Here's the deal. Millions of people in Tanzania and other African countries are starving and millions more are threatened with starvation. Many areas are receiving food aid, some almost permanently. Because of prolonged drought, millions of people are not able to grow enough food, resulting in illness and death from both food shortages and water shortages.
Along come the British, the Americans, the Dutch, the Germans, the Malaysians and the Indonesians, and what do they do? Bring food aid? No, they are in Tanzania to 'buy' land on the cheap so they can grow biofuel crops. These countries are worried that their overfed populations may not have enough petrol to drive their lardy arses to the supermarket and buy cheap food which has been grown using cheap labour in developing countries.
These biofuel companies are targeting the most productive land in areas that also have the best water supply. Water supplies are even diverted to serve the purposes of the biofuel crop growers. Small farmers in their thousands are being duped into signing over their land to be used for up to three decades. They are being duped into growing non-food crops for biofuel companies. They are being duped into giving up food production and to using their scarce water supplies to power cars in rich countries.
The Tanzanian and other governments are obligingly allowing these biofuel companies to grow jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil where people could be growing food. These governments are even subsidizing the growing of biofuel crops by foreigners at the expense of the farmers they are dispossessing and starving. What kind of perverse relationship is this?
The last thing countries like Tanzania need now is to give over its most productive land to monocultures, especially non-food monocultures. Such misuse of land is one of the reasons why the country is facing droughts at the moment. And giving small amounts of 'food aid' to countries at the same time as you are also defrauding them out of the means to produce enough food is just despicable.
How many times do Westerners need to be told that the world does not have the capacity to allow them to keep on using resources at the rate they are using them now? They need to reduce their use of resources, not steal more resources from the countries that they have been exploiting for centuries.
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Monday, September 28, 2009
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So important to fight biofuels and keep land for forests and food! Thanks for this blog. I appreciate and share your righteous anger.
ReplyDeleteHave you read this piece? http://sharonastyk.com/2008/01/30/haitians-eat-dirt-cars-eat-corn/
Quite similar....
Thanks Anon, you're right. But even growing forests is becoming a cloudy issues here. There are people with a few acres of land being told they have to plant some trees, perhaps 10%, while permits are still being issued to loggers in old growth forests, what's left of them. So growing trees is now being rammed down the throats of people who are trying to eke a living from a paltry piece of land while others point the finger at the poor.
ReplyDeleteI'll read that piece, I'm sure there are many writing about the same sentiment, it's not even the first time I've written about it.
S
You have hit the nail right fair and square on the head
ReplyDeleteThanks Dad Mzungu. I recently met an Australian in Nairobi who works with biofuel crop production in the Tana River area. When I told him what I thought of biofuels he nearly hit me fair and square on the head.
ReplyDeleteS
Oh wow! How true this is. I wonder why African governments are so willing to sell their citizenry for a few pieces of silver! Kibaki did the same in Tana River, giving Qataris our most fertile piece of land at the Coast, when three quarters of the population at the Coast is living in arid areas!
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that no one is ever going to bail out the African Continent from its troubles, the sooner these 'leaders' realise this, the sooner they'll stop selling us to people in it for their own gain.
Hi Mama
ReplyDeleteYes, it is Africans selling out Africans, that's why foreign governments are slow to criticize people like Kibaki, he does what they want most of the time.
But things are in a perilous state in Kenya and other countries. I just wonder how Kenyans will feel when they realise that as the starve, the country is exporting huge surpluses.
It pisses me off and I'm not even hungry.
S
Yes, speak out and keep speaking. Biofuels even worse than beef.
ReplyDeleteThanks George, yes it's a sore point here now that so many people and so much land is locked into providing non-food products and even food products for export while people starve.
ReplyDelete