Westerners Turn to Cannibalism to Solve Fuel Shortages

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. Sphere: Related Content

Gold Discovered in Kenya: British Firm Now Very Rich

AllAfrica.com have an article about a British company that has just discovered gold in the South West of Kenya. Sadly, the article makes it sound as if discovering gold is good news. It is good news for the companies involved and the article tries to make it sound as if it will also be good news for people living in the area and people already involved in artisanal mining.

Does anyone seriously believe that any African country is better off for discovering gold? I don't think the artisanal miners will be jumping for joy either, despite the gold firm's claims to have forged 'excellent relationships' with local people. There's always a lot of similar bullshit when foreign companies know they are on to a good thing here.

Kenya should take a look at the experience of Tanzania. In fact, this mining area is probably contiguous with some of Tanzania's mines, given the suspiciously straight South border between the two countries. Tanzanians receive little or nothing from their substantial gold reserves. Most of the profits go to foreigners, especially Canadian ones. The Tanzanian government seems to be very favourable when it comes to foreign mining operations, giving them tax breaks and leaving employment laws lax enough to give the gold firms carte blanch to treat people like slaves.

Kenya could ask the artisanal miners there if they have 'excellent relationships' with gold firms, that's if they can still find artisanal miners in the gold industry. Or they could read an article called "Golden Opportunity: Justice and Respect in Mining". Before Kenyans allow themselves to be walked over and taken advantage of yet again, allow even more of their environment to be destroyed, allow more of their people to be exploited in a savage and corrupt industry, allow themselves to be duped out of even more revenue, allow a handful of people to become extremely rich at the expense of the majority, they really should read the article. Sphere: Related Content

Let's Go and Watch People Die in Slow Motion

Taking photographs in East Africa is not a straightforward matter. It's advisable to ask permission before taking a photograph and the answer is often something like 'we are ashamed of how we live, we don't want people to photograph it'. Sometimes it's a more brash 'give me one dollar' or something similar. One has to be careful taking photographs, it can be intrusive. Perhaps it always is.

I was quite taken aback when I met volunteers in Kenya who told me that a 'professional' photographer who had visited their area explicitly demanded that sick and dying people pose so as to show off their emaciation and their suffering. These volunteers, Kenyan and European, felt humiliated. But not as humiliated as the people being asked to show their protruding ribs and collar bones.

So I was speechless when I heard that for 2500 Kenyan shillings (about £20), you can go on an organised tour of Kibera, 'the friendliest slum in the world'. Some Dutch and Kenyan (apparently) people have set up Kibera Tours and they arrange for guides, security, 'dedicated photography points', etc. They even give advice on what to wear and carry and what to do and what not to do while on the tour.

Is human deprivation now a spectator event? Who will be next to try to make money out of water shortages, food shortages, inadequate housing, non-existent schooling and health services, disease and corruption?

I don't think this is the way to advocate for social change. Sphere: Related Content

Misspent Aid Money

Photo: A lot of money is spent on this sort of material, which is all very well. But much of the HIV prevention, treatment and care work is done by volunteers.

Since HIV/Aids has been identified, tens, perhaps hundreds of millions, have been spent on advertising, marketing and publicity. Great, the more people know, the better. However, people who are 'experts' in advertising, marketing and publicity do not seem to know much about public health, nor do they seem to care. So campaigns have received a lot of attention for a short time.

Well, that's what advertising, marketing and publicity are all about. But it's not what public health is all about. People have human rights that relate to health, as well as other basic benefits. Human rights are not a matter of a quick (and extremely expensive) campaign. People need to be aware of their rights and those who are in a position to do so, should object when people are denied their rights.

There are many examples of the excesses of advertising, marketing and publicity campaigns but one featured on the BBC website yesterday certainly takes the biscuit. An Adolf Hitler lookalike is shown having sex and represents HIV, so to speak. For any viewer, Adolf Hitler could just as easily represent a HIV positive person. If the viewer is HIV positive they will experience the sort of stigmatizing attitude that they and other campaigners have spent years fighting against.

So well done to the advertising, marketing and publicity industries. They always know how to make a bad situation worse. Let's hope that their lack of success at achieving anything permanent results in this campaign having as short term an effect as all their other travesties. The worrying thing is, who insists on continuing to give millions of dollars of aid money to these idiots? Sphere: Related Content

Patent Medicines, Branded Goods and Quackery

Photo: Cough medicine that is more likely to do harm than good.

Most people in developing countries, especially the poorest, have to spend a lot of money on self medication. Insurance is far too expensive, as are hospital and clinic visits. So private pharmacies, shops and supermarkets supply a range of things that you will see people buying and using regularly.

