Under the specious claim of delivering "aid to Africa," western governments are backing an initiative—described by some as another form of "colonialism"—that is effectively enabling the corporate takeover of African nations by some of the world’s biggest food and agriculture companies.
It has become expected that practically anything Mr. Obama is in favor of turns out to be
a swindle and a corporate grab. Foreign politicians and corporations should have no say
in Africa's farming future, as their involvement is completely self-serving, deceiving, and
morally and ethically bankrupt. What gives them the right to even be there?
Why not call them the Bilderburgers, instead of the G7?
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
Confucius
If the governments of those countries weren't corporate whores like in the USA they would be putting a bounty on the heads of the G7 psychopaths and giving them all a personal karma visit.
It's the Berlin Conference of 1884 all over again, but worse. This time, instead of European imperial powers giving each other chunks of the continent, it's a unified corporate effort aided by Western government backed finance institutions to create markets for their products while at the same time eliminating the competition, small farmers.
Development Finance Institutions: OPIC (USA), FMO (Netherlands), DEG (Germany), CDC (UK), Norfund (Norway), Finnfund (Finland), Swedfund (Sweden), SIFEM (Switzerland), OeEB (Austria) and IFU (Denmark) are working with large foundations that promote corporate agendas: Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, ONE, Syngenta Foundation and others to facilitate a corporate takeover of African agriculture that will determine what crops are grown and how these crops are grown.
A continent of small farmers that in the 1960's made Africa self-sufficient in food with spectacularly varied, regional, affordable, and safe organic food is now in mortal danger of losing all its remaining diversity to a monolithic agenda of corporate profit.
Africa is facing a bigger threat than colonialism because once the infrastructure of small farms is lost to corporate agriculture through sneaky programs like the New Alliance for Food Security and AGRA native crops will become extinct and African food will become uniform, less nutritious, and laced with chemical pesticides. The negative effects of colonialism can be reversed, the loss millions of small farmers growing safe and nutritious food cannot.
To borrow from Graham Greene: Corporations are like the leper that wanders into your village, except he's forgotten to wear his bell, and all he wants to do is love you.
Large parts of Africa will become empty of people because the corporate produced gmos won't be able to survive there and the industrial model of agriculture won't be able to produce enough. Or, the corporations will avoid those areas and force people off of what little good land there is in Africa. These agro corporations just haven't learned that their model of agriculture just won't work in Africa. They just won't admit that local knowledge of the land, environment and utilization of local heirloom crops is superior to their gmos and chemicals. The sorghum and millet farmers in Africa don't grow corn because corn won't grow or they would already be growing corn. Personally, I think if these corporations want to monoculture huge fields, they should go to Siberia. The Soviets grew wheat there, the corporations can do the same. I wouldn't recommend huge monoculture operations in environments that do not get a hard freeze every year. Hard freezes knock back the pests.
A few counter-examples.
Much of West Africa, such as the Cote d'Ivoire, grows Cocoa. 'Better' than its homeland of Americas because it doesn't have the pests and pathogens found in the Americas.
Using western agriculture techniques Rhodesia was a breadbasket of south Africa, and South Africa was/is also productive. Now Zimbabwe is a famine zone. Thank government mismanagement of rural property rights.
Also using western agriculture techniques, Algeria once was productive wine country. That stopped after Algerian independence.
I've recently learned that, in fact, Russia is opening up sections of Siberia for massive corporate agricultural activities. I think the Chinese and Japanese are who the Russians are mainly opening up to.
