily and continuously at the the will of another was one of the hard lessons he had to learn when he began to work for Europeans."

Even so, the report reveals the positive measures taken by the Kenya Government to coerce Africans into seeking wage employment.
In the first instance the Kikuyu and other East African tribes were enclosed within small reserve areas which to an agricultural people was disastrous. In the terms of the report, South Nyeri, one of the three component districts comprising the Kikuyu reserved lands, had a population estimated in 1944 to be 542 to the square mile. This population density is probably among the highest in the world. As well as this the Government instituted a hut tax and poll tax, payable only directly in cash. Thus within two simple but brutal measures the authorities began to reduce the African from a dignified tribesman with a stake in his community to a dispossessed wage worker forced into white landowners' service or into industrial undertakings.

The report dwells in some detail on many reasons for the African workers' so-called inefficiency, including lack of education and poverty. It says, "Perhaps in some respects the greatest handicap is physical and arises from malnutrition." On the question of wages this report is equally forthright, "...it is clear that the wage plan does not ensure wages adequate to enable an African residing in any of the towns to bring up a family." Again: "It is therefore with more confidence that the whole survey team, including the medical and nutritional investigators, record their reasoned observation that they found much discontent concerning wages in relation to cost of living."

Apart from laying bare the ruthlessness of of British Colonial policy, even in modern times, the report contained a disquieting warning. Quoting a doctor who lived in East Africa for two decades it said "A doctor....can assert that the cause of the poor work output is more mental than physical. Malnutrition and disease play their part but, sitting and talking with the workers in their homes, one became aware of a very grave discontent which, unless constructively guided and relieved, may well threaten civil peace."

It was the violent repression that Mau Mau provoked that enabled British interests to finally destroy the Kikuyu and other tribal structures. The way is now clear for the rapid conversion of East Africans into wage workers. Mau Mau retaliation was bloody and horrible, primitive political struggles often are, but undoubtedly British colonial policy first provoked the violence.

P. Lawrence

Africa's Chinese strikers

Labor conflicts involving overseas Chinese workers have become more frequent in recent years due to the increasing flow of Chinese nationals to foreign labor markets .

Two Chinese workers were killed and four were injured when the strikers, reported to number between 100 and 200, confronted Equatorial Guinean security forces who intervened when the protesters tried to stop other Chinese colleagues from working. Equatorial Guinea's government has imposed a news blackout on the incident and the small country's tightly controlled media have made no mention of it. Government ministers reached by telephone by Reuters declined to answer questions about it.
China has withdrawn more than 400 of its workers from Equatorial Guinea
A senior government official said Equatorial Guinea's authorities had asked China to withdraw the workers involved in the labour dispute.

"We do not want strikes in our country. We asked the Chinese ambassador ... to find other workers," the official said.

China invests heavily in development projects in resource-rich African countries. Large oil and gas deposits were discovered in Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1990s and in 2004 the country was listed as the world's fastest-growing economy, though it ranks near the bottom of a UN human development index.

Nature's Exploitation

To meet the worldwide demand and the regulation that, from next week, petrol and diesel sold in Britain must be mixed with bioethanol or biodiesel as part of a drive to cut the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, the Mumias Sugar Company in Kenya is planning to plant 20,000 hectares of the Tana delta to grow sugar cane for biofuels and food. The £165m project, including an ethanol refinery and food-processing plant, promises to create thousands of jobs in an area dominated by traditional cattle herding, small-scale rice and subsistence farming. The scheme would destroy the wetlands - home to 345 species of birds, including the threatened Basra reed warbler, the Tana river cisticola, and 22 species of waterbirds such as slender-billed gulls and Caspian terns, which are so numerous there they are considered 'internationally important' to the global populations.
In the Tana delta, the two main worries are that monoculture planting would replace a large area of rich and diverse habitat, including unusual but unprotected Borassus palm savannah, and that irrigation for the new plants would use up to one third of the available water, claims the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which has taken the unusual step of protesting directly to the Kenyan government. Local campaigners say that Kenya's National Environment Management Authority is expected to approve the scheme. Mumias is also only one of a handful of schemes proposed in the delta, including commercial rice-growing and cattle breeding.
If approved, large areas would become 'ecological deserts', destroying wintering grounds for birds and the bugs they feed on, and dams would divert water essential to wildlife and cattle herders during the dry season, warned Paul Matiku, executive director of campaign group Nature Kenya. Matiku is also worried about water diversion causing soil erosion, pollution harming fish stocks and damage to the nascent tourism industry.

'This development would be a national disaster, wreaking havoc with the area's ecosystem and spelling the end for wildlife across much of the delta.'

The plans submitted by Mumias suggest about half the crop could be used for food and half for biofuel, primarily to sell in Kenya. But high prices for biofuels overseas could force Mumias to sell to European and US buyers, said Paul Buckley, of the RSPB.

The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has called for a comprehensive review of the policy on biofuels as the crisis in world food prices threatens to trigger global instability. Last week former Labour Environment Minister Elliot Morley called for the government to delay the new biofuel requirement until 'comprehensive certification and assessment schemes are put in place', echoing criticism by the Environment Department's chief scientific adviser, Professor Robert Watson. The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has also spoken out against the risk of biofuels, especially of growing corn for ethanol in the US. British consumers should be protected by 200 pages of regulations governing the sustainability of biofuels; however, critics claim that indirectly British demand will suck in supplies from other markets, which would then be forced to turn to new suppliers like Mumias. Farmers are also clearing new land for displaced food crops. British regulations also rely, for the first two years at least, on embarrassing retailers by forcing them to publish details of where they buy their biofuel, but there is no punishment for buying from sources that cause damage to habitats, soil or water.

The Tana river delta, teeming with birds and home to hippos and crocodiles, lions and elephants, are more than 4,000 miles from Britain. But this patchwork of savannah and mangrove swamp on the east coast of Africa is the latest victim of the British thirst for biofuels.

Food for thought

As a result of the protests reported here Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has cancelled custom duties after a second day of violent protests against rising food costs. Mr Gbagbo also cut taxes on basic household products .

But let no-one be under the mis-comprehension that tampering with the effects locally will solve the problem .

The head of the World Food Programme warned rising food prices had helped create a "perfect storm", leaving more people hungry than ever before. "The cost of our food has doubled in just the last nine months," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran. "We're very concerned about our operations."

Sheeran also confirmed what Socialist Banner keeps repeating - that capitalism is a "can't pay, can't have" system of society regardless of need .

"We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before," she said. "Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."