However, I can't help thinking that people are being fleeced because many of these products seem to have ingredients that would be of little benefit to sick people. The main ingredient of the cough medicine above is creosote (which has known negative effects on health). The smell of the stuff is enough to make you gag and my friend using it certainly gagged every time she had to take some.

People are also being fleeced because they are being sold branded versions of things like paracetamol and aspirin, which are very expensive compared to the generic versions. The cost of some of these branded medicines and the patent medicines, such as Panadol, Gripe Water and various syrups and tonics are often the equivalent of a good meal or two, something that might be of far greater help to the symptoms.

I guess developing countries are an easy target for this kind of exploitation, given low levels of health care, little or no access to health education and constant bombardment with advertisements, advertorials and sneaky appearances of various products in soaps and dramas.



Photo: This van certainly says a lot! Sphere: Related Content

Sweat Shops or 'Export Processing Zones'

Further to my previous posting, about the extractive industries and how the Tanzanian government does little to protect Tanzanian people from the excesses of this massively wealthy industry, here's some more mixed news.

Fourteen regions have been identified as suitable for Export Processing Zones (EPZ). EPZs are almost indistinguishable from sweat shops. Fair enough, the government needs to find some way to get more people into employment and to generate some revenue for the country. But EPZs have been operating for sevearl decades in several countries and they simply lead to exploitation.

In theory, they don't have to lead to exploitation. In theory, the government could use existing legislation and international agreements to protect their people against the overwork, underpay, sexual coercion and other forms of exploitation faced by employees in existing EPZ. And that may be what the Tanzanian government is intending.

But, looking at their record with regard to the gold mining industry, the fishing industry, tourism and other areas of commerce, it seems unlikely that anything will be done that might interfere with rich multinationals becoming richer, at all costs. Any threat of regulation or legislation could result in these vultures leaving the country and moving to somewhere regulation and legislation could always be waved in the interests of moneymaking. Sphere: Related Content

Penetrative Theft

Photo: A view of Mwanza, North Western Tanzania.


Tanzania is the third largest producer of gold in Africa. Does this mean that the country receives lots of revenue from this massive industry and that hundreds of thousands of people are employed extracting gold? No, most people are poor and only a few thousand people are employed in the industry now.

In fact, the government gives so many tax breaks and other benefits to foreign miners that even politicians, who usually make lots of money even when their electorate remain poor, don't make that much from gold. Well, I'm sure they do ok, but for some strange reason, they seem happy to watch the country's gold being raided by these foreign operators.

In addition to demanding low royalties from foreign companies, the country is losing out because gold had traditionally been labour intensive. Now, with high technology extractive processes, employment is minimal, most of the big earners are not Tanzanian and the majority of workers are paid very low wages. Several hundred thousand former artisan miners are unemployed as a result of these foreign companies taking over.

Much of the Tanzanian government's thinking on the industry seems to have been shaped by the bizarre strictures of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who insist on low taxes, low royalties, incentives for foreign 'investment' and various de facto subsidies that are not available to any Tanzanians who might otherwise be able to get into the industry. As a result, Tanzanians haven’t a hope of being to compete, competition only being a good thing when the odds are stacked against them, it seems.

The biggest operators in Tanzania, Canadian Barrick Gold and South African AngloGold Ashanti, appear to be making huge amounts of money by these various deceits. But those who can do anything about this don't seem interested in intervening. The above international financial institutions don’t actually see any problem in such iniquities. The Canadian and South African governments could intervene, though they may not see this as being in their interest. But I don't understand why the Tanzanian government has for so long failed to right this terrible injustice.

In addition to this assault on the Tanzanian economy and the welfare of Tanzanians, the international financial institutions, multinational extractive operators and others involved don't seem to have any respect for democracy or human rights. In the long term, extractive industries cause immense environmental damage, the consequences of which will be borne by Tanzanians.

National and international laws need to protect people and prevent multinationals from destroying whole communities and defrauding sovereign countries. They should also prevent irreversible destruction of environments, which will probably affect future generations more than present generations. Rich country governments who are profiting from these industries, along with the powerful but unelected and unaccountable members of international financial institutions, also have a duty to see that these laws are properly policed.

Sadly, Tanzania is not the only country in Africa where this sort of exploitation is taking place. In fact, most African countries with natural resources that are highly valued by the West are being similarly plundered: Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, the list goes on. But Tanzania is one of the few where Western governments didn't have to oversee a war in order to take what they wanted. For some reason, the Tanzanian government is far more compliant that some other African administrations. Sphere: Related Content