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.