[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Manufactured Famine

[Bill Totten]

A new wave of food colonialism is snatching food from the mouths of the
poor.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (August 26 2008)

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), Mike Davis tells the story
of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The
hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the
Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the
export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While
Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other
extravangances, "the most colossal and expensive meal in world history",
between twelve and 29 million people died {1}. Only Stalin manufactured
a comparable hunger.

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab.
As Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the
impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is
the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels
and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit Europe to
snatch food from the mouths of some of the world's poorest people.

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes
from fish {2}. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it
sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human
development index. One in six of the working population is employed in
the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women {3}.
Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to
collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal's stocks.

The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a
result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no
longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won't
confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats.
The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West
Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of
Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result,
Senegal's marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours.
Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country's
waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European
trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run
by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997 {4}.

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing
families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or
twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The
same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the
EU has maintained fisheries agreements {5, 6}. In return for wretched
amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been
looted.

The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew
its fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen - mostly from
Spain and France - have found ways round the ban. They have been
registering their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local
fishermen and transferring catches at sea from local boats. These
practices mean that they can continue to take the country's fish, and
have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profits are kept on
ice until the catch arrives in Europe.

Mandelson's office is trying to negotiate economic partnership
agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been
concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including
Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European
companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African
soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host
country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and
European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish
are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The
dodges used by European trawlers would be legalised.

The UN's Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU's
negotiations as "not sufficiently inclusive". They suffer from a "lack
of transparency" and from the African countries' lack of capacity to
handle the legal complexities {7}. ActionAid shows that Mandelson's
office has ignored these problems, raised the pressure on reluctant
countries and "moved ahead in the negotiations at a pace much faster
than the [African nations] could handle". If these agreements are forced
on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will be responsible for another imperial
famine.

This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to
govern the relations between rich counties and poor. As global food
supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the
hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the
UK's indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food {8}.
We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus Valley,
which contains most of Pakistan's best farmland. To meet the demand for
exports, the valley's aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can
be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan
headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In
some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the
diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we
buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all
accrue to Pakistan.

Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are
securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer
nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a
series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares.
Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the
owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets
over "the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified
farms as hungry locals look on". Through "secretive bilateral
agreements", the paper reports, "the investors hope to be able to bypass
any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose
during a crisis" {9}.

Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of
thousands of hectares{10, 11}. This is easy for the corrupt governments
of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the
land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically
transforms other people's property into foreign exchange {12, 13}. But
5.6 million Sudanese and ten million Ethiopians are currently in need of
food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such
famines.

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to
the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing
power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their
value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the
deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the
rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the
hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but - in the short term at
any rate - we will hardly notice. The rich world's governments will
protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it
means that other people must starve.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the
Making of the Third World. Verso, London.

2. ActionAid, 11th August 2008. SelFISH Europe.
http://www.illegal-fishing.info/uploads/ActionAidSelFISHEurope.pdf

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. Vlad M. Kaczynski and David L. Fluharty, March 2002. European
policies in West Africa: who benefits from fisheries agreements? Marine
Policy, Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 75-93.
doi:10.1016/S0308-597X{01}00039-2

6. Tim Judah, 1st August 2001. The battle for West Africa's fish.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1464966.stm

7. UNECA, EPA Negotiations: African Countries Continental Review,
African Trade Policy Centre, February 2007. Quoted by ActionAid, ibid.

8. Ashok Chapagain and Stuart Orr, August 2008. UK Water Footprint: the
impact of the UK's food and fibre consumption on global water resources.
Volume one. http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_uk_footprint.pdf

9. Javier Blas and Andrew England, 19th August 2008. Foreign fields:
Rich states look beyond their borders for fertile soil. Financial Times.

10. ibid.

11. Barney Jopson and Andrew England, 11th August 2008. Sudan woos
investors to put $1bn in farming. Financial Times.

12. For discussions of how landrights in Africa are overruled, see:

Lorenzo Cotula, September 2007. Legal empowerment for local resource
control. International Institute for Environment and Development.
http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/12542IIED.pdf

and:

13. Camilla Toulmin, 2006. Securing Land and Property Rights in Africa:
Improving the
Investment Climate. Chapter 2.3 of the Global Competitiveness Report,
World Economic Forum, Switzerland.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/08/26/manufactured-famine/


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